What comes first Equipment or Doctrine? (from: I see a Role for MGS)

[TangoTwoBravo]

Going back to how you defined doctrine, I also don't know if I would include how we get the "means and skilled men" for war as part of doctrine in this discussion.  Force generation has, I suppose, its own 'doctrine' and that can certainly have an impact on failure or success.  Regardless, doctrine that exists independent of means (to include equipment and technology) may find itself rather irrelevant.

I hate quoting myself...

Thinking about it more, how a force prepares for war would indeed be a part of doctrine as you mention.  I think that Canada regards doctrine as 'a formal expression of military knowledge and thought which covers the nature of the conflict, the preparation of the army for conflict and the method of engaging in conflict.'  Perhaps I am overly focussed on the tactical level, but I still place my own emphasis on the method of engaging in conflict.  That being said, whether your national doctrine is based on a long-service professional army or a concript army with massive reserves may indeed drive what methods you use.  I have read arguments about principles of war and whether they indeed are immutable over time or if they have changed.  If doctrine is restricted to principles and tenets then it does, indeed, gain some independence from external forces.  You may find, however, that the devil is in the details.  Some doctrine reads like a collection of truisms and you can use a principle of war to support practically any course of action.  The following example is a bit ridiculus to be sure, but a battalion of infantry advancing on foot in close order with their colours and drums seems to achieve concentration of force and maintenance of morale, and the enemy machine gunners will probably be surprised to be offered such a target.

Kirkhill,

Having done my staff training with the Americans I can recognize the football analogy.  We often talked of "plays" and "playbooks."  We enjoyed answering "METT-T" to any question from our instructors about what we would do in a given situation.  In Canada, however, we do have drills at many levels so it isn't like we make it as we go along each time.  Doctrine would, I believe, include the 'appreciation' that the commander employs, although whether he indeed follows it is up to debate.

I like the idea of initiative and letting the leader on the spot, at whatever level, determine the best way to accomplish a task.  That leader may need, however, a frame of reference that springs from doctrine.  Assuming that they will find a way over fire-swept ground may not be setting them up for success, especially if the methods they have been taught and trained are not suitable for the existing conditions.  Hoping that people figure it out on their own may not always work.  A doctrine that assumes away technology or other external forces may not be of much use.  That being said, doctrine should have some enduring aspects and I wouldn't suggest that it changes all the time. 

Are we arguing about where Doctrine ends and TTPs start, and whether Doctrine is unchanging while TTPs evolve in response to any number of external factors?

 

[a_majoor]

Since I doing a lot of hand waving at this point, I can understand why my ideas seem a bit vague. I am pitching this too high, as it were, so maybe an example will make this more understandable:

You decide to change careers and take up your new position as the local warlord somewhere in Dafur. You have a collection of locals armed with various AK series weapons, mortars, a couple of UNIMOG trucks and a few Toyota Land Cruisers mounting 14.5mm HMG's

In order to employ them most effectively against maurading enemy militias, Sudanese forces and other factions, you can pull out your well worn "Combat Team Commander's Handbook" and create a combined arms team out of these disparate elements. The TTP's need to be adjusted to reflect the equipment and terrain, and the effects are much smaller and closer than you may be used to, but otherwise the well known combined arms doctrine works just as well with this equiment as with Leopard 1 and M-113's, or ranks of pikemen and "Companion" heavy cavalry.

Doctrine will have to change if you are heavily overmatched or operating in unexpected environments (i.e. when entering close or complex terrain), in which case you might change into an insurgent force or refuse combat.

 

[Kirkhill]

So if I am looking for common ground here can we say that "doctrine" is what is taught and that that which is taught is designed to make the best use of available resources.  Implicit recognition that not every soldier is an Alexander (or has a Field Marshal's Baton in his knapsack) or that locks don't have the necessary flair to be flankers.

We conduct training to prepare for eventualities, right enough, but don't we also train to build cohesion and familiarity?  If you leave flexibility out of the syllabus and doctrine becomes dogma don't you just make it that much more difficult for the occasional Alexanders to respond effectively to a change in the enemy's actions or the situation? 

