Military doctrine is the expression of how military forces contribute to campaigns, major operations, battles, and engagements.
It is a guide to action, rather than hard and fast rules. Doctrine provides a common frame of reference across the military. It helps standardize operations, facilitating readiness by establishing common ways of accomplishing military tasks.
Doctrine links theory, history, experimentation, and practice. Its objective is to foster initiative and creative thinking. Doctrine provides the military with an authoritative body of statements on how military forces conduct operations and provides a common lexicon for use by military planners and leaders.
Read more about Military Doctrine: Defining Doctrine, Development of Doctrine, Relationship Between Doctrine and Strategy
Famous quotes containing the words military and/or doctrine:
“War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valour, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“Every doctrine has a theory of the beginning.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)