Ibid - Australian Army

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Study Paper No. 301
doctrine under difficult conditions; however, by the first half of the
1990s, there was a hardening of doctrinal categories around lowlevel
operations for fighting in northern Australia. Eventually, this
geographical imperative contributed to the Army’s failure to
anticipate and adapt new ideas to meet changing strategic
conditions.
In the next century, the new LWD series must seek to remedy
weaknesses in anticipation and adaptability by encouraging the
feedback of creative ideas on doctrine from within the officer corps,
even if this is sometimes critical in tone. The Army must recognise
the validity of Clausewitz’s statement that, in preparing for the
deadly practice of war, ‘criticism exists only to recognise the truth,
not to act as judge’. 313 Used in this positive way, doctrinal debate
has the potential to help clarify and encapsulate a philosophy for the
employment of force based on the triangular interaction of military
history, operational experience and technological possibility.
However, the success of such an approach depends on willing
intellectual activity from within the Australian Army officer corps.
As the leading American military historian Peter Paret reminds us,
the most important aspect of military innovation is ‘not the
development of weapons or methods, nor even their general
adoption, but their intellectual mastery’. 314
Finally, the British strategist Air Marshal Lord Tedder once
observed that the best military doctrine looks ‘forward from the
past . . . not back to the past’. 315 The Australian Army may need to
draw on its illustrious past and on the fortitude and flair of the
Digger for developing doctrine, but such doctrine must be designed
313
314
315
Quoted in Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State, Oxford University
Press, New York, 1976, p. 341.
Peter Paret, Innovation and Reform in Warfare, United States Air
Force Academy, Colorado, 1962, p. 2.
Lord Arthur Tedder, ‘The Unities of War’, in The Impact of Air
Power: National Security and World Politics, ed. Eugene M. Emme,
D. Van Nostrand Co., Inc., New Jersey, 1959, p. 339. Emphasis
added.