DoD Doctrine’s Islands (and the Bridges Between Them)

I was listening to an audiobook on the drive back from my daughter’s travel hockey tournament when the narrator used a DoD term that instantly dated the book. Same concept, different term; and you can tell it was written ~a decade ago.

That sent me down a rabbit hole: how do DoD doctrinal publications actually cite each other over time?

So I vibe-coded a quick analysis pipeline to answer four questions:

• Do DoD publications cite other DoD publications?

• Do the services/MILDEPs, OSD, and Joint pubs cite each other?

• Are there “foundational” pubs that everyone references?

• Are there doctrinal outliers that are ignored?

Scope / caveats: I only used sources that didn’t require a CAC, and I stopped improving the PDF extraction when it was “good enough” to satisfy my curiosity.

Data pipeline

How to read the below graph:

• Each node = a publication

• Bigger node = cited more often by other DoD publications

• Joint Pubs = teal/greenish-blue

• OSD = yellow

• Army = blue

• Air Force = orange

• USMC = royal purple

• Navy = pink (the AI chose it, I swear)

Clustering DoD publications by Department impact

What jumped out

1) A meaningful chunk is isolated. Out of 2,498 DoD publications I could download, 481 neither cite another DoD publication nor are cited by any other DoD publication. That’s ~19% that are effectively “citation islands” by academic-style impact measures.

2) OSD publications mostly stay inside OSD. That yellow cluster off to the side is largely DoD Instructions (DoDIs), Manuals (DoDMs), and Directives (DoDDs). They aren’t widely cited outside OSD so are not impacting the broader department nearly as much as I would have assumed. Notable exception: DoDD 3025.18 (Defense Support of Civil Authorities / DSCA) shows broader citation across the services.

3) Joint Pubs are the center of gravity. The Joint Pub cluster dominates the center of the graph and shows the strongest department-wide influence. This implies that the uniformed Joint Staff are more impactful to the department than the broader civilian Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and MILDEPs. In my dataset, the most cited document was JP 1‑02 (DoD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms), followed by JP 3‑0 (Joint Campaigns and Operation).

4) The Air Force is doctrinally “off to the side”. The orange cluster is tightly self-referential: Air Force pubs cite Air Force pubs, with comparatively less cross‑citation to/from other services.

5) Army / USMC / Navy cross-cite more. Those clusters show more interconnection and cross-service citation than the Air Force set.

6) Some orgs are under represented. Coast Guard and Space Force aren’t well represented in what I could pull without using a CAC. My guess is a lot of Space Force material is still access-controlled (or simply has not been FOIA’d yet so my AI agent could find them).