alien:

how operational art devoured

strategy

Justin Kelly
Mike Brennan

September 2009

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ISBN 1-58487-402-3

ii
 CONTENTS

Foreword ..............................................................................v
Summary ............................................................................vii
Preface …………………………………………........……...1
Introduction ………..............……………………...........…5
The Time Before …….............……………………............11
The Expansion of War and the Birth of
Operational Art ...........................................................17
Annihilation …………...………………….............21
Operational Art in Germany ………...………................ 25
The Bureaucratization of War ………….....................5
Theory as Praxis: Freie Operationen ………...............29
Blitzkrieg: Penetration, Encirclement,
Annihilation ............................................................32
Operational Art Gets a Name: Tukhachevskiy
and Deep Attacks ………........................................…40
Soviet Operational Art: Penetration,
Encirclement, Annihilation .................................... 43
The British School: Bloodless War and
“Strategic Paralysis”....................................................49
J. F. C. Fuller and “Strategic Paralysis”............... 51
Liddell-Hart and War on the Mind …….............53
Shimon Naveh and Operational Shock ..............56
FM 100-5 and the Leavenworth Heresy..............59
The Problem of Levels .......................................... 63
Operational Art: The Next Steps .....................................71
A Time After? ..............................................................72
Conclusion: Operational Art Is Not the Whole of
Warfare—Only a Discretionary Part of It ............... 85
Bibliography ……………………...................................... 99
Endnotes …………………...............................…………104
About the Authors ………..................………………… 120

iii
 FOREWORD

The publication of the 1982 version of Army Field

Manual (FM) 100-5, Operations, introduced to the
English-speaking world the idea of an operational level
of war which encompassed the planning and conduct
of campaigns and major operations. It was followed 3
years later by the introduction of the term “operational
art” which was, in practice, the skillful management
of the operational level of war. This conception of
an identifiably separate level of war that defined
the jurisdiction of the profession of arms was, for a
number of historical and cultural reasons, attractive to
U.S. practitioners and plausible to its English-speaking
allies. As a result, it and its associated doctrine spread
rapidly around the world.
This monograph argues that the idea of an
operational level of war charged with the planning and
conduct of campaigns misconceives the relationship
between wars, campaigns, and operations, and is both
historically mistaken and wrong in theory. Brigadier
Justin Kelly (Australian Army Retired) and Dr. Michael
Brennan conclude that its incorporation into U.S.
doctrine has had the regrettable impact of separating
the conduct of campaigns from the conduct of wars
and consequently marginalized the role of politics in
the direction of war. In essence, they argue that the
idea of the campaign has come to overwhelm that of
strategy.
This monograph argues that as warfare continues to
diffuse across definitional and conceptual boundaries
and as the close orchestration of all of the instruments
of national power becomes even more important,
the current conception of campaigns and operations
becomes crippling. To cope with these demands by
formulating and prosecuting “national campaigns,”

v
the authors propose that the responsibility for
campaign design should “actually” return to the
political-strategic leadership of nations supported by
the entirety of the state bureaucracy. This would mark
the return of the campaign to its historical sources. If
the United States and its allies fail to make this change,
they risk continuing to have a “way of battle” rather
than a “way of war.”

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director
Strategic Studies Institute

vi
 SUMMARY

There was a time when the world had no need for op-
erational art, a time when sovereigns led their armies in the
field and where the yoking of war to politics was their per-
sonal undertaking. It was the sovereign who chose wheth-
er or not to fight, where to fight, how long to fight, and it
was they who were constantly balancing opportunities and
threats, risks and returns, costs and benefits. In the era of
“strategies of a single point,” the connections between tac-
tics and statecraft were immediate and intimate. As modern
states emerged, their economic and social organization en-
abled them to deploy and sustain armies of ever increasing
size. Big armies needed more space, and the theater of op-
erations grew along with them. This increasingly removed
the actions of those armies from the direct scrutiny of the
sovereign, and the connection between war and politics be-
came unacceptably stretched.
The idea of the campaign was expanded to redress this
widening gap, and it gained a geographic meaning in ad-
dition to its traditional temporal one. The campaign became
the pursuit of the war’s objectives by an independent
commander acting beyond the immediate scrutiny of
his sovereign. The framework provided by the campaign
objectives, geographic boundaries, resources, and other
guidance provided by the sovereign determined the
freedom of action available to the campaign commander.
Within those freedoms, he was able to sequence battles as he
thought necessary in order to achieve the objectives that had
been provided to him. Most likely a number of tactical action
sequences connected by a unifying idea, i.e., “operations,”
each directed at somehow setting the conditions for the
next step, would be necessary. The cascading hierarchy of
objectives—political, strategic, campaign, operational, and
tactical—reconnected tactical action to the political purposes
of the war.
These thoughts had emerged by the late-19th century
and were further developed and adorned as the experience

vii
of total war grew through World Wars I and II. Although
they had been a part of U.S. doctrine until after World War
I, they disappeared for awhile, and it was not until the 1982
version of U.S. Army Field Manual (FM) 100-5 that these
ideas were reintroduced, although in a different form.
Rather than meeting its original purpose of contributing
to the attainment of campaign objectives laid down by
strategy, operational art—practiced as a “level of war”—
assumed responsibility for campaign planning. This reduced
political leadership to the role of “strategic sponsors,” quite
specifically widening the gap between politics and warfare.
The result has been a well-demonstrated ability to win
battles that have not always contributed to strategic success,
producing “a way of battle rather than a way of war.”
The political leadership of a country cannot simply
set objectives for a war, provide the requisite materiel,
then stand back and await victory. Nor should the nation
or its military be seduced by this prospect. Politicians
should be involved in the minute-to-minute conduct of
war; as Clausewitz reminds us, political considerations are
“influential in the planning of war, of the campaign, and
often even of the battle.” As war continues to diffuse across
definitional and conceptual boundaries and as enemies seek
ways to exploit democracy’s vulnerabilities, closing the gap
between politics and the conduct of war is becoming ever
more important.
It is time we returned what we now call campaign design
to the political and strategic leadership of the country and
returned operational art to its original venue, where it was
overwhelmingly concerned with tactics.

viii
 alien:
how operational art devoured
strategy

Preface

The purpose of such an innovation [operational art]

is unclear . . . in western military science operational
art as a theoretical concept is completely rejected.
. . . The West should not add this concept to its
armory.

Walter Jacobs
Army, November 1961

In most fields of military endeavor, theory has had

only a modest influence on praxis. Faced with real
problems, the militaries of the world generally set
about contriving practical solutions in a more or less
theory-free environment, generating the seeds of new
theory as a by-product. Theory, however, is influential
in the preparation for war; bad theory risks leading us
into poor preparations. Analyses of the consequences
of poor preparation for war line the bookcases of most
of the people reading this monograph.
In recent times many have theorized about the
character of contemporary conflict, introducing rel-
atively new ideas such as systems theory into our
understanding while retaining much of our original
lexicon. In this necessary process, occasionally the
original context is lost or abandoned, sometimes
resulting in confusion, error, and dilution of meaning.
This monograph focuses on one key phrase of the
soldier’s lexicon—operational art. Operational art is
a term whose original context has been lost, and its
meaning has been consequently stretched beyond

1
useful limits. The exercise of operational art has come
to represent the pinnacle of the profession of arms and
the core of its professional jurisdiction. Partially as a
result of this, its relationship with campaign planning
has been clouded, and it has come to compete with
strategy rather than being its humble servant.
The militaries of the world had always used terms
like “operation” and “operational” but they had
multiple meanings and usages. It was only towards
the end of the 19th century that a special meaning of
operation—as a succession of tactical actions sharing
a single unifying idea—was defined and began to pass
generally into doctrine. After the catharsis of World
War I, military theorists in the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR) began to write about “operational
art,” the skillful design and execution of operations, as
a discrete and identifiable subject worthy of intensive
theoretical examination.
Most of the debate surrounding the codification
of operational art took place in languages other than
English. As a result, the debate was largely invisible to
the Anglophone world. This changed dramatically in
1982 with the publication of U.S. Army Field Manual
(FM) 100-5, Operations, which reintroduced English
speakers to the idea that the area between strategy and
tactics might not be entirely vacant. For reasons that are
unclear, the relatively neat Soviet idea of operational
art became, via FM 100-5, the “operational level of
war.” We argue that this transition was a theoretical
solecism creating complications for the application of
operational art, and further that we may not be able
to overcome these complications in the context of
contemporary wars. Wrong-headed theory has been
translated into doctrine and is now hindering rather
than supporting the conduct of war.

2
 As originally proposed by the Soviets, operational
art was confined firmly within a context provided
by a campaign plan arrived at by strategy and was
constrained in its responsibilities to the attainment of
discrete identifiable objectives within that campaign.
In western usage it has come to encompass both
that meaning plus the design, planning, and conduct of
campaigns. One can reasonably argue that “a rose by any
other name is still a rose”—that, for example, campaigns
clearly need to be designed and that if we call this
process “operational art” it does not matter that we are
diverging from the classical usage of the term. But such
an argument ignores the subsequent questions of who
then designs and executes “operations” in the classical
meaning of the word and what is the residual role for
strategic leadership. Arguably, the concern occasionally
aired about the “compression of the operational level
of war” is a symptom of this theoretical confusion
and actually demonstrates strategy reasserting its
traditional and proper role in the face of a faddish
usurper.
With emerging theoretical frameworks like systemic
operational design, effects-based operations, the British
comprehensive approach, and Australia’s adaptive cam-
paigning, we are attempting to take operational art into
new and largely uncharted territory where theorists
and practitioners alike will be asking it to deal with
circumstances encompassing a degree of complexity
that has not hitherto been its lot. Under these concepts
we expect operational artists to align all the instruments
of national power to help resolve a military problem.
As developed here, in the not too distant past this was
the purview of the national leader, executing national
strategy from a position on, or near, the battlefield. If
operational art is now associated with an independent

3
level of war, personified in the presence of an
independent operational commander charged with
the design and execution of campaigns, then we are
asking an individual at the periphery to organize the
center from which the other instruments of national
power receive their direction. This is confused at best.
If readers accept that leadership of the center from the
periphery is problematic, then “we” need to exercise
peer leadership at the center to achieve the level of
national and international coordination that is described
in our doctrine. This is surely beyond the purview
of operational art or of an operational commander.
Campaign design and planning are correctly a product
of strategy and must occur either in national capitals or
at least within the national strategic leadership.
Recent western military exploits in Iraq, Somalia,
Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and East
Timor, all represent, if not strategic failure, at least
failures of strategy. The question we need to ask
ourselves is whether this weakness is endemic or at
least partially a result of our own theoretical failings by
allowing operational art to escape from any reasonable
delimitation and, by so doing, subvert the role of
strategy and hide the need for a strategic art? Also
to the point, how well does our existing theoretical
framework enable us to adapt to the demands of
contemporary conflict? This monograph attempts to
answer such questions.

4
INTRODUCTION

[T]he prime requirement of operational command

is creativity [which] implies the cognitive powers
to deal with the complexities of abstract strategic
aims and the ability to assemble a series of tactical
actions into an abstract outcome”—which in nearly
all situations will be the submission of the enemy.

Shimon Naveh1

Wars are fought to achieve a distribution of political

power that is satisfactory to the victor. Political power
rests on the acquiescence of a population, however
that is attained. Therefore, the fundamental challenge
in war is to assemble a sequence of actions that seems
likely to change the minds of a hostile population. Some
stratagems, tactics, or weapons may be, or become,
inimical to that shift in the popular consensus and be
counterproductive. Some may have mixed impacts—
influencing different parts of the target community in
different ways. Actions to overcome armed resistance
may alienate sectors of the population, while failing
to do so may be a path to defeat. Shifts in the circum-
stances on the ground, in the domestic politics of the
belligerents, or in the wider international community
may validate, invalidate, or alter the strategic objectives
being sought, the campaign plan being pursued, or the
tactics being employed. Although these complexities
are not new, they are becoming increasingly salient in
our contemporary setting.
The aphorism that “strategy proposes but tactics
disposes” is valid. Unless strategy includes a tactical
view, it may seek objectives which are practically
unachievable, or it may miscalculate the costs and
benefits likely to emerge from a conflict. These costs are

5
not limited to the direct economic and social impacts of
war on the belligerents but extend to international public
opinion and international politics. The consequences
of tactical actions can, more than ever, now decide
not just who wins the war but also the shape of the
peace that follows it.2 Equally, tactics needs to serve
strategy, and tactical action without strategic purpose
is merely senseless violence. The strategic direction of
a war needs to be intimately sensitive to the details of
the warfare being conducted so as to ensure both that
it is making realistic demands, and that the military
action remains in keeping with the wider conduct
of the war. Moreover, tactics needs to be constantly
seeking to contribute to the ends laid down by strategy
with economy, efficiency, and nuance, the latter being
shaped by an awareness of the wider conduct of the
war. A two-way conversation between strategy and
tactics is fundamental to the successful prosecution of
any war.
Sound theory attempts to deal with this reality.
The German school of military theorists that emerged
around the end of the 18th century, for example, saw
war as a “giant demonic force, a huge spiritual entity,
surcharged with brutal energy.”3 For those responsible
for the management of this beast, it was clear that to
be understood and properly directed war needed to
be seen in the round. As Herbert Scharnhorst usefully
reminded us, “One must habitually consider the
whole of war before its components.”4 Michael Handel
expands on this proposition, arguing that war needs to
be viewed as a Gestalt, or complex whole comprising
concrete and abstract elements: “[B]ecause of its
infinite complexity and non-linear nature, war can
only be understood as an organic whole, not as a mere
compendium of various separate elements.”5

6
 Today systems theory reinforces this understanding,
reminding us that war should be seen as one cluster
of emergent behaviors of an enormously complex
system and as one that will develop its own emergent
behaviors according to its initial conditions and
infinitely small changes in its environment, truly
“more than a chameleon.” Systems theory also informs
us that attempts to establish absolute control over such
a complex adaptive system are futile, and the best that
can be hoped for is to damp undesirable behaviors and
reinforce desirable ones to sustain the system in an
equilibrium that, if not ideal, is at least recognizable.
In a recent article in Military Review, Huba Wass de
Czega described the difficulty of attempting to realize
some idealized condition within the dynamism of real
wars. He compares the existing doctrinal approach
of setting an objective and “going for it,” with “the
foundational discourses of the Confucian and Taoist
east [which] do not frame life experience in terms of
idealized ends or ‘visions’.” Chinese sages thought
it impossible to know what an idealized end could
be. They did not trust the mind to have a mirror-
like correspondence to external reality. Instead they
thought that distinguishing “better” from “worse” was
the best one could do. Life experience, in their eastern
perspective, was a perpetual and ever changing flow of
events. Intellectual energy, in flowing with the way of
the world, should ideally focus on understanding the
forces, tendencies, and propensities of the contextual
situation. In their understanding, one harmonizes
with existence by enhancing the forces tending to flow
toward “better,” while subtly diverting and blocking
those tending toward “worse.”6
To cope with this fundamental dynamism and at
the risk of oversimplification, the art of war can be

7
characterized as a continuous conversation between
strategic ends, i.e., that which is to be achieved; and
tactical means, i.e., that which is to be done. Strategic
propositions are invariably abstract, and tactical
actions are necessarily concrete. The array of feasible
tactical actions can be combined in any number of
ways to create conditions that appear to be conducive
to the original strategic proposition. The management
of this conversation among ends, ways, and means is
the art of war. It is an art because there is nothing fixed
in the connections between them. The results of tactical
action might not have the strategic consequences
that were being sought; because the conversation
is not conducted in isolation and the enemy gets a
vote, forced changes may occur.7 Therefore, as a war
progresses, the strategic ends of the belligerents will
usually evolve steadily. In the constant search for
fleeting asymmetrical advantage, the tactical means
chosen will undergo continuous and sometimes radical
change. If the ends and the means change, the ways
necessarily will need to change as well.
This dynamism has two consequences for theory.
First, war needs to be managed as a whole—with the
two-way conversation between strategy and tactics
also being a continuous one. Second, any attempts
to gain understanding by breaking a system into its
constituent parts, in this case strategy-operations-
tactics, isolate in theory what are united in praxis. As a
result, such analysis generates theory that is practically
and literally meaningless. The English-speaking world
has grown to have a linear view of war, with ends,
ways, and means arranged hierarchically and linked
to discrete levels of command. At least implicitly,
most of the conversation is one-way traffic: strategy
directs and tactics obeys. This is war on Henry Ford’s

8
assembly line with Frederick Taylor measuring
progress. It demeans the importance of the continuous
and intimate two-way conversation that is essential for
success. A more satisfactory perspective would notice
that these are nested. These two contending views are
shown diagrammatically at Figure 1. In practice—but
not in our current theory—tactics and operational art
are a part of—and not subordinate to—strategy.

Figure 1. Two Contending Views of the Ends-Ways-

Means Relationship.

This is more than a semantic difference. By taking a

hierarchical view and linking discrete responsibilities
to specific levels of command, we risk degrading
the intimacy of the conversation among ends, ways,
and means, making it easier for strategy to make
unreasonable demands; for example, in Iraq in 2003-

9
06, with ways overtaking ends; or in 1950, MacArthur’s
precipitate pursuit to the Yalu, with tactics to taking
on a life of its own. The reason the strategic corporal
is strategic is that his world—tactics—is, and always
has been, organic to strategy. This idea of the unity of
war is especially important as we try to understand
operational art. If we want to drag it into the sunlight
to examine it in detail, we necessarily have to drag its
strategic and tactical contexts with it.
We shall attempt to trace the evolution of operat-
ional art from its inception in the industrial revolution
to its present form. We begin by examining Prussian
practice in the mid-19th century and tracking the
emergence and application of operational theory into
and through the shared European experiences of World
War I. After that war, the need to identify theoretical
responses to the challenges it presented stimulated
an explosion of new thinking in Germany, Russia,
and Great Britain. The resultant differing responses
to a shared problem are compared and contrasted.
The emergence of operational art in the Anglophone
world, specifically with the release of FM 100-5 in
1982, is then examined. Rather than simply translating
existing theory and applying it in a new context, FM
100-5 created, we shall argue, a new and wrong theory,
confusing operational art with strategy. We conclude
with an examination of the impact of this confusion,
the so-called Leavenworth Heresy, on approaches to
contemporary conflict.
Our aim in this monograph is to explain what
operational art originally meant and why it is time we
returned this beast it to its enclosure.

10
The Time before

As a rule, destroying the enemy’s forces tends to be

a gradual process.