Don't you have to leave room for:

"...THE EXPLOIT OF WILLIAM WEBB ELLIS WHO WITH A FINE DISREGARD FOR THE RULES OF FOOTBALL AS PLAYED IN HIS TIME FIRST TOOK THE BALL IN HIS ARMS AND RAN WITH IT...." ?

I noted with interest that during the Grey Cup it was the Defensive Backfield that made all the going for both teams.  The offensive teams were most tied to the playbook (apparently the QB these days has it taped to his fore-arm).  The defensive line, by the nature of their work has to be the most responsive and thus less bound by the tyranny of the playbook.

 

[TangoTwoBravo]

The TTP's need to be adjusted to reflect the equipment and terrain, and the effects are much smaller and closer than you may be used to, but otherwise the well known combined arms doctrine works just as well with this equiment as with Leopard 1 and M-113's, or ranks of pikemen and "Companion" heavy cavalry.

Doctrine will have to change if you are heavily overmatched or operating in unexpected environments (i.e. when entering close or complex terrain), in which case you might change into an insurgent force or refuse combat.

I would argue that while having a principle about combined arms might endure, how that plays out into docrtine will certainly adjust as we switch from Companian cavalry to tanks.  It might not change all that much, however, going from a Leopard 1 to a Leopard II or M1, or even from a Sherman to an M1 since they are similar systems.

This may be an error, but I see doctrine as being the baseline for "how" we do things.  When we train we are, in essense, practicing and learning our doctrine.

Gazing back sixty-odd years and perhaps tying back in to the title of the thread, lets look at how the US Army set itself up for World War II.  As reports of German panzers in 1939 and 1940 came in the US Army looked to how the would defeat the tank threat and employ their own.  They devised the idea of a Tank Destroyer branch equipped with relatively light but mobile and hard-hitting AT systems.  The tank destroyers (whether towed or self-propelled) would destroy enemy tanks.  To their own tanks they gave the role of neutralizing enemy strongpoints.  I would argue that this vision of how the battle would be conducted was doctrine and it drove equipment decisions.  It was, perhaps, at the tactical level but I wouldn't just call it a TTP.  A breach drill or a defile drill is a TTP perhaps, but I would argue that your overall vision of how the various branches will interact is doctrine even if it is at a low level.

In the case of tank destroyer and tank doctrine for the US Army I would argue that their doctrine was somewhat faulty.  Reports from the field led to grudging changes to include putting guns on US tanks that could deal with enemy tanks and the eventual dissolution of the Tank Destroyer branch.

German doctrine dealing with the same issue was, perhaps, a little looser while still striving for the same idea.  They did prefer to leave the destruction of enemy tanks to their anti-tank weapons, but they had also learned to make their tanks capable of dealing with enemy tanks.  They were also happy to employ anti-aircraft guns to kill tanks.  The idea behind the US Tank Destroyer doctrine was, perhaps, sound, but its dogmatic application led to problems.  I've seen similar problems with 'paper/scisssors/rock' ideas in 1990's manouevre warfare texts.

I would argue that there is a relationship between doctrine and equipment.  If you have battle-tested doctrine and there have been few real technological changes then extant doctrine should probably guide equipment purchases.  If there has been a big change in weapons technology, however, we may have to adjust.  Perhaps there is a weighting that can applied on a sliding scale?  The higher the level of doctrine, the less effect technological changes might have?

Kirkhill,

The application of doctrine on the ground should, indeed, be flexible.  Dogma can be a trap as I alluded to earlier. 

 

[Kirkhill]

So T2B, what I think I am hearing you say is that in 1939-40 the US Army

Observed the application of doctrine, technology and tactics
Oriented the results to what they hoped to achieve
Decided on their own version of how to modify the technology, tactics and doctrine to achieve an advantage
Acted by implementing their changes
Observed the effect of their changes at Kasserine
Oriented
Decided on modifications
Acted again in Sicily...

