Forging the Sword: Doctrinal Change in the U.S. Army

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jensen, Benjamin M., author.

Forging the sword : doctrinal change in the U.S. Army / Benjamin M. Jensen.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-9560-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8047-9737-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. United States. Army—Reorganization—History—20th century.   2. United States. Army—Reorganization—History—21st century.   3. Military doctrine—United States—History—20th century.   4. Military doctrine—United States—History—21st century.   5. Organizational change—United States—History—20th century.   6. Organizational change—United States—History—21st century.   7. United States—Military policy.   I. Title.

UA25.J525 2016

355′.033573—dc23

2015017618

ISBN 978-0-8047-9738-2 (electronic)

Typeset by Newgen in 10/14 Minion

FORGING THE SWORD

Doctrinal Change in the U.S. Army

Benjamin M. Jensen

Stanford Security Studies

An Imprint of Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

1. To Change an Army

2. The First Battle of the Next War

3. The Central Battle

4. The New Warrior Class

5. Hearts and Minds Revisited

6. Incubators, Advocacy Networks, and Organizational Change

Notes

Index

Foreword

One of our most important duties as Army professionals is to think clearly about the problem of future armed conflict. That is because our vision of the future must drive change to ensure that Army forces are prepared to prevent conflict, shape the security environment, and win wars.

—General David G. Perkins, The U.S. Army Operating Concept: Win in a Complex World

WAR IS THE FINAL AUDITOR OF MILITARY ORGANIZATIONS. One of the greatest challenges confronting the military professional is how to build a learning organization that implements lessons and anticipates the challenges of future armed conflict. Anticipating the future begins with an analysis of the present and an understanding of history. Consideration of continuities in the nature of war as well as changes in the character of warfare is essential to making wise decisions about future force development. Grounded projections into the future serve as the basis for military innovation and how leaders prepare their soldiers and units for the challenges of future war. As the historian Sir Michael Howard observed, No matter how clearly one thinks, it is impossible to anticipate precisely the character of future conflict. The key is to not be so far off the mark that it becomes impossible to adjust once that character is revealed.¹ In this book, Benjamin Jensen offers important insights into how militaries learn, adapt, and sustain innovation to ensure that, when called on to fight, they do not find themselves too far off the mark.

Of particular importance is Jensen’s emphasis on the need for creative forums in which leaders and soldiers experiment and visualize new forms of warfare. Military leaders need a space to imagine future war and develop new theories of victory to test through experimentation. Innovation begins with leaders cultivating creative space. Jensen’s observation that experimentation is necessary to test concepts and challenge assumptions about future war is consistent with the finding of historians MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray in The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050 that

the key technique of innovation was open-ended experiment and exercises that tested systems to breakdown rather than aiming at the validation of hopes or theories. Simple honesty and the free flow of ideas between superiors and subordinates—key components of all successful military cultures—were centrally important to the ability to learn from experience. And the overriding purpose of experiments and exercises was to improve the effectiveness of units and of the service as a whole, rather than singling out commanders who had allegedly failed.²

Successful military experimentation evaluates ideas, challenges assumptions, and tests new concepts.

The U.S. Army defines innovation as the result of critical and creative thinking and the conversion of new ideas into valued outcomes. Ben Jensen’s insights are consistent with the Army’s effort to develop and mature concepts, assess those concepts in experimentation and other learning venues, and use what is learned to drive future force development. Critical and creative thinking about future armed conflict requires consideration of threats, enemies, and adversaries; anticipated missions; emerging technologies; and historical observations and lessons learned. Ultimately, innovation requires the development of new tools or methods that permit military forces to anticipate future demands, stay ahead of determined enemies, and accomplish the mission. Invention is not innovation. Innovation often results from the identification of opportunities to use existing capabilities in new ways. And while technology helps shape the character of warfare, military forces gain differential advantage over enemies through the integration of technologies with adaptive leaders and well-trained organizations based on a sound concept of how to fight. As the late historian I. B. Holley Jr. observed, Unless the armed forces are guided by appropriate doctrines, greater numbers and superior weapons are no guarantee of victory.³

