Lieutenant Colonel Gian P. Gentile
I propose a consideration to adjust the Principles of War as accepted by the American military since J.F.C. Fuller first came out with them in the early 1920s and the American Army's use of them in the majority of its major doctrinal manuals. I do not propose radically new principles of war like Lieutenant Commander Christopher Van Avery did in a recent summer Armed Forces Journal article. His proposal of very different Principles seemed too "new-ageish" for me and in my mind wrongly assumed that the information revolution of the 1990s produced a concomitant revolution in military affairs (a still debated and contested notion by scholars). Too, with regard to Avery, I do not accept his historical premise of now as the time to radically adjust the Principles of War because of the so called recent RMA; one could easily make the argument that we should have produced new Principles of War shortly after August 1945 and the advent of atomic war and Bernard Brodie's classic The Absolute Weapon.
So my recommendation is much less radical than Avery's, more conservative and still generally accepting of the classic list that Fuller gave us shortly after World War I. But I also want to embrace the evolution of our thinking on war and embrace certain changes of approach and emphasis over the last five years; specifically the war on terror and new doctrinal writings within the American Army and Marine Corps on counterinsurgency (COIN). I also premise my proposal on the notion that the Army's new COIN doctrine has become the Army's defacto operational doctrine.
And finally we should make things challenging in such a proposal; that we limit ourselves to 9 Principles since that was the original number that Fuller gave us. This limit is more than formulaic; its intent is to force us to make hard choices over the Principles since in the months and years ahead we will be making hard choices about the structure of the American Army and the types of wars we think we will be fighting.
With that in mind, here are my proposed changes with brief explanations next to the specific Principles that I believe we should consider changing.
1. Mass (no change)
2, Surprise (no change)
3. Simplicity (no change)
4. Economy of Force (no change)
5. Unity of Command (no change)
6. Objective (no change)
7. Offensive (no change)
8. Security; Here I propose replacing the Principle of "Security" with a new Principle, "Protection of the People." Since so much of our operations today are COIN based and we know as our doctrine tells us that through protecting the people our own security will emerge out of that protection, then it seems to me that we no longer need Security as a Principle of War because if we protect the people accordingly security will come in due course.
9. Maneuver; I propose replacing this Principle of War with "Tactical Success Guarantees Nothing." Obviously this new Principle is taken directly from the Paradoxes of the new COIN manual, FM 3-24. Since in modern war as we experience it today and in the future our soldiers all need to be "strategic corporals" then we should indoctrinate our Army to understand that tactics in and of themselves mean nothing as the paradox tells us. Maneuver as a Principle in the original list had to do primarily with the maneuvering of military forces in the field at the tactical and operational levels of war. Since one of the bedrocks of "maneuver" was tactics, and since the COIN paradox tells us that tactics in and of themselves are not that important unless they are linked to other lines of operations and higher objectives then replacing Maneuver with that paradox eliminates deadwood, so to speak, from the original Principles list.
So there it is; a modest proposal to adjust the Principles of War by replacing two from the original list with two derived from our more recent experience with war and what we might expect in the future.
Lt. Col. Gian Gentile, an active Army lieutenant colonel, commanded an armored reconnaissance squadron in west Baghdad in 2006. The views in this article are his own and not necessarily those of the Department of Defense.
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SWJ Editors Links
The Dogmas of War: A Rigid Counterinsurgency Doctrine Obscures Iraq's Realities by Lieutenant Colonel Gian Gentile, Armed Forces Journal.