 

[TangoTwoBravo]

I suppose, but I wouldn't restrict doctrine to a decision-making model, even a buzzword model like the OODA Loop.  The fundamental steps of the decision-making process are probably quite similar for all rational actors through time, but I would argue that process is not the extent of doctrine.

My point in including the tank destroyer tangent was to give an example of what I would call doctrine at a relatively low tactical level.  The bonus for me was that it shows that slavishly hitching equipment decisions to doctrine can lead to problems and also that doctrine can change.

 

[a_majoor]

That was a great example (and I am sad to say it didn't even occur to me), but I also think it reflects the relative primacy of doctrine over equipment.

The US Army's "Tank Destroyer" branch was a great example of fitting equipment specifications to doctrine. The contemporary British fielded slow, massively armoured "Infantry Tanks" and fast, lightly armoured "Cruiser Tanks" to create weapons that fit their armoured doctrine. The French had a much different idea about the use of AFV's, leading to the contemporary "Char B" series of tanks, while the Red Army had decided tanks would be the future of Cavalry (until Stalin decided to eliminate both the doctrine and the writers....), leading to the BV series of fast tanks.

The Germans did best of all, since they expanded their ideas of combined arms doctrine much more broadly than their counterparts, although the negative consequence of that ended up being a relatively short ranged and inflexible air force.

So from the top, all these forces had to deal with similar problems. The combined arms ideal was the basis of their doctrinal solutions. In every case these armies came up with some sort of mechanized force, based around tanks. As we get down closer to the weeds we start seeing a divergence of opinion as to exactly what the roles of the various pieces of the combined arms teams will be, and this is what leads to the different end results. Outside factors such as the terrain they operated out of, historical experience, ideology and the technological and industrial resources at hand also had a lot to do with the shaping of the doctrine and the ultimate shape of the forces deployed to employ doctrine (the Red Army looked to the long distances and open battles of the Russian Civil War, the use of masses of conscripted troops, and ideology of exporting the Socialist revolution as the backdrop to their 1936 Field Regulations, for example).

Hard experience in battle did cause evolutionary changes in contemporary doctrine, and I would suggest that all the various armies solutions in 1945 had converged much more closely than they were in 1939 (not only the doctrine but even as far down as the specifications of the equipment [once you discount wingers like the "Maus" tank]).

 

[TangoTwoBravo]

I would agree that doctrine often drives equipment, but I would argue that the relationship between the two should be dynamic.  If your doctrine is sound and battle-tested then I have no particular problem with it determining what equipment is to be acquired.  That being said, however, we should also realize that no doctrine is perfect and that equipment capabilities do change.  Doctrine should guide equipment decisions, but we should also have our eyes open to the possibility that the situation has changed and we have to alter our doctrine to fit the new situation (or new capability).  It can be hard, however, to really predict how a new weapon will work on the battlefield.  We military types tend to be both traditionalists and skeptics.  This can protect us from some bad ideas but it can also blind us to good ones. 

I hate to pick on Haig, but as related in The Social History of the Machine Gun he insisted in 1913 that a Cavalry Division have four Brigades.  It needed four brigades "For the charge!  Two brigades in the first line, one in support and one in reserve."  Battle-tested, time-honoured and irrelevant doctrine.  I have read that the 1908 pattern cavalry sword was the perfect expression of doctrine in a weapon (designed for a thrust). 

As you note, the distinctions between cruiser,infantry, support, heavy, light and medium tanks seemed to disappear as time went by and we ended up with the Main Battle Tank.  Some are a bit lighter, some a bit slower etc,  but all in all we have settled on a rather general-purpose platform which makes sense on a variety of levels.  The various doctrine writers were all right to some degree, but many also had it wrong.  A tank should be able to support an infantry platoon, but it should also be able to destroy a tank that it meets.  At the higher level they should be massed, but at the same time you need to give all elements to deal with enemy tanks in turn.  The doctrine that had been hammered out by 1945 in most nations was based on a blend of theoretical work and combat experience.

