Doctrine and Strategy

Doctrine is not strategy.

The NATO definition of strategy is "presenting the manner in which military power should be developed and applied to acheive national objectives or those of a group of nations."

The official definition of strategy by the US DOD is : "Strategy is a prudent idea or set of ideas for employing the instruments of national power in a synchronized and integrated fashion to acheive national or multinational objectives."

Whereas, military doctrine has been universally defined as a "guide to action."

Military strategy provides the rationale for military operations. It was Field Marshall Alan Brooke who describes the art of military strategy most aptly as: "to derive from the aim [read policy] a series of military objectives to be acheived: to assess these objectives as to the military requirements they create, and the pre-conditions which the acheivement of each is likely to necessitate: to measure available and potential resources against the requirements and to chart from this process a coherent pattern of priorities and a rational course of action."

Doctrine, on the other hand, seeks to provide a common conceptual framework for a military service:

• what the service perceives itself to be ("Who are we?")
• what its mission is ("What do we do?")
• how the mission is to be carried out ("How do we do that?")
• how the mission has been carried out in history ("How did we do that in the past?")
• other questions

Doctrine reflects the judgements of professional military officers, and to a lesser but important extent civilian leaders, about what is and is not militarily possible and necessary.