Doctrine. Something I keep promising to write about and then don’t. Doctrine is, “the body of formal knowledge that tells a fighting force how it is expected to fight” (Parshall and Tully, 83). it is not a plan for a specific war, but the general planning framework a military brings to every war; think of it like a very complex list of “best practices”. This is necessary because war is too complex to make this stuff up on the fly. That said, just because a military has a written out doctrine doesn’t mean they can execute on that doctrine; the doctrine may call for things that military (or its political leaders) are simply not capable or willing to do. That said, a military that finds itself operating well outside its own doctrine is likely in trouble. Russian maneuver warfare doctrine generally goes by the moniker Deep Battle or Deep Operations (Глубокая операция) and to say that the Russian Armed Forces [in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine] have not managed to pull off their doctrine in practice is a significant understatement.
Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.
