BuggerAll said:
msr said:
Quite frankly I would recommend British Military Doctrine, seeing as how few have actually read it...
"The second part of the study asked the same 114 officers whether they had read Army Field Manual Volume 1 Part 10, the counter-insurgency operations manual, taking this as the doctrinal baseline for their tactical-level understanding of operations in Afghanistan. The data gathered showed that for the sample population, only 31 per cent of officers were familiar with this publication. Perhaps more importantly, this meant that more than two-thirds of officers that each had completed an average of two operational deployments had no knowledge of fundamental counter-insurgency principles. "
RUSI JOURNAL DECEMBER 2009 VOL. 154 NO. 6 pp. 26â31
Of course we shouldn't have to be spoonfed this stuff and should be expected to be sufficiently interested in the job to get out there and find out what we should know I can't help wondering if more of an effort should be put into advertising this sort of stuff.
I've only become aware of this via ARRSE, I'm an occasional user of ArmyNet but this one passed me by. If it is considered desirable that officers should read Army Field Manual Volume 1 Part 10, the counter-insurgency operations manual should we be told and shouldn't we be given/lent the manual?
Reading doctrine should be a key part of officer training and development. The problem is that once you've spent 12 hours a day pushing emails back and forward in whatever HQ you work in then the last thing you want to do when you get home is read some doctrine.
Training should take time to develop the conceptual component, unfortunately officer study weeks are such OJAR events then the organiser is not going to have "Monday: reading doctrine, Tuesday: doctrine discussion, Wednesday: read more doctrine" on the timetable.
I've said it before elsewhere but if you don't give officers the time and intellectual space to develop and learn then the army will continue to breed unwitting anti-intellectuals.