Military doctrine in the context of "Operational mobility"

Armoured warfare is the use of armoured fighting vehicles in modern warfare. It is a major component of modern methods of war. The premise of armoured warfare rests on the ability of troops to penetrate conventional defensive lines through use of manoeuvre by armoured units.

Much of the application of armoured warfare depends on the use of tanks and related vehicles used by other supporting arms such as infantry fighting vehicles, self-propelled artillery, and other combat vehicles, as well as mounted combat engineers and other support units. The doctrine of armoured warfare was developed to break the static nature of World War I trench warfare on the Western Front, and return to the 19th century school of thought that advocated manoeuvre and decisive battle outcomes in military strategy.

Combat arms (or fighting arms in non-American parlance) are troops within national armed forces who participate in direct tactical ground combat. In general, they are units that carry or employ weapons, such as infantry, cavalry, and artillery units. The use of multiple combat arms in mutually supporting ways is known as combined arms. In some armies, notably the British Army and Canadian Army, artillery and combat engineer units are categorized as combat support, while in others, such as the U.S. Army, they are considered part of the combat arms. Armored troops constitute a combat arm in name, although many have histories derived from cavalry units.

Artillery is included as a combat arm primarily based on the history of employing cannons in close combat, and later in the anti-tank role until the advent of anti-tank guided missiles. The inclusion of special forces in some armed forces as a separate combat arm is often doctrinal because the troops of special forces units are essentially specialized infantry, often with historical links to ordinary light infantry units.

Grand strategy or high strategy is a state's strategy of how means (military and nonmilitary) can be used to advance and achieve national interests in the long-term. Issues of grand strategy typically include the choice of military doctrine, force structure and alliances, as well as economic relations, diplomatic behavior, and methods to extract or mobilize resources.

In contrast to strategy, grand strategy encompasses more than military means (such as diplomatic and economic means); does not equate success with purely military victory but also the pursuit of peacetime goals and prosperity; and considers goals and interests in the long-term rather than short-term.

A military operation plan (commonly called a war plan before World War II) is a formal plan for military armed forces, their military organizations and units to conduct operations, as drawn up by commanders within the combat operations process in achieving objectives before or during a conflict. Military plans are generally produced in accordance with the military doctrine of the troops involved. Because planning is a valuable exercise for senior military staff, in peacetime nations generally produce plans (of varying detail) even for very unlikely hypothetical scenarios.

Plan XVII and the Schlieffen Plan are examples of World War I military plans. The United States developed a famous color-coded set of war plans in the early 20th century; see United States color-coded war plans.

Network-centric warfare, also called network-centric operations or net-centric warfare, is a military doctrine or theory of war that aims to translate an information advantage, enabled partly by information technology, into a competitive advantage through the computer networking of dispersed forces. It was pioneered by the United States Department of Defense in the 1990s.

In the field of military theory, the operational level of war (also called operational art, as derived from Russian: оперативное искусство, or operational warfare) represents the level of command that connects the details of tactics with the goals of strategy. In other words, it involves creating, through successful tactics in the theater of military operations, the conditions needed for strategic success.

In U.S. Joint military doctrine, operational art is "the cognitive approach by commanders and staffs—supported by their skill, knowledge, experience, creativity, and judgment—to develop strategies, campaigns, and operations to organize and employ military forces by integrating ends, ways, and means". It correlates political requirements with military power. Operational art is defined by its military-political scope, not by force size, scale of operations or degree of effort. Likewise, operational art provides theory and skills, and the operational level permits doctrinal structure and process.

An order of battle of an armed force participating in a military operation or campaign shows the hierarchical organization, command structure, strength, disposition of personnel, and equipment of units and formations of the armed force. Various abbreviations are in use, including OOB, O/B, or OB, while ORBAT remains the most common in the United Kingdom. An order of battle is distinct from a table of organisation, which is the intended composition of a given unit or formation according to the military doctrine of its armed force. Historically, an order of battle was the order in which troops were positioned relative to the position of the army commander or the chronological order in which ships were deployed in naval situations.

As combat operations develop during a campaign, orders of battle may be revised and altered in response to the military needs and challenges. Also the known details of an order of battle may change during the course of executing the commanders' after action reports and/or other accounting methods (e.g. despatches) as combat assessment is conducted.

A submachine gun (SMG) or sub-gun is a magazine-fed automatic carbine designed to fire handgun cartridges. The term "submachine gun" was coined by John T. Thompson, the inventor of the Thompson submachine gun, to describe its design concept as an automatic firearm with notably less firepower than a machine gun (hence the prefix "sub-"). As a machine gun must fire rifle cartridges to be classified as such, submachine guns are not considered machine guns.

In the 20th century, the submachine gun was developed during World War I (1914–1918) as a close quarter offensive weapon, mainly for trench raiding. At its peak during World War II (1939–1945), millions of submachine guns were made for assault troops and auxiliaries whose doctrines emphasized close-quarter suppressive fire. New submachine gun designs appeared frequently during the Cold War, especially among special forces, commandos and mechanized infantrymen. Submachine gun usage for frontline combat decreased in the 1980s and 1990s.