Clausewitz

The need for “operations” was a product of

changes brought about by the the Napoleonic concept
of the nation in arms and the impact of the industrial
revolution. The nation in arms provided huge armies,
while the Industrial Revolution provided the means to
equip, deploy, command, and sustain them. Whereas
in the wars of the 18th century armies in the field
seldom exceeded 150,000 troops, Napoleon invaded
Russia in 1812 with 600,000 men, while the Prussians
invaded France in 1870 with 1,200,000. As a result of
such increases, the size of the battlefield grew from
a few kilometers wide in Frederick’s time to several
hundred kilometers in France in 1871.
The use of seemingly inexhaustible mass armies
supported by the full economic power of increasingly
well-organized states escalated warfare, at least in
Europe, from limited wars of dynastic maneuvering
to unlimited and stupendously violent wars seeking
the complete subjugation of the enemy. This raised the
stakes of war for the belligerents at the same time that
the increased scope and dispersion of action reduced
the ability to maintain tight control. Therefore, whereas
it remained a common practice for European monarchs
to accompany their armies into the field until well
into the 19th century, the sovereign’s presence no
longer ensured that the means committed to tactical
engagements remained yoked to strategic objectives.8
As a result of these influences, the conversation

11
between politics, strategy, and tactical action achieved
a new importance for soldiers, as increasingly they
would be the ones trying to make these connections.
The need to examine this experience was the animating
impulse for Carl von Clausewitz and Henri Jomini, who
became the progenitors of the larger part of modern
military theory. Despite some differences, both of these
theorists considered the task of connecting battles as
“strategy,” to be used in the context of deciding where
and when to fight to realize the purposes of a war.
There is a tendency for us today to try to herd
Clausewitz and Jomini out of their corral and into
our own. In this vein, it is not uncommon for those
today to think that their failure to recognize the role
of “operations” was simply the result of the absence
of an appropriate term. To mend this “deficiency,” we
substitute “operations” for their use of “strategy.” To
do so is wrong. The reason these two great theorists
did not suggest the existence of an intervening
layer between strategy and tactics is that in their
(Napoleonic) context, the need for such a layer did not
exist. Kings and emperors, along with some trusted
advisers, still customarily went to war and directed its
conduct in pursuit of an acceptable outcome. Strategy
directed tactics with great immediacy and intimacy.
The decision as to whether to fight or not, where to
fight, how to fight, and how long to fight, as well as
what risks were acceptable and what costs bearable,
were made “on the spot” by the head of state. There
was no need or role for operations or operational art,
and so neither Clausewitz nor Jomini proposed such a
construct.
It has been suggested that Jomini introduced the
term “Grand Tactics” to encapsulate what we now
call operations. However, a careful reading indicates
that grand tactics—“the art of posting troops upon

12
the battlefield according to the characteristics of the
ground”—was tactics pure and simple.9 To strengthen
this understanding, Jomini contrasts the “tactical
combinations” of grand tactics with the more potent
“strategic combinations” that threaten to make a
general the “master of his enemy’s communications
while at the same time holding his own.”10 He thus
describes strategy as the “art of making war on
the map [which] comprehends the whole theatre
of operations,”11 whereas statesmanship decides
“whether a war is proper, opportune, or indispensable
and determines the various operations necessary
to attain the object of the war,”12 and military policy
deals with “the political considerations relating to the
operations of armies.”13 Jomini’s view is thus complete
and remains reasonable even today, describing, as it
does, the sweep from operations and tactics to military
strategy through national strategy. However, despite
the creation of the bridging idea of “grand tactics,”
the extent of the overlap between each of the areas
he defines prevents him from clearly articulating the
connections between them. As a result, he ends up
describing what a thing is but not how it works, and
his utility to us is thus correspondingly modest.
In contrast, Clausewitz held a clear view that
war was a Gestalt that could be understood only in
terms of its political direction.14 He described war
as an extension of politics that were themselves the
product of the interplay of rational, nonrational, and
irrational influences mutually interacting in “the
remarkable trinity.” Therefore, political direction was
not equated to rational policy but to rational policy
shaped, circumscribed, and subverted by the irrational
and nonrational forces inherent in the base polity.15
At the same time, the realities of combat—chance,

13
uncertainty, and friction—and the independent will of
the enemy made warfare as dynamic and unpredictable
as its political direction. Clausewitz understood the
dynamism of war—why it was “more than a true
chameleon” which only changes its skin color. In
today’s terminology, Clausewitz saw war as a complex
system constantly threatening to escape human control,
to lose coherence and slide into chaos. This recognition
led him to postulate a theory of war based on how war
might be prevented from losing its coherence, and he
posited a systems view in which it was made coherent
only by its political aim. To Clausewitz, keeping actions
aligned behind the political aim was both the greatest
challenge in warfare and the essence of good practice.
Clausewitz therefore argued that in war every
action needed to contribute to the attainment of
the political aim: “tactics teaches the use of the
armed forces in the engagement. Strategy, the use of
engagements for the object of the war.”16 Clausewitz’s
elegant explanation avoids the reductionism of Jomini,
while providing incisive clarity as to the need to
connect tactics (engagements or battles) directly to
the attainment of the political objective of the war. As
usual, Clausewitz is able to explain to us not just what
something is, but how it works in practice.
Although Clauswitz separates the two ideas of
“strategy” and “tactics” for didactic clarity, there
is a strong caveat against considering them in
isolation. Strategy proposes, but tactics disposes, or,
in Clausewitz’s terms, “all strategic planning rests
on tactical success alone.” As a result, although it is
tempting to conduct discrete analyses of strategy and
tactics, to do so is wrong. The ideas of strategy and
tactics are fused, as are the ideas of “strategy” and
“political aim.” The dynamism of each influence on a

14
war, from politics to minor tactics, together with the
infinitely changeable connections between each them,
means that war cannot be analyzed by dissection—it
can only be understood as a complex and dynamic
whole. War does not lend itself to analysis by levels.
Despite his clarity and utility, Clausewitz would
probably be unknown to the English speaking world
today had it not been for Helmuth von Moltke. The
Austro-Prussian (1866) and the Franco-Prussian
(1870-71) wars both concluded with the complete
overthrow of seemingly more powerful enemies by the
Prussians. With some justification, the responsibility
for this success was ascribed to the military acumen
of Prussian Chief of the General Staff von Moltke. As
a result, his views on the nature and conduct of war,
which he acknowledged rested heavily on his reading
of Clausewitz, became of interest to the broad military
community. Clausewitz thus came to the attention of
the Anglophone world.17
The 1866 war was decided at the Battle of
Königgrätz. In the approach to this battle, Moltke
“flouted traditional theories about the advantages
of operations on interior lines and demonstrated the
manner in which space and movement could be used to
encircle and destroy an army guided by conventional
operational views.”18 Specifically, Königgrätz showed
that “in an age in which industrial progress was making
it possible to arm and transport armies which dwarfed
those of antiquity, wars would be won by those
nations which could raise, train, deploy, and command
large armies most effectively” and that “wars of the
future were going to be won . . . by operational plans
which took account of such things as time, space, the
increased size of modern armies, the available means
of transportation, and the increased effectiveness of

15
modern weaponry.” In a particular situation, Moltke
had given an impressive demonstration of how
these factors must be related in an operational plan,
dividing his army to assure the greatest possible speed
in deployment, and “concentrating it not before, but
during the battle, when concentration would have
maximum effect.”19
A number of aspects of the war of 1866 provided
exemplars that would shape one arguably false view
of operational art into the 21st century.20 The
mobilization and deployment of mass armies
demanded time, space, and enormously detailed staff
work. The process of calling-out corps and divisions,
concentrating and victualling them, and directing them
to the chosen theater of operations consumed time and
road and rail space, all of which were in critically short
supply. Moving the entire army as a concentrated mass
would have created an unbearable burden on the road
and rail infrastructure of 1860s Europe. Prussian staff
organization—which was to become the exemplar
for the rest of the world—dealt with these connected
challenges by linking the call-out of troops with the
availability of road and rail space to enable a dispersed
approach march to the area in which the enemy was
to be brought to battle. In essence, this meant that the
means available for the decisive battle was directly and
quite rigidly connected with the processes of national
mobilization.
Moltke’s plans in 1866 therefore dealt with
connecting strategic decisions with a decisive battle
through a bureaucratized process of mobilization and
movement to set the stage for tactical action—what
was called in German the “Aufsmarsch.” This is not
operational art. The War of 1866 was an old-fashioned
war in which the campaign and the decisive battle

16
essentially formed a singularity. The design of the
campaign was overwhelmingly strategic, set out to
create both the opportunity for a single decisive battle
and the concentration of sufficient troops to provide a
reasonable prospect of victory. In this context, the art
of designing campaigns that align the instruments of
national power to achieve strategic objectives clearly
lies within the purview of strategy.
The War of 1866 did not exemplify operational art
because there was no need for it. The Prussian King,
Chancellor, and Chief of the General Staff deployed as
a single Headquarters, providing robust connections
between strategic objectives and the specific tactical
actions taken. Although the Prussian army began its
movement from dispersed locations, it aimed towards a
single point which facilitated this intimate relationship.
The birth of operational art itelf would need to await
the events of 1870.21

THE EXPANSION OF WAR AND The Birth

of Operational art

Although they are closely connected in time and

necessarily share a number of similarities, between
the wars of 1866 and 1870 there occurred a watershed
in the evolution of operational art. Isserson describes
a typical Napoleonic campaign as “a great, long
approach, which engendered a long operational line,
and a short final engagement in a single area, which,
with respect to the long operational line is a single point
in space and a single moment in time.”20 This echoes
Clausewitz’ interpretation of Napoleonic warfare:
“The field of battle in the face of strategy is no more
than a point; in precisely the same way the duration of
battle reduces to a single moment in time.” As a result,
Isserson describes Napoleonic war as the era of single

17
point strategy since “the entire mission of a military
leader was reduced to concentrating all his forces at
one point and throwing them into battle as a one act
tactical phenomenon.”22
In this sense, the war of 1866 demonstrated the
strategy of a single point—Königgrätz—but, by 1870,
the larger armies and more expansive theater of
operations meant that this was no longer appropriate.
In 1870-71 there were many battles that influenced each
other and which extended through time and across
space. War had outgrown the strategy of a single
point. Whereas in 1866 all the Prussian armies moved
towards Königgrätz, in 1870 the Germans’ frontage was
100 km in their assembly areas, immediately increasing
to 150 km as the force advanced. The defeat of France
required four discrete combat links: Spichern-Werth,
Metz, Sedan, and Paris, each of which represented a
cluster of lesser battles of varying scale. This meant
that battle, instead of occurring in a single place with
the mass of the forces of both sides engaged, became
distributed into a number of subordinate battles across
a sometimes expanding front.23 As a result, “Moltke was
faced with a completely new problem of coordinating
and directing combat efforts, tactically dissociated
and dispersed in space to achieve the overall aim of
defeating the enemy.”24
As a consequence of this realization, towards the
end of the 19th century German military thinkers
were aware “that the battlefield had grown larger
and deadlier.” Battles and engagements had lost
their distinctiveness and would blend into an all-
encompassing “Gesamtschlacht” [overall battle] that
might extend across the entire width and depth of the
theater of war.25 Of course, without some unification,
the Gesamtschlacht would threaten to dissolve into an

18
uncoordinated brawl. A framework to direct it was
required. By 1895 at the latest, one had emerged, here
described by Baron Colmar Von der Goltz:

In the course of military events there will always be

separate groups of affairs springing into prominence, the
parts of which are more intimately connected with each
other than the preceding or subsequent occurrences.
Military activity then tends with livelier interest towards
a special object and leaves all others to one side, or
subordinates them, until the former is attained. After
that, a certain abatement, or perhaps a brief pause for
recuperation, may be observed until a more rapid course
of action is again adopted, and, in a manner, a new idea,
a second objective, becomes visible.

Every such group of actions will be composed of

marches, the assumption of positions, and combats, and
is called an “operation.” . . . That the different groups
of occurrences . . . must be connected by the bond
of a common leading thought, and not arbitrarily or
accidentally strung together, is a matter of course, and
does not remove the distinction.

Again, among certain operations a more intimate

relationship will generally be brought about by the fact
that they are conducted under similar circumstance, at
the same time of year, against the same hostile army and
are separated from the rest of the operations through
conditions of time or space, change of opponents or
alteration in the method of conducting the war. Such an
association of operations is called a “campaign,” which
forms a definite portion of the war.26

Therefore, at least in Germany by the end of the

19th century, there was an understanding that the
evolution of warfare; the increasing size of armies;
and improvements in firepower, communications,
logistics, and the consequent expansion of theaters
of operations, had created new conditions. These

19
new conditions had led to the need to group tactical
actions into “operations” and to group “operations”
into “campaigns.” As a result, strategy was faced with
problems of a complexity new to it. Rather than war
planning involving the design of a single campaign
focused on creating the opportunity for a single
decisive battle, it now possibly involved a need to plan
several campaigns, each of which was itself a cluster
of discrete and largely foreseen operations intended to
achieve intermediate objectives combining to form the
objective of the campaign as a whole. The summation
of the objectives of each of the campaigns, in turn,
represented the objectives of the war.
Between 1871 and World War I, war continued to
expand as enlarged logistics capabilities increased the
ability to assemble, distribute, and sustain masses of
troops. In Europe in particular, strategic circumstances
created imperatives to link the decision for war, national
mobilization, and the national economy directly with
the conduct of war. As a result, campaign plans were
connected very directly with the highest strategic
decisions and were a product of strategic planning
which laid down a scheme of maneuver and allocated
resources, objectives, timings, and axes of advance to
each of them.
At the same time, the need to coordinate multiple
blows distributed across time and space but supporting
a single unifying idea broadened the understanding
of the campaign (adding a geographic meaning to
its previous temporal one) and created the special
meaning of “operation” that we retain today. Within
the campaign, clusters of tactical actions grouped
in time or location and pursuing their own unifying
idea—but one subordinate to that of the campaign—
formed individual operations. The arrangement of
these tactical actions and the retention of their focus

20
on the campaign intent formed the entirety of the new,
and as yet nameless, kid on the block—operational
art. Whereas in 1866, the congruence of the war,
the campaign, and the Battle of Königgrätz made
operational art unnecessary, by 1870-71 it had become
essential. It took until the end of the 19th century for
this experience to be translated into theory and the
test of World War I to prompt the initial theories to be
revised and matured.

Annihilation.

Victory through battle is the most important moment in

war. Victory alone will break the will of the enemy and
will subordinate his will to ours. Neither the capture of
terrain, fortress, nor severance of lines of communication
will achieve this objective. To achieve decision, breaking
the will of the enemy through the destruction of his
forces, that is the operational objective. This operational
aim will then serve the needs of strategy. 27

Moltke

Since he is commonly seen as one of the principal

authors of modern operational art, it is important to
note here the narrowness of one aspect of Moltke’s
conception. To him, the sole purpose of military action
was to overthrow the enemy’s means of resistance,
that is, to destroy the enemy’s army. Once disarmed,
the enemy was by definition helpless, and the victor
could dictate the terms for the subsequent peace. In
this understanding, Moltke stood in line of succession
connecting Napoleon with Clausewitz and Jomini,
and through them with Alfred Graf von Schlieffen
and 20th-century German and Russian theory. This
idea of annihilation (in German Vernichtungsgedanke)
and how it might be best achieved provide the thread

21
unifying the subsequent development of Continental
military thought. The cognitive processes of identifying
where, when, and how the annihilating battles might
be triggered, together with the management of risk
in the context of time and space, of the belligerents’
intentions and logistic capacities, and of the theater’s
logistical parameters, formed the basis of the art. Still,
the underlying idea remained remarkably simple: to
find, fix, and destroy the enemy army in the largest
and most decisive battle that could be assembled.
Moltke saw that strategy bridged the gap from
politics to tactics, i.e., that politics could not “be
separated from strategy, for politics uses war to attain
its objectives and has a decisive influence on a war’s
beginning and end. Politics does this in such a manner
that it reserves to itself the right to increase its demands
during the course of the war or to satisfy itself with
minor successes.”28 He also saw that strategy dealt with
establishing the setting for successful tactical action:
“The first task of strategy is . . . the first deployment
of the army. Here multifarious political, geographic,
and national considerations come into question. . . .
But these arrangements . . . must unfailingly lead to
the intended result,” which was “afford[ing] tactics the
means for fighting and the probability of winning by
the direction of armies and their meeting at the place
of combat,”29 with “the objective [being] . . . the hostile
army insofar as it defends the object of the war.”30
This last stipulation—“insofar as it defends the
object of the war”—requires a little enlargement.
Clausewitz enumerated the three main goals of every
war:31
1. “To defeat the enemy armed force and destroy it.
That means to direct the main effort first and always
against the opponent’s main army;

22
 2. To take possession of the enemy’s nonmilitary
resources, i.e., occupation of the country or at least
[take] action against the capital and other important
strong points [at least partially because the enemy army
was most likely to be found in front of such important
assets]; and,
3. To win over public opinion [that is, to convince
the population of the enemy state that they were
defeated]. This goal may be achieved by great victories
or possession of the capital.”32

Despite this positive articulation in On War, he

acknowledges that “the aim of disarming the enemy
. . . is in fact not always encountered in reality, and
need not be achieved as a condition of peace. On no
account should theory raise it to the level of a law
[for] . . . a variety of means are available to subdue the
opponent’s will.”33 Clausewitz links this caution to the
idea of the means and ends of a particular war. If the
ends are effectively unlimited, the total subjugation
of a country for example, then the enemy’s willpower
will need to be totally disarmed, and this is likely to
require that the three steps above be completed. In
more limited wars, for example, where the object is
to seize a province as a basis for negotiation, such an
absolutist approach would be inappropriate.
In both the 1866 and 1870-71 wars, the object was
the subjugation of the enemy state, and hence Moltke
closely followed the Clausewitzian prescription.
He moved on the enemy’s capital (in 1866) and the
enemy’s fortresses (in 1871), thereby drawing the
enemy armies into large battles which were won by
Prussian tactical superiority (marginal in 1866 and
marked in 1871), thereby placing the enemy capital
at his mercy. Moltke, therefore, was pursuing a battle

23
of annihilation (Vernichtungschlacht) because one was
called for by theory.
Walter Goerlitz recounts a fascinating dialogue
between Moltke and Frederick William, the Crown
prince of Prussia, which highlights Moltke’s focus on
the French Army in the 1870 war:

The Crown prince asked what would happen after Paris

had been taken?

Moltke: Then we shall push forward into the south of

France in order to finally break the enemy’s power.

Crown Prince: But what will happen when our own

strength is exhausted—when we can no longer win
battles?

Moltke. We must always win battles. We must throw

France completely to the ground.

Crown Prince: And what then?

Moltke: Then we can dictate the kind of peace we want.

Crown Prince: And if we ourselves bleed to death in the

process?

Moltke: We shall not bleed to death and, if we do, we

shall have got peace in return.

The Crown Prince then asked whether Moltke was

informed about the current political situation, which
might perhaps make such a course seem unwise. Moltke
replied: “No, I have only to concern myself with military
matters.”34

In Moltke’s mind, therefore, the design of a war,

and its subordinate campaigns, was focused principally
and overwhelmingly on the destruction of the enemy’s
army. Although, in 1870-71, he was seeking to destroy

24
the French powers of resistance so as to enable the
Prussians to dictate the kind of peace they wanted, he
saw that his role was limited to setting the conditions
for successful battle. Of course, in 1870-71, Moltke’s
headquarters was also the royal headquarters—
which he shared with both his king and the Prussian
Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck—both of whom acted
vigorously and continuously to keep the conduct of
the war aligned with its evolving political objectives.
As the battlefield expanded and the ability of stra-
tegy to exercise sufficient control to reliably assemble
the instruments of “the” decisive battle declined, the
role of operational art arose, though this entity was not
yet christened with a formal name. Subordinate to a
campaign aimed at annihilating the enemy, operational
art was itself focused on its contribution to annihilation
through the creation of opportunities for tactical battle
under advantageous conditions. Because of this tactical
focus, operational art evolved to create conditions for
tactical actions that promised to impose the greatest
possible attrition on the enemy. With the exception of
the British School (of which more later), this focus on
wholesale attrition unifies the subsequent evolution of
operational theory.

Operational art in germany

The Bureaucratization of War.

In the lead-up to World War I, then, there was

recognition that there was need to yoke geographically
and temporally separate combat efforts to some unified
scheme of maneuver, that battles remained the only
decisive instrument in warfare, and that a succession
of blows was necessary to defeat mass armies fielded
by modern states.35

25
 At the same time, by 1905 armies 20 times the size
of those that had fought in 1870 confronted each other
in central Europe. Each minute a brigade of 3,000
men with its artillery could discharge a volume of
fire equal to that of the whole of Wellington’s army of
60,000 soldiers firing volley and salvo at Waterloo.36
Schlieffen, Chief of the German General Staff from
1891, noted that the problem was not how to kill with
these deadly instruments, but how to defend against
them.37 It is difficult from the perspective of the 21st
century to fully imagine how it was that armies of
such a size, with their hunger for supplies of all
sorts, could be maneuvered and sustained, given the
transport infrastructure of central Europe in the late-
19th century. Roads remained largely unsealed and
designed to meet only the needs of the local economy,
while railroads, although expanding rapidly, were
still of limited capacity, unevenly distributed, and, at
least initially, aimed at meeting economic needs rather
than military ones. Other than rail locomotives, motive
power was provided by draught animals or human
toilers. In this infrastructural context, Central European
powers needed to deploy armies of four to six million
men, plus possibly more than a million horses, and
then maneuver and sustain them in battle.
As a result, the importance of railroads for the
deployment, maneuver, and support of armies, which
had begun to emerge as a factor in 1870, came to dominate
military planning in the lead-up to World War I since
any network decisions taken in one place necessarily
impacted on the remainder. If a network is working
at its maximum capacity, its flexibility is necessarily
constrained. As a result, the reliance by the Central
Powers on railways meant that strategy, mobilization,
and deployment of armies became connected in a way

26
that was much more direct and rigid than had been
the general experience. World War I was accordingly
the most comprehensively planned in history, “not
only thought, written, and talked about in general, but
specifically laid out on paper in complex timetables,
mobilization charts, and plans for men, weapons, and
supplies. These plans were then practiced through war
games, staff rides, and large-scale maneuvers before
the war itself was declared.”38 This preplanning lasted
not for days, weeks, or months, but for decades. In
this context, the role of operational art was necessarily
constrained by the framework of the campaign plan
which was itself inextricably enmeshed in, and the
product of, the processes of mobilization and strategic
deployment.
The reliance on railways had another important
impact. The bureaucratization of war had been
driven by the progressive expansion of armies. That
bureaucratization now expanded from the relatively
narrow confines of the military staff and increasingly
encompassed the agencies responsible for management
of railways and telegraphs. Probably for the first time,
interagency coordination became fundamental to the
prosecution of war. While we see this now as “new” in
the contemporary context, it has been an instrument of
wars of national survival for at least a century.
For Germany, the challenge presented by this
moment in the evolution of warfare received extra
spice because, since the departure of Bismarck in 1890,
German diplomacy had antagonized her neighbors
and alarmed other more remote onlookers to such an
extent that the country was now encircled by hostile
alliances. German planning was therefore predicated
on the inevitability of a war on two fronts, on each of
which it would face an enemy of comparable power.

