Doctrine and Jargon

Does jargon kill? Disturbingly, a recent Fort Leavenworth study of the 2006 July War found that Israel’s SOD doctrine (Systemic Operational Design) was cutting edge, complex…and almost impossible to understand:

‘The language and style incorporated in the doctrine proved nearly incomprehensible to many officers within the IDF…The core of SOD may not be without merit, but it is useless if it cannot be understood by officers attempting to carry out operation orders using SOD terminology and methodology.’

And there are signs that this problem of language, confusing complexity with obscurity, infects Western militaries more broadly. Brian Linn argues in his excellent new study of American strategic culture that while we lack a coherent concept of the nature of the current war, we are left with technocratic gibberish, the Pentagon-speak of ‘capabilities organised cross-enterprise, adapting dynamically to uncertainty and turbulence in a multi-dimensional, nonlinear, competitive environment.’

Given that military doctrine is simply the principles that guide action, it should be clear and quickly understood. Once it becomes too elaborate by trying to replicate the complexity of the world, once it uses language that makes it too indigestible, then it stops being doctrine.

This may also reflect one broader difficulty: we are dealing here not just with doctrine, but with codified doctrine. Doctrine can exist as an unwritten, remembered operational code rather than as a formally written, official text. In collective memory, wisdom and principles can be vague and contradictory, but they are passed down in the vernacular and in a way that can be understood and transmitted.

By contrast, doctrine that is endlessly rewritten and supplemented by talented theoretical minds can quickly lose the strengths of an ‘oral’ tradition, becoming an elite manual for specialist insiders rather than a shared and effective code. Worse, it can become something folk don’t want to read in the first place.

Clearly, this isn’t always the case. But it’s a danger to be wary of.