Hi Maximus,

Quote Originally Posted by Maximus View Post
....This said, the simple fact that we have a new counterinsurgency doctrine is in many ways a miracle, especially one that was blessed so quickly by the USMC and US Army! Since publication this new doctrine has already had profound impacts on the training and education process, not to mention the conduct of U.S. forces on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. Everyday that the authors could have spent double and triple checking sources, re-wording footnotes, bibliography, etc., is one more day that this mission critical publication would not have been where it needed to be--in the hands of those executing COIN or preparing to execute.
I would hope that anyone with two neurons to rub together would agree with your point that the primary aim of any FM is to get doctrine into the hands of the troops as quickly as possible. Furthermore, I totally agree that a lot of citations and footnotes are, in all probability, an interference with an FM as a training document. This is one of the reasons why I totally agree with Adam's comment that there should have been two versions - one with and one without citations.

Let me, for the moment, bring out another aspect to doctrinal writing that hasn't received as much emphasis as it should. It is my understanding, and please correct me if I am wrong, that part of the function of doctrinal writing is to define an "operational reality", i.e. what to look for, how to react to these perceptions and, most importantly, why. In effect, doctrine is applied theory; "praxis" in academic-speak. If this is the case, then doctrine plays an important role in professional military education. It is this function of doctrine that I see as being a very good reason for having a "critical edition" of doctrine available (i.e. full citations, etc.).

Quote Originally Posted by Maximus View Post
The previous post mentioned that it won't be long before we have quality control circles looking at publications down to the rifle squad level.
I'm going to take this on a (somewhat) academic tangent . First, when Ken mentioned Taylor, I really had to laugh since Taylor actually took many of his ideas, filtered 3rd and 4th hand (without citations ), from the beginnings of modern warfare going back to William the Silent and Maurice of Nassau. Second, Demming actually got a lot of his ideas from Mao via, in part, the 1st Marine Raider BTN. The idea of using quality control circles, or some modern variant of them, is actually not too bad. In some ways, the SWC is just a giant quality control circle, as are many of the informal communications networks that exist.

That being said, let's take it back to doctrine and FM 3-24. A good critical edition of FM 3-24 would serve as a solid basis for for the development of expansions to, and specific applications of counter-insurgency operations. I believe that is one of the reasons why we saw the use of paradoxes in the manual. I am not saying that the critical edition should have come first, just that it should be there. One final comment and then I'll leave off: I fully expect that the authors of the manual draft chapters included references in their drafts, and I would ask that anyone on the SWC who was an author or reviewer if this was so. If it was, then the production of a critical edition of FM 3-24 could have been produced at the same time as the regular edition.

Marc