Lecture
At every stage of historical development it has been a pressing matter to reflect on the problems of military development, on the political and military-strategic goals of wars, their probable character and methods of conduct, and the preparation of the state and its armed forces for military conflicts. In the course of such studies the laws and regularities of war and of military affairs were identified, and their dependence on the level of economic and socio-political development of society was assessed. This objectively required a generalisation of the accumulated knowledge, its systematisation and its concretisation in the military doctrine of the state as a system of views held by the political and military leadership on the use of military force to achieve political goals. In the course of its evolution, military doctrine was filled with new, ever more refined content and, as a rule, reflected and continues to reflect the character of the international military-political situation. Of particular theoretical and practical interest under contemporary conditions is an examination of the foundations of the formation and the political content of military doctrine.
The appearance of military doctrines is closely bound up with the emergence of states, the development of armed forces and their employment to achieve one or another political goal. Consequently, doctrine has travelled its own path of historical development and formation.
As war came to be understood as a socio-political phenomenon, along with its laws and regularities, the dependence of the course and outcome of armed struggle on a number of factors became ever more evident. These factors were conditioned by the foreign policy of states, their economic capabilities, the maturity of their military policy, the level of the art of war, and the quality of the troops' combat training. Account was also taken of the country's geographical position, the morale of the people and the army, the existence of a general plan for waging war, and the coordination of all links of the military-state machinery for its implementation. The desire of political actors to study more fully the impact of these factors and the specific features of their manifestation and use in achieving victory in war became the motive for elaborating an integrated system of views known as the military doctrine of the state.
The first attempts to understand, assess and generalise everything that affects success in war date to the era of slaveholding. In antiquity, rulers and military commanders had to determine the necessary size and composition of armies and the procedure for manning them, and to choose the objectives of campaigns of conquest and the methods of armed struggle against the enemy. Implementing the decisions taken involved engaging considerable masses of people and great efforts to arm and supply them. This required particular knowledge and skills on the part of leaders and commanders, which objectively contributed to introducing theoretical and organisational principles into military affairs. Alongside this, principles and procedures were worked out for creating military formations and preparing them for war and its conduct. They took shape over a long period by empirical means and were subsequently adopted in the light of the needs of military practice.
The development of the military sphere contributed to the formation of legislative acts defining the procedure for drawing the population into military formations, their composition, armament and subordination, and the norms of taxation of citizens for the upkeep of the army. The body of such acts laid the legal foundation for the process of forming the armed forces and elaborating military-doctrinal provisions.
A significant role in generalising military experience and formulating on its basis the provisions for organising military affairs was played by the commanders, historians and philosophers of antiquity – Sun Tzu, Xenophon, Julius Caesar and others. In the descriptions of military campaigns they created, the principal aspects of the accumulated knowledge were set out and recommendations were given on preparing for and waging war. Yet, despite the great significance of their military-theoretical legacy for subsequent times, they were nevertheless unable to reveal the essence of war or the regularities of preparing for and waging it.
Military-doctrinal provisions were further developed in the era of feudalism with the appearance of regular armies. This required a radical transformation of the entire system of training troops.
As the scope of military operations grew and the direction of troops became more complex, permanent command bodies were created. This entailed a clear regulation of the problems of preparing for and waging war. Legislative documents began to appear that defined questions of building the state's armed forces and preparing them for war. As the means of armed struggle developed and mass armies appeared, the experience of preparing for and conducting military operations was generalised. On the basis of the study, analysis and generalisation of the experience of wars, military knowledge too was brought into a definite system.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the development of military science reached such a level that the drafting of plans for building and training the armed forces and for conducting military operations began to take the form of purposeful state activity. The ultimate aim of such work was to ensure the fulfilment of the political and military-strategic tasks facing the state.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, amid the rapid development of the economy and science and the improvement of weaponry, preparation for war required the creation of a system of coordinated measures that would affect all spheres of the country's life. This led to an awareness of the need for the state to elaborate and adopt in advance a definite body of views on their implementation in the military sphere.