The role of doctrine in military innovation is often overlooked. Doctrine, though not prescriptive, is what a military institution teaches in professional education and in the training of operational forces about how those forces accomplish military objectives. Jensen points out the importance of incubators (informal subunits outside bureaucratic structures) to develop sound doctrine as well as advocacy networks to implement that doctrine through changes in organization, training, materiel development, leader education, and personnel policies. Forging the Sword: Doctrinal Change in the U.S. Army contains important insights into how to foster learning organizations that can anticipate the challenges of future armed conflict and develop the ability to meet those challenges.

Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster

Director, Army Capabilities Integration Center

Deputy Commanding General, Futures, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command

Acknowledgments

AS THIS BOOK SHOWS, NO ONE PERSON OWNS AN IDEA. Networks of individuals exchange theories and observations, as stories, whose circulation creates a combustible environment conducive to novel insights. While there are many hubs in my network, I thank two people who proved especially helpful to this project in its early stages: Charles Tilly and Christopher Layne. These senior scholars helped a young U.S. Army officer see the world through a different lens. I also thank Dean Jim Goldgeier and the International Affairs Research Institute in the American University School of International Service for creating an academic environment encouraging scholars to bridge the gap and address important policy issues. It funded a book incubator that helped shape the final form of the manuscript. I am similarly grateful to the Smith Richardson Foundation for supporting the research that led to this book. In addition, the book benefited from the generous support provided by Donald L. Bren, the Marine Corps University Foundation, and Marine Corps University. I am also forever indebted to mentors Abdul Aziz Said and John Richardson, as well as my family, for teaching me empathy and patience. Last, this book would not have been possible without the assistance of Stanford University Press, and especially Geoffrey Burns and James Holt.

1

To Change an Army

DURING THE WINTER ENCAMPMENT AT VALLEY FORGE IN 1778, Baron von Steuben, a Prussian officer introduced to the American Revolutionary cause by Benjamin Franklin, formed a model company of one hundred hand-selected men. He set out to experiment with drill and tactics for the New World battlefield, documenting his search in a collection of notes that became Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States. On March 29, 1779, John Jay, president of the Continental Congress, signed an order approving the regulations. What started as a soldier’s experiment at Valley Forge became the blue book of the U.S. Army, a doctrinal manual outlining how to train and fight an army. Baron von Steuben’s work remained the Army’s informal doctrinal treatise until 1812.

The process Baron von Steuben initiated at Valley Forge continues in the modern U.S. Army. Despite repeated assertions by pundits and academics alike that the military is a conservative, parochial organization resistant to internal reform, the U.S. Army has a long history of reinventing its war fighting doctrine. This book traces this dynamic process and reflects on the character of military change. Specifically, it analyzes the unique role played by knowledge networks that allowed new ideas to form and diffuse in an otherwise rigid and complex bureaucracy.

The historical cases in this book highlight two institutional processes associated with developing new ways of war in the U.S. Army. Doctrinal change requires incubators, informal subunits established outside the hierarchy, and advocacy networks championing new concepts that emerge from incubators. Ranging from special study groups to war games, test beds, and field exercises, incubators provide a safe space for experimentation and the construction of new operational concepts. Incubators form sites where officers engage in what scholar-practitioner Thomas Mahnken calls speculation, a search to identify novel ways to solve existing operational problems.¹ These concepts become the foundation of new doctrine articulating a theory of how to fight and win future conflicts.

Professional soldiers require these safe spaces to visualize new forms of warfare. Outside the formal hierarchy, officers are free from routines and bias that crowd out the space for innovation.² Advocacy networks represent crosscutting institutional networks that spread the ideas throughout the broader defense community. These networks connect different constituents in the bureaucracy and infect them with new ideas that officers would otherwise reject. New doctrine requires forums where officers (re)imagine war and networks in which they can tell their story.

