Flawed Doctrine or Flawed Strategy?

[Bob's World]

How do you write strategy for the future? Can you tell the future? The strategy of September the 10th 2001 was irrelevant by the 12th. What the military contribution to strategy is surely dependant on circumstances of the moment.

Doctrine is and should be substantially enduring, excepting substantial changes in organisation or equipment capability. E.G. I'd suggest the basics of a cordon and search operation have not changed since about 1960.

...though to take on the inertia of the doctrinaires you sometimes have to have some big brass ones!

In my current job I have met some professional futurists...guys who make living creating projections of the future. There were several at the last TRADOC conference I went to in fact, to lend their insights to writing the next Future Operating Environment (FOE). That's not what we do.

So much of what you see out there in terms of current understanding of what needs to be done is based upon what needed to be done for the last war. Almost a definition of doctrine, which is a codification of what needed to be done for the last war, applied to the next. Thus the "fighting the last war" syndrome.

Worth noting is that every previous insurgency took place in a pre-globalized world, where tactics of isolating the insurgent from the populace were feasible, and an insurgent organization could more easily be suppressed and order restored without having to actually deal with the underlying conditions of poor governance that gave rise to the last insurgency, and ultimately the next due to letting them continue.

Our work is not an effort to predict the future so much as it is to understand better the here and now, and to look then at what worked and in the past and ask what is still valid today, and what must be updated in order to achieve similar successful effects in this new environment.

I, for one, believe that the principles of both state-based and populace-based conflicts, while very different, are also very enduring in nature. But the environment in which they occur, made up of the history and culture of the affected populace/state; the terrain, veg, weather; the available technologies; etc, etc shape each in a unique way.

It is not a prediction of the future to say that the rate and availability of information today is unique in the history of man. Nor is it a prediction of the future to challenge tried and true COIN TTPs against their validity in this new operating environment.

Who will use them? Don't know. Where? Don't know. But there are trends and indicators of change.

This is my big beef with the Intel community from top to bottom. Gross negligent failure to evolve from a complete and total focus in identifying and learning as much as possible about who the "enemy" is; and a equally complete refusal to put their tremendous energy, skill and talent to creating a similar understanding of the environment in which these groups operate, and the causations that give rise to them in the first place and sustain them in their efforts. They are all about the symptom, and neither know, understand, nor care about the causes. It’s a disgrace, and it is putting out nation at risk.

So they drone on about who changed their name to AQ last, Who the top senior leadership is, endless drivel about ideology and radicalism; but I have yet to see them lay out the failures of governance around the world that are the causation of such groups. Or a linkage chart of 'legitimacy' laying out where activities by the U.S. have created dangerous perceptions of legitimacy over other populaces governances, and thereby placed us in the crosshairs of those same populaces as they seek change.

So, no, I don't try to predict the future, but I do try to understand more fully the here and now. That means a deep study and understanding of the past, without also adopting a blind adherence to the same.