Ibid - Australian Army

71
Study Paper No. 301
command, will be the biggest challenge facing the new Force
Development Group of the CATDC.
Tactical Heritage, Training and Doctrine
The 1985 Fundamentals of Land Force Operations declared,
‘the essence of soldiering is excellence at the execution of the
tactical level of warfare’. 288 The Australian Army has a history of
success at the tactical level of war that is second to none in modern
warfare. However, in recent years, familiarity with the tactical level
of warfare has sometimes become a refuge from the complexities of
operational-level warfare.
The tendency of many Army officers to fall back on tactical
solutions was noted in September 1992 when the staff of the
Director General Force Development—Land in Headquarters ADF
produced a discussion paper on doctrine policy. The paper noted
that, along with strategic guidance, ‘the main influence on doctrine
tends not to be innovative and original thought, but our military
heritage (which has a distinctly cultural as well as a historical
dimension)’. 289 The paper’s authors wondered whether Army
doctrine was lagging because of ‘an individual and an institutional
attachment to the past which is essentially emotional rather than
intellectual’. 290
This penchant for the tactical level has added to the difficulty of
incorporating doctrine into training and course instructional content
at the operational level. This disconnection between doctrine and
training was well exemplified by an Army Doctrine Branch report
288
289
290
The Fundamentals of Land Force Operations 1985, para. 231.
Headquarters ADF, Directorate General Force Development—Land,
‘Discussion Paper on Policy for the Development of Doctrine’,
Doctrine Officers’ Training Seminar, September 1992, p. 6.
Ibid., p. 7.