Military doctrine is a key component of grand strategy.

[1]

NATO's definition of strategy is "presenting the manner in

which military power should be developed and applied to
achieve national objectives or those of a group of na-
tions."[11] The official definition of strategy by the United
States Department of Defense is: "Strategy is a prudent idea
or set of ideas for employing the instruments of national
power in a synchronized and integrated fashion to achieve na-
tional or multinational objectives."[12]

Military strategy provides the rationale for military operations.

Field Marshal Viscount Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial
General Staff and co-chairman of the Anglo-US Combined
Chiefs of Staff Committee for most of the Second World War,
described the art of military strategy as: "to derive from the
[policy] aim a series of military objectives to be achieved: to
assess these objectives as to the military requirements they
create, and the pre-conditions which the achievement of each
is likely to necessitate: to measure available and potential re-
sources against the requirements and to chart from this
process a coherent pattern of priorities and a rational course
of action."[13]

Instead, doctrine seeks to provide a common conceptual

framework for a military service:

• what the service perceives itself to be ("Who are we?")

• what its mission is ("What do we do?")
• how the mission is to be carried out ("How do we do
that?")
• how the mission has been carried out in history ("How did
we do that in the past?")
• other questions.[14]
In the same way, doctrine is neither operations nor tactics. It
serves as a conceptual framework uniting all three levels of
warfare.
Doctrine reflects the judgments of professional military offi-
cers, and to a lesser but important extent civilian leaders,
about what is and is not militarily possible and necessary.[15]

Factors to consider include:

• military technology
• national geography
• the capabilities of adversaries
• the capability of one's own organization