In Russia an enormous role in forming the foundations of the state's military doctrine was played by the works and activity of such commanders and military theorists as Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Ivan the Terrible, M. I. Vorotynsky, O. Mikhailov, Peter I, P. S. Saltykov, P. A. Rumyantsev, A. V. Suvorov, G. A. Potemkin, M. I. Kutuzov and others.
After Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, Russian military-theoretical thought for the first time pointed to the need to define the very concept of "military doctrine" and to identify its principal elements. The problem was covered in the newspaper Russkiy Invalid, in whose materials military doctrine was regarded as a system of guiding rules adopted in the army. Attempts to elaborate and adopt a military doctrine were undertaken before the First World War. At that time General V. Borisov proposed Suvorov's "science of victory" as the basis of a unified military doctrine. In his view, the successful actions of the Russian army had to be built on bold offensive strategy and tactics designed to secure Russia's victory in a future war. But the definition of the most important guidelines for the Russian army never received due attention.
The strongest impetus to the discussion of the military doctrine of the Red Army was given by the outstanding military thinker A. A. Svechin. In his apt formulation, "doctrine, being a manifestation of the will to victory, gives form to the transition from thought to action"; doctrine is needed so that "in the sphere of military thinking the army should not be human dust, but a single whole"; the creation of a military doctrine "requires an enormous common effort and upsurge, great labour and the agreement of the army's mentors"; doctrine must be created on the basis of military-historical work, must have above all native roots and must not be borrowed from foreign authors.
Great credit for the formation of military doctrine belongs to M. V. Frunze. He elaborated its general theoretical foundations, gave a comprehensive substantiation of its essence and investigated the factors that determine the viability of a state's military doctrine. In the works of M. V. Frunze two sides of doctrine – the political and the military-technical – were identified for the first time.
The problems of forming Russia's military doctrine have constantly been at the centre of attention of statesmen and military theorists. These problems were, as a rule, preceded by scholarly debates. The first took place in Russia in 1912. The second debate unfolded in 1918–1922. In its course the theoretical foundations of military doctrine were elaborated. The third debate began in 1962 with the publication of the book by Marshal of the Soviet Union R. Ya. Malinovsky, Vigilantly Standing Guard over Peace. In it the provisions of the USSR's military doctrine were openly proclaimed. The fourth debate took place in 1987. Military thought turned to the problem of doctrine in connection with the adoption of the document "On the Military Doctrine of the Warsaw Pact Member States". In May 1992 a scholarly conference devoted to examining the problems of Russia's military security and the formation of its military doctrine received wide resonance. In November 1993 the "Basic Provisions of the Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation" were put into effect. On 21 April 2000 the Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation was adopted, which develops the Basic Provisions of the Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation of 1993 and gives concrete form, as applied to the military sphere, to the guidelines of the National Security Concept of the Russian Federation.
The preamble of the military doctrine notes that it is a document of a transitional period – a period of the establishment of democratic statehood, a mixed economy, the transformation of Russia's military organisation, and the formation of a new world order. This document became a constituent part of the complex of normative, legal, conceptual and programmatic political documents that regulate and organise activity in the field of ensuring Russia's military and national security.
It should be noted that the development of military doctrine has passed through several stages:
the first – the emergence of doctrinal provisions as a body of traditional views on the development and employment of the armed forces, based on prior experience;
the second – the development of doctrinal provisions through the legislative formalisation of state guidelines on building the armed forces, and the fixing of the methods of their training and employment in regulations, manuals and instructions:
the third – the systematisation of the provisions governing the organisation of the country's defence and the creation, training and employment of the armed forces, and their consolidation into a single system of guidelines, i.e. into a national military doctrine.
Military doctrine is called upon above all to answer the main question: in the name of what must one serve and what must be defended? This is the most important provision, without which it is impossible to organise either the development of the Armed Forces or the training and education of personnel.
