ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the fundamental challenges facing the national defence establishment with particular attention to land warfare and the historical events, like the Vietnam War, that have influenced the ideas of American defence policymakers. It argues that while international and bureaucratic concerns are important to understanding general patterns of defence policymaking, a cultural–cognitive account provides greater specificity to the conditions and times in which such patterns will occur. In the maxim of British military theorist J. F. C. Fuller, doctrine is the ‘central idea that at a given time, as affected by strategic circumstance, is actuating an army’. The chapter also argues that the origins of today’s doctrine are largely reflected in the early post-Vietnam experience. The chapter provides a historical case of the US Army involvement in counter-insurgency and contingency operations in order to provide context and an explanation of the importance of cultural cognitive effects on doctrinal development.
