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. There are three broad categories of military doctrines: (1) Offensive doctrines aim to punish an adversary, (2) Defensive doctrines aim to deny an adversary, and (3) Deterrent doctrines aim to disarm an adversary. Different military doctrines have different implications for world politics. For example, offensive doctrines tend to lead to arms races and conflicts.
Defining doctrine NATO's definition of doctrine, used unaltered by many member nations, is:
Fundamental principles by which the military forces guide their actions in support of objectives. It is authoritative but requires judgement in application. In 1998 the Canadian Army stated:
Military doctrine is a formal expression of military knowledge and thought, that the army accepts as being relevant at a given time, which covers the nature of conflict, the preparation of the army for conflict, and the method of engaging in conflict to achieve success ... it is descriptive rather than prescriptive, requiring judgement in application. It does not establish dogma or provide a checklist of procedures, but is rather an authoritative guide, describing how the army thinks about fighting, not how to fight. As such it attempts to be definitive enough to guide military activity, yet versatile enough to accommodate a wide variety of situations. A U.S. Air Force Air University staff study in 1948 defined military doctrine functionally as "those concepts, principles, policies, tactics, techniques, practices, and procedures which are essential to efficiency in organizing, training, equipping, and employing its tactical and service units". A U.S. Army essay written in 2016 similarly defined military doctrine as "consist[ing] of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs)". In 2005 Gary Sheffield of the Defence Studies Department of King's College London/JSCSC quoted J F C Fuller's 1923 definition of doctrine as the "central idea of an army". In 1965 the Soviet Dictionary of Basic Military Terms defined military doctrine as "a state's officially accepted system of scientifically founded views on the nature of modern wars and the use of the armed forces in them. ... Military doctrine has two aspects: social-political and military-technical." The social-political side "encompasses all questions concerning methodology, economic, and social bases, the political goals of war. It is the defining and the more stable side." The other side, the military-technical, must accord with the political goals. It includes the "creation of military structure, technical equipping of the armed forces, their training, definition of forms and means of conducting operations and war as a whole".
Relationship between doctrine and strategy
Military doctrine is a key component of grand strategy. NATO's definition of strategy is "presenting the manner in which military power should be developed and applied to achieve national objectives or those of a group of nations." The official definition of strategy by the United States Department of Defense is: "Strategy is a prudent idea or set of ideas for employing the instruments of national power in a synchronized and integrated fashion to achieve national or multinational objectives." Military strategy provides the rationale for military operations. Field Marshal Viscount Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff and co-chairman of the Anglo-US Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee for most of the Second World War, described the art of military strategy as: "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 potential resources against the requirements and to chart from this process a coherent pattern of priorities and a rational course of action." Instead, doctrine seeks to provide a common conceptual framework for a military service:
what the service perceives itself to be ("Who are we?") what its mission is ("What do we do?") how the mission is to be carried out ("How do we do that?") how the mission has been carried out in history ("How did we do that in the past?") other questions. In the same way, doctrine is neither operations nor tactics. It serves as a conceptual framework uniting all three levels of warfare. Doctrine reflects the judgments of professional military officers, and to a lesser but important extent civilian leaders, about what is and is not militarily possible and necessary. Factors to consider include:
military technology national geography the capabilities of adversaries the capability of one's own organization
Military doctrine by country
China Chinese military doctrine is influenced by a number of sources including an indigenous classical military tradition characterized by strategists such as Sun Tzu and modern strategists such as Mao Zedong, along with Western and Soviet influences. One distinctive characteristic of Chinese military science is that it places emphasis on the relationship between the military and society and views military force as merely one part of an overarching grand strategy. According to French newspaper Le Monde, the Chinese nuclear doctrine is to maintain a nuclear force allowing it to deter and respond to a nuclear attack. However, new evolutions show that China could allow use of its nuclear arsenal in more situations.
France Following the defeat of the French Army in the Franco-Prussian War, the French military, as part of its movements to increase professionalism, emphasized officer training at the École supérieure de guerre, under the direction of its commandant, Ferdinand Foch, who began developing a consistent doctrine for handling armies, corps, and divisions. Foch's 1906 work, Des principes de la guerre (translated by Hilaire Belloc as The Principles of War) expressed this doctrine.
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