If a particular doctrine has lots of rules and restrictions then perhaps we have opportunities for failure.  If it has lots of "your job is to do this and my job is to do that" or "tanks deal with such and such a target" then we might be handcuffing ourselves.  If the underlying doctrinal assumptions are based on faulty premises or special cases then we also have opportunities for failure. 

To go down another historical rabbit-hole, the Japanese Army in the 1930s was engaged in a guerrilla war in China.  Tanks were seen as supporting the infantry in the Japanese Army.  Their tanks were relatively slow and primarily armed with machine guns, and to be fair they were not alone in this regard.  Some tanks were even designed for the purpose of bringing up supplies for the infantry.  These did quite well, however, against poorly armed guerrillas.  Their bruising encounter with Zhukov in 1939, however, revealed that their Army was not really ready for a clash with a peer opponent out in the open.  They began to reorganize and made efforts to improve their tanks and acquire larger antitank guns but they were never able to make up the difference (the 1945 replay is quite fascinating and was used by Rand as an example of what a  Soviet blitz into Germany would look like).  I should add that at the strategic level Japan had to make priorities balancing a navy and an army and underplaying tanks is an understandable resource decision.  I only raise this to show the danger of developing a body of military thought that is focused on a special case.  You had better hope that you fight in that special case...

 

[dapaterson]

I only raise this to show the danger of developing a body of military thought that is focused on a special case.  You had better hope that you fight in that special case...

Or, to quote the grandson of  McNaughton, "Afghanistan is A war, not necessarily THE war."

 

[TangoTwoBravo]

Or, to quote the grandson of  McNaughton, "Afghanistan is A war, not necessarily THE war."

A good point.  I guess we deal with the alligator closest to the boat, but we should also seek to retain the ability to deal with other alligators (or snakes or bears or some other metaphor/allegory) that lurk in the swamp.  For expeditionary nations like ours, we should probably avoid the words "never" and "always" in our doctrine when framing what the future conflict will look like.  An Israeli doctrine writer can probably focus on "the war", while we need to devote some portion of our thoughts and resources to "a war."  I am guilty of emphasizing "the war" all the time, and did so on the SCTF thread last year.  Still, we need to beat this alligator first...

 

[Michael OLeary]

Ah, the elusive doctrine.  What come first? The equipment or the doctrine?  DLR or DLFD?  Here is my take on this.

Actually, the elusive part is when "doctrine" is actually used to support or deny weapons initiatives.

It wasn't "in our doctrine" to use the 60 with bipod in the late 80s.  Even though units were starting to do so, the Infantry School refused to allow staff to document of new drills because the weapon in that employment "wasn't in our doctrine".  Apparently doctrine is enough reason to turn a blind eye to reality.

In the mid-1980s we had the 120 mm mortar project.  I've been told this was a pet project of a very senior officer who was using the Corps 86 model as a means to bring in a weapon system from a particular country  Interestingly, although a number of weapon systems were trialled, ones which were not comparable examples, only one fit a Statement of Requirement that exactly matched its published characteristics (and no other 120 in the world met that SOR).  That project died when it was determined that there was no doctrinal justification for it (perhaps when the senior officer was replaced?), but we were able to ignore doctrine long enough to actually trial three different systems.

So, which is it really? Theory/doctrine leads or reality/equipment leads?

 

[McG]

Docrtine can easily be developed without equipment: look at the development of combined arms theory in the British and German armies in the 20's and 30s when much of the kit either didn't exist or was composed of inadequate stand-ins.

Even this doctrine development had to take into consideration the potential for equipment to fill roles.  A combined arms doctrine based on archers and horses would have looked significantly different than the ones based on machine guns & armoured vehicles.  This goes back to my earlier point that these things need to feed back into each other.  Doctrine will only be marginal (at best) if it fails to consider & exploit the potential of modern technology.  At the same time, equipment that is incompatible or ill-suited to doctrine will weaken the overall force. 

