How we fight: A critical exploration of US military doctrine

Abstract

This essay seeks to answer the question, ‘How can we understand and critically examine the role of doctrine by which US military operations are conceptualized and performed?’ I employ Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of the modernist grand narrative and Karl E. Weick’s construct of generic sensemaking to demonstrate and criticize how doctrine’s logic of systematicity has become institutionalized in US military.

The dominant concepts of war held by military institutions have a significant effect upon which kinds of force they acquire and train, therefore, upon the kinds of war they are prepared to fight.

Carl Builder (1989: 127)

We need not certainly presuppose that the world somehow is systematic (simple, uniform, and the like) to validate our penchant for the systematicity of our cognitive commitments.

Nicholas Rescher (2001: 201)

Introduction

In mid-February 1991, while assigned as an American Army major in the war plans cell of Headquarters XVIII Airborne Corps, I had the opportunity to helicopter over two of the Army’s most high-tech corps—my own and the more heavily mechanized VII Corps. For about an hour, we flew from the leftmost western flank of the XVIII to the rightmost flank of the VII. The sight was spectacular. Two giant army corps, with nearly 300,000 US troops, were on-line, ready to commence the ground attack into Iraq. There was an over-the-horizon line up hundreds of tanks, mechanized infantry, and countless support troops and their vehicles carrying enough fuel and ammunition to fight a lightning war hundreds of miles into enemy territory. It was the most amazing land formation of military mechanized might ever assembled, trained, and readied under what many considered the most transformative doctrine in modern military history.

Dubbed AirLand Battle, the doctrine was a generalizable concept for conducting combined arms operations developed by the presumptive military intellectuals of their time to include the iconic Generals William DePuy and Donn Starry (DePuy, 1961; Romjue, 1984; Starry, 1982). ¹ In the wake of the Vietnam War and boosted by the Reagan military buildup, AirLand Battle was envisioned to rejuvenate the Army and Air Force partnership. The combined arms purpose was to methodically beat the Warsaw Pact on the battlefields of Western Europe without the use of nuclear weapons. I had no idea that 25 years later I would be writing this journal article questioning what I thought at the time to be an unbeatable way to prepare for and fight wars. My faith and confidence (with an assumed professional credential—my staff college diploma), invested in the concepts provided by AirLand Battle doctrine and the institution’s promise of doctrine itself, have since diminished. Little did I know in 1991, when I returned home, that the United States and Iraq would be continuously involved in what could be characterized as America’s longest war with no end in sight.

I write this essay in the midst of several ongoing conflicts: terrorist attacks on the homelands of nation states which have not seen war for generations; nuclear threats from a rogue North Korea; a potential failed nation and nuclear-weaponized state of Pakistan, the emergent nuclear weaponization of an Islamic radicalized Iran, and the complex wars and militarized disputes underway in Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, and scattered throughout regions of Africa and the Asia Pacific rim. I hope my small narrative about US military doctrine will both inform other social scientists who are concerned about the appropriate use of military force and serve as paralogical reasoning to those military insiders who otherwise would unreflexively subscribe to its veracity.

To that dual purpose, I address this question: How can we understand and critically view the role of doctrine by which US military operations are conceptualized and performed? In Part 1, toward conveying understanding, I derive my interpretations principally from the descriptive theories of grand narrative (Lyotard, 1984) and generic sensemaking (Weick, 1995). In Part 2, I present ‘little narratives’ (Lyotard’s (1984) form of emancipatory paralogy), in my attempt to ‘destabilize’ and ‘disturb’ this grand order of military reasoning and perhaps eventually to help ‘change the rules’ of the ‘language game’ upon which US military doctrine’s consensus is based (pp. 60–67). Finally, I present some conclusions.

Part 1: understanding US military doctrine

An entire field army, in a sense, is a vast integrated weapons system. The interdependence of working parts of the field army—that is integration of infantry, armor, engineers, signal and other supporting elements, is the ultimate expression of Army doctrine. The Navy and Air Force have similar talent in their functional doctrinal fields. (General William E. DePuy (1961: 36)

Operational art is the marshaling of fighting systems—weapons systems, organizational systems, tactical systems, supporting systems of all kinds—in large units. In practice, it is the planning and conduct of campaigns with those systems. (General Donn A. Starry (1982: 107)

Jean-François Lyotard (1984), in The Postmodern Condition, describes performativity in terms of the modernist’s grand narrative of systematicity: ‘The true goal of the system, the reason it programs itself like a computer, is the optimization of the global relationship between input and output’ (p. 11). Lyotard portrays the Laplacean meta-assumption of universal systematicity (aka the system of the world) as the hallmark of the modernist grand narrative:

… since performativity is defined by an input/output ratio, there is a presupposition that the system into which the input, is, entered is stable; that system must follow a regular ‘path’ that it is possible to express as a continuous function possessing a derivative, so that an accurate prediction of the output can be made. Such is the positivist ‘philosophy’ of efficiency. (p. 54)

Lyotard further argues that expectations of progressive ‘performance improvement’ of the system motivate the production of knowledge within this logic of systematicity (p. 12). US military doctrine serves this grand narrative where those indoctrinated may only conceive military action as an input to achieve a desired output. The US military operates in the purposeful way that doctrine prescribes—to improve the state of a regional system (‘stability’ in the Middle East, Eurasia, or the Pacific Rim) or the global system (a ‘stable’ world).

My second and overlapping assertion is that US military doctrine is an example of generic sensemaking. Karl E. Weick (1993), in Sensemaking in Organizations, stresses the importance of studying generic sensemaking in organizations, a process that involves revealing ‘roles and rules exist that enable individuals to be interchanged with little disruption to the ongoing pattern of interaction’ (p. 633, citing Wiley, 1988). Weick et al. (2005) remind us that the central idea of organized sensemaking is performative in nature—‘that people organize to make sense of equivocal inputs and enact this sense back into the world to make that world more orderly’ (p. 410). Doctrinal terms and concepts provide clear specification toward the industrial-like reproducibility of individual and organizational roles and activities and give a sense of disambiguation and orderliness as to ‘how we fight’. ² Doctrinal manuals serve to standardize military action and invoke the institution’s modernist quest for predictable reliability in war through the creation of ‘habituated action patterns’ (Weick, 1995: 71–75). Military doctrine establishes systematicity as its generic logic of action ³ complete with ontological and epistemological structures written purposefully, so individuals and organizations perform clearly defined functions and tasks with shared language and methodology.

This logic of systematicity is written into dozens upon dozens of ‘how to’ manuals covering a wide spectrum of subjects available in breathtaking detail, ranging from employing nuclear weapons, conducting conventional warfare campaigns, countering and in some cases supporting guerilla activities (aka small wars) to supporting humanitarian relief operations. These publications contribute significantly to the way the US military claims to be a profession (like engineering, medicine, and law), communicates options to political decision makers, and organizes its forces, plans, and operations accordingly. Moreover, because of its attractiveness as a believed effective source of national power—the threat or use of American military force—other military institutions adopt this doctrine. Shared by other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member countries as well as a host of other modern armed forces, the US Department of Defense (DoD) definition of doctrine confirms an intent to generically sensemake as a coalition, a unified system of systems, by publishing ‘fundamental principles by which the military forces or elements thereof guide their actions in support of national objectives’ (DoD, 2015).

The grand narrative of systematicity applies to how the US military currently organizes in anticipation of missions programmed (as one would a computer) to perform doctrinally categorized sets of detailed functions and tasks. Paul Edwards (1996), in his historic analysis of the Cold War years, refers to this narrative as closed-world discourse: ‘the language, technologies, and practices that together supported the visions of centrally controlled, automated global power at the heart of American Cold War politics’ (p. 7). The longevity and pervasiveness of closed-world discourse are stunning, and its engineered systematicity continues decades after America’s and NATO’s ‘Cold War’ with communist countries. Based on its doctrine, the US military designs its organizations around the blending of high-tech machines and humans invested in the science of systems engineering. Military units are designed as modular subsystems that may be joined to perform military functions (command and control, movement, and maneuver, intelligence, supporting fires, logistics, etc.), with these functions further refined by publishing a highly elaborated and preordained hierarchy of tasks.

Individuals (infantry, air crewmembers, unmanned aerial vehicle pilots, logistics troops, pilots, coxswains, artillerymen, communications specialists, etc.) are technically trained as an integral part of military hardware to perform well-defined, standardized tasks at the lowest levels in the organization—a fighter pilot, teams, crews, squads, companies, squadrons, groups, divisions, and so on. Doctrine formulates ‘individual tasks’ that mission commanders may aggregate into unitized, cross-functional ‘collective tasks’ that are further codified all the way up to ‘strategic and national’ level (the realm of combatant commands, and the President’s cabinet). These tasks link into a more detailed database of hundreds of generic tasks dubbed the Universal Joint Task List (DoD, 2002: B-A-3). Each service department (Army, Navy, and Air Force) has constructed similar, supporting task hierarchies conforming to their respective contributions to the warfare domains of the land, sea, aerospace, and cyberspace.

Illustrating the logic of Peter Drucker’s (1954) management-by-objectives recipe, US military planning doctrine conveys hierarchical control. When assigned a mission objective, a military headquarters (HQ) commander and staff are expected to operationalize those objectives through a doctrinal process of ‘mission analysis‘, resulting in more precisely defined array of essential tasks believed to be effective in changing the targeted system to a clearly defined end state. That HQ then assigns these tasks to an array of appropriate functionalized subordinate HQs (infantry, armor, logistics, engineer, etc.) and attaches the appropriate units doctrinally programmed to perform these tasks under the control of those integrating HQs. Command and control doctrine assures clarity and disciplined accomplishment of those assigned tasks. When these HQs and their attached units are grouped together, US doctrine calls these ‘task headquarters’, ‘task organizations’, and ‘task forces’ which are organized functionally with the necessary ‘enabling capabilities’ (such as communications, intelligence, and transportation; DoD, 2015). In short, mission accomplishment is expected by building (like with the modularity of Legos) the correct subordinate HQs and units that are coterminous with the delegations of essential tasks and functions for specific missions (DoD, 2011b). Prosecuting a ‘perfect war’ becomes a matter of constructing correctly the engineered military system of systems (Gibson, 1986).

Herbert Simon (1947) claims, ‘It is the machine gunner and not the major who fights the battles’ (pp. 2–3). Yet, it takes the shared meaning of doctrine to create complex logistical systems that, through intricate planning regimens, will place the machine gunner into the war zone equipped not just with the machine gun but complete with the presumed advantaged task performativity (‘provide covering fire’) to standards written in a field manual. Indeed, physical management of task integration by and within US military units is performed by seasoned, enlisted ‘blue collar’ supervisory chain called noncommissioned officers (NCOs); technicians, called warrant officers; and a college educated class, namely, commissioned officers, who are trained to integrate cross-functional tasks in larger scales with doctrine manuals serving as their textbooks. At the time of this writing, for example, across three dozen functionalities, the US Department of the Army—one of three service secretariats—has created 210 enlisted military occupational specialties, 80 warrant officer specialties, and 169 officer specialties to cover doctrinal task accomplishment. Each service has similar numbers of position specialties.

Units are collectives of military occupational specialties coupled and trained with their equipment and allocated to mass-reproducible positions. Schools train military members based on ‘critical task lists’ governed by ‘critical task and site selection boards’ to ensure the level of training required to meet doctrinal performance standards (US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), 2015: 10). The institution also procures and allocates expensive, high-tech equipment. Occupational specialties and equipment combine according to functionalized tables of organization. These tables are engineered to link, line by line, equipment to the specialized personnel positions in units. ⁴ These tables are numbered and each specialized unit (e.g. engineering reconnaissance, ground attack, and air defense) is given a Standard Requirement Code that becomes part of a managed inventory of modularized capabilities managed globally by the Secretary of Defense through his joint staff.

The challenge remains on how to plan and control the implementation of these functions and tasks by these military organizations in the conduct of military operations. US doctrine recognizes that war is an uncertain undertaking; yet, policymakers still expect precise control of military force during operations to prevent unwarranted casualties and unrestrained escalation that may include the use of nuclear weapons. The science of cybernetics, based in system theory, addresses ‘the set of problems centering about communication, control, and statistical mechanics’ (Wiener, 1948: 19). John Steinbruner (1974) writes in his classic book, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision, that the science of cybernetics demands operating with ‘highly focused attention and highly programmed response’ where ‘decisions are fragmented into small fragmented into small segments and the segments treated sequentially. The process is dominated by established procedure’ (pp. 86–87).

It is no wonder that the science of cybernetics is the preferential logic for the US military’s command and control doctrine. Doctrinal texts contain detailed guidelines designed to control task performance by carefully constructed feedback mechanisms. This feedback includes incorporating global positioning technology, with symbols showing designated kill zones or prescribed operating areas, locations of friends, foes, and neutral parties depicted on a computerized map; transmitting detailed situation reports from lower HQs to higher HQs; intelligence collection, analysis, and sharing; equipment maintenance status; visibility over global military supply chains; and other regulating measures. These descriptions are commensurate with the US military’s purchase of a wide array of information technology systems geared to the cybernetic command and control of operations.

US planning doctrine employs the science of cybernetics in its pursuit of effects-based operations (EBO) (Mattis, 2008; Ruby, 2008). EBO espouses that commanders, after identifying enemy system nodes and defining the tasks to address them, should control military interventions through detailed plans and orders that permit ‘synchronization’ of task execution with focused attention to operational assessments (DoD, 2011b). The premise is that through the proper integration and control of tasks and objectives through levels of military HQs that unified action (the ultimate goal of the system of systems framework) can be achieved (DoD, 2011a). The hierarchical control of task performance to achieve objectives are additive, that is, will produce the overall desired effects—ultimately accomplishing the overall strategic objective contained in the nation’s or coalition’s foreign policy. Operational assessments at the higher HQ serve to steer task performance that keeps layers of unit actions on parallel tracks in space and time across all subordinate HQs. This cybernetic logic is clear in this excerpt from a keystone doctrinal manual, Joint Operations:

During execution, the commander’s staff identifies those key assessment indicators that suggest progress or setbacks in accomplishing tasks, creating effects, and achieving objectives. Assessment actions and measures help commanders adjust operations and resources as required, determine when to execute branches and sequels [contingencies] and make other critical decisions to ensure current and future operations remain aligned with the mission and military end state. (DoD, 2011a: xiv; emphasis added)

There may be no grander narrative of systematicity documented in a single organization today. This system of systems approach to warfare is part and parcel to the modernist’s grand narrative of systematicity. US doctrine represents an ideology which, as do all ideologies, deserves critical review.

In Part 2, I attempt to counter-narrate to disturb and disrupt the modernist grand narrative of systematicity that underlies US military doctrine (Lyotard’s (1984) paralogical petit récits, pp. 60–61) and summarize reports from the few contrarian military writers. I attempt to present a balanced analysis of doctrine’s pros and cons along with some illustrative historic examples that portray inherent value tensions and reveal paradoxes that doctrine fails to address. The formation of written doctrine and its underlying logic contributes to the US military’s enactment of its operational reality, hence giving literal sensemaking to who lives and who dies. In this regard, I also discuss ethical issues associated with the morality of US military doctrine.

Part 2: a critical review of US military doctrine

Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert’s homology, but the inventor’s paralogy. (Jean-François Lyotard, 1984: xxv)

While US doctrinal concepts about what means shall be employed and how they should be employed may vary slightly, I have found only a few extant community of interest debates about the substantive impact of changing the underlying premise—that doctrine should continue as an assumed positive, progressive military science underpinned by the assumptions of systematicity. These socially complex, interrelated portents of military science may bind and blind US forces from considering alternative sensemakings in the prosecution of operations.

The US military claims social legitimacy as a ‘profession of arms’ (DoD, 2012a) based on the belief that its doctrine constitutes a specialized body of knowledge sufficient to claim expertise that cannot be understood or performed by laypeople (Huntington, 1957). For example, average citizens would not be able to employ intricate maneuvers and artillery support on an enemy position, while professionalized soldiers drill to do this with reliable knowhow. There are significant issues with this claim of a professional body of knowledge. For decades, the US military consistently enjoyed the highest ranked public trust across American institutions (Gallup, 2015). Without the appeal of machine-like trustworthiness of US military doctrine and its professional application, policymakers and their wartime political support may experience ‘Cartesian anxiety’ (Weick, 1995: 189, citing Bernstein, 1983)—the avoidance of the embarrassment that would otherwise be associated with rejection of both the assumptions of a positive, progressive science and the claim of being a reliable profession. Exposing doctrine as a pseudoscience endangers the social legitimacy of the institution, hence interfering with political support of state-sanctioned war. Nevertheless, I shall try, motivated by the paralogy of the little narrative.

The way the US military doctrinal manuals are developed and published indicates autocratic power at work, providing more of an illusion of scientific progress. The institution assumes its system of doctrinal publications gets better and better through operational experience and learned lessons. Publishing updated editions of the manuals gives the appearance of scientific-like progression, yet these texts neither require a citation system to buttress the efficacy of theoretical arguments nor are they subject to refereed reviews and other scholarly criticisms and mitigations afforded by other esoteric knowledge forms found, for example, in traditional professions, such as medicine and law. The publications become doctrine by virtue of a three- or four-star general or admiral signing them.

Updates to doctrinal manuals can take 5–10 years or more, reflecting a rather shallow rehashing or reorganization of jargon, slogans, and buzzwords, while the underlying closed-world logic of systematicity remains further entrenched, contributing to the illusion of an engineering-like professional discipline of study. For example, a proposed information technology–oriented doctrinal concept, Globally Integrated Operations (GIO) (DoD, 2012b), describes the systematicity of combining arms on an even grander scale where multinational friendly air, land, sea, and cyber forces can quickly aggregate into an integrated fighting system. Official military futurist writings claim that the key to future military success (through the year 2035) still resides in systems integration in that military competition will be increasingly a ‘struggle to match [the] ability to develop individual technologies with the ability to integrate these technologies into a single system’ (DoD, 2016: 16). The US military introduced GIO with little to no debate, as would otherwise be the case in blind peer-reviewed journals associated with the introduction of new or revised standards of practice.

When generic sensemakings (i.e. in this case the doctrinal systematized functions and tasks) do not seem to work well in practice, this produces a ‘collapse of sensemaking’, or vu jàdé—the opposite of déjà vu (Weick, 1993: 633–635). Experiences of collapses by the US military during and after the Vietnam War and in present wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq would ideally call for profound institutional change. The institution’s sensemaking afforded by doctrine’s system of systems appears repeatedly inadequate. Yet, rather than criticize the efficacy of doctrinal assumptions of systematicity, the institution and mainstream military theorists tend to double down in search of improved or incrementally changed doctrinal concepts and tasks within the same closed-world paradigm (Avant, 1993; Greenwood and Hammes, 2009; Linn, 2011; Posen, 1984). US military doctrine as generic sensemaking continues to double down on the logic of systematicity, intent on removing equivocality, increasing robotic-like predictive reliability, assuring compliance with hierarchical legal authority structures, and promising postbellum accountability. Cases on point follow.

In 1966, as the Vietnam War ramped up, the US Ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), President Johnson’s senior most representative, wanted the main effort of military action to focus on pacification—support to the counterinsurgent RVN. The US Army doctrinally organized its operations around the German Wehrmacht doctrinal concept, konzept der verbundenen Waffen—‘combined arms maneuver’ or ‘joint service operations’ (Hutchinson, 2014). The Army did not prepare itself to perform the required large-scale pacification projects (DoD, 1967: 66). ⁵ Reflecting on the disappointments of the Vietnam War, doubts about US military’s ability to win wars were swept away in the institution’s quest to regain legitimacy and find a more politically acceptable doctrine to counter the Soviet’s massive offensive military capability.

As I mentioned in the introduction to this essay, AirLand Battle was a modernized variant of the Wehrmacht’s combined arms maneuver, envisioning rapid aggregation and integration of air and ground forces to strike quickly and deeply into attacking Warsaw Pact enemy formations on the battlefields of Europe (Romjue, 1984). In the midst of the Reagan administration’s military buildup, weapons development of man–machine interfaces flourished in a system of systems approach to combined arms warfare. Included were the expensive procurement and fielding of high-tech systems such as the Air Force A10 Thunderbolt ‘tank killer’, the Army’s Apache attack helicopter, Abrams main battle tank, Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and Multiple Launch Rocket System, and the Navy’s Aegis Cruiser.

Within a decade after publication, there was quite a celebration of the success of AirLand Battle doctrine in the wake of Operation Desert Storm, where two US corps (seven divisions), a corps-sized US Marine Expeditionary Force, and many other coalition forces attacked quickly and deeply into Saddam Hussein’s territory (e.g. Keegan, 1991). The institution did not recognize serious political issues with Iraq continued to be unresolved and missed the fallacies of its doctrine’s claim to victory. The apparent decisiveness of the lightning war, a 100-hour ground campaign, seemed to blind the institution (and policymakers) from considering that the war in Iraq never really ended and continues today over a quarter of a century later. Having overly invested in the logic of systematicity in the 1980s, the US military interpreted the decisiveness Desert Storm as a clarion call for a deeper investment in conceptualizing war as an aggregation of its weapon systems (i.e. combined arms), designed to disrupt or destroy a foe’s ability to aggregate their weapon systems (a sort of system on system warfare). The underlying logic of victory, then, is attributed to how well aggregation occurs (through technological superiority) and that this will determine whose system shall win the war. Like their predecessors in Vietnam, the senior ground commanders in Iraq 2003–2007 were similarly quite slow to realize they were experiencing a collapse of sensemaking when the situation required novel thinking that combined arms doctrine failed to provide. Subsequent failures of the AirLand doctrine and its incremental derivatives in the early years of the post-9/11 Iraq conflict (Allawi, 2007; Ricks, 2006) drove the institutional focus on recreating the all-but-dismantled counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine. This resurgence of COIN doctrine was the US military’s attempt to garner knowledge from early 20th century Marine Corps occupations of parts of Central America and the Caribbean and with the Marine and Army attempts during the Vietnam War (Birtle, 2006; United States Marine Corps (USMC), 1940).

The refreshed US Army-Marine Corps COIN doctrine published 3 years after the US-led invasion into Iraq (US Army and Marine Corps, 2006) propelled General David Petraeus (later appointed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director) into fame. Eventually the institution deemed this doctrinal manual ineffective, stimulating a rewrite 8 years later (US Army and Marine Corps, 2014). However, there was no change to reliance on the underlying logic of systematicity and both the 2006 and 2014 versions of COIN doctrine continued to be oriented on hierarchical management by objectives, task management, and the science of cybernetic feedback. The repetitive uses of the words ‘stability’ and ‘instability’ in these versions point to the biological systems idea of autopoiesis (‘self-referential loops’) (Morgan, 2006: 243), continuing a closed-world discourse fueled by operational assessments, the promise of computer technologies and quantitative modeling, and visions of global communications connectivity for the ultimate in panoptical command and control.

It seems no matter how the US military rearranges, relabels, and republishes its doctrine, the underlying logic of action remains culturally imbedded. Experiencing collapses of sensemaking in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq seems not to result in wholesale changes to the logic of systematicity; rather, there is again a doubling down on the insularity of treating military actions as complicated servomechanisms (Bousquet, 2009). Despite a lack of success in recent operations, it should be no surprise that as the institution withdrew from Iraq and left a small residual force in Afghanistan, it would call once again for the return to a system of systems doctrine:

While the [Army operating] concept underscores the foundational capabilities the Army needs to prevent wars and shape security environments, it also recognizes that to deter enemies, reassure allies, and influence neutrals the Army must conduct sophisticated expeditionary maneuver and joint combined arms operations. (US Army TRADOC, 2014: i; emphasis added)

As the US military deploys more forces to Iraq and Syria in 2016, the logic of systematicity in combined or joint operations doctrine continues to prevail.

There are legal and moral issues associated with this form of reasoning. The US military institution also exercises little or no reflexivity about some ethical dilemmas that its doctrine presents, perhaps creating irresolvable situations in what Bateson et al. (1956) call a double bind. Written doctrine has a coercive, self-fulfilling nature while holding the senior commander responsible for success or failure in implementing it. For example, the US manual on ‘how to’ conduct joint operations states, ‘The guidance in this publication is authoritative; as such, this doctrine will be followed except when, in the judgment of the commander, exceptional circumstances dictate otherwise’ (DoD, 2011b: i).

Furthermore, when policymakers at the top try and make sense of ambiguous circumstances and relate them to national security, they consult with their principal military officers. For this purpose, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the senior most position in the US military, is given prominence in law, as he is legally bound by Title 10 US Code §163. He is bound to (1) provide military assistance and advice to the Secretary of Defense and the President and (2) testify the state of operations and readiness to the Congress, which has the Constitutional authority to ‘raise’ the military, primarily through financial appropriations. The Chairman’s use of doctrine helps frame the definition of a military intervention which recursively helps set foreign policy agendas. Such frames of reference are performative; in other words, US military doctrine provides premade, highly systematized solutions to decision makers who look for opportunities to attach them to national security policy problems (Cohen et al., 1972; Kingdon, 1984; Weick, 1995: 144).

While generic sensemaking may differ at various levels of a hierarchy (micro to macro) in less disciplined organizations (e.g. Bacharach et al., 1996; Weick, 1995: 27), the legal rationale for military indoctrination of recruits and career-long members is to align them with commonsense meanings. This assures the military carries out dangerous missions reliably and with clarity provided through accountable and lawfully established authority chains. It is no wonder that military doctrine profoundly reinforces the maintenance of hierarchical power structures in the political institutions of government. This particularly enhances the US tradition of civilian control over the military which is arguably a virtuous reason for the existence of military doctrine, to help assure disciplined subservience of an armed force in a democracy.

With its classification and categories of work clearly established and documented, senior military officers are able to provide their civilian bosses a way to disambiguate the messiness at hand and demonstrate that an ordered and accountable response is possible. The operationally defined capacities and abilities reassure policymakers and lawmakers that the US military will function precisely and disciplined ‘as ordered’. Yet, even with a sophisticated array of terms that purportedly give generic clarity for systematic action, there will be habituated organizational behaviors that may frustrate policymakers. There are historic examples. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy was simultaneously upset and pleased more than once with doctrinal applications by his military. Without clearance from the White House, the US Navy, according to its doctrinal repertoire to form a seaborne blockade, dangerously exercised Soviet submarine interdictions outside the perimeter of the President’s mandated ‘quarantine’ line. At the same time, to the President’s pleasure, the Navy performed its mission quite well along his directed quarantine line. Another example during the same crisis was the result of an authorized U2 flight that accidently breached Soviet air space. US Air Force fighter jets scrambled to support the unarmed reconnaissance plane’s reentry into friendly air space. As prescribed by standard procedure and unbeknownst by the President, the fighters carried nuclear tipped rockets with autonomous discretion of the pilots to use them (Allison and Zelikow, 1999: 236, 143).

Espousing US military doctrine as a legitimate science is also both prestigious and financially rewarding to other nations, particularly those prone to isomorphic mimicry (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983: 154). This isomorphic quality seems to sustain a myth that the doctrine is somehow more potent as more sign on, perhaps giving international legal legitimacy in the form of treaties, such as NATO. The US doctrine’s use of elaborated task structures and functional groupings gives all who subscribe the illusion of heightened efficaciousness and the appearance of a positive and progressive military science at work. This detailed doctrine also provides a scientific-like justification for budgets to finance a standing defense industry as it helps rationalize the lawful procurements of hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons systems. The extent to which these systems achieve the doctrinal system of systems performance standard permits cost–benefit analyses to justify procurement decisions (Sloan, 2012).

For example, the US military’s elaborate system of ‘capabilities and integration development’ uses a process called ‘gap analysis’ to search for advanced technologies to perform tasks the current force cannot presently accomplish (DoD, 2012c). To project into the future, the DoD produces ‘future concepts’ which read like narratives in doctrine manuals, but, like science fiction, are intended to project through trend analyses what war will be like years from now (e.g. see DoD, 2012b). US defense industries pay close attention to announcements of system of systems ‘capability gaps’ as these represent opportunities to sell their research and development services or existing products and for Congress to rationalize appropriated funds to buy well-defined capabilities. The Office of the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology writes in its handbook,

The Department of Defense (DoD) continually seeks to acquire, sustain, and manage material and non-material solutions to address capability needs of the war fighter in military operations and to provide efficient support and readiness in peacetime. A growing number of military capabilities are achieved through a system of systems (SoS) approach. (DoD, 2008: v)

Defense industries have developed marketing strategies geared to system of systems engineering solutions designed to erase these capability gaps. The US-based National Defense Industrial Association produces a widely distributed magazine (and free membership to military and DoD civil servant subscribers) and an elaborate website that frequently describes capabilities gaps that the DoD has identified:

In the Army’s latest operating concept, leaders said that the service faces an uncertain future with many unknown variables, from the enemy to the location of the battlefield. What will be needed to counter this threat is a slew of new cutting edge technologies to give soldiers an advantage—these include more powerful helicopters, tougher trucks, better communication devices, more efficient equipment to reduce soldier load and better cyber defenses. (Tadjdeh, 2015)

There are other associated recursions where new doctrine drives the procurement decisions and where advanced technologies drive revisions in doctrine, for example, with resultant specifications on the types of weapons and ammunition developed by defense industries. Related to the systematized attrition strategy and combined arms maneuver doctrine employed in the Vietnam War, the Army replaced the larger caliber 7.62 mm M14 rifle with the higher velocity 5.56 mm M16. One research study reports that the M16 ‘… was designed to wound rather than kill. The theory is that wounding an enemy soldier is better than killing him because a wounded soldier eliminates three people: the wounded man and two others to evacuate him’ (Grossman, 2009: 348). While United States considers the M16 within the bounds of international law, several members of the International Committee of the Red Cross consider the bullet’s fragmentation capability to be inhumane (Parks, 2010: 15). Variants of the original 5.56 mm M16 are still the primary infantry weapon in the US military.

As Weick (1995) points out, while generic sensemakings may result in unbreakable organizational behaviors (pp. 111–113), a ‘by the book’ approach may in some cases prevent evil outcomes as found in the Abu Ghraib incident (Adams et al., 2006). Researchers concluded that if the Army had trained guards properly in detainee doctrinal procedures, the abuse might have been preventable. However, US military history is also replete with examples of soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen creating non-doctrinal solutions that work for the greater good despite their indoctrinations toward habituated action patterns. Evidence of localized innovation includes the Navy and Army troops facing a highly adaptive enemy jointly developed inventive riverine operations in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War. Combined arms tactics mixed with the use of advanced technologies in new ways that arguably saved the lives of friendly forces. ⁶ While these units creatively deviated from doctrine, the need for operational assessments nevertheless encouraged both enemy body counts and the killing of noncombatants in Vietnamese villages believed to harbor the enemy.

Despite the potential for ignorant performance and by-the-book behavior in oligarchic bureaucracies, what is perhaps most remarkable about the US tactical units in action 40 years after the Vietnam War ended is the interrelating of young officers, NCOs, and troops who today seem to infrequently conduct atrocities in wartime. Now passing the quindecinnial of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, during which the United States has deployed over a million soldiers, marines, airmen, and sailors (Baiocchi, 2013: 5), the reported actions that could be considered criminal or immoral appear to reflect a rather small incidence rate as compared to wars in the last century. With reference to Afghanistan operations, for example, an independent Amnesty International (2014) report reflects a US military institution that appears to be involved in decreasing such incidents—a ‘welcome development is due in part to the fact that international forces are involved in fewer military operations overall, but it also reflects important changes in military tactics’ (p. 18).

All in all, there seem to be a plethora of questions about the intellectual and ethical merits of the current doctrine-based US military. Heedful rule following may at times outweigh the disadvantages in terms of legality and paradoxes of double-bind situations. Issues include the underpinning logic of systematicity that seems to mask what is more accurately described as an attempt at social engineering and quest for eventual autonomous machines and weapons (since at least 1969, according to Edwards, 1996: 43). This form of ‘technowar’ (Gibson, 1986) risks reducing moral reasoning to a yes or no switch rather than presenting a messy dilemma for the individual troop on the ground.

The issues associated with the intellectual and ethical hazards of doctrine and treating military operations as engineerable systems become more obvious with critical study. Are there alternative logics of military action? There is at least some evidence of a divergence from a few military writers leading away from the logic of systematicity and perhaps the idea of doctrine altogether. Aaron Jackson (2013) proposes this cultural description of doctrine as ‘the most visible expression of a military’s belief system’ (p. 2). In his examination of several schools of thought on doctrine, Jackson characterizes a recent punctuation as the ‘design school’, an anti-positivist view that advocates a relational view of knowledge. ⁷

The design school is arguably a Lyotardian petit récit, introduced by a somewhat deviant segment of the military community led by military intellectuals such as Brigadier General (Ret.) Shimon Naveh, the founder and former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Operational Theory Research Institute. This school of thought is particularly countercultural and orients practice on paralogical communicative processes. Haridimos Tsoukas and Mary Jo Hatch (2001) would refer to this purposeful process of dealing with wartime complexity as ‘generating and accommodating multiple inequivalent descriptions’ (p. 986; emphasis added). Military design theory assumes each operation is unique and that organizing requires frames of references from a radical paradigm or maintaining a relational view with multiple paradigms—highly customized, and descriptive logics of action (Paparone, 2013).

Other military theorists have challenged the very idea of having a formalized doctrine altogether. In her monograph, Anna Simons (2010) deftly critiques those who seek predetermined solutions under what she calls the Lawrence Paradox, named after the famed World War I British officer, and archeologist, Thomas E. Lawrence who led the Arabian insurgency against the Ottoman Turks in present-day Syria, Palestine, and the Sinai. Simons suggests that military doctrines are hardly more than cultural-based mythologies. She highlights the repeated institutional failures to appreciate the depth of experiential learning and tacit knowing needed to prosecute complex military interventions. She coins the term ‘genericize’ to denote a fallacy of thinking inherent to the central idea of doctrine—that what an organization or individual learns from experiencing one successful set of solutions from the past can be applied generally to other situations in the future. ‘The Lawrence paradox refers to our propensity to turn unduplicable lessons into generic principles as if anyone should be able to apply them’ (Simons, 2010: vi). Furthermore,

… the penchant to genericize in and of itself teaches the wrong lesson. It implies that once the right lessons have been taught and trained, anyone should be able to apply them. Yet, history suggests this is hardly the case. More to the point, those who orchestrated successful campaigns in the past invariably broke new ground. That is why their campaigns succeeded. This was usually in the wake of something old and tried, which means such individuals came to the situation able to read and analyze it differently than their predecessors, or they saw different possibilities, or both. (pp. 21–22; emphasis in original)

Simons adds that doctrine ‘requires too much updating. As it is, [the DOD] is forever changing terms, which then requires that training be realigned with whatever are the new terms’ points of reference’ (p. 22).

Others have also explored overreliance on military doctrine’s logic of systematicity as an organizing construct. Borrowing from the work of Jacques Rancière, Ben Zweibelson (2015) recommends that US military advisers should play the role of the ‘ignorant schoolmaster’, avoiding the mirror-imaging problem of making US doctrine and other institutionalisms the answers to friendly, nonwestern military problems. Operating in ignorance should be a viable alternative to counter institutional hubris, and, to that acknowledgement, Zweibelson outlines an anti-doctrine—an ‘ignorance for action’:

We want to know exactly when we have solved a problem, with something definitive, like accomplishing a checkmate in a game of chess. Yet, complex situations immerse us more in our own ignorance as we progress, with few if any authoritative end states. We have a fear of ignorance and the application of ignorance for action. (p. 102)

US Army Special Forces (SF) represent a subculture that prides itself for being rather impervious to doctrinal orthodoxy and very sensitive to the co-opting and protection of noncombatants as an imperative in winning hearts and minds as a core aspect to their work. Grant Martin (2015) found in his field experiment when training SF candidates that the less doctrinally scripted the sensemaking process, the more the burgeoning teams operate with creative effectiveness. Martin concludes that creative and critical reasoning processes in these unconventional teams operate with an agnosticism toward established doctrine. In that regard, the SF and other teams, who are considered part of a growing organization, special operations forces (SOF), may indicate the emergence of a countercultural mindset within the DoD. ⁸

These little narratives move against the grain of the modernity and suggest a counterbalancing rapprochement or ‘processes of resignification (i.e. as Weick et al. (2005) suggested that novel situations require new meanings) that guide managerial behavior in different and possibly more reflexive directions’ (Wickert and Schaefer, 2014: 3; see also Spicer et al., 2009). Rather than a focus on reproduction of doctrinal skills from the individual to the aggregated military formations, perhaps sensemaking for military operations should become more linguistically creative, with localized designs that seem more oriented on the aesthetics of artesian craftwork than on the closed worldview that treats military people and organizations like programmable computers.

Conclusion

At last, I return to the original research question of this study—How can we understand and critically examine the role of doctrine by which US military operations are conceptualized and performed? The recent history of the logic and language of systematicity in the US military is clear and has been so deeply habituated as the institution’s generic sensemakings as to qualify as a performative partner in the Lyotardian grand narrative.

The need for order, control, and disambiguation does help explain why doctrine has systematized organizational designs and operations around the premises imbedded in the system of systems paradigm. How else can a military to coordinate large-scale combined arms maneuvers complete with timely air support, logistics, reconnaissance, and so forth? This systematicity was apparent in the US application of AirLand Battle, where synchronization and cybernetic controls proved so successful in Operation Desert Storm. However, when top officials, troops, and their units are faced with the uncertainties of long wars, the ambiguity of friend versus foe, dispersed occupations, nation building, ethnic cleansing, religious, and tribal warfare conditions in foreign lands, Anna Simons’ Lawrence Paradox seems confirmed and worthy of further study. The propensity to generically conceptualize war as a system of systems from the macroscopic level should be compared to the required contextual, ephemeral, asynchronous, interpretive, perception-based sensemakings about war at the localized, microscopic level of organization. The value of tacit knowledge gained through immersion in the situation coupled with ways to narrate with creatively dissonant-rich descriptions may present other ways to strategize and enact military operations, for example, more from the ‘bottom up’ of the organization.

In that regard, future research should examine why at micro-levels of organization, soldier, sailor, airman, and marine small teams and units, particularly immersed in ongoing operations, feel socially restrained from committing indiscriminant killing or other immoral activities. The opportunity to hide behind the ‘mask’ associated with the systematicity of closed-world warfare should create opportunities for these troops and units to take their license to kill for granted. The potential to hide behind the sanction of doctrine and enact administratively sanctioned evil does not seem to interfere with the virtue of the average Joe or Josephine in uniform acting with other frames of reference other than doctrine. I admit being speculative here, based on my own, anecdotal interaction with troops over the last 40 years. The emergence of Internet-based social media and cellular communications technologies available to deployed troops may somehow create an alternate means of organized sensemaking that constructs an emergent social-network counter-narrative against the longstanding formalized narrative of published doctrine (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1997: 328).

In a Lyotardian sense, these would be countless accessible and localized petit récits that ‘disturb the order of “reason”’ that the grand narrative of systematicity demands (Lyotard, 1984: 64). However, with the exception of some non-subscribed special operations organizations that follow a different source of authoritative direction (Ernst, 2016), the issues remain in that US military organizations still are designed, manned, and wrapped in a closed-world discourse. The US military institution views itself as a doctrine-based system of systems, complete with well-defined missions and functions, equipped with specially designed, technologically advanced weapon systems inextricably integrated with human specialists, all designed to create well-planned effects.

As its correspondent body of knowledge, the US military has produced the most elaborate doctrinal publications that represent perhaps the grandest institutionalized logic of systematicity on the planet. No matter what the jargon du jour that cloaks its underpinnings, with conceptualizations such as combined arms maneuver (circa 1940s), AirLand Battle (circa 1980s), a return to COIN (2000s), or, the futuristic concept, GIO, the US military continues to enact war with generic sensemakings based on the task-based and functionalistic logics of combined arms, also known as system of systems. For decades, this logic has been replete with elaborate task taxonomies and cybernetic measures of effectiveness and performance that one would expect in the image of the ‘organizations as machines’ (Morgan, 2006: 11) fueled by closed-world discourse. Given the US military’s grand narrative of systematicity, exposing and critically addressing the pros and cons of generic sensemaking manifested in US military doctrine may help other types of organizations become more reflexive about their own presuppositions.