27
 France had a modern railway system with major
lines radiating from Paris. The Russian system was
poor, very patchy, and incomplete. The German system
reflected the federal nature of the new German State
but was a little advanced over that of its competitors
and had been somewhat influenced by military needs
from its inception. In 1893 the German General Staff
had assumed a measure of control over the building
of track and the purchasing of equipment.39 It was
anticipated that, due to its better railway system,
France would mobilize faster than the Russians, that
France would begin an offensive as mobilization made
troops available, and that this offensive would be in
the “center,” i.e., in Alsace and Lorraine. Consequently,
German war planning anticipated a rapid war of
annihilation against the French involving a holding
action in the center while riposting with a massive
envelopment around their western flank intended to
effectively encircle the entirety of the French army.
Once France was destroyed, forces would be rapidly
switched to the Eastern Front to defeat the Russians.
The German war plan, of which the “Schlieffen
Plan” was a part, connected the strategic, political, and
economic circumstances of Germany with the conduct
of a continent-wide war conducted in a number of
noncontiguous theaters. It was produced and managed
by supreme headquarters and clearly transcended
classification as “operational” or as “a succession of
tactical actions sharing some unifying idea within a
portion of campaign.” As such, the plan exemplified an
activity which occurs definitionally and functionally at
a higher level. In fact, it exemplifies strategy as expres-
sed in the form of a number of campaign plans. The
required coordination between German government
agencies—diplomatic, telegraphic, and transport,
the decision to breach Belgian neutrality, and the

28
coordination of complementary but discrete opera-
tions by different armies, each answering to supreme
headquarters, is clearly at a higher level than
“operational.” The part of the strategic war plan that
dealt with the Western Front framed the campaigns
there by describing the operations that were to be
undertaken and allocating resources, objectives, and
milestones down to army level within each. Within
each of these operations, in the absence of an army
group level of command, each of the army commanders
sequenced his tactical actions to meet the demands of the
war plan. Operational art, although not yet recognized
by name, looked to achieve by tactical action what had
been proposed by strategy. It was 100 percent tactically
focused because it was undertaken within a campaign
context that had been entirely provided by strategy.

Theory as Praxis: Freie Operationen.

Apart from their interest in Clausewitz, admittedly

an important exception, the Germans have not been
active military theoreticians. Their predilection to
view war as an organic whole constantly undergoing
fundamental and comprehensive change, usually
for the worse, rested on a Weltanschauung heavily
influenced by romanticism, with a consequent lack of
desire to entomb the theory of war in an enlightenment
framework of definition, disaggregation, and analysis.
This is why Clausewitz, for example, concentrates on
the dynamics causing change rather than on producing
a taxonomy of all its manifestations. Moltke, with his
dictum that strategy was a system of expedients, was
not making excuses for a failure to plan, but rather was
accepting the infinite variety of circumstances that may
eventually have to be accommodated. The German

29
approach to warfare was therefore based on careful
preparation of the individual with the understanding
that, faced with situations of great novelty and fearsome
prospect, only the man on the spot could hope to take
actions that were actually appropriate. This is the
origin of auftragstaktik, which the Anglophone world
has taken up as “Mission Command” or “Directive
Control” and which is aimed at creating sufficient
scope for commanders at all levels to take actions based
on their understanding of how their guiding purpose
may be attained in the face of existing circumstances.
The term “freie operationen” or “free operations”
entered German doctrine in 1996 to extend the concept
of auftragstaktik into general application. According
to Dieter Brand, it was a traditional idea which had
been the antecedent and conceptual underpinning
to auftragstaktik but which had previously existed
only in practice and not in doctrine.40 Its roots are
easily seen in Frederick the Great’s famous saying
qualifying the need to obey orders absolutely and
in Moltke’s various aphorisms concerning the need
to adapt to local conditions. Freie operationen were
intended to enable creativity and flexible adaptation
to local circumstances while retaining a focus on the
outcome being sought. To sustain coherence in the face
of complex and dynamic events, the Germans aimed
not to control the individual actions of its soldiers,
but to prepare them so that their commanders could
confidently expect them to take the “right” actions. To
this end, the German General Staff, with its rigorous
procedures for officer selection and education and
its system of staff rides, wargames, map exercises,
and large-scale exercises with troops, has historically
sought to provide commonality of approach and a
measure of consistency to decisionmaking. Assigning
general staff officers as chiefs of staff for commanders

30
selected for their qualities of leadership, energy, and
aggressiveness was intended to provide the capacity for
freie operationen while keeping them firmly harnessed
to the higher purpose—the annihilation of the enemy.
The exercise of freie operationen is well demonstrated
by General Alexander von Kluck, commander of the
most westerly German Army in the early stages of
World War I. Although he had been a keen adherent
of the need for the widest possible envelopment of
the French Army, as the campaign in Belgium and
northern France developed he came to the conclusion
that, rather than continuing with the plan and moving
to the west and south of Paris, the best opportunity
to meet the guiding purpose—the annihilation of
the French Army—required that he shorten his arc
to sweep to the north and east of Paris. This was the
“correct” solution given the circumstances as von
Kluck saw them, and it was within his authority to
make these adjustments. Although he didn’t know it,
von Kluck was demonstrating operational art. Faced
with his initiative, supreme headquarters then, of
course, had the role of either redirecting von Kluck
or making the necessary adjustments to the rest of the
theater. It chose the latter.41 The determination of the
Germans to provide scope for creativity and innovation
is exemplified by the idea of freie operationen, is innate
to their approach to warfare, and explains the relative
(to the Russians, for example) scantiness of their
operational doctrine or theory. To understand German
operational art requires that one examine praxis rather
than theory.
It is not necessary here to chart the entire course
of World War I, but it presented in stark relief the
twin-headed problem with which theory would
henceforth have to deal. That is, on one hand nation-

31
states were demonstrably not easily defeated in single
decisive battles or even operations, while on the other
hand, because of their power and organization, they
were liable to field armies of size sufficient to enable
the establishment of a defensive line with practically
unassailable flanks—leading to the type of stabilized
front seen in France and Belgium from 1914. This
situation was the principal influence on the evolution
of operational art in Germany between the wars.

Blitzkrieg: Penetration, Encirclement, Annihilation.

Germany’s fundamental strategic problem of

managing a potential two-front war had not changed.
This meant that a rapid victory on at least one of those
fronts was necessary for national survival. Therefore,
short and violent wars aimed at the annihilation of at
least one of the enemy armies continued to be seen as
necessary. This was not new—at least since Moltke, the
“annihilation principle” (Vernichtungsprinzip) had been
the bedrock of German warfighting thought aditional
view was that annihilation of an enemy required
wide envelopment. This meant that the basic forms of
maneuver seen early in World War I—frontal pressure
paired with envelopment to enable the encirclement
and destruction of an enemy—remained central to
German thinking:

Victory was seen to lie in strategic surprise, in the

concentration of force at the decisive point, and in fast,
far-reaching concentric encircling movements, all of
which aimed at creating the decisive Kesselschlachten
(cauldron battles) to surround, kill, and capture the
opposing army in as short a time as possible.42

32
The objective of envelopment was not the flanks of the
enemy but his line of retreat, the thinking being that this
would force the enemy to fight with severed lines of
communication and with a reversed front, leading most
probably to disintegration and collapse. These aspects
represented enduring themes in the German approach
to warfare since Frederick the Great. As Matthew
Cooper points out, “Double envelopment became their
theme, vernichtungsgedanke their watchword.”43
The realization of these traditional approaches in the
face of a rapidly evolving technological environment
had been the principal problem presented by World
War I. To restore opportunities for envelopment and
annihilation, tactical innovation was needed if the
stabilized front was to be penetrated. The tactical
failures of the war had begun to be remedied by its
conclusion, and storm troop tactics had demonstrated
that penetration of a fully-developed defensive
zone was possible if small agile groups could be
provided with sufficient striking power. The problem
demonstrated during the Saint-Mihiel Offensive (April-
September 1918), however, was that these groups
lacked the endurance and mobility to turn their local
tactical success into something more significant. Here
the German experience countering Allied tanks was
instructive. Tanks seemingly offered the ability to take
the fundamentals of storm troop tactics and sustain
them through the depth of the defended zone and into
the undefended territory beyond. At the same time,
the problems of sustaining artillery support beyond
the initial range of the guns was to be countered by the
use of aircraft in close support of the attacking forces.
To maintain the speed of penetration necessary to
offset the movement of defending forces to the point of
penetration, the offensive would flow around centers

33
of resistance, relying on follow-on forces to consolidate
and sustain the gap created.
The Germans in the interwar years did not, as far
as can be determined, recognize the term “operational
art.” The independence that commanders enjoyed
under freie operationen to sequence tactical actions in
pursuit of higher-level objectives meant that the role
that we currently ascribe to operational art existed in
the broad fabric of the German understanding of war
and consequently in their preparation of leaders and
training of staffs. World War II German operational art
was therefore seen in praxis rather than in doctrine.
Advanced combined arms tactics applied by aggressive
leaders sometimes exercising considerable personal
initiative to create and develop deep penetrations,
followed by wide envelopments to encircle, isolate,
and destroy large enemy groupings, was the German
way of war. It was shared by the German military in
a sufficiently broad sense apparently that it did not
warrant comprehensive theoretical examination. The
contribution of German theorists following World
War I was therefore not in operational art, but in the
development of an approach to combined arms tactics
that was startlingly effective and which closely fitted
the requirements of the German way of war. The
employment of these combined arms tactics to execute
annihilating cauldron battles came to be known in
the Anglophone world as “Blitzkrieg.” The execution
of Blitzkrieg in attacks on France and Russia, in turn,
demonstrated both its power and its limitations.
The evolution of the German plan to invade
France, Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), is well known, but
for the purposes of this monograph it is important
for us to try to identify what in the plan is and is
not operational art. As has been stated, the Germans

34
during World War II did not recognize an operational
level of war, an operational level of command, or the
idea of operational art. The design of the campaign in
France necessarily combined problems of tactics—e.g.,
the ability to move mechanized forces through the
Ardennes and the penetration of the defense at Sedan,
with problems of large-scale maneuver by multiple
army groups; strategic problems of mobilization and
the allocation of effort to other active fronts (such as the
invasion of Norway); and strategic questions of how to
bring about the submission of the French and possibly
the British. If this process of designing a campaign is
considered to be “operational art,” then the term is
certainly a very broad tent. In this case, encompassing
all the headquarters from the head of state down to at
least corps, at which level Guderian, for example, was
clearly demonstrating operational art by conceiving and
executing a succession of tactical actions to achieve the
objectives laid down in the campaign plan.44 This all-
encompassing view of operational art is theoretically
and doctrinally worthless because, in practice, it makes
“operational art” nearly synonymous with “warfare”
itself.
Alternatively, and more correctly, the design of the
campaign in France was a strategic process in which
the conversation between strategic aspirations and
tactical possibilities was kept clearly in mind. France
represented a single theater of operations, and from
the start it was conceived that the single campaign to
defeat the French would be conducted in a number of
phases. The initial phase involved the coordination
of the actions of German Army Group B in the low
countries, A in the Ardennes, and C in Alsace. It was
planned and commanded by the German supreme
command including Hitler and his immediate advisers.

35
Having arrived at a scheme of maneuver and identified
objectives down to army level and lower, allocated
resources accordingly, and set key timings, the
supreme headquarters then coordinated the conduct
of the campaign day by day.
It can be understood as the establishment of three
consecutive thrusts, only the first of which was clearly
identified at the outset:
• The first flowed from three coordinated
operations to apply frontal pressure in Belgium
and the Netherlands and to penetrate the Maginot
Line at Sedan, leading to the encirclement of
the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and the
French 1st Army group in the Low Countries
and the establishment of a new front roughly
along the line of the Somme.
• With this first thrust successful, the subsequent
phase of the campaign, which was not clearly
envisaged at the start, involved penetrations of
this new front to initiate:
— a single operation to encircle the French
2nd Army Group and press it against the
Atlantic coast, and
— a further single operation that pressed the 3rd
Army Group against the Vosge Mountains
and the German frontier.

In practice, therefore, the German campaign in France

was a product of strategy, with each of the headquarters
further down the chain pursuing that strategy as
it evolved in line with circumstances but with a
gradually increasing focus on tactical realities. It is at
the army group level and below that we most clearly
see “operations” consisting of a sequence of tactical
actions sharing a common purpose, with Guderian at
and after Sedan providing the prime example.

36
 The interplay of strategy and operational art is
further demonstrated in the German invasion of Russia
in late June 1941. In his memoir, Erich von Manstein
sketches the debate that occurred over the plan as a
whole.45 According to him, the Army preferred a single
thrust directed on Moscow, arguing that the Russians
were obliged to defend it and therefore that is where
their army could be forced to give battle. Once the
Russian army was defeated, the political and economic
objectives of the invasion would be more readily
harvested. Adolph Hitler, however, sought to move
directly on Leningrad, the birthplace of Bolshevism,
and only subsequently on Moscow and the Ukraine.
The wisdom of this argument, or the lack of it,
remains conjectural; whether the loss of Leningrad
and/or Moscow and/or the Ukraine would really
have broken the Russian will or ability to resist is
not certain, although Moscow’s role as the railway
hub joining the South and East with the North and
West seems to endow it with considerable military
importance. Its capture would have substantial-
ly reduced the capacity of the Russians to shift
defensive effort from place to place. In the end, Hitler’s
view prevailed, with the capture of Leningrad, over
800 kilometers from the German line of departure,
becoming the immediate objective. To avoid the
paralyzing prospect of a stabilized front, it was
believed necessary, before moving on to Leningrad,
to destroy the mass of the Russian army, thought at
the time to comprise somewhere around 147 available
divisions (although by August 11, 1941, the Germans
had encountered 360) before it could withdraw from
western Russia. The resulting campaign plan envisaged
an offensive on a broad front with two army groups
directed to pin Russian forces in White Russia against

37
the Baltic and subsequently destroy them, and a third
to encircle and destroy Russian forces in the Western
Ukraine. Following success in this phase, subsequent
phases of the campaign would be devoted to the
seizure of Moscow and the Eastern Ukraine.46
Following the usual collaborative planning effort,
the strategic directive for Operation BARBAROSSA,
prepared by supreme headquarters (Oberkommando
der Wehrmacht [OKW]) and signed by Hitler, describes
the campaign in some detail.47 It allocates two Army
groups to the area north of the Pripyat Marshes and
describes their broad maneuver and objectives. The
single army group south of the Pripyat Marshes is
directed to conduct a double envelopment, with
one wing originating near Lublin and directed at
Kiev and the other originating in southern Rumania.
Following in the wake of this directive, the Army High
Command (Oberkommando des Heeres [OKH]) issued
its own directive providing details of the organization
of each of the Army Groups, plus their start positions,
axes of advance, and immediate and subsequent
objectives. These two directives, which comprise the
campaign design, are products of a strategic process
simultaneously considering ends, ways, and means.
For the Germans at least, campaign planning was a
task for strategy.
Within this broad front, the German way of war
was successfully demonstrated through the customary
combination of frontal pressure with deep penetrations
to establish annihilating killing grounds. Within the
classical definition of an operation, provided earlier,
the establishment and prosecution of each of these huge
actions was an operation demonstrating operational
art in its own right and depending on the freedom of
action available to the commander. If he were really

38
free to sequence tactical actions as he saw fit, each of
the wings of the envelopment could also arguably
be considered operational art. If this view is taken,
operational art has an overwhelmingly tactical focus,
and its role is considerably clarified. The campaign
plan, provided by strategy, provides objectives, axes,
resources, and timings to operational commanders who
then conduct the sequence of tactical actions necessary
to comply with it. Good operational art in this context
is principally tactical and is largely concerned with
meeting the objectives provided by the campaign plan
in the most efficient and elegant manner possible. Its
economy is designed to avoid unproductive tactical
encounters, creating opportunities for more productive
ones and exploiting the situations that emerge from
each engagement, whether successful or unsuccessful.
Accordingly, operational art is, or should be, much
more about tactics than about strategy.
By the end of September 1941, the Germans believed
they had inflicted losses on the Russians amounting to
two and a half million men, 22,000 guns, 18,000 tanks,
and 14, 000 aircraft.48 By the end of 1941, Russian losses
of men had grown to 4 million killed and three and a
half million taken prisoner. The seven great encounters
of Bialystok-Misnk, Smolensk, Uman, Gomel, Kiev,
The Sea of Azov, and Bryansk-Vyazma alone resulted
in the capture of more then two and a quarter million
soldiers and the destruction or capture of 9,327 tanks
and 16,179 guns. In a further 13 minor battles of
encirclement, another 736,000 Soviet soldiers were
taken prisoner, while 4,960 tanks and 9,033 guns were
captured or destroyed.49 Despite these huge losses,
Russia was not defeated. However, it is hard to argue
this was the result of a failure of German operational
art, which did demonstrably lead to the wholesale

39
slaughter of the enemy. Rather, the failure here was
one of strategy—poor strategy that led the Germans
to design campaigns with objectives that were too
ambitious to be achieved by the tactical resources they
were able to allocate and apply.
German operational art in World War II was
traditional rather than revolutionary. It rested on
the use of the advanced combined arms tactics that
emerged from their analysis of the lessons of World
War I, involving the traditional combination of
frontal pressure with deep penetration leading to
encirclement and annihilation. German operational
art was reliably successful because the preparation of
German commanders and staff officers, and the tactical
excellence of the Wehrmacht, underpinned the flexible
and adaptive implementation of ambitious schemes
of maneuver. Without sound strategy, however,
operational art is helpless, and in the German case
strategy was too often flawed.

Operational art Gets a Name:

TukHachevskIy and Deep Attacks

At the risk of leaping a little ahead, it is necessary to

explain the wider Soviet conceptual framework before
plotting the evolution of operational art in Russia. It
was the Soviets who gave us the term operational art.
Although the term “operation” in its special meaning
of a sequenced group of tactical actions had been
around since the second half of the 19th century, the
identification and codification of operational art had to
await the arrival of the socialist state. In stark contrast
to the German “war as a whole” idea, the Soviets,
guided by dialectical Marxism, found it necessary
to distill “science” out of the universal experience of
war, in the process producing a comprehensive and

40
multi-partite taxonomy of its components.50 In Soviet
usage, military science was understood as a system of
knowledge facilitating the understanding of practical
experience rather than some concept of incontestable
precision. The military art, as a subset of military
science, involved the application of this system of
knowledge in practical situations.51 Operational art, a
subset of military art, employed tactics and logistics
to resolve a series of tactical problems that together
were intended to achieve an intermediate aim within
a campaign.
In the wake of Russia’s failure against the Germans
in World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution of November
1917 against the Czarist government would eventually
see the establishment of the USSR. The ensuing civil
war (1917-23) led to an oft-unnoticed concurrent war
against Poland (1919-21). In combination with the
application of Marxist ideology to the problem of
armed struggle, the lessons of these three wars shaped
the development of Soviet military theory. It is worth
noting from the start that Soviet theory was firmly
rooted in a specific strategic context—it was intended
to resolve the problems attendant on defending the
Soviet state against a threat from Western Europe.
Therefore, the locale and belligerents of the future war
for which they were preparing were already largely
decided, and the initial debates within the Soviet
Union were focused on the form that the war should
take. Accordingly,

M. V. Frunze, M. N. Tukhachevskiy, A. I. Yegorov, V.

K. Triandafillov, . . . N. Ye.Varfolomeyev, and others
were in favour of developing a theory of operations for
a concrete war in defence of the only soviet state in the
world. In their opinion this theory would serve as the
foundation of a specific system for conducting operations
and a guide specifically for the Red Army.52

41
 It is not necessary to recount the entirety of the
debate here, but initially it involved a dispute between
A. A. Svechin and M. Tukhachevskiy over whether an
offensive or defensive war was most appropriate in
view of the threat to, and the level of industrial and
economic development of, the tyro state. In the end,
Tukhachevskiy’s view was to prevail, and Soviet
doctrine broke with historical Russian practice and
settled on an approach to defensive war that rested
heavily on offensive action.53 As with the Germans, the
Soviet approach to war would be to seek the annihila-
tion of the enemy, rather than his exhaustion.54
As well as gaining broad command experience
during the Civil War, Tukhachevskiy had been
the (defeated) commander of the Northern Front
during the climactic Battle of Warsaw in the war
against Poland, and this experience shaped his
understanding of the problems of contemporary war.
A number of things had gone wrong. Tukhachevskiy
had relied on the moral impact of his advance to break
the Polish will to resist and therefore had focused on
geographic objectives rather than on the destruction of
Polish forces. As a result, despite a succession of tactical
setbacks, the Polish forces remained largely intact, and,
although their line was pushed back, the Russians could
not seize Warsaw before they themselves culminated.
At the same time, the Southern Front, swinging around
the Pripyet Marshes, failed to coordinate with the
Northern Front, with the consequence that the Polish
line was not suppressed along its entire length. This
enabled troops to be withdrawn from unpressured
parts of the Polish line to form a counterattack force
sufficiently powerful to throw back and decisively
defeat the Russians.

