Doctrine, Technology, and War

This paper aims at illuminating some of the more basic relationships between doctrine, technology, and war. The approach will be to use selected historical vignettes to shed light on these relationships. Nevertheless, the discussion will not be exclusively historical or backward looking. The deeper, more enduring linkages between doctrine, technology, and war also suggest certain bounds on how much the conduct of war can be expected to change in the decades ahead-even if the hypothesis of an emerging revolution in military affairs is borne out in the decades ahead. These boundaries or limits, presumably, should be of interest to anyone concerned with either air power or joint doctrine. Why concentrate on the more basic relationships between doctrine, technology, and war particularly at a time when so much about war seems subject to imminent change? The answer stems from a point repeatedly emphasized by Albert Wohlstetter: namely, to avoid confusing ourselves "about matters of great importance for national security."2 Today, as during the opening years of the nuclear age, we are confronted with the likelihood of large changes in the weapons of war arising from a panoply of technological advances, especially those bearing on the gathering, processing, dissemination, and rapid exploitation of ever more precise, detailed, and synoptic information. Precision weapons, advanced surveillance platforms, and even low observability can be viewed as technologically driven variations on this overarching theme. Such changes in the prevailing means of war inevitably entail changes in other aspects of military societies. In the words of the naval historian Elting Morison: "Military organizations are societies