Efforts to reform military organizations occur in different sequences, settings, and circumstances as organizations adapt to the changing character of war. Reforms in China by Qin minister Shang Yang in 356 BC broke with the tradition of cohorts of aristocrats in chariots to form a new mode of land warfare dominated by large infantry formations supported by cavalry.³ The Roman Marius Reforms in 107 BC grew out of a manpower shortage. The method for generating a force that was built around small landowning classes proved unable to fill the legion’s ranks to counter threats posed by Germanic Cimbri and Teuton tribes. To address this battlefield shortage, Gaius Marius expanded recruitment to the landless classes and designed a new tactical formation, the cohort, to employ them.⁴ Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, resurrected the ancient military tradition of drill and used it alongside new operational concepts like volley fire to increase the power of the Dutch Standing Army in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In each case the reforms started with a unique problem and experimentation by military leaders refining their craft.

The emergence of modern military organizations and bureaucracies dedicated to land warfare also illuminates portraits of soldiers grappling with change. In the nineteenth century military leaders across Europe and the Americas copied the Prussian General Staff, created in the wake of the Prussian Army’s defeat at Jena in 1806.⁵ The emulation involved looking at how to synchronize increasingly complex military functions. Field Marshal Count Helmuth von Moltke wrote Instructions for Large Unit Commander in 1869, codifying the practice of moving units separately and then concentrating them before battle.⁶ In 1903 while serving as an artillery colonel on the French General Staff (and later as the commandant of the École Militaire), Marshal Ferdinand Foch wrote Principles of War in an effort to distill the Napoleonic way of war and how it differed from Helmuth von Moltke and the German school. In it, Foch emphasized the importance of firepower, a central idea in French doctrine since the 1875 official military Service Regulations.⁷ In 1915, U.S. Navy commodore Dudley W. Knox argued that modern doctrine was a European intellectual construct designed to help commanding officers teach or train their subordinates so that they would think like their commander or at least understand his intent in war.⁸

This observation presents a conundrum for military leaders. While the structure of bureaucracy provided the controls and procedures necessary to command large armies, it also tended to lock in particular processes and ways of thinking about war. Big structures created deep habits. This standardization suggests modern military bureaucracies should resist change.⁹ These organizations—made of bundles of rituals, standard operating procedures, mandates, and bureaucrats focused on turf and budgets—tend to adapt either incrementally or in response to threats to their autonomy.¹⁰ The modern military, like all bureaucracy, is an iron cage prone to crowding out innovation in an effort to promote efficiency and existing processes.

Civilian bureaucrats and military officers are expected to be unwilling or reluctant to escape this iron cage. This organizational resistance to change should be especially pronounced during peacetime, when there are few incentives to challenge existing routines and uncertainty about where or when the next war will be.¹¹ Change in military organizations should be an anomaly.

Yet anomalous change has become a frequent occurrence in the U.S. Army since the end of the Vietnam War. Since 1975, officers in the U.S. Army have rewritten its flagship doctrinal manual, Operations, seven times. These manuals were not just episodes of bureaucratic recycling and updating procedures. Rather, many tended to embody new theories of victory, visions of how to fight and win the next war.¹²

Continual change in an entrenched bureaucracy is the puzzle at the center the book. I seek to show how professional military officers anticipate future wars to develop new military doctrine. The study of doctrine formation helps illuminate the bridge between tactics and strategy. Strategy establishes the ends, the national security objectives that military forces, along with other agencies and instruments of power, seek to achieve. Doctrine is the means, articulating how to fight within a given context.¹³

In this chapter I establish the argument and overarching logic of the book. First, I define doctrine as a formalized theory of victory prescribing how the military professional should execute critical tasks in support of national security objectives. Second, I situate doctrine in relation to the broader study of military innovation. Specifically, I differentiate exogenous and endogenous causal factors to explain change. Third, I define the causal mechanisms at the root of change in U.S. Army doctrine: incubators and advocacy networks. These mechanisms form the analytical framework applied in the historical case studies: the development of the 1976 Active Defense, the 1982 AirLand Battle, the 1993 Full-Dimensional Operations, and the 2006 counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrines. These studies seek to isolate the sequence of change associated with publishing new doctrine and the extent to which these mechanisms were active.