42
Soviet Operational Art: Penetration, Encirclement,
Annihilation.

In combination with the lessons of World War

I—principally the problems of penetrating an intact
front that had no assailable flanks and the demonstrated
difficulty of defeating a nation-state—the lessons of
Warsaw had a profound effect on Russian theory. The
problem of the stabilized front that had been so amply
demonstrated in World War I was the fundamental
challenge to be resolved. Initially the debate was how
this eventuality could be avoided, but quickly it was
accepted that any sound basis for the development of
theory should accept that such a front would occur,
and that solutions should aim to deal with it. The need
for a series of repeated blows to defeat the mass army
of a contemporary state was already well-established
in military thought. The challenge was to combine the
two contradictory problems of an intact and defensively
strong stabilized front with a strategy of annihilation,
but without repeating the bloody stalemate of the
Western Front in World War I.
Tukhachevskiy immediately understood that if
the Red Army were to successfully resolve this
contradiction, certain operational questions would
have to be addressed first. “It was the demand to solve
the problem of annihilation that led Tukhachevskiy and
his colleagues to a rigorous and thorough examination
of operational art.”55 By 1923 Tukhachevskiy had begun
to articulate the broad shape of Soviet operational art:

[S]ince it is impossible, with the extended fronts of

modern times, to destroy the enemy’s army at a single
blow, we are obligated to try to do this gradually by
operations which will be more costly to the enemy
than to ourselves. . . . In short, a series of destructive

43
 operations conducted on logical principles and linked
together by an uninterrupted pursuit may take the place
of the decisive battle that was the form of engagement in
the armies of the past, which fought on shorter fronts.56

This was not intended to be a Fullerian lunge

for the jugular of the opposing army nor an attempt
to paralyze it through fear. Tukhachevskiy and his
colleagues were intent on physical annihilation. This
was because, one suspects, Tukhachevskiy had tried
the “moral factors” approach at Warsaw, and it had
not worked. As a result, Tukhachevskiy was quite clear
that “an operation is the organized struggle of each of
the armies for the destruction of the men and material
of the other. Not the destruction of some hypothetical,
abstract nervous system of the army, but destruction of
the real organism—the troops and real nervous system
of the opponent, the army’s communications, must be
the operational goal.”57 The difference between this
focus and the approaches advanced in the recent era of
network-centric euphoria, for example, is noteworthy.
It is further developed in the discussion of “strategic
paralysis” and “operational shock” in the next section.
We may encapsulate the two dominant streams
in Russian operational art as follows: successive
operations, the infliction of a series of damaging
blows, along with deep operations, with the linking
of these blows designed to achieve penetrations of
increasing depth until the enemy defensive zone,
including deep reserves, had been pierced and the
conditions for mobile warfare thereby reestablished.
These preparations would create the conditions for
the encirclement and subsequent annihilation of large
enemy groups.58 These two ideas were eventually
combined in Soviet deep operations theory in which
a deep attack was understood as simultaneously
destroying, suppressing, and pinning down not only

44
those defending forces designated to repel an attack
from the front, but also those located well behind the
front. In practice, this would mean

a significant penetration into the tactical depth of the

enemy disposition; [then] immediate infliction of a
second, third, and subsequent blows on the heels of the
first [in order to] bring the enemy to complete defeat.
The ideal would be to plan the actions of friendly
armed forces in such a way that, employing a series of
crushing blows carried to their conclusion, they would
lead to a complete defeat of the enemy, to his complete
capitulation.59

Although deep attack theory well matched the nature

of the problem, how the deep attack could be reliably
conducted was a puzzle that had occupied planners
on the western front throughout World War I. Taken
as a whole, technological developments had favored
the defense. However, the tank, aircraft, and radio
communications meant that technology came to favor
the offense once a penetration had been achieved,
specifically by enabling its development into depth at
a speed that could thwart enemy attempts at defensive
maneuver. Therefore, to be successful, the deep attack
needed to achieve the initial penetration, suppress the
rest of the enemy defensive system so as to provide
time for the initial exploitation of the penetration to
gather steam, and then be able to follow up that initial
exploitation to expand and support it, bringing about
a collapse of the defensive front.
By 1928 this thinking had become officially accepted,
and the Russian General Staff decreed: “It is essential
to conduct a series of successive operations which are
appropriately distributed in space and time. By the
combination of a series of operations, it is essential

45
to force the enemy to exhaust its material and human
resources or to cause the enemy to accept battle by its
main mass of armed troops under disadvantageous
conditions and eliminate them.”60 By 1936 the deep
attack was written into Field Service Regulations. It
would take place in the campaign context of a general
offensive intended to engage the entirety of the enemy
defensive front to suppress its ability to respond with
large-scale maneuver. It was thus described as a four-
echelon offensive:61
• Air instruments were considered to be the first
echelon, intended to achieve control of the air
and begin attacks on identified targets;
• The second echelon was comprised of combined
arms “shock” armies with lavish allocations of
artillery intended to break into and through
the enemy’s defensive crust; these shock
armies were themselves deeply echeloned so
as to achieve an overwhelming change in the
correlation of forces along the axes chosen for
the breakthrough;
• In the third echelon, mobile groups comprising
large formations of tanks supported by para-
chute troops would develop the penetration to
its full depth; and,
• The fourth echelon, essentially a reserve,
would lend weight to the advance and consoli-
date gains.

With the occasional minor modification to accom-

modate technological innovation, especially the
advent of nuclear weapons and the opportunities
offered by rotary wing aircraft, this broad approach to
the deep attack was sustained in Soviet doctrine until
the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War
in 1989.62

46
 The evolution of the theory of the deep attack
took place in conjunction with a refinement in Soviet
understanding of operations and operational art.
Because single decisive battles were no longer expected,
the path to the achievement of the annihilation of the
enemy needed to be broken into a series of operations.
Operations were understood as a sequence of tactical
actions

directed towards the achievement of a certain intermed-

iate goal in a certain theater of military operations. . . . On
the basis of the goal of an operation, operational art sets
forth a whole series of tactical missions . . .[and] dictates
the basic line of conduct of an operation, depending on
the material available, the time which may be allotted
for the handling of different tactical missions, the forces
which may be deployed . . . and finally the nature of the
operation itself.63

In this formation there is a clear hierarchy of respons-

ibilities, but not an articulation of a “level” distinct from
tactics. Supreme headquarters frames the campaign,
that is, it defines the theater, sets objectives, and allocates
resources. Within this framework, the front (army
group equivalent) decides on the successive operations
necessary to achieve the campaign objectives.64 In
today’s terminology, then, it is the task first of the
national headquarters and subsequently of the theater
commanders to establish the framework within which
individual operations are to be conducted. Strategy,
to the Soviets, was “the art of combining preparation
for war and a grouping of operations to achieve the
aim put forth for war for the armed forces,”65 that
is, strategy designed campaigns and decided which
operations were to be conducted.
It is within each of the successive operations laid
down by strategy that operational art comes into play.

47
Since the realities of the theater and logistics meant
that the operational potential of any force is limited,
the Soviet response was to seek to make each operation
decisive within its own depth. That is, each of the
successive operations was intended to annihilate the
enemy within its allocated geographic area by means
of breakthroughs and encirclements.66 According to
Isserson, “The core problem of operational art was
the conduct of the individual operation involving
the unification in time and space, both frontally and
in depth, of separate combat efforts, . . . not directly
connected tactically, to achieve an overall assigned
aim.”67
It is not useful to try to separate the Soviet
understanding of operational art from the concept
of deep attack. The deep attack was an operational
technique intended to be applied by operational
art. The two conceptual systems co-evolved and
progressively grew into a kind of unity in which the
Soviet theory of operational art came to describe how
deep attack might be employed, while deep attack
defined the limits of soviet operational art. For our
purposes, however, the key points are that Soviet
operational theory and the deep attack are specific
solutions to a problem set defined by the unique
geopolitical circumstances of the USSR, that is, they
were solutions to the specific problems posed by mass
armies fielded by nation-states threatening the Soviet
state. As a result, they were intended to deal with the
challenges of a stabilized front and the difficulties
of defeating states. Equally, the Soviets who gave us
the term operational art also provided it with a very
clear parameter—strategy. It was strategy, expressed
in a campaign plan, that defined the operations to be
conducted and the operational art which conducted

48
them. The operational objectives as provided by
strategy were made clear, and operational art had
merely to arrange matters for their achievement.

The British School: Bloodless War and

“Strategic Paralysis”

Unsurprisingly, the British approach to warfare is

conditioned by the nation’s history. Relatively secure
on their moated island, the British have traditionally
committed modest land forces to European wars in or-
der to cement alliances and demonstrate commitment
rather than to seek decisive victory in their own right.
Therefore, the British generally have not themselves
sought the complete overthrow of their enemies and
have seen most wars as “limited” in both the ends that
were reasonably attainable and the degree of commit-
ment made to them. This “limited liability” approach
is culturally reinforced by a history of imperial policing
and a strong navalist tradition. Naval warfare is sel-
dom decisive in itself; Trafalgar did not defeat Napo-
leon, and victory over the armada did not defeat Spain.
Naval victory in both cases prevented the enemy from
setting the conditions for a decisive battle on land. In
broad, British military history has not been shaped by
unlimited commitments in pursuit of unlimited objec-
tives. This cultural foundation has shaped the evolu-
tion of British theory.
George Orwell noted that “there is something
unsatisfactory in tracing an historical change to an
individual theorist, because a theory does not gain
ground unless material conditions favor it.” This
insight is especially true of the evolution of operational
art between the world wars.68 The fresh experience of

49
World War I was both shared and compelling. Inevitably
there was an awareness by those working in the field
of what others were doing internationally and thus a
degree of cross-fertilization. It is fair to say, however,
that generally the extent to which any one country was
directly influenced by what was being written or done
in another was peripheral. The theorists working in each
country were necessarily compelled to work within the
context presented by their own specific circumstances.
The Germans, for example, were not greatly influenced
by the Russians nor vice versa. With each faced with a
common problem and a common set of technologies,
however, a degree of convergence did emerge between
them, with the approaches to operational art in both
countries coming to rest on frontal pressure, deep
penetration, encirclement, and annihilation.69
Importantly, neither J. F. C. Fuller nor B. H. Liddell-
Hart were the progenitors of Blitzkreig, nor were they
more than marginally influential in the development
of Russian theory. The historiography of Liddell-
Hart’s claim to a role in the birth of Blitzkreig has been
comprehensively covered and is not important here.
A quick look at publication dates suggests that the
Russians were already well on the way by the time Ful-
ler produced his major works and were nigh complete
by the arrival of Liddell-Hart’s contributions.70 Equally,
neither Fuller nor Liddell-Hart was sufficiently
influential to engender genuine change in British
doctrine or practice at the time.
Nonetheless, despite failing to make the leap from
theory to praxis in any country between the wars, the
contributions of both Fuller and Liddell-Hart are of
interest because of the extent to which they contrast
with each other and, in particular, with the Germans
and Russians. To some extent, these contrasts are at
least partially concealed beneath superficial similarities;

50
again, these similarities make comparisons instructive
and, importantly, provide a conceptual bridge to more
contemporary experience.
Although both Fuller and Liddell-Hart had a
deep grounding in military history, it was the vivid
experience of World War I that was most influential
in the development of their thinking. Thus, along with
the Russians and Germans, the problems of dealing
with the stabilized front and the apparent tactical
superiority of the defense provided their focus.

J. F. C. Fuller and “Strategic Paralysis.”

Fuller had remained an active soldier throughout

the war and was an early recruit to the emerging tank
arm. As a result, his theoretical contribution, at least
initially, centerd on how tanks could be exploited to
restore the power of the tactical offensive. Perhaps
because he had risen to relatively senior ranks and had
been responsible for the planning of battles (including
the battle of Cambrai in November 1917), he was
not overly adverse to the ugly realities of battle and
was inclined to accept that fighting was a necessary
and inescapable part of war. Despite this, both he
and Liddell-Hart sought to find a way to fight that
directly minimized casualties—they sought a way of
war that was, if not bloodless, at least humane. Fuller
and Liddell-Hart’s cultural context—British history—
was able to accommodate this nuanced approach. It,
however, created a chasm between the Europeans
and the British school that could not be bridged. Since
Napoleon, the Europeans had viewed war as a fight
for national survival—in the face of such apocalyptic
ends, constraining the expenditure of blood or treasure
was nonsensical. Bloodless war was not a notion that
strongly impressed itself on European theorists.

51
 Beginning with his Plan 1919, written in May
1918, Fuller described how tanks, supported by gas
bombardment, could penetrate the tactical defense
and throw themselves over the communications of the
enemy army and in particular at enemy headquarters
to destroy or capture these “centers of thought.” The
result would be to paralyze the enemy’s ability to
conduct defensive maneuver. Under cover of this
“strategic paralysis” brought about by the “barrage
of demoralization,” the main attack would begin the
piecemeal destruction of the enemy’s main forces—its
infantry and artillery.71 The differences between Fuller
and his continental contemporaries are clear. Although
both sought the demoralization of the enemy, the latter
wanted to carry the main battle into depth to force
the enemy to fight at a marked disadvantage with a
reversed front, whereas Fuller saw the main battle
being conducted along the original front, albeit under
conditions made more favorable to the attacker because
of the paralysis of the enemy command apparatus.
To Fuller, the moral effect of the deep attack was
crucial, to the Europeans the deep attack was a step
on the path to the physical destruction of the enemy,
and the moral effect was an added bonus. That
Tukhachevskiy was aware of, but rejected, Fuller’s
thesis is clear from the Russian’s comment that

an operation is the organized struggle of each of the

armies for the destruction of the men and material of
the other. Not the destruction of some hypothetical,
abstract nervous system of the army, but destruction of
the real organism—the troops and real nervous system
of the opponent, the army’s communications, must be
the operational goal.72

Similarly, German kesselschlacht was aimed not at the

demoralization of the enemy but at forcing him to

52
fight with a reversed front and preventing him from
escaping annihilation—the fact that this often also
demoralized him only made a little easier the battle to
destroy those entrapped.

Liddell-Hart and War on the Mind.

Liddell-Hart, on the other hand, had been wounded

in 1916 and took no further part in subsequent combat
operations. He had initially approached the war with
enthusiasm and commitment, and it was only in the
postwar years that he began to take a more jaundiced
view of its conduct. Apparently, over a quarter of
his high school graduating class, together with a
commensurate portion of the rest of the “flower of
English youth,” were killed in the war, and the extent
of the effort swept away the old social and economic
order by which Liddell-Hart had been formed. Possibly
as a result of this, he was particularly keen to find a way
to avoid the carnage that he had experienced firsthand
and consistently sought to describe how battle might
be avoided.
In his writings, Liddell-Hart often uses the term
“strategy” when he is in fact (in stark contrast to
Clausewitz and others) speaking about operational
art. He coined the term “grand strategy” to fill the
resulting void in the higher direction of wars. To
Liddell-Hart, “tactics lies in and fills the province of
fighting. [Operational art] not only stops on the frontier,
but has for its purpose the reduction of fighting to the
slenderest possible proportions.” This statement is
unobjectionable, for in seeking to reduce the fighting
as much as possible, Liddell-Hart is providing one
reasonable parameter of “good” operational art. He
accepts that a decisive battle may still be necessary, but

53
argues that good operational art should ensure that it
be fought under the most advantageous circumstances
possible. “The more advantageous the circumstances,
the less, proportionately, will be the fighting. The
perfection of [operational art] therefore would be to
produce a decision without any serious fighting.”73
Liddell-Hart used the term “dislocation” of the
enemy to describe the creation of a situation that is “so
advantageous that if it does not cause the collapse of
the enemy of itself—its continuation by battle is sure to
do so.” Physical dislocation he describes as a move that
upsets the enemy’s dispositions and, by compelling
a sudden change of front, disrupts the distribution
and organization of his forces, separates his forces,
endangers his supplies, or menaces his withdrawal
routes.74 He grants that these most often flow from a
turning movement—from forcing the enemy to fight
with a reversed front. Put simply, therefore, Liddell-
Hart is telling us that turning the enemy confers
substantial military advantage. The novelty of this
conclusion is not compelling.
In the context of the problem of the stabilized
front after World War I, the Germans and Russians
attempted to develop techniques accepting that such
a front existed and which were intended to deal with
it. Liddell-Hart however sought to surprise the enemy
by going around his flank along the “line of least
expectation.” If a stabilized front did, in fact, exist,
he recognized that there might be a need to open an
“inner flank” after local penetration.75 But Liddell-
Hart does not explain how this inner flank may be
created and deepened sufficiently to pierce an enemy’s
defended zone and thus create the opportunity for
mobile warfare. As a result, he is restating the problem
of World War I rather than describing its solution.

54
 Liddell-Hart was much taken by the achievements
of the Mongols, by U.S. Civil War cavalry raiders, and
by Sherman—particularly his march to Atlanta.76 In
analyzing the British mechanization experiments in
the mid-1930s, he described his ideal of the operations
of the tank brigade:

The deeper behind the battle zone that the tank brigade
could penetrate, the more widespread would be the
confusion and dislocation it would cause, and the more
effective would be its action. Moreover the deeper it
went the safer it would be . . . it must therefore, move
rapidly and be able to appear and disappear . . . It must
. . . continually maneuver so as to threaten a number
of objectives. It must induce enemy concentrations in
one direction and then suddenly move 60 or 70 miles
elsewhere. It must be able to strike rapidly, carrying
out effective destruction in 2 or 3 hours and withdraw
rapidly and leave the enemy uncertain of its exact
whereabouts.”77

Based on these models, he relentlessly preached logistic

self-sufficiency, imagining a streamlined armored
force carrying only the bare necessities, living off the
countryside, and aided in critical moments by the
delivery of essential supplies from the air.78 To achieve
his ideal, he was seeking a stripped down force that
did not depend on its own lines of supply and was
therefore entirely unencumbered in its swoop on the
enemy’s. This is a romantic notion of the operations
of a mechanized raiding force rather than a practical
prescription that can, or could then, be applied in
practice. No large enemy force will be turned by the
mere presence in its rear of a band of mechanized
chindits. The turning effect flows not from irritation,
but from the need to actually turn a large force to
create a new front while simultaneously fighting on
the original front and to sustain supply. The striking

55
power and sustainability of the turning force is
therefore of fundamental importance. Here, Liddell-
Hart is too impressed by the emerging tactical power
of the tank and too impressed by his reading of history.
He therefore leans too far into the ideal and pays too
little attention to realities.
As well as physical dislocation, Liddell-Hart put
forward the idea of psychological dislocation. This
he described as the effect on the enemy commander
of being surprised and turned.79 “The key to success .
. . lies in rapidity of leverage, progressively extended
deeper—in demoralising the opposition by creating
successive flank threats quicker than the enemy can
meet them, so that his resistance as a whole or in parts,
is loosened by the fear of being cut off.”80 Psychological
dislocation was, in Liddell-Hart’s view, as powerful as
its physical cousin.
Psychological dislocation and Fuller’s “strategic
paralysis,” if not synonymous, then are at least closely
related ideas that are worth more detailed examination
since their starkly deliberate contrast with the Russian
and German focus on annihilation raises important
questions for the contemporary operational artist. This
similarity will be discussed in more detail later.

Shimon Naveh and Operational Shock.