Doctrine is elaborated on the basis of the conclusions drawn from an objective analysis of the contemporary military-political situation in the world and from long-term scientific forecasts. Doctrine is an organic continuation of the national security concept; it expresses the state's attitude towards war and towards the use of military force as a means of achieving political goals, and sets out the tasks facing the Armed Forces. It defines the character of military danger and of possible wars, and the ways of deterring aggression by military means. In addition, military doctrine reflects the principal provisions of strategic concepts and the principles of building the Armed Forces and of preparing the Army and Navy, and the country as a whole, for the defence of the Fatherland.
Military doctrine must reflect the changes taking place in the world and correspond to the character of the political regime and the goals of its domestic and foreign policy.
It must be noted that all the changes taking place in the world require not only Russia but literally all states to rethink and newly elaborate the content of their military policy and military strategy. The culmination of the interaction of military policy and strategy is military doctrine, which is understood as a system of officially adopted fundamental views held in the state for a given period of time on the place and role of military violence within the overall system of tasks involved in achieving the political goals set and protecting national (state) interests, on the character of a possible war and the methods of waging it, and on the preparation of the armed forces and the country as a whole for it. The content of military doctrine comprises the state's position with regard to wars; the identification of adversaries and allies in a possible war; the determination of the character of the war and of the state's goals and tasks in that war; and the substantiation of the size, qualitative condition, structure and other characteristics of the armed forces.
The practical side of military doctrine presupposes the existence of a mechanism for its elaboration and implementation by the country's supreme leadership. In the most general terms the structure of this mechanism looks as follows: the actors that formulate military doctrine; the principles of formulating military doctrine; the normative and legal framework of military doctrine.
The central role in the mechanism for elaborating and implementing military doctrine, as applied to Russia, is played above all by the actors that formulate it – the President of the Russian Federation, the Security Council of the Russian Federation, the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, the Government of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, and the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
No less significant a component of the mechanism under consideration are the principles of formulating military doctrine. The following are customarily counted among them.
The principle of the priority of force, when the requirements of military strategy are brought to the fore. The activity of the state is directed towards preparation for war to the detriment of all other spheres of society's life. This principle was implemented in Nazi Germany and partly in the USSR and China. The perniciousness of such a policy is obvious. Often a threat arises to the very existence of the state. The implementation of this principle in practice leads to certain consequences of a negative character:
the "distortion of the economy". A build-up of military might cannot always raise the level of military security, and so the militarisation of the economy damages national security. According to some sources, the United States spends 6% of gross domestic product annually on the country's defence, the countries of Western Europe up to 3%, while the former USSR spent up to 18% of GDP;
the creation of a military-industrial complex which, thanks to its powerful lobby, acts as an active participant in the state's military policy;
an enormous quantitative growth of the army, intelligence and counter-intelligence services, and paramilitary groupings. A huge army becomes dangerous for the society that gave rise to it;
the militarisation of public consciousness. Simple human qualities and feelings are deliberately destroyed.
The principle of defensive sufficiency. In this case what is meant is reasonable sufficiency for defence. The term "reasonable sufficiency of armaments" is understood as the minimum level of capabilities of a country or coalition of countries that ensures the state's reliable protection of its allies. The principle of reasonable sufficiency as a rule provides for the complete elimination of nuclear, chemical and other types of weapons of mass destruction. For conventional armaments, defensive sufficiency means such a combat composition in which the sides possess the ability to repel possible aggression but at the same time do not have the means for a surprise attack or for conducting large-scale operations and offensive actions. Full implementation of the principle of defensive sufficiency is possible only for states possessing considerable military potential and capable of mobilising all their forces within a short period for the conduct of military operations.
The principal parameters that reveal the essence of this principle are:
ensuring reliable military security with minimum expenditure;
deterring and guaranteeing a rebuff to any military aggression;
the commensurability of the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of defensive sufficiency with the degree of military danger and the military potential of the adversary (potential adversary);
the imparting by each state of a defensive orientation to its military structures and military activity;
maintaining and reducing the level of military balance between the opposing sides.