What Is Doctrine?

Military doctrine is a set of principles the Army uses to guide its actions in support of national objectives.¹⁴ This definition can be linked with J. F. C. Fuller’s characterization of doctrine as the central idea behind the organization of violence capturing how fighting formations respond to particular historical modes of war.¹⁵ In Clausewitzean terms, doctrine reflects the operative grammar of war.¹⁶ As a foundational script, it prescribes how the Army should execute critical tasks.¹⁷ Doctrine is connected to the first attribute James Q. Wilson defines as essential for successful organizational change: identifying critical tasks for dealing with the environment and its challenges.¹⁸

Doctrine exists in formal and informal forms at multiple levels. Formal doctrine reflects institutionalized knowledge in manuals, training circulars, and pamphlets. Informal doctrine reflects a broader professional discourse captured in articles, field orders, personnel letters, and so on.¹⁹ Most doctrine exists above the level of tactics and deals with synchronizing units conducting a series of battles (e.g., a campaign). In the U.S. context, these units can be service specific (e.g., the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps), multiservice (e.g., two services), or after 1987, joint. Regardless of whether they are service specific or joint, doctrine formally prescribes how the military professional should execute critical tasks in support of national security objectives. The focus of this study is on service-level formal doctrine—specifically, episodes of doctrine formation in the U.S. Army since the end of the Vietnam War.

The U.S. Army has a long history of using both informal and formal doctrine to capture and distill experience. Unofficial treatises such as Henry Bouquet’s Reflections on War with the Savages of North America, William Smith’s An Historical Account of the Expedition Against the Ohio Indians, in the Year 1764, and James Smith’s A Treatise on the Mode and Manner of Indian War diffused ideas on fighting frontier wars among officers and elites interested in the military profession.²⁰ Short of a complete, concept-driven theory of victory, these treatises were more initial reflections and collections of best practices and techniques. The father of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Dennis Hart Mahan, introduced concepts for frontier wars as they related to conflicts against native peoples in the West Point curriculum as early as 1835.²¹ At its origins, doctrine, much like Baron von Steuben’s reflections on drill, was personalized and informal. Individual thinkers published their reflections, and this knowledge infected officers through the education system and peer recommendations. Doctrine was the distillation of accumulated experience.²²

Formal doctrine started to emerge after the Spanish-American War and the associated Root Reforms in the form of field service and drill regulation. Drill regulations outlined the organization of military units and duties by sections. For example, the 1905 edition of Field Service Regulation discussed how the U.S. Army organized expeditionary forces and issued standardized orders. While the document also dealt with techniques such as establishing bases and maintaining lines of communication, procedures for conducting tactical movements and marches, and the proper employment of cavalry, it did so less in terms of general principles of war and more in line with tactics.²³

Formal doctrine, as a constitutive framework and general set of principles defining the employment of forces that operate above the level of tactics, did not begin to emerge in the United States until the 1941 edition of Field Manual 100-5: Field Service Regulations, Operations, in which it is discussed in relation to doctrines of combat for engaging in offensive and defensive actions.²⁴ The 1962 and 1968 editions of Field Manual 100-5 make a further shift toward stating general principles of warfare that animate tactics and force employment. The 1962 edition actually began to use the word doctrine while linking the employment of land combat to variable contingencies and national security policy.²⁵ The document moves beyond discussions of force tables and drill techniques to discuss strategy and military force as they related to principles of war and operational concepts.²⁶ As shown in Table 1.1, as the profession of arms evolved, so did the role and function of doctrine.

