Operational Art

The art of warfare is practiced in three levels: the strategic, operational, and tactical. Operational art refers to the military commander’s employment of force in a theater of operations to achieve strategic objectives. Operational art is inextricably linked to the planning and conduct of military campaigns in specific theaters of war, which distinguishes it from tactics and strategy. Strategy and tactics have long been studied and described, but the third level of war, the operational level, began to emerge only in the 19th century as nations began to field ever-larger armies. The maneuver of large armies or multiple armies required commanders to orchestrate large-scale maneuvers in the theater of war. During the Napoleonic Wars the aim of this maneuver was the pursuit of the decisive battle, such as Austerlitz and Waterloo. By World War I, it was clear that single battles could not yield strategic results. The armies were simply too large for single decisive battles to provide political results, and so campaigns designed to arrange a series of battles became necessary. During the interwar years, practitioners and theorists from several countries began to formalize theories of operational art. The roots of modern operational art can be traced back to World War I in which the conduct of operations in three dimensions became necessary. Historians have largely overlooked the operational level of war, but to the extent it has been studied, there is a good deal of debate on when, how, and why operational art developed. Scholarship on operational art generally falls into several categories that include current military theorists, schools of thought on the development of operational art, and campaign studies. Some historians assert that the roots of operational art lay with the development of the Prusso-German school in the 19th century. Other historians emphasize the Soviet interwar theorists as the preeminent authors of the concept. A much smaller number of scholars point to the United States contribution to operational art. In general, the study of operational art may be divided into the various schools of thought on the development of operational art, theory, and practice. Although the origins and practice of operational art have long been linked to large-scale conventional military operations, the advent of irregular warfare since 1945 has sparked a debate about the role of operational art in irregular warfare. Theorists, practitioners, and historians have wrestled with the concept of operational art in small wars and counterinsurgency. This recent interest peaked due to US counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.