strategy? What is doctrine? How are they related?

Strategy is the relation of ends to means through ways. It addresses 3 questions: What do I want to accomplish? How can I achieve my goal? With what?

Military doctrine is our best guess as to the best practices to conduct engagements and operations. It has been vetted and published as a textbook - we call that textbook a FM. As such, it addresses the how question of strategy.

The huge caveat about doctrine is that it is written by too few people, usually Majors and LTCs (or ex Majors and LTCs - contractors) , in too little time, with too little information and so suffers the same failings as most civilian textbooks do. (Just look at the books your kids use or the ones put out for college courses) Sometimes, of course, they actually say something as does 3-24 and a few others. (I think pretty highly of FM 100-20 of 1990, for instance, but then I had something to do with it. Nothing in 3-24 contradicts anything we said in 100-20, just exapnds on it.)

Doctrine, of course is not strategy but it does tell us how we plan to do the "how" of strategy. If there is a mismatch between doctrine and the strategic ways then the 3 legged strategy stool is off balance and the ways leg must be fixed. That means bringing doctrine in line with the strategic ways - usually by changing the doctrine.

Cheers

JohnT