The purpose of this essay is to develop and describe a plausible theory for The Maritime Doctrine Cycle, or actually any doctrine cycle, since there is little “maritimish” about a theory for cyclic change and development processes.
Based on a model for a generic maritime doctrine cycle by Dr. Geoffrey Till, from his book Sea Power – A Guide for the Twenty-First Century, the author of this essay uses empiricism from the Swedish doctrine cycle during the years 2000-2010, in order to develop a theory out of a model.
This is not an essay treating the subject how a perfect doctrine is written or composed, but how and during what auspices it is written and how doctrine keeps up with the operational demand of being versatile and adaptive. The similarities between the doctrine cycle and other systematic change and improvement theories is evident; especially the American-Japanese kaizen inspired quality programs that have had such a huge impact on Industry and governmental agencies during the last 20 years in the Developed World.
The result shows that the model of Till, together with the Swedish doctrine process, constitute foundation enough for theory making. That theory is for brevity’s sake best described as an amendment to the thoughts of Till with the doctrine process influence factors of benchmarking, technical and tactical evolution and different number of revolutions for each factor cycle. The factors interact with the big doctrine cycle wheel in the modus of a clockwork (on page 38, there is a figure illustrating this Clockwork Theory).