You're getting into the world of “what do we understand policy to be?” By and large, policy, at least public policy—that which is communicated to the public or that which I get to look at—is generally drafted in a relatively vague and ambiguous enough manner to be able to cover all potential contingencies and allow for activities to go on without specifying what they're going to be.
I think what you're really talking about is not the policy world, but, in the military world, the doctrine world, the development of specific doctrines. For the military, of course, doctrine is like the bible: how to do things. We have a long degree of experience of doctrinal development and doctrinal advancements and changes over time, largely, unfortunately, taking place after the fact, after we've entered into a conflict and found that existing doctrine has not worked.