The whole force development in the Army is impaired against doing this right.  While the force development & requirements folk are not in the same building, at least they are in the same city (basically).  However, with DLCD and doctrine in Kingston, the two halves of the Army's force development brain are not even close enough to sit together over coffee every other week & ensure they are working in the same step.

With equipment it stands out more because the wrong answer gets dumped on the troops & they have to make it work (or there is nothing & the troops still have to make things work).  When the doctrine side is missing, the troops make their own (which is a lot easier that fabricating vehicles, weapons & other kit in the field).  However, it seems to me that signs of the doctrine ball being dropped are plenty to be found.  The Infantry platoon & company doctrine is so badly out of date that it is hidden and not even available on the AEL.

When the field army runs into problems that require a fast & coherent response from the national headquarters, the solution is to create new ad-hoc organizations (like the CF C-IED TF) with PYs to do what should already be happening in existing staffs ... except that it is not because those staffs are so physically separated that good communication is not happening at the working levels.

Doctrine must lead the acquisition of equipment, but doctrine must also be realistic & account for the potential of technology & our soldiers.  when inputs change sufficient to make doctrine irrelevant or out-dated, then the Army must be flexible enough to quickly fix it.  At the same time, equipment acquisition must continue and so requirements staffs must know exactly the developments that are happening even prior to publishing new doctrine.  If we are ever going to get to this point, then the Army's force development efforts need to be put under a single roof (and I wouldn't feel any emotional pangs if that meant LFDTS had to again lose its "D").

 

[TangoTwoBravo]

I've spent the last month hunting in dusty vaults looking for what others before us may have said on this issue.  One intriguing passage came from a Captain Johathan House in his Towards Combined Arms Warfare: A Survey of 20th Century Tactics, Doctrine and Organization.  This was published in 1984 by the US Army Command and General Staff College and is a good little read on the major developments of the 20th century at the tactical level.

He makes the following points that relate to our discussion:

"It is not sufficient to develop a doctrine for combining the different arms and services.  In order to practice, refine and employ this doctrine at least five other elements are necessary:

1.   First, an army must design and procure weapons with the characteristics required by the doctrine and must stay abreast of technical changes that may invalidate or modify those weapons and doctrine.   

2.   The doctrine must be effectively explained and disseminated to the commanders who are expected to use it. 

3.   The commanders must believe that the doctrine can be effective with the organizations, weapons and troops available.   Previous experience can hamper this if doctrine has changed.

4.   The unit must have the training and morale to implement the doctrine

5.   A combined arms system cannot function without effective command and control to integrate and direct that system."

His first point seems to cut at the heart of what we have been discussing.  Weapons should be made according to doctrine, but doctrine should be updated to keep abreast of changes in weapons.  The other points are interesting and I wonder how a study of modern Canadian doctrine would look like through that framework.   

 

[Colin Parkinson]

For Canada the problem is we have two diametrically opposed doctrine to fill. The first is defense of Canada and the ability to operate in the terrain and weather dictated by our extremely long and diverse borders.

The 2nd is to field a expeditionary force which based on history has had to fight or maintain operations in Jungles, deserts, urban, rural areas, Africa, Asia, ME and lands in-between.

In the end the majority of the equipment must be flexible enough to be used in any possible scenario, creating a major headache for planners. This is why I have maintained that we need a requirement for heavier tracked forces and lighter wheeled  forces for the Army. In 1999 I doubt anyone foresaw us being involved in a shooting war in Afghanistan, predicating the next operation will also be difficult. We are going to have to live with a flexible doctrine and equipment structure that will never be perfect.

 

[McG]

The other points are interesting and I wonder how a study of modern Canadian doctrine would look like through that framework. 

I suspect it would come up lacking especially given that (as you once said) Canadian doctrine is whatever the highest-rank in the room says it is. 

 

[Panzer Grenadier]

I suspect it would come up lacking especially given that (as you once said) Canadian doctrine is whatever the highest-rank in the room says it is. 

That's quite sad - and probably more true than false.