Forging the Sword conducts a comparative historical process-tracing of doctrinal reform in the U.S. Army. The findings suggest that there are unaccounted-for institutional facilitators of change within military organizations. Thus, it argues that change in military organizations requires "incubators," designated subunits established outside the normal bureaucratic hierarchy, and "advocacy networks" championing new concepts. Incubators, ranging from special study groups to non-Title 10 war games and field exercises, provide a safe space for experimentation and the construction of new operational concepts. Advocacy networks then connect different constituents and inject them with concepts developed in incubators. This injection makes changes elites would have otherwise rejected a contagious narrative.
Forging the Sword conducts a comparative historical process-tracing of doctrinal reform in the U.S. Army. The findings suggest that there are unaccounted-for institutional facilitators of change within military organizations. Thus, it argues that change in military organizations requires "incubators," designated subunits established outside the normal bureaucratic hierarchy, and "advocacy networks" championing new concepts. Incubators, ranging from special study groups to non-Title 10 war games and field exercises, provide a safe space for experimentation and the construction of new operational concepts. Advocacy networks then connect different constituents and inject them with concepts developed in incubators. This injection makes changes elites would have otherwise rejected a contagious narrative.
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Overview
Forging the Sword conducts a comparative historical process-tracing of doctrinal reform in the U.S. Army. The findings suggest that there are unaccounted-for institutional facilitators of change within military organizations. Thus, it argues that change in military organizations requires "incubators," designated subunits established outside the normal bureaucratic hierarchy, and "advocacy networks" championing new concepts. Incubators, ranging from special study groups to non-Title 10 war games and field exercises, provide a safe space for experimentation and the construction of new operational concepts. Advocacy networks then connect different constituents and inject them with concepts developed in incubators. This injection makes changes elites would have otherwise rejected a contagious narrative.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804795609 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/24/2016 |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Forging the Sword
Doctrinal Change in the U.S. Army
By Benjamin M. Jensen
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9737-5
CHAPTER 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." 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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."
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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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." 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. In Clausewitzean terms, doctrine reflects the operative "grammar" of war. As a foundational script, it prescribes how the Army should execute critical tasks. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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. 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. 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. As shown in Table 1.1, as the profession of arms evolved, so did the role and function of doctrine.
As the purpose and meaning of doctrine evolved, the U.S. Army used it to link strategy and force structure. 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." 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. 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.
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." In a 1992 article, Sullivan similarly referred to doctrine as a "catalyst" providing "the framework for institutional changes within the Army." 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." 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." 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).
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. 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. 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. That is, minor changes at the tactical level can cascade into major changes in operational art.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Forging the Sword by Benjamin M. Jensen. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents and Abstracts1To Change an Army
chapter abstract
This chapter establishes the core argument of the book: the role of incubators and advocacy networks in enabling doctrinal change. Change is not necessarily natural or easy in complex bureaucracies like the military. Therefore, catalyzing change requires a unique configuration of institutional factors and environment shocks. The chapter explores this dilemma and reviews different perspectives on how military officers escape the iron cage of bureaucracy to imagine new ways of war. The work defines military doctrine and discusses various impediments to change as well as past accounts of how new ways of war emerge in a defense bureaucracy. In reviewing these different approaches, the work makes the case for a special role for the profession of arms and the role of knowledge networks in overcoming bureaucratic inertia.
2The First Battle of the Next War
chapter abstract
This chapter historically traces the emergence of the Active Defense doctrine in 1976. Specifically, the chapter will empirically examine the strategic context in terms of how military planners reconciled the Nixon doctrine and constraints implicit in the all-volunteer force and declining domestic resources. Senior leaders like General William DePuy used their analysis of the Arab-Israeli War as a means of conceptualizing what a future conventional war in Europe might look like. It was the operational problem necessitating new doctrine. From this vantage point, the chapter explores the institutional reform initiatives that gave birth to U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). TRADOC was a principal incubator that provided DePuy and his "boathouse gang" of young officers the space they needed to rewrite Cold War conventional doctrine.
3The Central Battle
chapter abstract
The chapter traces the emergence of the AirLand Battle doctrine as a response to shifting perceptions of the Soviet threat and new military concepts. First, the chapter examines the threats that drove national security considerations in the late 1970s and 1980s emphasizing the specific concerns voiced by Army leaders. Two stand out: the conventional balance in Europe and increased planning for non-NATO contingencies in Southwest Asia and the Far East Second, the analysis elucidates the conceptual underpinnings of doctrinal innovation in the development of AirLand Battle. Specifically, the emergence of two concepts, the Central Battle and Extended Battlefield, drove doctrinal development in the early 1980s. In both cases, incubators and advocacy networks proved central to helping military professionals define operational problems and spread their new concept across the organization.
4The New Warrior Class
chapter abstract
The chapter traces how senior military officers in TRADOC and the Department of the Army articulated threats following the Cold War. The case examines TRADOC initiatives linked to establishing a new war-fighting paradigm that crystallized in the June 1993 publication of FM 100-5, Operations, and the follow on 1994 TRADOC Pamphlet 525-5, Force XXI Operations. The new FM 100-5 embodied the broader realignment to a contingency-based force after the end of the Cold War. Force XXI linked together this vision of threat everywhere with new concepts governing the optimal mix of information technology. In tracing the episode, the chapter uncovers how incubators and advocacy networks helped officers develop and diffuse new ideas about how to array forces at the operational level.
5Hearts and Minds Revisited
chapter abstract
This chapter examines the development of FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency Operations, as an episode of doctrinal innovation. While the episode reflects doctrinal change, it is less dramatic than heralded at the time. Incubators and advocacy networks were present and appear to have enabled a group of thinkers around General David Petraeus, the "coinistas," to shift how the US defense establishment thought about counterinsurgency. The manual and subsequent surge did change the battle in Iraq, but the core ideas within the manual were neither new nor novel. Rather, they reflected a long tradition in military thinking about how to counter insurgents and guerillas to wage what was referred to during the American Revolution as petite guerre. The doctrine was old wine in a new bottle.
6Incubators, Advocacy Networks and Organizational Change
chapter abstract
This chapter summarizes the key findings and the role of incubators and advocacy networks in enabling doctrinal change in the U.S. Army. First, the conclusion reviews the evidence of these institutional mechanisms in each of the historical cases of doctrinal change. Second, it uses these findings to reflect on how military organizations change and the implications for defense policy. The major recommendation that emerges is a need to sustain intellectual vibrancy in the profession of arms. The chapter calls for sustaining funding for education and experimentation as a means of ensuring new ideas enter the profession. In addition, it highlights the need to maintain a professional culture where leaders publish new ideas and encourage subordinates to do so.