The principle of balancing, or of limited sovereignty. Its meaning lies in the state's enforced limitation of its national interests and of its activity in the sphere of defence for the sake of self-preservation or of the priority development of other branches of national life. Under such an approach, foreign policy must rely on a powerful ally. The price for this is a partial loss of sovereignty. Practically all neutral states adhere to this principle.
Taking the principles considered above into account, the actors of the country's military-political leadership formulate a number of concepts which taken together constitute the core of military doctrine. The logical scheme for elaborating a military doctrine may look as follows.
The concept of development defines the principal priorities and the vital and other interests of the state associated with them in domestic and foreign policy. The concept of security takes account of the threat to the state's interests in various spheres of life, outlines ways of neutralising it by political, economic, military and other means and, proceeding from available capabilities, determines the orientation of military policy. A concept of military security is formed as a constituent part of the state's Security Concept, and it is precisely this that constitutes the core of doctrine. The ministries and departments responsible for military security, proceeding from the goals set, elaborate in detail particular provisions of the concept of military security as applied to their own spheres of activity. Guidelines in the field of military security that have been brought into a system and harmonised, have undergone expert assessment and have been approved by the appropriate authorities will constitute the military doctrine.
Another important component of the mechanism for developing and implementing military doctrine is the body of legislation and regulations. The legal foundation of the Military Doctrine consists of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, federal laws and other normative legal acts of the Russian Federation. At the same time, the provisions of the Military Doctrine may be refined and supplemented in light of changes in the military-political situation, in the nature and content of military threats, and in the conditions governing the building, development and employment of the state's military organization; they may also be given concrete form in the annual addresses of the President of the Russian Federation to the Federal Assembly, in directives on planning the employment of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, other troops, military formations and bodies, and in other documents concerning the provision of the military security of the Russian Federation.
In our view, the military-doctrinal guidelines developed by the Ministry of Defence are of the greatest interest. Proceeding from the logical scheme by which military doctrine is formed, the Ministry should develop concepts for the building and employment of the Armed Forces and for training and education. Each of these, alongside general questions concerning the Armed Forces as a whole, should cover the problems of building, preparing and employing the services and combat arms of the Armed Forces, the special troops and the Rear Services, and should also formulate requirements for the state's economy during wartime and for those departments that participate in supporting the activity of the Armed Forces and cooperate with them in carrying out assigned missions.
Subsequently, once these concepts have been approved and given official status, they are implemented in the practical work of the military leadership - in force development programmes, in plans for operational and combat training, strategic deployment and the combat employment of the Armed Forces. In addition, they serve as the basis for developing doctrinal guidelines for the services and combat arms of the Armed Forces and for the special troops.
The doctrinal guidelines developed by the Ministry of Defence, in addition to being set out in the concepts mentioned above, may be elaborated in regulatory documents: manuals on the preparation and conduct of military operations; combat regulations for the large formations, units and subunits of the combat arms and special troops; manuals on the various types of support; guides to the combat employment of the combat arms and special troops; guides to operational and combat training; manuals on mobilization deployment and combat readiness; general military regulations, and others.
The list of documents set out here is not exhaustive. Changes in the structure of the Armed Forces and other factors may make it necessary to develop new normative documents. In drawing them up, however, one should avoid attempts to regulate questions of defence development and the employment of the Armed Forces rigidly within the framework of laws and official guidelines. Executive bodies and military personnel must always retain freedom in taking decisions within the limits established by military doctrine. Moreover, military doctrine must be flexible and must meet not only the requirements of the present day but also define the prospects for the development of military affairs five to ten years ahead.
The ministries and departments involved in military development and in sustaining the conduct of war develop their own systems of doctrinal documents.
On the whole, as historical experience has shown, the formation of military doctrine is a complex, continuous process of accumulating experience in the military field, of comprehending it theoretically and of bringing individual views, propositions and guidelines together into a single system. This process takes place objectively, under the influence of specific economic, socio-political, scientific, military-technical, geographical and other factors.
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