In 1996 Shimon Naveh, a retired Israeli general (and

admittedly something of an adherent of the British
School), published In Pursuit of Military Excellence.81 In
it he traces the evolution of the annihilation principle
and argues, as does Liddell-Hart, that it is bankrupt.
In its stead, he proposes the concept of operational
shock, which is a restatement of Fuller’s strategic
paralysis and Liddell-Hart’s psychological dislocation
although Naveh wrongly attributes the idea to Russian

56
innovation. Naveh quite rightly takes a systems
view of warfare.82 He describes operational shock
as “disrupting the opposing system’s rationale by
removing command from the system.”83 This is clearly
synonymous with Fuller’s prescription (from 1919)
to attack the enemy’s “centers of thought” in order
to create a “barrage of demoralization” that would
make the piecemeal destruction of the enemy so much
easier.
Two aspects of Soviet thought, in particular, attract
Naveh’s attention: recognition of the importance of
the turning maneuver, and the Soviet emphasis, from
about 1970, on simultaneity. The turning maneuver has
already been discussed in detail, and its contribution
to psychological dislocation and strategic paralysis is
apparent. Naveh may be guilty of wishful thinking,
however, in arguing that the Soviet embrace of turning
maneuvers was either unique or, more importantly,
focused on a psychological rather than physical
outcome. The Soviet’s way of war was based on a search
for certainty through the application of overwhelming
mass in a manner intended to annihilate the enemy.84
Deep battle and successive operations described the
techniques to be used to achieve this. The uncertain
psychological advantages of encircling the enemy were
clearly secondary to the physical certainties of killing
him. Military adventurism was not a trait encouraged
within the Soviet hierarchy.
Simultaneity is a little more complicated. From the
lessons broached earlier from the Soviet-Polish war,
the Soviets had recognized the need to suppress the
enemy’s ability to conduct defensive maneuver. In the
1920s, this had been primarily achieved by engaging
the entire enemy front to tie down as many of his
forces as possible. Over the succeeding decades, the

57
increased range of indirect fire, the power of supporting
aircraft, and the mobility of reserves meant that this
suppressive effect had to be extended into greater
depth. As a result, the use of air, long-range artillery,
forward detachments, and mobile groups to disrupt the
entire depth of the enemy’s defended zone increased
in importance. After World War II, this suppressive
action was necessarily expanded to encompass
nuclear delivery means and command and control.
On this basis, it could be argued that the increasing
importance of simultaneity was not predicated on a
search for something new—“operational shock”—but
rather represented a continuation of the fundamental
mechanisms of Soviet operational art: frontal pressure
and deep penetration leading to encirclement and
annihilation, while making allowances for changes in
the objective conditions of warfare.85
Despite the weaknesses identified here, there is
much to be gained from reading Fuller, Liddell-Hart,
and Naveh. Liddell-Hart, in particular, is able to exploit
(perhaps torture) history to isolate lessons that excite
and inform.86 But in understanding the evolution of
operational art, it is important to be quite clear that for
Fuller, Liddell-Hart, and Naveh, demoralization was
the aim of a deep attack, whereas for the Europeans,
demoralization followed from the likelihood of
annihilation and eased the path to it. In operational
planning, there is a stark contrast between stunning an
enemy into submission and killing him.87

58
FM 100-5 and the Leavenworth Heresy.

War and politics, campaign and statecraft, are Siamese

twins, inseparable and interdependent; and to talk of
military operations without the direction and interference
of an administrator is as absurd as to plan a campaign
without recruits, pay or rations.

Nicolay and Hay “Lincoln”88

So far as the situation in Iraq is concerned, the planning/

strategy failures are legion: there was no plan to prevent
looting, no plan for security/stabilization, no plan for
running the country; bureaucratic warfare between the
department of State and DoD over team personnel and
other issues were not reined in by the National Security
Council; Presidential Envoy Bremer’s CPA and its
predecessor “have been undermanned and operating
with team B from the beginning,” with no standby
capacity and bodies having to be scrounged from the
State Department: the international police, justice, and
rule of law teams were never brought in; there was
no planning for a stabilization force, there were not
enough troops, and there was no mandate to perform
stabilization tasks for what troops we had; the war was
essentially continued throughout the reconstruction
effort, with lack of security shutting down some
contractor work; there is a lack of good intelligence; it is
not clear to whom the government will be transferred, . .
. public information/psyops needs fixing; lack of greater
international involvement hurts the legitimacy of our
effort.


Bathsheba Crocker
December 2004

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience

but a defining framework for it.

Benjamin Whorf
“Thinking in Primitive Communities”

59
 In 1982 the U.S. Army published a revised version of
FM 100-5 which described how the U.S. Army intended
to fight. The 1982 version formed a key component
in the post-Vietnam renaissance that was sweeping
through the U.S. Army at the time. The advent of
the all-volunteer Army brought with it a renewal of
military professionalism in the widest sense, and this
flowed into approaches to training and education as
well as how the U.S. Army, as an institution, viewed
war and preparation for it.
One part of this new direction was a refocusing
away from counterinsurgency towards the defense
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
as being the Army’s core activity. Improvements in
technology were beginning to redress the absolute
advantage conferred by mass, and the introduction
of anti-tank guided weapons, night vision devices,
and artillery submunitions were beginning to make
the defeat of a Warsaw Pact offensive appear feasible
even without recourse to nuclear weapons. In this
environment, the 1982 version of FM 100-5 introduced
Air-Land battle which described a joint approach
to defeating Soviet operational art. Air-Land Battle
sought to moderate the force ratios encountered in
the close battle against the Soviets by “merging the
Active Defense (the centerpiece of the 1976 version
of FM 100-5) and deep attack of follow-on echelons
into one battle.”89 Air-Land battle also introduced into
American doctrine much of what we know as maneuver
theory. To a large extent, at least for maneuver forces,
it described a modernized Blitzkrieg seeking to exploit
the capabilities offered by highly trained professional
soldiers manning the superb new weapons systems,
such as the Abrams main battle tank (MBT), Bradley

60
infantry fighting vehicle (IFV), multiple launch rocket
system (MLRS), and Apache attack helicopter that were
then becoming available. All this was to take place in a
framework provided by the customary U.S. excellence
in logistics. This was well done and laudable. More
importantly for our purposes, however, it introduced
to the American Army the idea of the operational level of
war.
It is not clear how the German view of war as a
whole or the Soviet recognition of operational art
became translated, in American usage, into a discrete
level of war, existing somewhere between strategy and
tactics, but the translation became the source of much
subsequent confusion. This confusion is demonstrated
in the single paragraph on pp. 2-3 of the 1982 manual
that introduced this new species to the military
menagerie:

The Operational Level of War involves planning and

conducting campaigns. Campaigns are sustained
operations designed to defeat an enemy force in
a specified place and time with simultaneous and
sequential battles. The disposition of forces, selection of
objectives, and actions to weaken or outmaneuver the
enemy all set the terms for the next battle and exploit
tactical gains. They are all part of the operational level
of war.

Here FM 100-5 removes from strategy its traditional

role of planning campaigns and conflates the term
“campaign” with what the Soviets would recognize
as an “operation”—a sequence of simultaneous and
sequential battles, connected by a unifying idea and
intended to defeat an enemy force. This original error
was further compounded in the 1986 version of FM 100-
5 when the term “operational art” was introduced to
the American lexicon and defined as “the employment

61
of military forces to attain strategic goals in a theater
through the design, organization, and conduct of
campaigns and major operations.” This new and
heretical understanding of operations and operational
art spread through the Anglophone world like a virus.
With minor variations in spelling, the same definitions
had appeared in British, Canadian, and Australian
doctrine by the early years of the 1990s where they
remain relatively unchanged to this day.90
In seeking to understand the provenance of this
new idea, a number of possibilities suggest themselves.
As operational art was being born in English, its
strategic context—the defense of NATO—had already
been established; hence, the question of who, in fact,
planned campaigns did not arise. The design of the
campaign to defend NATO was already complete by
1982 and was not to change substantially between then
and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Although the Supreme
Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) and his staff
clearly had a role in campaign design, the probability
that any conventional confrontation could escalate
into nuclear conflagration and, even without nuclear
weapons, that most of the members countries would
be laid waste and their military and economic power
substantially destroyed, necessarily engaged their
national governments very intimately. The imperative
to defend as far forward along the Inner German Border
as possible, the likely Warsaw Pact axes and scheme of
maneuver, the forces to be provided by each member
country together with their responsibilities, areas of
operations, limitations on employment, and even
likely combat effectiveness, had all been factored into
a unified military plan and agreed by the governments
of the member countries.
The U.S. chain of command resulting from the
Goldwater-Nichols Act had established the role of the

62
combatant commanders in chief as joint warfighters
in a chain of command connected with the President
through the Secretary of Defense. Defining their role in
the process of conducting a war necessarily involved
defining their inputs and outputs. Thus the idea of
an operational level of war charged with campaign
planning met a bureaucratic need—establishment of
jurisdictional definition among an influential group
of senior officers—no bad thing if one is trying to get
new doctrine agreed upon. In sum, then, it seems most
likely that the idea of an operational level of war arose
at least partially for bureaucratic reasons rather than
reasons having to do with how to wage war.
There is nothing intrinsically erroneous with
ascribing new meanings to existing terms—language
formation is, after all, a dynamic process. Thus defining
operational art in the way it was in the 1986 edition
is not necessarily “wrong.” However, in combination
with the 1982 edition, the changes had the pernicious
effect of perverting the original purpose of operational
art—i.e., facilitating the dialogue between tactics
and strategy—by creating a discrete and influential
intermediate level of command, thus actually weaken-
ing and possibly muddling the tactical-strategic
interface. More specifically, the misunderstanding of
the role of operational art as proselytized in FM 100-
5 and the creation of an “Operational Level of War”
have led to an independent layer of command that
has usurped the role of strategy and thereby resisted
the role that the civilian leadership should play in
campaign planning.

The Problem of Levels.

Arthur Lykke, in an influential article published

in 1989, described strategy as consisting of ends, or

63
objectives towards which one strives; ways, or courses
of action; and means, or instruments by which some end
can be achieved.91 If we accept this construct, we reach
the conclusion that strategy necessarily requires the
simultaneous consideration of ends, ways, and means.
In the case of a specific conflict, the choice of ways
includes campaign design, i.e., the decisions on whom,
where, and how to fight. Campaign design would
also include a clear view on the scheme of maneuver,
the operations that seem likely to be necessary, and
therefore the resources required. Failure to complete, or
errors in the completion of, this analysis risks seeking
to achieve too much with too little or, conversely,
incurring opportunity costs that might detract from
the prosecution of the wider conflict.
Of equal importance, each individual campaign
needs to be examined in the wider strategic context
to ensure that the internal ends-ways-means rationale
for it is in accord with the higher direction of national
strategy and is likely to be politically sustainable
through its planned duration. In this context,
operations, as a sequence of tactical actions, and tactics,
actual battles and engagements, clearly come under the
category of “means.” Observe that this analysis leads
to a model broadly consonant with Scharnhorst’s and
Clausewitz’s dictum that we consider war as a whole;
apparently encapsulates the idea of war as a Gestalt;
and offers opportunities for the multiple loops and
connections that recognize war as a complex adaptive
system. This model is also broadly in accord with
theory and is entirely consonant with German and
Soviet approaches to operational art. (See Figure 2.)

64
Figure 2. Ends, Ways, and Means in War as a Whole.

In contrast, however, if we conduct a similar

analysis with discrete levels of war and their associated
levels of command, a hierarchical model emerges such
as that in Figure 3.

Figure 3. The Continuum of War.

65
 The “Continuum of War” model, accords with most
extant western doctrine, reflecting what Eliot Cohen has
referred to as the “Huntingtonian” or “normal” theory
of civil military relations.92 In this model, it is the “duty
of the statesman to formulate a ‘clear, concise, and
unambiguous declaration of national policy,’ to guide
the military that bridged ‘the continually irritating gap
between the executive and legislature’.”93 Once this
was provided, the politicians should simply get out of
the way and let the military get on with its job. As was
written at the Command and General Staff School in
1936:

Politics and Strategy are radically and fundamentally

things apart. Strategy begins where politics ends. All
that soldiers ask is that once the policy is settled, strategy
and command shall be regarded as something in a
sphere apart from politics. . . . The line of demarcation
must be drawn between politics and strategy, supply,
and operations. Having found this line, all sides must
abstain from trespassing.94

Although this is admittedly an extreme view, it

continues to echo today. “[A] simplified Huntingtonian
concept remains the dominant view within the
American defense establishment,” with the Caspar
Weinberger and Colin Powell doctrines reflecting its
continuing authority. 95
In this vein, Antulio Echevarria has argued that,

the American way of war tends to shy away from

thinking about the complicated process of turning
military triumphs, whether on the scale of major
campaigns or small-unit actions, into strategic successes.
This tendency is symptomatic of a persistent bifurcation
in American strategic thinking—though by no means

66
 unique to Americans—in which military professionals
concentrate on winning battles and campaigns, while
policymakers focus on the diplomatic struggles that
precede and influence, or are influenced by, the actual
fighting. This bifurcation is partly a matter of preference
and partly a by-product of the American tradition of
subordinating military command to civilian leadership,
which creates two separate spheres of responsibility, one
for diplomacy and one for combat. . . . [This means that
there is an American way of Battle not an American Way
of War]. . . . [T]o move toward a genuine way of war,
American military and political leaders must address
two key problems. First, they must better define the
respective roles and responsibilities of the logic and
grammar of war, and, in the process, take steps that will
diminish the bifurcation in American strategic thinking.
Second, political and military leaders must habituate
themselves to thinking more thoroughly about how to
turn combat successes into favorable strategic outcomes.
Such thinking is not new, but it is clearly not yet a matter
of habit. Failure to see the purpose for which a war is
fought as part of war itself amounts to treating battle as an
end in itself.96

The existence of an independent level of war served

by its own level of command, operating free from
unwelcome interference from strategy, represents the
foundation on which the U.S. military can define its
professional jurisdiction. Performing operational art,
as defined in the 1986 version of FM 100-5, represents
the pinnacle of the profession of arms. It was therefore
both a product of the self-perception of the U.S. military
and a necessary input to it. This, arguably, is the true
reason for the heretofore unchallenged theoretical
solecism that appeared in FM 100-5 in 1982.
Unfortunately, the hierarchical separation of levels
of war on which the continuum of war is based is
not reflected in practice. Strategy is free to expand,
contract, or alter its objectives as circumstances create

67
new opportunities or foreclose others; or as the costs-
benefits calculus changes. The connection between war
and politics gives strategy its functionality; therefore,
war is necessarily vested with the same volatility as
politics. Any attempt in theory to insulate the practical
conduct of war from this volatility is erroneous. This
means that there is not an overlap between strategy,
operational art, and tactics, they are completely fused.
Tactical actions necessarily carry strategic implications,
while strategy conceptualizes, creates, and applies
tactical forces, as well as shaping their diplomatic,
economic, demographic, and operational environ-
ments. An American soldier on a street corner in
Baghdad not only personifies a strategic decision
to invade Iraq, but also the entire political, social,
diplomatic, cultural, and economic evolution of the
United States from before its war for independence. The
actions of this strategic private are fraught with a broad
spectrum of implications—military, Iraqi domestic
political, U.S. domestic political, and international
political implications. Any attempt to conceptually
separate tactics from strategy denies this connection.97
The failure to adequately take a truly strategic
perspective into campaign planning is manifest in
America’s recent wars. The 1990-91 Gulf War serves
as an example. Yes, in this single campaign, there
were two successful instances of operational art:
Instant Thunder, the air operation to shape
the environment, and Desert Storm, to eject Iraqi
forces from Kuwait. The latter demonstrated many of
the characteristics of classical operational art: frontal
pressure to suppress the enemy, deep penetration
to encircle him, and then a process of attrition of an
enemy forced to fight with a reversed front. Both

68
Heinz Guderian and Tukhachevskiy would have been
pleased with DESERT STORM as an operation—a
classic kesselschlacht. However, despite this success, the
1991 campaign was not sufficient to end the war with
Iraq—for which a succession of additional campaigns
was required—and which is only now, apparently,
coming to a conclusion.
The story of Desert Storm does not require
retelling here. The confusion surrounding the
termination of the operation, the negotiation of a cease-
fire by General Norman Schwarzkopf in the apparent
absence of any guidance from above, and the litany of
strategic opportunities thereby foregone, have been
comprehensively covered elsewhere. However, they
all indicate a surfeit of attention being paid to a single
operation and a failure to ensure that the campaign
fitted into a strategy. In practice, the operation
supplanted the campaign which, in turn, became the
strategy. Understandably, Schwarzkopf was focused
on the operation—but who was focused on the war?
Iraq (2003-?) is an instructive example of the
problems of the existing doctrinal approach. In 2003,
who was responsible for anticipating that the campaign
to remove Saddam, including another compelling
example of Guderian-like operational art, would
necessarily be followed by one to establish a successor
regime? To simply answer “Bush” or “Rumsfeld” is
to hide what has become a doctrinal void. Political
leaders are no longer students of war. Therefore, there
is a need that their judgment be complemented by
wise and candid advisory support to discourage them
from demanding the unachievable. Equally though,
they need to be made fully aware of the costs and
risks attendant on the choices being offered to them.
These costs and risks span fields as diverse as minor

69
tactics and international economics, and they are not
amenable to adequate consideration at the provincial
headquarters of a combatant commander or even in the
office of a Secretary of Defense. Binding the conduct
of a campaign to that of a war and ensuring the war
contributes to the state’s role in the march of history is
an embodiment of the idea that war is an extension of
politics.
The 2007 troop “surge” was conducted when the
President, substantially alone, balanced the economic,
diplomatic, strategic, political, and military costs and
benefits of the alternatives available to him and chose
to fight on. This was a return to “classic” campaigning
in which the head of state, rather than merely acceding
to the advice proferred, laid out the objectives and
constraints of the campaign and chose the general who
would be responsible.
But the surge aside, disjunctions between politics,
strategy, campaign planning, and the conduct of
operations were also demonstrated in Somalia (1992)
and Kosovo (1998). What allowed the conduct of war
and strategy to become so disjointed? How did it
come to this? Strategic failure cannot be blamed on
any one idea or problem but rather tends, like most
accidents, to be the result of a confluence of otherwise
unconnected errors. The aim of military doctrine,
planning, and organization is to limit the number of
errors being made so as to reduce the frequency of
these accidents. Not everything is within the control of
military leadership, but doctrine largely is. Unsound
doctrine is a bad starting point for any war.
The U.S. military’s decision to extend the meaning
of operational art to encompass campaign planning is
a theoretical dead end which perpetuates the failing
identified by Echavarria and others. By conflating two

70
very different ideas, the U.S. (and the Anglophone
world in lockstep) has reinforced the difficulty of the
strategic management of wars and exposed an Achilles
heel. At the same time, by expanding the meaning
of operational art to be nearly all-encompassing, the
detailed examination of its necessary evolution is
compromised. When the United States finds itself
fighting Serbia, Somali warlords, or failed and failing
second and third rank states, these weaknesses may be
apparent but their consequences manageable. But if, at
some time in the future, the United States finds itself at
war with a great power, these theoretical obfuscations
may prove to be more damaging.

Operational art: The Next Steps

For the enemy the war remained fundamentally . . . a

seamless web of political-military-psychological factors
to be manipulated by a highly centralized command
authority that never took its eye off the political goal
of ultimate control of the South. For the United States,
however, the war had become by October 1967 a complex
of three separate, or only loosely related, struggles: there
was a large-scale, conventional war, . . . the confused
pacification effort, . . . and the curiously remote air war
against North Vietnam.

Townsend Hoopes
The Limits of Intervention

The great fusion of technologies is impelling the domains

of politics, economics, the military, culture, diplomacy,
and religion to overlap each other. The connection
points are ready, and the trend towards the merging of
the various domains is very clear. All of these things are
rendering more and more obsolete the idea of confining
warfare to the military domain. . . .

Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui

71
 You fight your war and I’ll fight mine.

Mao

A Time After?

