Military Doctrine: Strategies Tactics and Operational Art in Modern Warfare

By Fouad Sabry

What is Military Doctrine

Military doctrine is the expression of how military forces contribute to campaigns, major operations, battles, and engagements. A military doctrine outlines what military means should be used, how forces should be structured, where forces should be deployed, and the modes of cooperation between types of forces. "Joint doctrine" refers to the doctrines shared and aligned by multinational forces or joint service operations.

How you will benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Military doctrine

Chapter 2: Finnish Defence Forces

Chapter 3: French Armed Forces

Chapter 4: Mutual assured destruction

Chapter 5: No first use

Chapter 6: Electromagnetic warfare

Chapter 7: Military science

Chapter 8: Military strategy

Chapter 9: Special operations

Chapter 10: AirLand Battle

(II) Answering the public top questions about military doctrine.

Who this book is for

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of Military Doctrine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Jun 18, 2024

Book preview

Chapter 1: Military doctrine

The expression of how armed forces participate in campaigns, major operations, battles, and engagements is known as military doctrine.

It is not a set of rigid rules, but rather a guide to action. A unified frame of reference is provided by doctrine for the whole force. By providing standard methods for doing military duties, it helps standardize operations and facilitates readiness.

Theory, history, experimentation, and practice are all connected by doctrine. Its goal is to promote initiative and original thought. The military's authoritative body of declarations on how its forces execute operations is known as doctrine. It also gives military leaders and planners a common language to work with.

Joint service activities or multinational troops are said to share and coordinate their doctrines under the term joint doctrine..

Many of its member countries still adhere to the NATO definition of doctrine, which is:

Fundamental guidelines that the military forces use to direct their operations in support of goals. Although authoritative, its use calls for discretion.

The Canadian Army announced in 1998:

Military doctrine is a formalized expression of military knowledge and thought that the army accepts as current at a particular time. It addresses the nature of conflict, how to prepare the army for conflict, and how to engage in conflict successfully. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive, requiring discretion in application. Instead of establishing doctrine or listing steps to follow, it serves as an authoritative manual that explains how the army views combat rather than how to engage in it. It aims to be clear enough to direct military activities while being adaptable enough to handle a range of situations.

Military doctrine was functionally defined as those concepts, principles, rules, tactics, techniques, practices, and procedures which are necessary to efficiency in organizing, training, equipping, and using its tactical and service units by a 1948 U.S. Air Force Air University staff study.

A lot of countries conveyed their military philosophies through laws prior to the creation of separate doctrinal publications.

The War Office published Field Service Regulations in 1909, 1917, 1923, 1930, and 1935. Subsequently, additional publications with similar titles appeared. First published in 1988, British Military Doctrine is now British Defense Doctrine, which is relevant to all armed forces.

Following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the country began to construct its military doctrine.

The École supérieure de guerre, under its commandant's guidance, Ferdinand Foch, started creating a reliable theory for managing armies, corps, and divisions.

The 1906 work of Foch, This idea was stated in Des principes de la guerre, also known as The Principles of War by Hilaire Belloc.

Regulations for the Instruction of the Troops in Field Service and the Exercises of the Larger Units of the 17th June, 1870, issued Prussian doctrine. The theory was updated in 1887 and published in English by Karl Kaltenborn and Stachau as The Order of Field Service of the German Army in 1893. It was again republished in 1908 as Felddienst Ordnung (Field Service Regulations).

M. V. Frunze had a significant influence on Soviet doctrine.

The War Department's Field Service Regulations were how doctrine was outlined between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. Additionally, a lot of leaders produced military manuals that were used by both Union and Confederate soldiers. These publications included Hardee's Tactics, which was issued by a private publisher. Regulations and Instructions for the Field Service of the U.S. Cavalry, a manual for cavalrymen, was written by General George B. McClellan in 1862.

The creation of Field Service Regulations was under the purview of the General Staff. They were first published in 1908, then revised on the basis of the experiences of European nations during the first few months of the war in 1913 and again in 1914.

Field Service Regulations - Operations, which was released in 1941, contained U.S. Army doctrine. This name has been discontinued in favor of U.S. Army Field Manuals (FM).

Strategy is not doctrine. The phrase showing the manner in which military strength should be developed and utilized to achieve national objectives or those of a group of nations is used in the NATO definition of strategy.

The justification for military operations is provided by military strategy. The art of military strategy, according to Field Marshal Viscount Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff and co-chairman of the Anglo-US Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee for the majority of the Second World War, is to "derive from the [policy] aim a series of military objectives to be achieved: to assess these objectives as to the military requirements they create, and the pre-conditions which the achievement of each is likely to necessitate: to measure available and practical resources in order to

Instead, doctrine aims to give a military service a common conceptual foundation:

a description of the service as it sees itself (Who are we?)

What Does This Organization Do?

How to carry out the mission (How do we do that?)

history of the mission's execution (How did we do it in the past?)

other questions.

The same is true of ideology, which is neither an operation nor a tactic. It acts as the conceptual framework that connects the three tiers of combat.

