Linear Doctrine Lost the War — Here's What Happens Next
Why linear doctrine still dominates military thinking while the real fight moves to signal, narrative, and collapse.
Doctrine Breaks Quietly: What the War Colleges Miss
According to JP 5‑0, a center of gravity is ‘a source of power that provides moral or physical strength, freedom of action, or will to act.
— Joint Publication 5-0, U.S. Department of Defense
That line has been quoted so often in military classrooms, it might as well be chiseled into stone. I’ve seen it on whiteboards, briefing slides, and during one particularly painful war game, repeated like gospel while the entire scenario fell apart before our eyes.
The problem?
The war had already changed.
But the doctrine hadn’t noticed.
I. Doctrine Doesn’t Break Loudly
Over years in defense strategy and interagency operations, I’ve come to recognize a pattern: doctrine rarely fails with noise. It fails with silence, delay, and the illusion of control.
Most senior leaders don’t see it happening.
War colleges still teach models like they’re operating in a vacuum—one where humans are rational actors, time is linear, and campaigns unfold like chess matches.
But here’s what those models never account for:
Narrative disinformation that spreads faster than orders
Medical disruptions that fracture unit cohesion without a shot fired
Coherence loss inside the system itself—from the people who feel it in their bodies long before a doctrine catches up
II. What the War Colleges Still Miss
The core problem is epistemological. They teach linear logic in a nonlinear environment.
Center of gravity? Try field volatility. Try coherence drift.
Lines of operation? There are no “lines” when your adversary manipulates signal, health, and information simultaneously across domains.
Deterrence models? Built for state actors, not distributed networks running on chaos and belief.
And then there’s the real kicker: most doctrine doesn’t even recognize its own failure—because it's designed to measure outcomes using outdated frames.
We saw this during counterinsurgency campaigns. We see it now in cyberspace, cognitive warfare, and what I’d call synthetic coercion—when people comply not because of force, but because the architecture of choice itself has been pre-written.
That’s not just strategic collapse.
That’s narrative warfare.
And we’re still briefing PowerPoints.
III. What Comes Next
We need new mental models—built not on predictability, but on pattern sensing, signal interpretation, and adaptive narrative maneuvering.
We need frameworks that can:
Operate without closure
Accept incoherence without paralysis
Track emergence rather than enforce control
This isn't theoretical. The next war won't start in a theater. It'll start in a system collapse—medical, logistical, cognitive, narrative—and by the time doctrine catches up, it will already be too late.
Doctrine doesn’t need to explode to become obsolete. It just needs to keep missing the real fight.
Some of us are beginning to map this shift through fiction as well—because sometimes the only way to explain what’s breaking is to build a new story around it.
In another project, I’ve begun sketching what this collapse looks like in practice—a world where doctrine breaks so quietly, no one sees the signal until it’s too late.
Welcome to The Quantum Doctrine.
Dr. Crisanna Shackelford
📡 Strategic Signal, Nonlinear Warfare, and What Comes Next
sounds eerily like the entire distracted, sick, divided USA! 🎭 We can do more.
This is an important message. One that every citizen should hear throughout all education & training.
Doctrine comes from the top, as a summary of bottom-up lessons learned?
More lessons are ALWAYS flowing from bottom to top, from periphery to ex-centers?
You don't say!
How about adding a bit more?
No doctrine can track its own obsolescence.
Zero predictive power.
But we always have adequate observational & adaptive power.
We don't have to immediately predict what will work, but we do have to detect and admit what isn't working, and prepare to change!
Many have talked about this.
Homo sapiens give group actions a chance, 'cuz aggregate logic can overcome hurdles that individual logic can't.
However, that comes with additional costs, of group selection & coordination.
Even group behavior must sometimes retreat from dead-ends.
Jumping further than this article:
Why must all adaptations be seen as an "enemy?"
That's an obsolete doctrine right there.
We always have more options. Stable alliances, outright symbioses and gradual fusions, as opposed to conflict. Affinity isn't all-or-nothing. There's ALWAYS some path bridging from cost-of-coordination to return-on-coordination. It just takes more vs less work to find it, hence the cost.
One may posit that beyond EVERY cost-of-interaction/coordination spectrum is an ALWAYS GREATER return-on-coordination spectrum. There may eventually be something absolutely incompatible, but Trillions of years of apparent evolution hasn't yet found that asymptote.
The real limits are internal, involving expediencies, current capabilities and transient adaptive rate. The greater the initial frictions, the greater the eventual return-on-coordination.
It's not always a fight. It's an opportunity with escalating difficulty of negotiation.** Why settle for small gains when far greater gains are available with a bit of redirected imagination? The core issue is that homo sapiens have a lingering bias to conflict that is still slightly larger than our bias to improve negotiations. The ratio of those 2 biases continues to change. Accelerating that adaptation seems to define the current moment of human adaptive rate.
The magnitude of every fight sets the minimal floor of a greater opportunity missed.
Granted, both sides have to survive each other's mistakes long enough to negotiate. That's the price of being in the game.
Some additional comments:
- "state actors ... running on chaos and belief" [you mean the UnDead British Empire, & MI6?]
- "narrative warfare" [How about more compelling purpose?]
What comes next? We can be distracted with endless details. The summary: be more dynamic - i.e., increase agility, across all operations, i.e., INCREASE NET ADAPTIVE RATE. That would, of course, threaten and reduce the half-life of any & all doctrines - unless the emerging factions distilling doctrine could improve dynamic negotiation with distributed, emerging lessons being learned? Why, that would define a MORE PERFECT UNION. (That sounds vaguely familiar...)
At the moment of adaptive negotiation, ONE'S OWN TEAM IS JUST AS MUCH THE ENEMY AS THE SUPPOSED OPPONENT! Aggregate adaptation extends to improved handling of all emerging Romeos & Juliets.
** of course every fight short of extinction can be defined as part of negotiation; a nuance