Starry’s work initiated an intellectual renaissance in twentieth-century military thought, which can still serve as a model for the army (and other services) as they develop operational concepts, weigh the trade-offs associated with modernization, and more generally seek to understand how wars will be fought on the twenty-first-century battlefield.
Today, U.S. Army General Donn A. Starry, the commanding general of the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) from July 1977 to July 1981, is best remembered as the architect of the Cold War doctrine known as AirLand Battle, that first appeared in the 1982 edition of Army Field Manual (FM) 100-5, Operations. AirLand Battle doctrine was an artifact of a dispirited army turning its attention away from recent failed counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam to focus instead on the Warsaw Pact and the defense of Western Europe. Starry’s work initiated an intellectual renaissance in twentieth-century military thought, which can still serve as a model for the army (and other services) as they develop operational concepts, weigh the trade-offs associated with modernization, and more generally seek to understand how wars will be fought on the twenty-first-century battlefield.
Starry developed AirLand Battle to replace the controversial doctrine of Active Defense that his predecessor and inaugural TRADOC commander, General William DePuy, had developed for the 1976 version of FM 100-5. Many U.S. Army officers and defense analysts rejected DePuy’s approach, deeming Active Defense as reactive, emphasizing defense and stopping the “Soviet operational breakthrough maneuver” rather than taking the offensive. But affecting change in an institution as large as the army is challenging. As retired brigadier general Huba Wass de Czege has pointed out, “the Army’s struggle to get the doctrine ‘right enough’ after Vietnam” took “13 years”, and when AirLand Battle was “right enough,” it was a “way of thinking about war and a mental conditioning rather than a rigid set of rules and list to be done in lock-step fashion.”
Starry had as commanding general of the U.S. Army Armor Center and School under DePuy played a prominent role in fashioning Active Defense through his analysis of the 1973 Arab-Israeli (Yom Kippur) War and other activities. However, in his follow-on assignment as commander, V Corps in West Germany from 1976 to 1977, he began a rigorous effort to determine if employment of Active Defense was realistic. Using terrain analysis, experiments, examination of Soviet military doctrine, and information about force ratios, Starry concluded U.S. Army units in the V Corps sector of NATO’s central region would be considerably outnumbered. This assessment along with a reexamination of his earlier study of the Yom Kippur War, whereby he modified the tactical lessons of that conflict to the NATO scenario, prepared Starry for his next assignment as TRADOC commander. He was primed to revise the Active Defense doctrine.
As important as AirLand Battle doctrine was, however, it was only one element of a more complex conceptualization of warfare based on the idea of the “central battle,” which Starry defined as “the place on the battlefield where all aspects of firepower and maneuver come together to produce decisive action.” As he noted, “When the Central Battle idea was first conceived, I made the point that operational concepts had to be the driving force for describing interactions that were to occur on the most intense part of the battlefield (emphasis added).” Operational concepts do not validate the procurement of a specific weapon system or equipment. They are ideas necessary to achieve a desired military objective, but must be adaptable to changing perceptions and circumstances. Further, he stressed that they must be tested and their relationship to other concepts—tactical, organizational, training, and materiel concepts—ascertained. He was clear: “Concepts are not (emphasis in the original) doctrine until tested, approved, and accepted.” Thus, Starry fashioned a framework for how concepts not only resulted in doctrine, but the relationship doctrine had to training development, materiel requirements and organizations.
The first component he stipulated for framing an operational concept was the threat. To help define threats, Starry—unimpressed with how the former Army Combat Development Command had used long-range forecasts to determine requirements for the future combat environment—called for the army to work with the intelligence community to develop estimates of enemy capabilities. After discussions with the intelligence professionals, Starry came to believe that eight years was the appropriate time horizon for threat estimates informing combat developments; thus, 1986 became the endpoint for a number of studies that TRADOC conducted. However, Starry was also aware that the threat often changes, with the enemy devising countermeasures that complicate doctrine’s formation and narrowing its useful life.
The second component to framing an operational concept was defining the mission that the theater commander confronts at the operational level of war. Starry and others believed that the army had neglected to do this when formulating Active Defense. Starry stated simply that the mission was to fight and win at that level. In the European context, U.S. vital interests were at stake; therefore, the mission at the operational level was to “disrupt, delay, and destroy as possible” the attacking and follow-on Warsaw Pact forces, and “to win, not just avert defeat.” Starry envisioned NATO forces using a combination of deep attack and close-in battle to seize and hold the initiative through maneuver and fires. The use of such conventional means raised the nuclear threshold. Nonetheless, the army had to be capable of operating on the nuclear battlefield, because the Soviets were prepared to use these weapons.