Doctrine reflects professional military officers' assessments of what is and is not militarily feasible and required, as well as to a lesser but still significant amount, civilian leaders.

Considerable factors include:

military technology

national geography

the capabilities of the opposition

one's own organization's capacity

Chinese military doctrine is influenced by a variety of sources, including the country's own classical military legacy, which was exemplified by modern strategists like Mao Zedong and Sun Tzu, as well as Western and Soviet influences. Chinese military science is unique in that it emphasizes the connection between the military and society and sees military might as just one element of a comprehensive grand strategy.

Chinese nuclear strategy, according to the French publication Le Monde, calls for the country to keep a nuclear force that would enable it to thwart and counter nuclear attacks. However, recent developments suggest that China would permit the use of its nuclear arsenal in additional circumstances.

Following the Franco-Prussian War's French Army's defeat,, the French armed forces, as a part of its initiatives to boost professionalism, emphasized officer training at the École de Guerre.

Ferdinand Foch, as an educator, argued against the idea that a commander shouldn't move units without first telling his/her subordinates of the plan.

By doing this, A standard doctrine serves as a training ground.

So, we have a doctrine. All of the minds are alert and approach every problem from the same perspective. Knowing the basic concept behind the issue, each person will approach it differently, and we can be confident that each of these a thousand approaches will act to focus everyone's efforts on the same goal.

The idea of Auftragstaktik (Mission-type tactics), which can be viewed as a theory within which formal rules might be ignored in some circumstances to reduce friction, is a part of German military doctrine. Everything in war is extremely simple, but the easiest thing is difficult, said Carl von Clausewitz. The commander must try his utmost to resolve issues such as lost communications, troops being sent to the wrong spot, delays brought on by weather, etc. When in charge, commanders are encouraged by Auftragstaktik to use initiative, adaptability, and improvisation.

The Indian Army's current battle doctrine is built on the efficient combined use of holding formations and striking formations. When an attack occurs, holding formations would keep the enemy at bay while strike formations launched a counterattack to destroy the adversary's forces. If India attacked, the holding formations would contain the enemy forces while the strike formations launched an attack at a location of India's choosing.

The Indian military has lately performed multiple drills based on the new Cold Start war doctrine that was just accepted. Cold Start entails integrated battle groups for offensive operations as well as coordinated operations across India's three forces. The readiness of India's troops to quickly deploy and launch offensive operations without breaching the enemy's nuclear-use threshold is a crucial element. It was designed to be pulled off the shelf and activated within 72 hours amid a crisis, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.

Israel's strategic shallowness and tiny size influence its military philosophy. It uses deterrence, including a rumored arsenal of nuclear weapons, to make up the difference. It seeks to offset its numeric disadvantage by maintaining its superiority in quality.

During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, advocated for a focus on operational offense:

We will bring the conflict to the borders of their nation if [the Arabs] continue to assault us as they did this time. We have no plans to fight a static defensive battle where we were attacked. If they attack us again in the future, we want the battle to be fought in the enemy's country rather than our own, and we want to be attacking rather than on the defensive.

A similar justification for Israel's preemptive start to the war was provided by Yitzhak Rabin, who served as Chief of the IDF Staff during the Six-Day War:

Israel's fundamental tenet was that it would not start a war until it was waged against it. We then lived within the lines drawn before the Six-Day Fight, lines that provided Israel no depth. As a result, Israel was always forced to launch an instant attack and take the war to the enemy's territory.

Since the early years of the state, IDF command has been decentralized, with junior commanders having considerable authority in the context of mission-type commands.

Military doctrine had a significantly different connotation in the Soviet Union than it did in the American military. It was described as a system of views on the nature of war and ways of fighting it, and on the preparation of the country and army for war, formally embraced in a given state and its armed forces by Soviet Minister of Defense Marshal Andrei Grechko in 1975.

In Soviet times, military doctrine experts focused on both the political and military-technical aspects, whereas Westerners neglected the political aspect from a Soviet perspective. Harriet F. Scott and William Scott, two Western critics, claimed that the political component of Soviet military doctrine better explained Soviet activities in the international arena..

Operational and combined-arms combat are both emphasized in Soviet (and modern) Russian doctrine. It places emphasis on starting military conflicts at a time, place, and under conditions of its choosing and on thoroughly preparing the battlespace for operations.

Strategic and operational flexibility and adaptability are sacrificed for tactical flexibility and adaptability in former Soviet and Russian doctrine; tactical personnel are trained as relatively rigid executors of precise, detailed orders, whereas the operational-strategic level of Russian military doctrine is where most innovation occurs.

The Soviet reaction to nuclear strategic issues started with top-secret publications. But by 1962, when Vasily Sokolovsky, Marshal of the Soviet Union, published his book Military Strategy, the Soviets had published their officially endorsed views on the subject and their plans for dealing with nuclear conflict.

early 2010s and the 2000s, The Swedish Armed Forces were changed by the Moderate Party-led governments from a Cold War defensive posture to one of