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constructs, and doctrine in a coherent temporal framework.
Doctrine is focused on near-term operational issues and describes the proper
employment of current capabilities and current organizations. Doctrine
addresses how best to employ, how to organize, and how to command today’s
capabilities. Doctrine is examined and validated during training, exercises,
contingency operations, and times of armed conflict. Exercises, wargaming, and
experiments allow us to test emerging doctrinal concepts and better align predicted
capabilities with sound operational practices. Experience during conflict refines
doctrine in real time. Encounters with unpredictable adversaries often highlight
doctrinal gaps and provide fresh perspectives on historic and future challenges.
Emerging doctrine generally drives force development in the two to seven
year time frame. Still not proven as extant practice, it examines an operating
concept for doctrine development. Emerging doctrine is further developed and
refined to drive future operational and tactical doctrine. Emerging doctrine
combines operating concepts with near-term practical approaches within the current
context of doctrine. Experiments, wargames, and historical study, when honestly and
rigorously conducted, are useful methods for evaluating emerging doctrine and
providing a basis for doctrinal considerations.
Operating concepts generally look out from seven to fifteen years, and
postulate reasonable operating scenarios that, through a combination of
analysis and the use of descriptive examples, examine a range of issues such
as employment, operating environment, C2, support, organization, and
planning considerations. As new technologies mature to the point where their
performance can be reasonably bounded as a new, separate system or part of an
existing system, they are examined within the framework of an operating concept.
Depending on their purpose, operating concepts can speak to the present, near
future, or distant future. Operating concepts define the parameters of envisioned
capabilities. Like emerging doctrine, experiments, wargames, and historical study
are useful methods for evaluating new operating concepts.
Vision statements describe key operating constructs and desired operational
capabilities well in the future, usually fifteen years and beyond. Vision serves to
focus technology investments toward achieving these capabilities. Emerging
concepts and technologies are best investigated through experimentation and
wargaming techniques. As future concepts are envisioned, it is important to also
examine doctrine to support these potential capabilities. Vision provides the basis for
wargaming, and the results of wargaming may point to doctrinal considerations
requiring further examination.
Using doctrine, emerging doctrine, operating concepts, and vision, the Air Force can
look toward the future and consider the long-term impacts of advanced technologies
such as directed energy weapons, new unmanned systems, joint C2 systems, and
conceptual advancements. As this framework builds from the general (long-term) to the
specific (near-term), Airmen can investigate a wide range of doctrine, organization,