overlapping British doctrines being prepared in 2009 to deal with stabilization
operations (the responsibility of the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Cen-
tre) and counter-insurgency (carried out by the Army’s Land Warfare Centre) was
also—likeField Manual 3–24—intended for publication. The armed forces’ own
statements of intent provided the strategic narrative for the understanding of how
defence policy was to be implemented, and became the basis for policy itself. The
adoption of the so-called comprehensive approach, a term coined within the
Ministry of Defence in response to operational realities in Iraq and Afghanistan,
was a case in point. Designed to deal with situations on the ground in the most
effective manner possible, its implications reached into the relationships between
the Ministry of Defence on the one hand and the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office and the Department for International Development on the other. For the
latter two, ‘the comprehensive approach’, for all its apparent inclusiveness, was
stamped ‘made in the Ministry of Defence’, just as the ‘manoeuvrist approach’
had been ‘made in the army’. An operational concept appropriate to the armed
forces proved to be at odds with the wider philosophies that underpinned the
missions of their departments. 109
In 1993, Alistair Irwin, whose career was shaped by the campaign in Northern
Ireland and was to become its general officer commanding in 2000, stressed that it
was at the operational level that the politician ‘will legitimately have an effect on
what is being done’. 110 His point was largely overlooked, and so too was its
corollary. Generals, charged with stabilization operations in a multinational
environment and in somebody else’s country, need to be able to operate (and
the word is used advisedly) at the political level. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
demanded a different understanding of operations from the scenarios which
confronted Bagnall and the ‘Ginge’ group. Clearly, the exercise of operational
art has always required an appreciation of the strategic effects of the use of
military force, but its primary field for creativity—its ‘art’—lay in its intimate
understanding of the tactics and capacities of armed forces and their relationship
to the principles of war. The creativity of the commander in Iraq and Afghanistan
was applied more in the political realm, in dealing with allies and political
masters. Much of the rest was tactics.
In becoming joint, and in being applied to war in all its forms, doctrine also
lost its meaning. Since it had to command consent across the armed forces, across
departments, and across allies, so it lost the spark which came from debate. It
became ossified. The army might try to develop counter-insurgency doctrine
from the bottom up through the directorate of land warfare, the residual legacy of
its directorate of doctrine and concepts, but its product had to mesh with the
joint doctrine on stabilization operations, and both then had to command
consent in the wider security community. Moreover, single-service doctrine had
no obvious forum in which it could be taught when the ownership of professional
education was itself joint. Operational art had become stove-piped, a process, and
even a science. In continuing to stress the ‘manoeuvrist approach’, while simulta-
neously embracing stabilization operations, doctrine did more than match words
that have competing meanings. It also created conceptual confusion. From 2006
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 129