This monograph has so far traced the evolution of

operational art from its sources in the industrial and
political revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th
centuries to the present, as well as in the Anglophone
world, to the erroneous interpretations dating from the
FM 100-5 of 1982 and 1986. The next questions to arise
are whether operational art was purely an artifact of the
industrial age or whether it has continued relevance as
we enter the post-industrial era.
In the successful 1982 British campaign to eject
Argentinean forces from the Falklands Islands, the
British government, to exploit strong public support
for military action before it subsided, directed
dispatch of the campaign task force within 3 days of
the Argentinean invasion, overriding military advice
and forgoing the opportunity for detailed preparation
and workup. The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher,
personally—and in “real time”—approved the sinking
of the Argentine cruiser Belgrano by HMS Conqueror.98
The Government directed that South Georgia be retaken
as soon as possible, despite its military insignificance
and in the face of military advice to the contrary, the
purpose being to assuage public pressure for action
and to sharpen the credibility of British diplomacy.
The landings in May 1982 were undertaken despite
the failure to achieve air or sea superiority around the
Falklands because it was politically unthinkable for the
government to consider abandoning operations in the

72
South Atlantic. There were no indications that a more
predominant position could be attained in the short
term, and the public’s patience was not inexhaustible.
Following the landings, and subsequent to the loss
from air and missile attack of a number of British ships,
the land force commander was directed to engage
the enemy at Goose Green despite his argument that
it was strategically irrelevant and a distraction. This
direction was in response to the enormous public
outcry for signs of movement. As Max Hastings and
Simon Jenkins put it, “After almost 4 days of unbroken
bad news, London needed a tangible victory. If ever
there was a politician’s battle, then Goose Green was
to be it.”99
Each war is unique, of course, and there is no
universally applicable model, but the conduct of the
Falklands War demonstrates some characteristics of
modern war that need to be accommodated in the
further evolution of operational art. From the British
perspective, the “ends” of this war went well beyond
the liberation of the Falklands. The British decision for
war, although taken in justifiable self-defense, was a
step in the Thatcherite project to rebuild Britain’s self-
perception, prestige, and role in the world; therefore,
this war was one part of a larger and much more diffuse
political competition. The “ways” of the war thus
needed to take account both of the specific military
problem and of the larger project. Its successful
execution demanded continued support from the
international community, especially the United States
and France, both of whom needed to balance this support
with countervailing pressures on them. Accordingly,
concern for international perceptions of British actions
needed to be balanced against maintenance of British
public resolve and a demonstration of British military

73
potency. The Falklands was a truly limited war in which
the continuing dialogue among ends, ways, and means
required a high degree of political and diplomatic
sophistication and the close coupling of tactical action
with politics. The Falklands war thus had many of the
characteristics of a “modern” war.
In this case, British political leadership was intim-
ately involved in campaign planning and execution.
The need to ensure that military action, diplomacy,
and public opinion remained in close alignment led the
Thatcher government to involve itself quite intimately
in the direction of military actions, ranging from
the tactical, e.g., to attack Goose Green and sink the
Belgrano, to the more operational, e.g., to seize South
Georgia and accept the risk of proceeding without
securing air and sea superiority. The conduct of the
war demanded this level of political intervention for
strategic “success.”100
The importance of the intimate involvement of
strategy with tactics is futher illuminated by Bob
Woodward in The War Within (2008), which describes
the debates within the U.S. Government surrounding
the conduct of the middle stages of the Iraq War.101 He
shows that it was the Bush administration, overcoming
the opposition of public opinion, Congress, the
Departments of State and Defense, the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, and the incumbent commander, which
engineered the Surge and framed the subsequent
campaign. Without this level of strategic involvement
at the highest levels, it would not have been possible
to cut through the complex of competing interests to
bring the Iraq war to what may now be a satisfactory
conclusion.
In the context of this “modern” war, the existing
doctrinal orthodoxy that campaign planning and

74
conduct are the privileged province of operational art
is demonstrably invalid. If campaign planning and
conduct so intimately involve the political level, then
the existence of a discrete operational level of war,
charged with this responsibility and equipped with
its own forms of analysis, is nonsense. If operational
art encompasses everything from international politics
to the actual preparation for battle, it is so broad an
activity as to be doctrinally meaningless.
However, again using the Falklands as an example,
the land force efforts to cross the island and seize
Port Stanley, and the maritime efforts to establish
and enforce exclusion zones around the islands, each
represent sequences of tactical actions conducted
within a campaign and connected by a unifying
idea. In short, then, they meet the 1895 von der Goltz
definition of an “operation” and are entirely consonant
with Russian and German thinking.102 As such, they
demonstrated operational art—not expressed as a
campaign plan here but as a set of connected actions
that sought to achieve an objective provided by the
campaign plan. It is this traditional relationship
between strategy and operations that seems most
appropriate to the future of warfare.
Despite continuing debates about the rise or decline
of the state, the impacts of resource scarcity, pandemic
diseases, urbanization, global warming, economic
globalization, demographics, etc., there is a degree of
consensus surrounding the likely character of warfare
in the next epoch. A number of authors have proposed
conceptual models, many of which are worth careful
reading. But the one model we find most relevant and
interesting here is set forth in the 1999 book by two
Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Colonels: Qiao
Liang and Wang Xiangsui.103 Unrestricted Warfare was
written in the aftermath of the campaigns in Iraq and

75
Kosovo as a conceptual response to U.S. conventional
military predominance. Essentially, it argues for the
exploitation and acceleration of a universally accepted
trend presently underpinning the evolution of warfare:
diffusion.
“Diffusion” describes the blurring of the conceptual
boundaries that we have customarily used to aid our
understanding and conduct of warfare. The basic
premise is that diffusion of warfare from the confines of
the traditional battlefield into all the spaces of human
activity will inevitably lead to unrestricted warfare:

The great fusion of technologies is impelling the domains

of politics, economics, the military, culture, diplomacy,
and religion to overlap each other. The connection
points are ready, and the trend towards the merging of
the various domains is very clear. All of these things are
rendering more and more obsolete the idea of confining
warfare to the military domain. . . .104

As a result, in unrestricted warfare there is no longer

any distinction between what is or is not the battlefield.
Spaces in nature, including the ground, the seas, the
air, and outer space, are battlefields, but social spaces
such as the military, politics, economics, culture,
and the psyche are also battlefields. Moreover, the
technological space linking these two great spaces
is most susceptible of all to serving as a venue for
conflict which antagonists spare no effort to win.
National power can be military, quasi-military, or
nonmilitary. It can employ violence or nonviolence. It
can be a confrontation between professional soldiers or
between newly emerging forces consisting primarily
of ordinary people or experts. These characteristics of
unrestricted warfare “mark the watershed between it
and traditional warfare, as well as the starting line for
new types of warfare.”105

76
 This theme was taken up and expanded in the
Australian Army’s concept, Complex Warfighting, which
noted that the boundaries between war and peace,
combatants and noncombatants, the home front and the
battlefront, special and conventional operations, state
and nonstate actors, military and nonmilitary power,
and geographical features themselves, were all in the
process of dissolution. Although warfare has always
involved the application of all of the instruments of
national power and always been intended to impact
the psychology of the target population, warfare has
customarily expressed these relationships through the
application of military force. Diffusion removes the
primacy of military force, making it simply one of a
suite of levers that can be utilized.
A corollary to the foregoing evolution is that
military defeat of the enemy is no longer the principal,
or even an important, step on the path to winning
a war: annihilation is no longer the objective. The
objective of unrestricted war rather is to directly attack
the target population’s will to resist by attacking its
self-perceptions, directly imposing on it the economic
and social costs of war, diplomatically isolating it,
undermining the morality of its position, and, in short,
inducing the people to reject the continuance of the
war. It is warfare which focuses on the political aim to
the exclusion of all else.106
According to its authors, the prosecution of
unrestricted war requires:107
• “Omnidirectionality,” which is “360 degree
observation and design involving the combined
use of all related factors and making plans . . .
employing all measures, and combining the use
of all war resources which can be mobilized,
to have a field of vision with no blind spots,

77
 a concept unhindered by obstacles, and an
orientation with no blind angles.”
• “Synchrony,” which seeks to employ all
the military and nonmilitary resources in a
concentrated and orchestrated way in temporally
compressed wars: “So many objectives which in
the past had to be accomplished in stages through
an accumulation of battles and campaigns may
now be accomplished quickly under conditions
of simultaneous occurrence, simultaneous
action, and simultaneous completion. Thus,
stress on ‘synchrony’ in combat operations now
exceeds the stress on “phasing.”
• “Multidimensional Coordination,” which
refers to coordination and cooperation among
different forces in different spheres in order
to accomplish an objective. “On the face of it,
this definition is not at all novel. . . . The only
difference between it and similar explanations
is, and this is a great difference, the introduction
of nonmilitary and nonwar factors into the
sphere of war directly rather than indirectly.”
• “Adjustment and Control of the Entire
Process—During the Entire Course of a War,
from Its Start, through Its Progress, to its
Conclusion, Continually Acquire Information,
Adjust Action, and Control the Situation.
Warfare is a dynamic process full of randomness
and creativity. Any attempt to tie a war to a
set of ideas within a predetermined plan is
little short of absurdity or naïveté. Therefore,
it is necessary to have feedback and revisions
throughout the entire course of a war while it is
actually happening to keep the initiative within
one’s grasp.”

78
The thrust, if not the detail, of Unrestricted Warfare
represents the current orthodoxy on the ways war
will, or should, be fought in the immediate future.
The challenges of diffusion and the need to align
all the instruments of national power behind the
prosecution of war are increasingly represented in
the military doctrines of the world. The 2007 U.S.
Joint Operating Environment concept is an example.
It notes: “Evolving U.S. joint operations doctrine
posits a national-level campaign that focuses national
capabilities—diplomatic, economic, information, and
military—toward averting, deterring, and if necessary
winning future conflicts. Once engaged, the United
States must consider the political, economic, legal,
military, and territorial aspects of the adversary’s
capability. In complex environments, multiple
interactions constantly occur and effects of the specific
consequences of military activities will reverberate
across each of these domains—and sometimes other
unanticipated ones.”108
In describing the nature of potential U.S. adver-
saries, the Joint Operating Environment also identifies
the weakness in the current U.S. approach to the
separation between politics and warfare:

In their view, American confidence in the technical

aspects of war has led to less emphasis on the political
foundations of war, in planning for a viable political
end state, and in matching national means to this end
state. The implications of this foreign perception will
be adversaries that are more willing and able to fight in
the cultural and political domains. Adversary strategic
and operational design will attempt to balance regional
requirements to engage or even dominate neighbors,
while simultaneously recognizing the need to shaping
U.S. perception and engagement, while preparing for
conflict with U.S. forces.109

79
The prosecution of our next wars should set the
conceptual and doctrinal framework for the further
evolution of operational art. Both in its original
conception and in its current manifestation, it is suited
to strategies of annihilation rather than to those of
imposing exhaustion. The delegation of authority
and responsibility which underpins our current
conceptions of an operational level of war presents
lethally dangerous vulnerabilities to a thoughtful
enemy.
Unrestricted warfare and the “national campaigns”
described in the Joint Operating Environment
cannot conceivably be planned or their execution
coordinated other than at the highest strategic levels.
The interplay of domestic and international politics,
diplomacy, economics, and military action executed
in both physical space and cyber-space is now so
inextricably meshed that political leadership, all of the
organs of state bureaucracy, all of the organs of state
security, commercial corporations, nongovernmental
organizations, as well as fielded military forces need
to be aligned and coordinated. The design, planning,
and conduct of such a campaign, and the nesting of
that campaign in an overall strategy for the conduct
of an unrestricted war, together with its ongoing
refinement, adjustment, and redirection, is not a job for
a joint task force (JTF) commander posted somewhere
in the provinces. Now, more than ever, there is a need
for true strategic art.
Strategic art involves the continuous orchestration
of all the instruments of national power to protect and
promote national interests in both war and peace. It
therefore involves the perpetual facilitation of the
dialogue among ends, ways, and means. It is not a

80
military function, though the military has an essential
and unique contribution to make to it. The performance
of that function will, however, demand a degree of
redefinition of what the profession of arms entails.
Strategic art requires the identification of threats,
challenges, and problems; the derivation and
articulation of an array of potential measures to
counter them; the clustering of these measures in
action plans; the attainment of bureaucratic consensus
and allocation of resources; and the supervision and
subsequent adjustment of implementation. Strategic
art is public policy requiring a closing of the customary
gap between conception and implementation. As such,
we should expect the normal algorithms of public
policy to become more dominant. Therefore, rather
than a government approaching its military saying,
“We’ve got a war on and we want you to go and beat
X,” in the era of unrestricted warfare it is just as likely
that a military or some other agency will approach its
government saying, “We believe we are under attack,
and this is our proposed response.”
The contribution the military can make in this
realm of public policy is a result of its planning cul-
ture and bureaucratic focus on the preparation for, and
execution of, wars. Military bureaucracies, uniquely
in governmental machinery as a rule, see planning as
part of a comprehensive effort to address all existing
and potential problems, not solely a response to im-
mediate problems. Viewed from the civilian world,
military planning is essentially a comprehensive risk
management method in which the consequences of the
occurrence of events at risk is “disaster.” Because they
provide the venue for the confluence of intelligence,
a national security focus, long-service national secu-
rity professionals, and a planning culture, military bu-

81
reaucracies are arguably the only organizations able to
identify and coordinate a response to the multi-modal,
hard-to-recognize, and hard-to-define threats typi-
cal of unrestricted warfare. The obligation therefore
rests on them to accept the responsibility to exercise
bureaucratic leadership so as to stimulate and orga-
nize national responses to diffuse, often nonmilitary,
threats. This necessarily involves campaign planning
as a bureaucracy-centric rather than commander-cen-
tric activity, and therefore rests on influence and peer
leadership more than it does on command authority
or direction. Only military bureaucracies at the seat of
government can exercise strategic art to plan and ex-
ecute “national campaigns” of the sort envisaged, for
example, in the Joint Operating Environment.
Campaign planning should be a strategic artifact,
conducted in national capitals and involving the
detailed coordination of domestic and international
politics with military, diplomatic, economic, and
informational actions. This resulting multi-modal
campaign will likely comprise a number of lines of
operation, both military and nonmilitary. Within
this multi-modal campaign, there are two alternative
models for operational art:
• It can be focused on the achievement of the
campaign objectives within one line of operation,
either within a geographic subdivision of the
theater, or within the theater as a whole; or,
• It can be focused on the achievement of campaign
objectives for all the lines of operation within a
geographic subdivision of the theater.

It is clear from the doctrines of the Anglophone

armies that we aspire to the latter model in which the
relevant commander is applying both military and

82
nonmilitary resources to the achievement of objectives
in social, political, economic, and security arenas within
his assigned boundaries. The extent to which this more
attractive comprehensive model is achievable will
depend on the extent to which strategic art is able to
establish unity of command. It is only sensible to ask a
commander to conduct multi-modal operations across
a number of lines of operation if he is also delegated
control over the necessary resources. The procedures
for this in the military are well established, but control
of interagency and other resources remains prob-
lematic.
Without this control, the independence necessary for
the commander to sequence tactical actions in pursuit of
campaign objectives—i.e., to perform operational art—
is missing. Resolving conflicting interagency priorities,
work practices, and worldviews by negotiation and
consensus-building may be necessary in today’s
complex operations, but it is not operational art: it is
simply muddling through. The type of multi-modal
coordination described, for example, in the Australian
Army’s concept Adaptive Campaigning, the U.S. Joint
Operating Environment, and the British Comprehensive
Approach cannot be realized without the establishment
of a high degree of unity of command across military
and nonmilitary agencies that is, in turn, further
delegated to geographically focused headquarters.110
This is a worthy aspiration, but one which will likely
remain only aspiration until demands arise that are
more compelling than the current rash of small wars.
Even the less ambitious first model above is
exceedingly difficult, but it at least proffers the prospect
of practicality. In this model, military or nonmilitary
leaders would be responsible for sequencing actions
within a specified line of operation. This allows

83
the problems of interagency coordination, at least
potentially, to be managed as part of the management
of the campaign as a whole instead of becoming a
problem delegated to some hapless junior commander.
If strategic art is able to achieve sufficient bureaucratic
consensus to deliver a practical level of unity of
command within a line of operation, then there may
be opportunities to achieve operational art within that
line.
This, however, again threatens to take a relatively
simple idea and extend it into new and untested areas.
Are actions sequenced within a line of operation focused
on infrastructure or law and order actually operational
art? They fit the formal definition but may no longer
involve military resources, military objectives, or
military command. Is extending its meaning into this
realm productive or useful? In answering this question,
we must go to the functions of any military theory.
Does “it” (the redefinition) help us better understand
the problem of war, train individuals, structure
organizations, or acquire equipment? Does it explain
the military problem to political leadership? Again, it
seems to us that by unwittingly extending the meaning
of operational art to meet emerging conceptual needs,
its meaning and military utility are diluted and
devalued. Interagency cooperation needs be explained,
trained, and done by governments, it needs be taught to
commanders, and the military needs to be prepared to
participate. This does not, however, define its place in
theory. Interagency coordination within a campaign is
not necessarily operational art because not everything
that happens within a campaign is.
If operational art were to be returned to its
traditional enclosure—as the sequencing of tactical
actions to achieve objectives provided by the campaign

84
plan—and if it were to retain its traditional focus on the
enemy, then it has utility as an intellectual framework
supporting the preparation for war. It would not,
however, be the war but simply an aspect of warfare to
be exploited or ignored as the circumstances demand.
In acknowledging the complexity and intercon-
nectedness of contemporary conflict, there is a tendency
to be apologetic about the use of force—as if it is in
some sense a measure of failure. Very likely, this is
principally a result of our present overconcentration
on counterinsurgency. In any event, we need to be
careful lest it overwhelm the core of the profession of
arms—which is the skillful use of those arms. Tactical
combat remains the basis of all military endeavor.
The challenges of choosing who, when, where, and
how to fight to achieve an assigned mission remain
the most important ones facing soldiers. Traditional
operational art helps meet those challenges. The
selection of objectives to which operational art should
strive, and their relationship with actions in other lines
of operation, remain a problem for campaign planning
and conduct which is, at least for the present, beyond
the purview or capacity of operational art to resolve.

CONCLUSION: OPERATIONAL ART IS

NOT THE WHOLE OF WARFARE—ONLY A
DISCRETIONARY PART OF IT

Strategical and tactical matters often flow into each

other.

Von der Goltz, 1895

The kind of thinking we have called “operational art” is

often now required at battalion level.

