Doctrine is essential to the functioning of an organization the scale of the U.S. Army. The Army defines doctrine as “fundamental principles, with supporting tactics, techniques, procedures, and terms..
Doctrine is essential to the functioning of an organization the scale of the U.S. Army. The Army defines doctrine as “fundamental principles, with supporting tactics, techniques, procedures, and terms and symbols, used for the conduct of operations and as a guide for actions of operating forces, and elements of the institutional force that directly support operations in support of national objectives” (Headquarters, Department of the Army, 2012). Academic interest in doctrine has waxed and waned over the previous four decades. In an effort to encourage further study of doctrine’s importance and understand the state of the literature, this paper is a selective review of the current literature of two significant army doctrine manuals, ADP 3-0 Operations and FM 3-24 Insurgency and Countering Insurgency. Overall, this paper finds that the scholarly literature on both ADP 3-0 and FM 3-24 highlights weaknesses in their conceptual frameworks and in the case of FM 3-24 emphasizes that it was flawed from its conception
