The Army has always had ghosts. Not the kind that rattle chains, but the kind that haunt PowerPoint slides and doctrinal manuals. Each generation thinks that its doctrine is new, even revolutionary. Yet if you listen closely, ghosts whisper from the shadows: Pentomic Army, AirLand Battle, Counterinsurgency, Multidomain Operations.
The Army’s intellectual history is like a good Halloween story—crowded with spirits that refuse to rest. The graph below traces their appearances in Military Review over the past seven decades. Each curve even looks like a ghost: a prominent torso followed by a dwindling train. Pentomic and AirLand Battle passed into memory, while Multidomain Operations shows one foot in the grave. And Counterinsurgency? That’s the undead doctrine, clawing out of the dirt every few decades.
The Army doesn’t invent new doctrines so much as resurrect them.
Doctrine’s Ghosts
The evidence of those resurrections is clear. Every few years, leaders conjure a new operating concept or doctrine. The Pentomic Army answered the nuclear battlefield of the 1950s. AirLand Battle guided the Army through the end of the Cold War, while Multidomain Operations helped bury counterinsurgency. Before going further, a quick calibration: there are other ideas not included here, and these ideas aren’t perfectly comparable. Pentomic, AirLand Battle, and Multidomain Operations are named Army operating concepts, while counterinsurgency is narrower. But their ghosts still mingle in the pages of Military Review and shape how we think today.
Of all the spooks, our Pentomic ghost haunts us least. This US Army nuclear-era experiment in five-battle-group divisions was an attempt to stay relevant on an atomic battlefield. Unpopular and unworkable, it vanished almost as quickly as it appeared. In Military Review, Pentomic is mentioned 157 times. Depicted by the black line, it first appeared in 1957, peaked in 1958, and was effectively gone by 1962. From that point forward, the term only occasionally stirred from the Cold War grave.
AirLand Battle casts a longer shadow. This late–Cold War concept sought to break Soviet echelons through synchronized air-ground operations and to restore coherence to the Army’s post-Vietnam identity. As the Training and Doctrine Command commander, General Donn Starry deliberately launched AirLand Battle in the pages of Military Review with his 1981 article “Extending the Battlefield.” As Benjamin Jensen later observed, Starry used the journal “to protect the emerging AirLand Battle concept and create a space for younger officers to apply it.”
Starry’s approach worked. Writers mentioned AirLand 969 times. The orange line on the graph shows the surge between 1983 and 1989, peaking in 1986 as the Army formalized Field Manual 100-5, enshrining the concept in its capstone operations doctrine. Mentions declined steadily through the 1990s, ending by 1996 as the Army’s attention drifted elsewhere. Now, AirLand Battle haunts us in historical pieces or through invocation as the ancestor of today’s operating concept.
Today’s concept, Multidomain Operations, already shows one foot in the grave. Formalized in Field Manual 3-0, Operations in 2023, it began life as Multi-Domain Battle in a 2017 Training and Doctrine Command white paper, shedding “battle” for “operations” along its journey from concept to doctrine.
Like his Cold War predecessor Donn Starry, General David Perkins launched the concept in Military Review with his 2017 article “Multi-Domain Battle: Driving Change to Win in the Future.” Depicted by the purple line, Multidomain has been mentioned 514 times, surging to 156 in 2017 before declining each year since, down to just 11 mentions in 2024. Like its predecessors, Multidomain Operations seems destined to join the Army’s ghostly pantheon: Once invoked with conviction, soon buried out back with the others.
And while these ghosts haunt, one figure refuses to stay buried . . .
The Zombie
Within the ghostly graveyard of doctrinal demons there is a zombie—counterinsurgency—born on the frontier, reborn in the Philippines, resurrected in Vietnam, and risen again in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army puts two in the chest and one in the head of this walking-dead concept after each conflict, preferring to think about large-scale, conventional wars. Yet counterinsurgency crawls out of its grave whenever the Army needs to control populations, train partners, or win hearts and minds.
The data show why it feels immortal. In Military Review, counterinsurgency appears 1,529 times—roughly as many mentions as Pentomic, AirLand Battle, and Multidomain combined. Unlike the spectral rise and fade of other doctrines, counterinsurgency’s curve forms a double hump: first cresting with Vietnam, then returning three decades later during the post-9/11 wars. From 2004 to 2011 it dominated professional writing, peaking in 2006 amid the Iraq surge and the publication of Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency. After 2014, it again decayed toward silence.
Counterinsurgency’s persistence makes it the Army’s undead idea: sometimes buried, never gone.
No Rest for the Doctrinal Dead
Lately, it isn’t the undead returning so much as the unearthed.
In Ukraine, constant overhead surveillance and cheap loitering munitions have turned front lines into ghost towns. Battalions disperse, brigades hesitate to mass, and anything that concentrates draws fire. It’s no surprise some people have dug up Pentomic ideas. Dispersed formations, small independent units, and distributed networks—the very bones of that 1950s experiment—are back on the table.
Perhaps there is no true death for doctrine. Ghosts linger in the archives, waiting for the right conditions to rise—the right crisis, the right buzzword, the right general. This Halloween, remember: The Army doesn’t so much invent ideas as resurrect them.
Lt. Col. Zachary Griffiths commands 4th Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne). He also champions seasonal and offbeat writing as a way to strengthen the profession’s sense of community—see his reflection at the Harding Project.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.