Wass de Czega, 2009

85
 It is in the nature of revolutions that they destroy
what they replace. The 1982 introduction of the
operational level of war into the Anglophone lexicon
was, in this sense, truly revolutionary: it can be said
to have destroyed strategy as it was. This monograph
has dwelt on the historical and elemental roots of the
theoretical and practical underpinnings of the terms
“operational art” and “levels of war,” and explained
the consequences for strategy. That analysis provides
context for a discussion of the need to revisit doctrine
and perhaps pause before piling new conceptual
theory—currently systems and systems design—on a
flawed idea. In the remainder of this monograph, we
initiate that discussion, revisiting our key themes in
the process.
There was a time when the world had no need for
operational art: a time when sovereigns led their armies
in the field and where the yoking of war to politics was
his or her personal undertaking. It was the sovereigns
who chose whether or not to fight, where to fight,
and for how long to fight, and it was they who were
constantly balancing opportunities and threats, risks
and returns, costs and benefits. In the era of “strategies
of a single point,” the connections between tactics and
statecraft were immediate and intimate.
As modern states emerged, their economic and
social organization enabled them to deploy and sustain
armies of ever expanding size. The nation fielding such
armies was increasingly linked to their sustainment
and to their success or failure. This meant that the
conduct of operations was increasingly geared to the
capacity and willingness of the citizens to pay the
price of victory in both blood and treasure. The Army
became, more than ever, an extension of the will of the

86
state, that was, itself, an extension of the will of the
people. Louis XIV’s dictum “L’etat, c’est moi” became
“l’etat, c’est nous.” Accordingly, national leaders were
required not just to manage the international politics
of war but domestic politics at war. This meant that
the “logic” that supported the selection of a course of
action was decreasingly likely to be purely, or even
predominantly, military.
General Ulysses Grant’s campaign in Northern
Virginia in 1864 is an excellent example of the power of
this new domestic political influence. Having appointed
Grant as General in Chief in March of that election
year, President Abraham Lincoln’s direction to him
was to take Richmond.111 In addition to this injunction,
because he feared the adverse electoral impact of yet
another Confederate raid on Washington, Lincoln
insisted that Grant keep the Army of the Potomac
squarely between that city and General Robert E. Lee’s
Army of Virginia. This obliged Grant to campaign
overland through northern Virginia rather than exploit
the Atlantic flank by approaching Richmond through
North Carolina. Lincoln also ordered Grant to appoint
Generals Benjamin Butler and Franz Sigel to command
two supporting offensives on the James River and in
the Shenandoah Valley, respectively.112 Butler was a
prominent Democrat with presidential aspirations,
and Lincoln was keen to show that he was not fighting
a solely Republican war. Sigel, on the other hand,
brought with him a large constituency of German
immigrants. Both Butler and Sigel failed, and Grant,
after The Wilderness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, and
Cold Harbor, eventually found himself southeast of
Richmond—probably not too far from where he would
have started without Lincoln’s directives.
The intimacy of the relationship between politics
and the conduct of war is also apparent in subsesquent

87
events. By 1864, the Confederacy was economically
broken and scraping the bottom of its pool of manpower,
whereas the Union was growing in both economic and
military power. However, if the northern electorate
had rejected Lincoln in the election of 1864, there
was every possibility of the Confederacy achieving
a negotiated peace based on the overturning of the
Emancipation Proclamation and, in effect, a return to
the status quo ante. In terms of the Union war effort, the
cost in blood of the campaign in northern Virgina, the
extension of the war into 1865, General Jubal Early’s
raid on Washington in July resulting from Sigel’s
failure, and Butler’s failure on the James River could
all be recovered from. But a defeat by Lincoln in the
election could not have been recouped.
In addition to this tightening of the coupling betwe-
en national politics and the conduct of operations, the
expansion of war also had two important consequences
for the evolution of operational art: the need for a
succession of blows to defeat a modern nation-state
and the problem of linking tactical actions across an
ever expanding theater of operations to the political
purposes of the war.
Wars are fought to redistribute political power
across national boundaries. The most worn path to that
redistribution has been for each of the belligerents to
attempt to remove the powers of resistance of the other.
In the era of strategies of a single point, this was often,
at least notionally, accomplished in a single climactic
battle. As armies grew, however, and as the size of the
theater of operations grew accordingly, the prospects
of defeating the armed forces of a modern state in a
single decisive battle receded dramatically. As a result,
the need for a number of battles to be connected in such
a way as to most effectively and economically disarm

88
the enemy was widely recognized. In Europe at least,
warfare was typically based on the annihilation of the
armed forces of the enemy and typically required the
connection of a number of battles.
The expansion of the theater of operations also
removed the actions of those armies from the direct
scrutiny of the sovereign, with the connection between
war and politics becoming unacceptably stretched.
In an era of poor communications, the problems of
coordinating the actions of armies that might be spread
across the continent of Europe became increasingly
salient. If the sovereign could not be present to link
tactics with politics, how could he be confident that
this connection was in some way being made?
The idea of the campaign was expanded to fill the
dual need: the need to connect a succession of battles
to disarm the enemy, and the need to reconnect tactics
and politics. To do this, the term “campaign” gained
a geographic meaning in addition to its traditional
temporal one. The campaign had always been a discrete
and identifiable portion of the war which somehow
contributed to the favorable resolution of the whole,
but it grew to mean not only a set of activities within
a temporally circumscribed “season” but became, as
necessary, the pursuit of the war’s objectives by an
independent commander acting beyond the immediate
scrutiny of his sovereign. The objectives which this
commander strove to achieve, however, were not his
own; rather, they were laid down by the sovereign and
formed the bridge between the specific campaign and
the wider war.
The framework provided by the direction, cam-
paign objectives, geographic boundaries, resources,
and other necessaries provided by the sovereign
determined the freedom of action available to the

89
campaign commander. Within those freedoms, he
was able to sequence battles as he thought necessary
so as to achieve the objectives that had been assigned
to him. The entirety of the campaign objectives might,
on occasion, be achieved by a single sequence of
battles. More likely, however, a number of sequences,
each directed at somehow setting the conditions
for the next step, would be necessary. In the former
case, the “operation” or sequence of tactical actions
connected by a unifying idea, and the “campaign”
were synonymous. In the latter case, the campaign
consisted of a number of separate operations that each
contributed to the whole. The cascading hierarchy of
objectives—political, strategic, campaign, operational,
and tactical—reconnected tactical action to the political
purposes of the war and again, at least notionally,
enabled the succession of blows delivered by an
independent commander to contribute directly to the
annihilation of the enemy army as a whole.
World War I was the quintessential European
dynastic war. Although the objective technological,
economic, and social conditions that determined the
character of warfare were quite familiar in the West, the
failure of the initial plans of the Germans and French
led to the establishment of a stabilized front with
no apparently assailable flank. Along this front, the
tactical defensive power conferred by the combination
of field fortifications, artillery, and machine guns, in
combination with the ability conferred by railways
to move masses of men and materiel from place to
place along it, created a military problem to which no
solution was found during the course of the war.
In the period after World War I, while the world’s
political leaders were busy redistributing political
power and creating the League of Nations, soldiers

90
got on with preparing for the next war. The military
problems that World War I had presented became the
focus of that preparation. In Germany, they resulted
in tactical innovations intended to restore effective
striking power to the tactical offensive—Blitzkrieg—
which would reenable the preferred forms for German
large-scale maneuver—kesselschlacht—intended to
annihilate the armed forces of the enemy.
In the USSR similar responses to the challenges
highlighted by World War I led to the identification
of operational art as a discrete component of military
science. After a lengthy debate, the Soviets settled on
the deep attack as the basic offensive technique. This
involved a general offensive to suppress the enemy’s
ability to conduct defensive maneuver, the application
of enormously powerful combined arms armies to
create penetrations, and then the extension of these
penetrations into the depth of the enemy defensive
layout to encircle large agglomerations of combat
power preparatory to their annihilation.
It was within the context of the extension of the
initial penetrations that the role for operational art first
emerged. To maintain momentum and continue to
deepen the penetrations faster than the enemy could
respond, deep echelonment of forces was envisaged. As
each echelon achieved its objectives, its successor would
assume the lead and push on to its own objectives, etc.
Within each of these echelons, typically at the level of
army command, there would be a succession of battles
by regiments, by divisions, or by the army as a whole
intended to both secure the objective and annihilate the
enemy forces occupying the geographic space between
the starting point and the objective. This formed the
operation, decisive within its own depth, and within

91
which lay the opportunity for the application of
operational art in the thoughtful combination of tactics
and logistics to meet the objectives of the operation.
Good operational art made for successful operations,
successful operations contributed to a successful deep
attack, successful deep attacks led to the encirclement of
the enemy, and the continuation of the general offensive
that had initially suppressed the enemy front led to the
annihilation of the encircled enemy. Repetition of this
mechanism would eventually lead to the disarming of
the enemy and the opportunity for the USSR to dictate
the terms of the subsequent peace. “Operations” and
operational art in the USSR were essential but modest
components of military science, clearly subordinate to
the campaign plan which was itself a product of the
supreme headquarters working in conjunction with the
political leadership in the European strategic context.
The Anglophone world remained throughout
this revolution largely oblivious to the emergence
of the operation or the advent of operational art and
arguably a relatively smaller body of formal land
doctrine addressing issues above tactical training.
Attitudes in the West began to change with the rise
of NATO and saw marked movement in 1982 when
the U.S. Army published FM-100-5, reintroducing
to English the idea of “operations,” and in the 1986
version, the term “operational art.” During this same
period, probably for a combination of reasons, rather
than adopting the prevailing understanding of the
meanings and role of operations and operational art,
the U.S. Army acceded to the idea of an operational
level of war and introduced it to NATO. Our research
has established that this new “level” was simply an
artifact. While giving “nodding acknowledgment” to
the German and Soviet theorists, it had no historical

92
or practical precursors and represented at best a
convenient analytical way station for training purposes.
Unfortunately, it also established a point of departure
for a new and profoundly erroneous interpolation in
military theory.
In the American/NATO usage of FM-100-5, rather
than meeting its original purpose of contributing
to the attainment of campaign objectives laid down
by strategy, operational art—practiced as a “level
of war”—assumed the responsibility for campaign
planning and, by reducing the political leadership
to the role of “strategic sponsors,” quite specifically
widened the gap between politics and warfare. The
result has been a well-demonstrated ability to win
battles that have not always contributed to strategic
success, i.e., “a way of battle rather than a way of war.”
To a large extent, the creation of an operational level of
war undid all the good effort to constructively connect
politics and tactics that had been expended by theorists
since Moltke.
This pernicious solecism—operational level of
war—has confused our response to the continuing
evolution of warfare. At a time when the connections
between tactics and politics are being continuously
strengthened and exploited by actual and putative
enemies, we have stretched the meaning of operational
art until it has become a near synonym for the entirety
of warfare. In combination with its role as a defining
component of the jurisdiction of the profession of
arms, it has effectively discouraged us from making
the institutional adaptations necessary to cope with
the increasing connectedness of the more-military and
less-military aspects of contemporary warfare.
Clausewitz’s dictum that war is an extension of
politics by other means is universally recognized

93
and lauded—but perhaps not always understood in
practice. To be fully understood it might have to be
paired with former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill’s
aphorism that “all politics is local.” Strategists and
soldiers tend to see war as an extension of policy—
the pursuit of rationally derived goals through
the application of effort commensurate with their
professional responsibility. Clausewitz, arguably
demonstrating greater wisdom, saw war as an
extension of politics—“a chaotic process involving
competing personalities (whose individual actions may
indeed have a rational basis), chance and friction, and
popular emotion.”113 In a war, the actions of all of the
protagonists are determined by this interaction of
policy and politics. To isolate one from the other is to
ignore a critical part of the whole.
The political leadership of a country cannot simply
set objectives for a war, provide the requisite materiel,
then stand back and await victory. Nor should the
nation or its military be seduced by this prospect.
Politicians must necessarily be concerned with the
minute-to-minute conduct of war and today’s plethora
of military actions. Only thus can they adjust to the
working of the adversary’s remarkable trinity and that
of other interested states, while managing their own
“trinity.” Thus political considerations are “influential
in the planning of war, of the campaign, and often
even of the battle.”114 Clausewitz further cautions us
that multiple points of view—administrative, military,
political—cannot be a basis for planning wars and that
the political perspective must be given precedence
over everything.115
Faced with U.S. military strength as the backbone of
military power in “The West,” thoughtful enemies will
seek paths to victory that do not rest solely on direct

94
military contests with the United States. The Vietnam
War demonstrated to the world the fractiousness of U.S.
politics. Though the North Vietnamese were seemingly
accidental beneficiaries of it, their experience has
provided a lesson widely recognized by putative adver-
saries. There is in Liang and Xiangsui’s Unrestricted
War and other present literature a recognition that
American confidence in the technological aspects
of war has traditionally led to less emphasis on its
political foundations, leading to a popular reluctance
to keep the nation’s shoulder to the wheel. The result
of this broad perception will be adversaries that seek
to fight us more in the cultural and political domains
than in the military. Such enemies do not buy into
neat mechanistic warfare based on the defense of
bureaucratic jurisdictions. Rather, they require that all
of the instruments of national power be considered as
fingers on the right hand of government.
If operational art is the entirety of warfare from
campaign design down to battalion level—and if
it is principally the purview of the military—then
the type of “national campaigns” envisaged in the
Joint Operating Environment, seeking the coherent
and direct application of all of the instruments of
national power, are beyond our reach. Perhaps we
should use the term “strategic art” to encompass the
bureaucratic effort required to deal with the types of
diffuse, nuanced, and complex problems we anticipate
in the future. At present, operational art is filling that
space—as it unthinkingly threatens to fill the space
occupied by tactics and even minor tactics: if battalion
commanders are operational artists, as suggested in
the quotation at the start of this section, then surely the
strategic corporal also needs to be one.
Despite the doctrine presently published by
the world’s militaries, doctrine which preaches

95
independence for combatant commanders, there is no
evidence that politicians are content to set concrete
objectives and then sit back and passively watch the
conduct of a war for which they are responsible to
both their domestic and international constituencies
now and for the rest of history. The development of
a military theory based on a rejection of empirical
experience in favor of an undemonstrated ideal does
not guarantee failure—but it makes failure more likely.
The U.S. theory of an operational level of war charged
with campaign planning and working in conjunction
with the existing post-Goldwater-Nichols security
hierarchy threatens effective campaign planning.
Specifically, it threatens to resist close engagement
with the political and bureaucratic leadership until
strategic pressures become intolerable, at which time
the “10,000-mile screw driver” pierces the carapace
of the operational commander, often to his chargrin.
Or, more usually, the operational level theory means
that a campaign is undertaken without the strategic
level being fully engaged in examination of the ends-
ways-means interaction, with resulting self-imposed
strategic surprise which needs to be dealt with as the
war progresses.
The result has been characterized as “compression”
of the operational level of war, in which the strategic
level is charged with being guilty of intrusion into the
realms of operations and tactics. If the reader accepts
the journey of discovery embodied in this monograph,
he or she will reject the foregoing charge. Operational
art arose as the industrial revolution expanded the
battlefield with the result that strategy was unable to
sustain adequate intimacy in its dialogue with tactics.
The more limited character of contemporary wars and
the state of communications technologies have now

96
removed these barriers, making it feasible for strategy
to reconnect with tactics in the way nature intended.
Rather than the operational level being compressed,
strategy is reasserting its rightful role and attempting
to meet its responsibilities, this in the face of the dual
resistances presented by the enemy and a dysfunctional
military doctrine.
The term “operational art” can mean anything
we decree it to mean, but it cannot usefully mean
everything we presently think it does. It is not at all
clear that interagency operational art is practical nor
that a logical line of operation seeking to establish the
rule of law in a vanquished foe can truly be said to
contain opportunities for operational art. Arguably,
we are confusing the terms “operational art” and
“purposeful action.” To be useful, trainable, and
applicable, operational art must have meaningful
boundaries.
As the West becomes increasingly apologetic
about the application of force, the original meaning
and purpose of operational art—the thoughtful
combination of tactics and logistics to achieve assigned
objectives (principally the annihilation of the enemy)—
has become hidden by the well-intentioned but
problematic attempt to “do good,” rather than simply
stopping the enemy from “doing bad.” Even in today’s
counterinsurgencies, the sequences of tactical actions
necessary to destroy the enemy’s military capabilities
and capacity present generous scope for the application
of operational art as it was originally conceived.
However, as long as we confuse operational art with
the distribution of electricity to the civilian populace,
we are unlikely to find the clarity necessary to do this.
It is time we returned operational art to its original
province. Without good strategy which acknowledges

97
the abstractions and dynamism of politics and designs
campaigns accordingly, operational art is bereft of its
guiding logic and becomes pointless. Operational art
is not the entirety of warfare. Operational art is not
the design and conduct of campaigns. Operational
art is not an interagency problem. Operational art is
the thoughtful sequencing of tactical actions to defeat
a component of the armed forces of the enemy. Good
operational art, demonstrated as often as necessary
to support the achievement of campaign objectives,
ensures that tactical actions contribute to the attainment
of the purpose of a war—and that is all.

98
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103
ENDNOTES

1. Shimon Naveh, In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution

of Operational Theory, Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1997, p. 186.

2. This is an esoteric point that might require enlargement.

The extreme case is instructive because the linkages are clear. The
act of employing a nuclear weapon is tactical—but the strategic
consequences extend not just to the resolution of the specific war
but also to the world order that prevails afterwards and the relative
standing of the countries using or impacted by the weapons. The
same problem is attendant on the use of all weapons although not
in as overt or extreme a manner. The debate about the Israeli use
of cluster bombs in Lebanon in 2006 and of white phosphorus in
Gaza in 2008-09 present examples of this connection between the
tactical and strategic.

3. Herbert Rosinski, “Scharnhorst to Schlieffen: ‘The Rise and

Decline of German Military Thought’,” Naval War College Review,
Summer 1976, p. 85.

4. Ibid., p. 103.

5. Michael I. Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought,

London, United Kingdom: Frank Cass, 2001, p. 345.

6. Huba Wass de Czega, “Systemic Operational Design:
Learning and Adapting in Complex Missions,” Military Review,
January/February 2009. We think that, in the language of Isaiah
Berlin, this makes Sun Tsu and Confucius foxes, and we in the
West hedgehogs:

[F]oxes seek many ends at the same time and see the
world in all its complexity, [but] never integrating
their thinking into one overall concept. Hedgehogs
simplify a complex world into a single, organizing idea,
a basic principle that organizes and guides everything.
A hedgehog reduces all challenges and dilemmas to
simple—indeed almost simplistic—hedgehog ideas.
Hedgehogs understand that the essence of profound
insight is simplicity. Hedgehogs aren’t simpletons: they

104
 have a piercing insight that allows them to see through
complexity and discern underlying patterns.

Perhaps there is still a debate to be had about the relative

advantages that foxes and hedgehogs might bring to today’s
“complex missions.”

7. Here, for the students of systems theory, it is important

to recognize that the belligerent systems do not “compete” in
the systems sense, within a shared rule set. Rather, they are in
combat, each intent on the subversion of the other’s “ends,” to the
advantage of their own. In a formal sense, one end state/steady
state cannot be designed without the participation of, rather than
merely intimate knowledge of, the other. In combat this occurs at
the peace, not before.

8. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, for example, King

of Prussia Frederick Wilhelm; his Chancellor, Bismarck; and the
Chief of the General Staff, Moltke, all shared a single deployed
headquarters, whereas on the French side, Napoleon III and
substantial portions of his cabinet were similarly deployed.

9. Antoine Henri Jomini, “Summary of the Art of War,” Roots

of Strategy Book 2, Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1987, p. 460.
Colonel G. F. R. Henderson took up this idea and explained
that grand tactics were to minor tactics what the latter were to
drill. They involve adapting the power of combination to the
requirements of battle. More intriguingly, Henderson notes that
Grand Tactics “deal principally with moral factors”; and their chief
end is the concentration of superior force, moral and physical, at
the decisive point and are “the art of generalship [and] include
those stratagems, maneuvers, and devices by which victories are
won, and concern only those officers who may find themselves in
independent command.” This is more expansive than Jomini and
begins to create a bridge to what we would today call operational
art. G. F. R. Henderson, “Strategy and its Teaching,” Journal of the
RUSI, No. 42, July 1898, p. 767.

10. He notes:

Grand Tactics is the art of forming good combinations

preliminary to battles as well as during their progress.

105
 The guiding principle in tactical combinations, as in
those of strategy, is to bring the mass of the force at
hand against a part of the opposing army and upon
that point the possession of which promises the most
important results. . . . I am of the opinion that if it be a
general’s design to make himself master of his enemy’s
communications while at the same time holding his
own, he should employ strategic rather than tactical
combinations.

Jomini, pp. 494-495.

11. Ibid., p. 461.

12. Ibid., p. 439.

13. Ibid., p. 447.

14. See Handel, pp. 435-452, which discusses Clausewitz’

Gestalt view of war; and Alan D. Beyerchen, “Clausewitz Non-
linearity and the Unpredictability of War,” International Security,
Vol. 17, No. 3, Winter, 1992, pp. 55-90.

15. For an expansion on this argument, see E. J. Villacres and

C. Bassford, “Reclaiming the Remarkable Trinity,” Parameters,
Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, Autumn 1995.

16. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, M. Howard and P. Paret,

eds., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, book 2, chap.
1.

17. Daniel J. Hughes, Moltke on the Art of War, Novato, CA:

Presidio Press, 1993. Many of Moltke’s writings on war include
much that is either directly quoted from, or which rests heavily
on, Clausewitz.

18. Gordon A. Craig, The Battle of Koniggratz, Philadelphia,

PA, and New York: J B Lippincot Co., 1964, p. xi.

19. Ibid., p. 175.

20. The literature is rich with discussion of Schlieffen’s

approach to operational art and its consequences for the conduct

106
of World War I, for example, but in reality Schlieffen and the
German General Staff were conducting strategic art by linking
the processes of war initiation, mobilization, and deployment
to set the conditions for the start of a number of simultaneous
campaigns that were connected by a unifying strategic idea.

21. We think that an argument could be made that operational

art was actually born during the American Civil War where in the
campaign in the West, General William T. Sherman sequenced
tactical action in accordance with a campaign design provided
by General Ulysses Grant. For whatever reasons, however, this
did not influence the development of theory and so represents
an early but terminal branch on the evolution of the theory of
operational art which took place exclusively in Europe until well
after World War II.

22. G. Isserson, “The Evolution of Operational art,” H. S.

Orenstein, ed., The Evolution of Soviet Operational art: 1927-1991:
The Documentary Basis, London, UK: Frank Cass, 1995, p. 55.

23. Although Königgrätz was preceded by three subordinate

battles, Gitchin, Tratenau, and Nachod, they were all part of a
concentric movement of forces towards the focus of Königgrätz.
In contrast, the war of 1870 opened with the battles of Werth and
Spicheren which were fought as elements of an expanding front.

24. Isserson, “The Evolution,” p. 59.

25. A. J. Echevarria, After Clausewitz: German Military Thinkers

Before the Great War, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press,
2000, p. 212. In 1905 Schlieffen, Chief of the German General
Staff, recognized the importance of the overall battle when he
invoked it as a means of overcoming the trend for contemporary
operations to slip into positional warfare, as had occurred in the
Russo-Japanese War. He therefore demanded unceasing combat
activity all along the line with all engagements, small and large,
contributing to the progress of the attack and to the development
of the overall battle. “Actions along one wing would contribute to
those on the other. A defensive action by one corps might enable
another to move forward.” All commanders would be expected to
constantly disrupt, spoil, or preempt enemy preparations.

107
 26. This is the first mention we can find of the use of “operation”
with its special meaning. See Baron Colmar Von der Goltz, “The
Operations” Section 8, The Conduct of War, 1895. A photocopy
of this document, produced by the U.S. Army War College Art
of War Colloquium in February 1983, is in the possession of the
authors. It is noteworthy that this definition appeared in the U.S.
Army publication, “The Principles of Strategy” (1920), which
was intended to provide an American text for the General Staff
School to replace Von der Goltz’ original. On this basis, the idea of
“Operations” as a cluster of tactical actions connected by a unifying
idea was already established in U.S. understanding prior to 1920
but had somehow been lost until it was resurrected by in FM 100-
5 in 1982. See Michael Matheny, In the Beginning, unreferenced
photocopy passed to the authors by Colonel Matheny in 2001.

27. Prussian Field Service Regulations 1869; Michael D.

Krause, “Moltke and the Origins of the Operational Level of War,”
Military Review, September 1990.

28. Moltke on the Art of War, pp. 13, 36.

29. Hughes, p. 47.

30. Ibid., p. 45.

31. Carl von Clausewitz, Hans Gatzke, ed., Principles of War,

Harrisburg, PA: The Military Service Publishing Company, 1948,
p. 46.

32. By way of contrast, in much of our practice today we have

stepped away from strategies of annihilation to embrace strategies
of exhaustion. In this, annihilation is focused on the destruction of
the military capacity of the enemy in order to be able to dictate the
terms of the peace, and exhaustion is focused on denying a more
powerful enemy victory long enough to exhaust him physically,
morally, or politically. Admittedly, these are in practice two
extremes on a continuum, with both being in play in most wars,
but it is important for our purposes to isolate them in terms of their
intent. Annihilation is the customary western approach to war.
Of course, wars do not end until one of the belligerents accepts
that he is beaten. Annihilation attempts to crush the enemy’s will
to resist by destroying his ability to resist, allowing the victor

108
to dictate subsequent events. A strategy of exhaustion, on the
other hand, tries to get to Clausewitz’ third point more directly,
by convincing the enemy that victory is either unachievable or,
if achievable, that the fruits of victory are not worth the trouble
being taken. Exhaustion is the classic strategy of the insurgent.

33. Clausewitz, p. 91.

34. Walter Goerlitz, The German General Staff, New York:

Praeger, 1953, p. 92.

35. Echavarria, p. 211, establishes that these understandings

had taken root in Germany as well as in imperial Russia.

36. John Keegan, Mask of Command, London, UK: Pimlico,

2004, p. 248.

37. Arden Bucholz, Moltke, Schlieffen and Prussian War Planning,

Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers, 1991, p. 314.

38. Ibid., p. 2.

39. Ibid., p. 147.

40. Dieter Brand, “The Origins of Freie Operationen,” Military

Review, July/August 2000, discusses the concept in some detail.

41. Barbara Tuchman, “Von Kluck’s Turn,” Chapter 21, The

Guns of August, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1988,
discusses this decision and its consequences in some detail.

42. Matthew Cooper, The German Army 1933-45: Its Political

and Military Failure, London, UK: Macdonald and Janes, 1978, p.
133.

43. Ibid., p. 134.

44. Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories, London, UK: Greenhill

Books, Herts, 1987, is the best reference for the development of
Fall. Robert A. Doughty, The Breaking Point: Sedan and the Fall of
France, Hamden, CT: Archon, 1990, is best for a description of
Guderian’s operations. Guderian is interesting because, taking

109
freie operationen to the extreme, he was largely responsible for
dragging his superiors across France while they resisted his
progress as best they could.

45. Manstein, pp. 175-178.

46. Much of the detail for this section is taken from U.S.
Department of the Army, The German Campaign in Russia: Planning
and Operations (1940-42), Washington, DC, 1955, pp. 6-36.

47. The placement of officers of the General Staff as Chiefs

of Staff and operations officers at each Headquarters down to at
least Corps level and sometimes lower made German operational
planning more collaborative and less hierarchical than our
understanding of the Anglophone equivalents. With each of these
officers bringing the particular focus of his formation but the
shared perspective of the General Staff, this, in turn, supported
the maintenance of intimacy in the conversation between strategy
and tactics.

48. Alan Clark, Barbarossa, London, UK: Cassell, 2005, p. 144.

49. Matthew Cooper, The German Army 1939-1945, p. 290.

There is not space here to discuss German operational art during
defensive maneuver but there are good examples in both Russia
and France of that aspect.

50. Orenstein, pp. xiii-xviii, describes this taxonomy in detail.

51. A. A. Svechin, Strategy and Operational Art, in Orenstein, p.

7.

52. I. Mariyevsky, Formation and Development of the Theory of

Operational art (1918-38), in Orenstein, p. 306.

53. James. J. Schneider, The Structure of a Strategic Revolution,

Novato CA: Presidio Press, 1994, traces the entire debate in some
detail.

54. Mariyevsky, p. 307, notes that, at least initially based on

the lessons of World War I, Frunze held the contrary position
“one could not place before oneself the aim of ‘destroying’ the

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enemy. . . . This is a dream that cannot be fulfilled.” Svechin put
forward similar views in Strategy and Operational Art, pp. 9-13.

55. Schneider, p. 177.

56. Ibid., p. 178. (As an aside—the soldierly hubris that

“today’s wars are different from yesterday’s wars” is salient here.
Cf. Clausewitz, “As a rule destroying the enemy’s forces tends to
be a gradual process,” p. 90.

57. M. Tukhachevskiy, “Voyna klopov,” Revolyustiya I voyna,

No. 22, 1923, quoted in Jacob Kipp, “Two Views of Warsaw: The
Russian Civil War and Soviet Operational Art, 1920-1932,” in
B. J. McKerchner and M. C. Hennessy, eds., The Operational Art:
Developments in the Theory of War, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996,
p. 53. Tukhachevskiy wrote the Preface to the Russian version of
Fuller’s Reformation of War in which he takes the time to challenge
much of what Fuller had to say. The Foreword in its entirety is
reproduced in R. E. Simpkin, Deep Battle, The Brainchild of Marshal
Tukhachevsky, London, UK: Brassey’s Defence Publishers, pp. 125-
134.

58. Tukhachevskiy considered encirclement to be the optimum

outcome of the deep attack and discusses it in some depth in New
Problems in Warfare.

59. G. Isserson, “Operational Prospects for the Future,”

H. S. Orenstein, ed., The Evolution of Soviet Operational Art: The
Documentary Basis, Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1995, p. 81.

60. Kipp, p. 309.

61. E. F. Ziemke, “The Soviet Theory of Deep Operations,”

Parameters, Vol. XIII, No. 2, 1982.

62. The most informative account of post-World War II

Soviet developments we have found is David M. Glantz, “Soviet
Operational Art Since 1936: ‘The Triumph of Maneuver War’,”
in Bruce W. Menning, ed., Historical Perspectives of the Operational
Art.

63. Svechin, quoted in Schneider, p. 175.

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 64. Triandafillov, “The Nature of Operations of Modern
Armies,” quoted in Schneider, p. 191.

65. Svechin, p. 6.

66. J. Kipp, “Two Views of Warsaw: The Russian Civil War

and Soviet Operational Art, 1920-1932,” in McKerchner and
Hennessy, p. 74. By the end of World War II, Soviet thinking
had begun to encompass the “salient thrust” which was a deep
attack intended not at encirclement but at splitting or shattering
the defensive front. This reflected the Soviets’ overwhelming and
growing materiel superiority over their German enemy and the
Hitler-directed propensity for German forces to stay in place. The
end result—annihilation—was the same.

67. Isserson, p. 66; and Schneider, p. 185.

68. George Orwell’s review of Liddell Hart, “The British Way

in Warfare,” New Statesman, November 21, 1942, quoted in Gat
Azar, A History of Military Thought, Oxford, CT: Oxford University
Press, 2001, p. 685.

69. J. S. Corum, The Roots of Blitzkrieg, Lawrence: University

of Kansas Press, 1992, analyzes the development of Blitzkrieg,
and in pp. 139-141, the role of British theorists, in some detail.
Although the Germans were certainly aware of Fuller in particular
and Liddell-Hart to a lesser extent, it would be unreasonable to
ascribe to either more than a marginal and diffuse influence.

70. For summaries of the debate about the British contribution

to the birth of Blitzkrieg, see Azar Gat, “Liddell-Hart’s Theory
of Armoured Warfare: Revising the Revisionists,” The Journal of
Strategic Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, March 1996, pp. 1-30; and Brian
Holden Reid, Studies in British Military Thought—Debates with
Fuller and Liddell-Hart, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1998.

71. This discussion is taken from Reid, pp. 74-75.

72. Tukhachevskiy, p. 53.

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 73. B. H. Liddell-Hart, Strategy, New York: Meridian, 1991, p.
324. For clarity in this monograph, the authors have here substi-
tuted operational art for Liddell-Hart’s usage of “Strategy.”

74. Ibid., p. 326.

75. Gat, “Liddell-Hart: Revising the Revisionists,” p. 11.

76. At the time he was writing “Strategy,” Liddell-Hart was

also working on his excellent study of Sherman: Soldier, Realist,
American, London, UK: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1929.

77. Gat, “Liddell-Hart: Revising the Revisionists,” p. 9.

78. Ibid., p. 14; Liddell-Hart, “Strategy,” p. 326. This provides

further and important contrast to the Soviet approach to
operational art in which they perceived the logistics of sustaining
striking power into depth as being as important as the actual
fighting. Soviet operational art, being about the application of
mass, is logistics-based.

79. Liddell-Hart, “Strategy,” p. 327.

80. From an article in The Times, September 18, 1935, quoted in

Gat, “Liddell-Hart: Revising the Revisionists,” p. 11.

81. Naveh.

82. It could be argued that in his discussion of Soviet

operational theory, Naveh overplays the role of systems theory.
No soldier can fail to have a systems view of warfare—everything
is clearly connected with everything else—and for the Soviets, this
view, filtered through Marxist reductionism, leads to enormously
detailed analysis of the multiple resultant interactions. Although
systems thinking was apparent in many sociological, economic,
and natural history tracts (Darwin’s Origin of Species, for example)
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, general systems theory
as an independent body of thought did not emerge until the
second half of the 20th century and is unlikely to have influenced
Tukhachevskiy and his colleagues who, with the exception of
Isserson, were by that time dead.

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 83. Naveh, p. 16. On p. 17 he lists the means of imposing
operational shock as isolating the commander from the system,
separating the layers of the hierarchy(CINC from JTF, JTF from
Corps, Corps from Division) and actions to suppress the enemy
system across its front and through its depth.

84. The Tukhachevskiy quote above is worth repeating in this

context: “[A]n operation is the organized struggle of each of the
armies for the destruction of the men and material of the other.
Not the destruction of some hypothetical, abstract nervous system
of the army, but destruction of the real organism—the troops and
real nervous system of the opponent, the army’s communications,
must be the operational goal.”

85. The Soviet term “shock” as in “shock army” requires some

explanation here. Shock armies were combined arms formations
intended to break into the enemy defense and develop the
penetration through the defensive zone. Once they had secured
a breach and established a bridgehead beyond the defensive
zone, “mobile forces” (initially overwhelmingly tank-heavy and
subsequently a little more balanced in terms of combined arms)
would exploit the penetration and develop it to the objectives of
the operation. The Operational Maneuver Group, for example,
was a “mobile,” not a “shock” formation. Naveh is asking us to
accept that in Soviet terminology shock troops did not shock but
mobile formations did.

86. In Strategy, p. 336, for example, Liddell-Hart lists a number

of points as “the concentrated essence of strategy” that present a
reasonable starting point for any planner: adjust your ends to your
means; keep the object always in mind; choose the line (or course)
of least expectation; exploit the line of least resistance; take a line
of operation which offers alternative objectives; ensure that both
plan and dispositions are flexible; do not throw your weight into a
stroke where your opponent is on guard; and do not attack along
the same line (or in the same form) after it has once failed.

87. The British School’s focus on the psychological impact

persists today in the ideas underpinning effects-based operations,
some of the more extreme aspirations for network-centric
warfare, and some approaches to counterinsurgency. The

114
efficacy, as opposed to the attractiveness, of these ideas remains
undemonstrated.

88. Quoted in Eliot Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers,

Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime, New York: Free Press, 2002,
p. 51.

89. Donn A. Starry, one of the prime movers behind the

doctrine, explains in “A Perspective on American Military
Thought,” Military Review, July 1989, p. 9, that it was intended as
a response to growing Soviet conventional strength and effective
nuclear parity. Also, although not stated explicitly in the manual,
the challenge for American arms that it identifies—“an enemy who
expects to sustain rapid maneuver in the offense,” the expectation
of facing “large numbers of high quality weapon systems; air and
ground maneuver forces; conventional, nuclear and chemical
fires; unconventional warfare; active reconnaissance, and target
acquisition efforts; and electronic warfare”—are a close match to
those expected on the NATO battlefield.

90. Emphasis in design added. Australia defines the operational

level of war as “the planning and conduct of campaigns and major
operations in order to achieve strategic objectives” (ADDP-D
2002, para 3-9). British Defence Doctrine (JDPO-01 2008, para
231) describes the operational level of war as “the level at which
campaigns are planned, conducted and sustained within a theatre
or area of operations.”

91. A. F. Lykke, “Toward an Understanding of Military

Strategy,” Military Review, May 1989, p. 3.

92. Cohen, Appendix.

93. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory
and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, New York: Vintage Books,
1964, pp. 307-308.

94. Ibid., p. 308; and Cohen, p. 228.

95. Cohen, p. 229. The Weinberger doctrine was formulated

by U.S. SECDEF Caspar Weinberger for a speech at the National
Press Club in the wake of the 1983 excursion into Lebanon. It

115
states, inter alia, that the United States should not commit forces to
combat unless the vital national interests of the US or its allies are
involved; that they should only be committed wholeheartedly and
with the clear intention of winning; and that they should only be
committed with clearly defined political and military objectives.
The Powell Doctrine was an expansion of the Weinberger doctrine
articulated by the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General
Colin Powell. Powell reinforced Weinberger’s points above and
added that all nonviolent policy measures needed to have been
fully exhausted, that a plausible exit strategy needed to have been
identified, that the full consequences of U.S. actions needed to
have been fully considered, and that the action have the support
of U.S. domestic and of the wider international audiences.

96. Antulio Echevarria, Towards An American Way of War,

Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College,
March 2004, p. v. To support this proposition, he cites Russell
Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States
Military Strategy and Policy, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1977; and Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and
the Rise of Peace, New York: Da Capo Press, 2003, p. 16. He argues
later that much like its predecessor, the current American way
of war focuses principally on defeating the enemy in battle. Its
underlying concepts are a polyglot of information-centric theories
such as network-centric warfare, rapid decisive operations, and
shock and awe that center on “taking down” an opponent quickly,
rather than finding ways to apply military force in the pursuit of
broader political aims. Moreover, the characteristics of the U.S.
style of warfare—speed, jointness, knowledge, and precision—
are better suited for strike operations than for translating such
operations into strategic successes.

97. An illustration of the close coupling of strategy and

tactics occurred in Iraq in 2007. During the Surge, the selected
counterinsurgency approach was “Clear-Hold-Build.” Buried
deep in the “hold” part was a decision to encircle cleared areas
of Baghdad with concrete “T-Walls” to prevent reinfiltration
by insurgents. This simple and successful tactical measure was
discussed and variously criticized in the Iraqi parliament, the U.S.
Congress, the UN, the various parliaments that comprise Europe,
and the international news media.

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 98. The discussion of the Falklands War rests heavily on Max
Hastings and Simon Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands, London,
UK: Michael Joseph, 1983.

99. Ibid., p. 231.

100. We will admit here to sharing the “hubris of the present.”

Clausewitz, pp. 608-609, notes that:

If war is to be fully consonant with political objectives,

and policy suited to the means available for war, then
unless statesman and soldier are combined in one person,
the only sound expedient is to make the commander-in-
chief a member of the cabinet, so that the cabinet can share
in the major aspects of his activities. But that, in turn, is
only feasible if the cabinet—that is, the government—is
near the theatre of operations, so that decisions can be
taken without serious loss of time.

Even in 1982 the state of electronic communications enabled the

British cabinet to be “close” enough to the theater of operations to
be involved in the major aspects of the campaign commander’s
activities.

101. Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret White House

History, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008.

102. For example, a 1955 German definition provided by

General Hans Speidel states, “Operations . . . is the conduct of
a series of engagements dependent on each other in time, space,
and effect, on the battlefield, and in accordance with the tasks
presented by strategic planning.” J. L. Wallach, The Dogma of the
Battle of Annihilation: The Theories of Clausewitz and Schlieffen and
Their Impact on the German Conduct of Two World Wars, Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1986, p. 11.

103. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare,

Beijing, China: People’s Liberation Army Literature and Arts
Publishing House, February 1999. Other particularly valuable
publications are Michael Evans, “From Kadesh to Kandahar:
Military Theory and the Future of War,” Naval War College
Review, Summer 2003; Frank Hoffman, Hybrid Wars, Arlington,

117
VA: Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, 2007; Australian Army,
Complex Warfighting, Army Headquarters, Canberra ACT 2003;
and U.S. Joint Forces Command, Joint Operating Environment:
Trends and Challenges for the Future Joint Operating Force through
2030, Norfolk, VA, 2007.

104. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, p. 162.

105. Ibid., p. 206.

106. Again, this idea is not entirely novel. Robert Osgood,

perhaps America’s leading theorist of limited war during the Cold
War, maintained that, even in an age laboring under the shadow of
nuclear escalation, the use of military force as a rational extension
of policy still had a place, providing one measured success “only
in political terms and not purely in terms of crushing the enemy.”
Robert E. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957, p. 22. The idea is also
picked up in U.S. Joint Command, p. 64.

While the adversary will not attempt to hold ground or

conduct combined arms warfare against U.S. territory,
warfare will be conducted as strikes that focus on the
erosion of national will by violent attacks against civilians,
and to disrupt our ability to fight abroad by attacking
critical nodes in those systems vital to support military
operations. Over time, the adversary hopes to cause the
withdrawal or disengagement of opposing U.S. forces
and capabilities—without having to actually engage and
defeat our military forces in the field. All capabilities will
be aimed at exhausting the U.S. strategically over time.

107. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, pp. 206-214.

108. U.S. Joint Forces Command, p. 67.

109. Ibid., p. 65.

110. Australian Army, Adaptive Campaigning, Army

Headquarters, Canberra ACT, 2009; The Joint Doctrine & Concepts
Centre, Joint Doctrine Note 4/05, The Comprehensive Approach,
Shrivenham, SWINDON Wilts, UK: Ministry of Defence.

118
 111. Shelby Foote, “Another Grand Design,” The Civil War, A
Narrative, Vol. VII, New York: Random House, 1974, p. 8.

112. Mark Grimsley, “Surviving Military Revolution: The U.S.

Civil War,” in MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray, eds.,
The Dynamics of Military Revolution 1300-2050, Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 82.

113. Villacres, p. 11.

114. US Joint Forces Command, p. 67.

115. Clausewitz, On War, p. 606.

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 ABOUT THE AUTHORS

JUSTIN KELLY retired from the Australian Army in

2007 as a Brigadier. An Armor officer, his last postings
in Australia were as Director General of Future Land
Warfare in Army Headquarters and Commander
of the Land Warfare Development Centre. His
operational appointments included command of the
Peace Monitoring Group on Bougainville, deputy
command of the United Nations peacekeeping force
in East Timor, and Director of Strategic Operations
in Headquarters Multi-National Force-Iraq. Brigadier
Kelley is a graduate of the Royal Military College
Duntroon, Royal Military College of Science (UK),
Army Command and Staff College, Joint Service Staff
College, and the U.S. Army War College.

MICHAEL BRENNAN currently holds the appoint-

ment of Director of General Simulation in the Australian
Department of Defence. His recent appoint-ments
include periods as Research Leader Human Systems
Integration within Australia’s Defence Science and
Technology Organisation and Scientific Adviser–Army.
He was attached to the USMC Warfighting Laboratory
during 1998-1999. Dr. Brennan holds a Ph.D. in Physics
from the Flinders University of South Australia.

The authors have collaborated for over a decade on

aspects of capability and concept development and
in the development of the Australian Army’s military
experimentation system.

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