TABLE 1.1   Doctrinal change in the U.S. Army after World War II (1945–2014)

SOURCE: Robert A. Doughty, The Evolution of U.S. Army Tactical Doctrine, 1946–1976 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, 1979); William O. Odom, After the Trenches: The Transformation of the U.S. Army, 1918–1939 (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2008).

NOTE: Major manuals from 1900 to 1945 include field service regulations published in 1905, 1908, 1910, 1913, 1914, 1917, 1923, 1939, 1941, and 1944; thus, the Army publishes an operational manual an average of every five years.

As the purpose and meaning of doctrine evolved, the U.S. Army used it to link strategy and force structure.²⁷ Doctrine became central to planning. According to the Department of the Army posture statement for fiscal year 1992, [Doctrine] forms the basis for planning and conducting campaigns, major operations, battles, and engagements.²⁸ Realizing that procurement and organization ultimately reflect congressional intrigue and technological change, services relied on doctrine as a means of maintaining autonomy. Doctrine functioned as a store of accumulated knowledge.²⁹ It was, and continues to be, a foundational text whose narration intraorganizational elites can directly influence. Furthermore, this store of knowledge is especially important for military professionals, since they must spend long periods not engaged in actual war fighting.³⁰

Historically, the U.S. Army used doctrine to initiate organizational reform. In a September 2, 1994, letter to general officers titled TRADOC Pamphlet 525-5, General Gordon R. Sullivan, chief of staff of the Army from 1991 to 1995, wrote that "no institution can transform itself coherently and successfully without a clear eye on what it wants to become. . . . Physical change invariably has it [sic] underpinnings in imaginative and rigorous thought about the future."³¹ In a 1992 article, Sullivan similarly referred to doctrine as a catalyst providing the framework for institutional changes within the Army.³² Doctrine, as a store of knowledge, is also a template for changing how military professionals solve new problems. It is evolutionary and progressive.

Much of doctrine is built around concepts. Former commanding general of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Donn Starry defined concepts as ideas, thoughts, and general notions about the conduct of military affairs.³³ They broadly depict the conduct of warfare and capture anticipated battlefields and tactical response repertoires. As defined in the 1982 edition of Field Manual 100-5, these concepts represent the core of [Army] doctrine, reflecting the way the Army fights its battles and campaigns, including tactics, procedures, organizations, support, equipment and training.³⁴ Therefore, a key task in tracing how military organizations sustain change is to investigate the sequence, setting, and circumstance animating the formation of operational concepts. To this end I uncover and examine the practices associated with the emergence of a new theory of victory that condense to form doctrinal change.

Doctrinal Change

Studies of military reforms in international relations, strategic studies, and history tend to include work on force structure and technology in addition to doctrine. This literature reflects a diverse body of work with little consensus. They share little consistency in a change’s source (e.g., major or minor, civilian or military), modality (e.g., innovation, adaptation, or emulation), or causes (e.g., the international system, civil-military relations, bureaucratic politics, cultural norms, or technology).³⁵

Many studies differentiate between major and minor change, often paralleling the analytical metaphor of levels of war. Any shift beneath the operational level (for the U.S. Army, the level at which officers plan campaigns and employ large formations) is seen as a minor and potentially isolated battlefield adaptation.³⁶ With respect to major change, scholars debate the types of actors who have the access, resources, and influence to initiate reforms. For example, Barry Posen argues that civilians intervene to prod reluctant militaries to develop new doctrine and force structure, while Stephen Peter Rosen contends that military elites initiate reform on their own, without civilian interference.³⁷ A growing body of work resists this top-down perspective in favor of horizontal and bottom-up innovation, in which actors across the military organization adapt to battlefield lessons and experiments to develop new ways of approaching operational problems.³⁸ That is, minor changes at the tactical level can cascade into major changes in operational art.

There is also a difference with respect to defining the pathway of military change. For Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff,