The Doctrine Debate - And How It Should Be Conducted

The Atlantic Monthly is running an article this month summarizing a major doctrinal debate in the Army: should the Army focus on its core competency to fight and win conventional wars, or should it transform to fight "long wars" like counterinsurgency and nation building? The article, titled The Petraeus Doctrine, calls these two camps The Conservatives and The Crusaders. If you're not familiar with the debate, this article is a great primer.

The article has caused some controversy; the most compelling critique is that it creates a false dichotomy. Can our military not train and plan for both missions? Small Wars Journal has already published one response.

The major players in this debate are in the Army, but the Air Force needs to pay attention. The Air Force was slow entering the dialogue; it mostly sat out during the drafting of FM 3-24 (the counterinsurgency manual upon which the Surge strategy was based) and had to scramble to catch up when it realized seismic changes were underway. When I completed Squadron Officer School by correspondence in mid-2007, I found the word "counterinsurgency" only one time in my ~800 page curriculum. When I attended the in-residence school, counterinsurgency was scarcely mentioned. Relatively few Air Force thinkers have engaged with the Army debate. Meanwhile, as the Air Force seeks to find its place in this turbulent new world, Defense Secretary Gates is handing down new priorities and new orders--less focus on fighting China someday, more focus on winning the Long War, more ISR capability. The Air Force needs to join the larger discussion and thoughtfully consider its role in a rapidly changing world.

The Atlantic Monthly article also raises a broader question: who should be having these kinds of debates? Who should make the ultimate decisions? Many would argue that this debate belongs at the level of the military's civilian supervisors. At present, however, Active Duty officers (or freshly retired officers) are leading the debate--and they are doing it in the public spotlight. Is this acceptable? I leave that as an open question, but I will say this: it is part of a growing trend, where military officers are being asked to shoulder more and more of our nation's responsibilities, because of a vacuum among other institutions. This is especially true of foreign policy; Defense Secretary Gates warned in July of "creeping militarization" of American foreign policy because of the erosion of America's civilian institutions. In The Mission, Dana Priest argues that, "U.S. leaders have been turning more and more to the military to solve problems that are often, at their root, political and economic." Now, it seems, officers are stepping forward to debate matters of grand strategy and defense transformation because a comparable debate is not taking place among their civilian leaders.