Ibid - Australian Army

67
Study Paper No. 301
There can be little doubt that the slow evolution of Australian
strategic guidance seriously affected the Army’s ability to formulate
doctrine. As Lieutenant General Hassett recognised in his 1975
Training Directive, the Army itself had to develop doctrine suited to
defending continental Australia in a strategic vacuum. 277 Although
the 1976 White Paper sketched a general picture of the policy of
Defence of Australia, for over a decade defining the contribution of
the Army became essentially an exercise in successive Chiefs of the
General Staff attempting to interpret the meaning of strategic
guidance.
The problem of inadequate strategic guidance was compounded by
the impact on the Army of the organisational changes of the
Dunstan–Bennett era between 1977 and 1984. The time lag
between the Army’s field practice and its doctrine development
increased markedly between the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Despite this unfavourable situation, Major General S. N. Gower, a
former head of doctrine and GOC Training Command, has argued
that doctrine development did achieve some considerable
successes—particularly in the first half of the 1980s. ‘The early
80s’, Gower points out, ‘saw the concepts of campaigning and the
operational level of war introduced to the Australian Army
doctrinally (concepts everyone has taken up, but no easy feat at the
time), and it was by no means a simple derivative of prevailing US
practice’. 278
In addition, by the time of the 1987 White Paper, the decision to
introduce directive control into Army doctrine had been taken in
principle by Lieutenant General Gration. Overall, then, given the
legacy of imprecise strategic guidance from 1972 to 1987, the
Army’s adoption of the operational level of war and directive
control by the late 1980s, and subsequently of operational art in the
early 1990s, were important and enduring advances.
277
278
‘Report on Doctrinal Conference’, 16–17 July 1975, p. i.
Letter to the author by Major General S. N. Gower (Retd),
28 September 1998.