Concepts Centre became in 2006) to address the topic were limited to what was
called a ‘Joint Doctrine Note’, published in March 2007.Countering Irregular
Activity within a Comprehensive Approachfailed to capture the imagination of
many soldiers. Despite the fact that the author of theDesign for Military Opera-
tions, Timothy Granville-Chapman, now had overall responsibility for doctrine as
vice-chief of the defence staff, doctrine development failed to respond to the
changes in war’s character. Such successes that were to be gleaned from Iraq and
Afghanistan seemed to be gained in spite of doctrine, not because of it. Returning
commanders rarely couched what they had been doing in terms of ‘manoeuvrism’
or the ‘manoeuvrist approach’, even though such terms remained the core of
command philosophy and as such staple fodder both in the Staff College and in
the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre.
THE LOSS OF OPERATIONAL ART?Operational art, having been subsumed in campaign planning in the 1990s,
lacked an institutional home. British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan did not
operate under a single, national theatre headquarters. As a junior partner in an
American-led coalition, Britain’s own operational methods became dependent on
the United States’s. First, the British stress on ‘manoeuvrism’ suffered from
America’s propensity for attrition; then, America’s energetic espousal of
counter-insurgency in December 2006 made Britain’s seem leaden footed. More
immediately the United Kingdom’s Permanent Joint Headquarters at North-
wood, just outside London, took over campaign planning at the national level,
but distance robbed it of the immediate contact with the battlefield on which the
‘manoeuvrist approach’ depended. Nor was the situation clarified by the fact that
the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, which housed both the minister and the
chiefs of staff, also had a command function.
Despite the fact that operational art at the theatre level was forfeit, or perhaps
precisely because it was, doctrine continued to have a dominant role in the
debate. The pressures of current operations meant that neither the Permanent
Joint Headquarters nor the Ministry of Defence had much time for longer-term
thinking, and so both increasingly looked to the Development, Concepts and
Doctrine Centre to do this for them. Doctrine in 1989 was focused at the
operational level, even thoughDesign for Military Operationsspecifically declared
that it was a document designed to be above the operational level, which it
defined as applicable to particular theatres of war. 106 WhenBritish Defence
Doctrinewas first published in 1996 as the coping stone to the edifice of doctrinal
publications, it declared itself to be ‘concerned chiefly with the strategic level’ and
‘the linkages between national policy and military operations’; operational doc-
trine itself now nestled underneath it. 107 Moreover, although directly reflective of
defence policy in a broader sense, and focused on expeditionary and joint warfare
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 127