By Ann Roosevelt
Today, the Army releases its new doctrine, FM 3-07 Stability Operations that could be used as a handbook by the military and other government entities so both have a common way to think about those issues, a top general says. “Importantly, that manual has been developed with our interagency partners, primarily USAID and the Department of State,” Gen. Scott Wallace, commander of Army Training and Doctrine Command, said last week. “It’s our expectation that that manual–because of the transparency and cooperation with the interagency–will become a handbook for both uniformed personnel and non-uniformed personnel that are operating in one of these contemporary operational environment situations.” The new doctrine, released at the Association of the U.S. Army annual conference in Washington, D.C., reflects not only what the service has learned over the past several years in Iraq and Afghanistan, but acknowledges the critical need for all elements of government to understand each other during stability operations.
“We have developed the manual specifically to bridge the gap between the acronyms and lexicon of the interagency and acronyms and lexicon of the military,” Wallace said. “So that instead of talking past each other, we’re talking with each other with common terms and common practices and that sort of thing.”
For example, FM 3-07 takes the stability tasks described in the Army’s FM 3-0 Operations, and maps them into the stability sectors coming from the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization.
The Army’s new FM 3-0 Operations, published in February, raised stability operations to be coequal with the traditional offensive and defensive operations. As an element of full spectrum operations, the military’s primary tasks of stability operations consist of civil security and control, the restoration of essential services, support to governance and support to the development of the economy and infrastructure.
The new field manual will also talk about transitional military authority, which was part of Army doctrine in post-World War II but somehow fell by the wayside, Wallace said.
“All of these are terms that are generally foreign to the military but now are being included in a military manual to provide us the right intellectual foundation to be able to talk to our interagency partner,” Wallace said. “It’s our hope that, and it is a hope at this point, that our interagency partners will use this manual, maybe slap their own cover on it and use it as a source document for their own operations so that we have a common way of thinking.”