When developing AirLand Battle, Starry was actually more interested in emerging deep fires and surveillance capabilities, systems that would help target and destroy enemy assets in the extended battlefield, and make deep attack possible.
The third component of developing an operational concept was the opportunities that new technology offered. Technological developments drive war, Starry noted, but “technology wins nothing unless it serves some doctrinal purpose.” It is worth noting that even before Active Defense, the army had already begun the modernization effort that would lead to the fielding of the “Big 5” systems (AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, the M-1 Abrams main battle tank, the UH-60 Black Hawk utility and transport helicopter, the Bradley fighting vehicles, and the Patriot air defense missile system). When developing AirLand Battle, Starry was actually more interested in emerging deep fires and surveillance capabilities, systems that would help target and destroy enemy assets in the extended battlefield, and make deep attack possible. The Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) that was in development met the second requirement. Working with the Air Force’s Tactical Air Command, Starry recognized that Joint STARS, the U.S. Air Force’s airborne battle management, command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platform, was the answer to the first. The emphasis was on the integration of U.S. air and ground forces, and ultimately, U.S. forces with those of our allies.
The final component was historical insight, or as Starry once wrote, “The acquisition of a sense of historical mindedness.” Starry—an avid student of U.S., British, Soviet, and German tactics and operations in World War II, as well as of theoreticians like Jomini and Clausewitz—believed that studying military history helped officers develop professional technical competence. History was not a blueprint, he maintained, but a means of improving judgment and fashioning a logical approach to problem solving and to understanding the “reasons for and the results of previous solutions.” But the value of historical insights went beyond reading traditional history texts; it included analysis and studies of doctrine, policy, planning exercises, campaigns and individual battles to learn especially under what circumstances outnumbered forces won battles and campaigns. These assessments were critical to understanding NATO’s defense against a massive Warsaw Pact attack into West Germany. Systemizing these insights was critical; thus, historical knowledge undergirded the 1982 edition of FM 100-5.
In Starry’s framework, TRADOC was responsible for integrating these four components into a draft concept statement of a page or two, which when approved, resulted in a concept paper that was a comprehensive analysis of the requirement and the preferred outcome, the concept of how this end was to accomplished, where and when it needed to be undertaken, the organization that is was responsible for doing it, and what was needed for achieving the desired result that addressed tactics, equipment, organizations, and training. A lengthy and thorough evaluation process, which Starry stated was the “business of TRADOC,” followed the approved concept paper and only then, after discussions within the Army and with other services and allies, was an operational concept incorporated into doctrine, training developments, materiel requirements, and organizations.
Starry’s approach, however, is not an input-output model. It is a framework that forces senior military leaders to undertake a methodical planning process that produces a theory of victory for both conventional and nuclear battlefields, grounded in U.S. policy objectives and its national defense strategy, before the army makes any substantial investment. Observers seem to think that the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts are going to lead directly to a new doctrine of war in the same way that conventional wisdom believes the Yom Kippur War produced AirLand Battle doctrine. However, just as the Yom Kippur war was merely an inflection point in the post-Vietnam reassessment of operational doctrine, these two conflicts, though rich in data, will likely only be part of the story of future doctrine development. In making these early assessments of means versus way and ends, the principal focus is on the tactical level of war and finding technological solutions, with little emphasis on the operational level of war where military resources are employed to achieve the strategic objectives (e.g., deterrence and warfighting) necessary to protect U.S. interests. For those looking for ways to accomplish strategic objectives, Starry’s framework and the evolution of AirLand Battle doctrine provide a useful guide.
Frank Jones is a Distinguished Fellow of the U.S. Army War College where he taught in the Department of National Security and Strategy. Previously, he had retired from the Office of the Secretary of Defense as a senior executive. He is the author or editor of three books and numerous articles on U.S. national security.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.
Photo Description: Soldiers from the 1-194th Field Artillery complete joint slingload training with UH-47 Chinook Helicopters out of the 2-211th General Support Aviation Battalion at Camp Ripley Training Center on May 19th, 2023. The two units worked together to complete two iterations of slingloading and firing two M777 Howitzers. Inset: GEN Donn A. Starry as Commander in Chief, U.S. Readiness Command
Photo Credit: Spc. Jorden Newbanks Inset: U.S. Readiness Command, Public Domain, via Wikimedia