conducted to tackle risks at their point of origin, its appearance preceded—rather
than followed—the Strategic Defence Review, published in 1998.
In other words, by the late 1990s doctrine’s focus on the operational level of
war had enabled it to move from a concentration on the equivalent of ‘grand
tactics’ to strategy; and in the absence of clear policy it increasingly acquired the
capacity to become the master, not the servant, of strategy. In 1988, the strategic
context had been set by the Soviet threat and the need to meet it with a
conventional capability. After 1991 scenario-driven defence thinking was replaced
by the acquisition of capabilities, although less was said about how those cap-
abilities (especially those designed for ‘high-end warfighting’) would be em-
ployed. The attractions of operational art to NATO armies rested precisely on
this ability to trump the vagaries of policy. It became, in the words of two
commentators writing in 1996, ‘a vehicle for military leaders to tie the hands of
those they are supposedly serving’, since ‘the new doctrine provides a ready-
mixed solution that defense intellectuals, diplomats and politicians would find far
harder to disassemble’. 108 As the assumptions of the Strategic Defence Review
found themselves at variance with realities on the ground, and especially so after
2003, defence operating assumptions ceased to relate to current commitments.
The latter were met by ‘urgent operational requirements’, which left the long-
term strategy nominally in place but rendered it increasingly unsustainable. The
government’s half-hearted response to this deficit, the National Security Strategy,
published in March 2008, defined its goals in terms which were so broad and
aspirational that they bore little relationship to deliverable outputs. It spurned
hard choices and specific goals, and so failed to fill the strategic vacuum into
which doctrine was stepping.
Doctrine did this in two ways. First, the understanding of the operational level
of war, where doctrine had its birth in 1988–9, acquired an increasingly strategic
complexion. The changes effected in the Staff College’s organization and curric-
ulum at its lower rungs edged the content of the Higher Command and Staff
Course away from the interface between operations and tactics to that between
operations and strategy (with knock-on effects for the Royal College of Defence
Studies, which sat above it in the hierarchy). Second, doctrine became a means of
public communication, a means of explaining what the armed forces do and how
they do it. The successor publications to the originalField Service Regulationshad
become ‘restricted’, not for wider dissemination, butDesign for Military Opera-
tions,Air Power Doctrine,The Fundamentals of British Maritime Doctrine, and
British Defence Doctrinewere all made commercially available. Just as the enemy
could now read how the British armed forces were thinking about war, so could
their own public. For over a decade after the appearance of the Strategic Defence
Review in 1998, nothing comparable was published by the government of the day
in terms of strategic guidance.
Thus, doctrine had the capacity to fill the need for an explicatory narrative.
The example of the US army’sField Manual 3–24, that on counter-insurgency,
completed in December 2006, was instructive; downloadable online, it was also
published commercially by the University of Chicago Press. The sequence of
128 The Evolution of Operational Art