As Kelly and Brennan point out, “the operation supplanted the campaign which, in turn, became the strategy” (p. However, the political leaders did not incorporate politics into the campaign or tactics sufficiently to achieve a true end to the war. Bush set his political objectives and allowed his generals to do all the campaign planning. The easiest example, which the authors’ mention briefly, is the Persian Gulf War (1990-1991).
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History is ripe with examples (recent ones!) where this approach-politicians setting strategy and remaining disconnected from operational art and tactics-yielded poor results for a state. Abstractly, many Americans would support the concept of a president defining a warpath and letting the generals loose to accomplish the mission as they see fit, but this is explicitly what Kelly and Brennan argue against (p. The result is operational art has morphed into an ambiguous role, as it often overtakes strategy in campaign planning, excluding politicians once they have determined their high-level objectives.
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The use of the word “design” gives this middle tier direct control over campaigning and tactics. Kelly and Brennan’s source of contention comes from the definition from an army manual, which defines operational art as “the employment of military forces to attain strategic goals in a theater through the design, organization, and conduct of campaigns and major operations” (pp. So what is the big deal? I already used the term “barrier” to describe operational art. Yet, as armies and battlefields became bigger and the roles of political leader and military leader separated, there arose a stronger need to translate strategy-the political objectives-to the battlefield. These leaders could give input to or even direct the tactics firsthand. Thus, a state’s leader could determine on the field if a campaign or battle was worth the cost to achieve his political objectives. 1804-1815) campaigning with their armies (p. In modern warfare, Kelly and Brennan use the examples of Prussian King Frederick the Great (r.
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1239-1307), as he conquered Wales and Scotland, or Genghis Khan (r. In the medieval world, state leaders often campaigned with their armies. In ancient Greece, political leaders were often synonymous with generals. Yet, until the past few hundred years, there was not a strong need for anything resembling operational art. In many of my courses, teachers have stressed the need to identify which of the three levels I was operating in when analyzing any battle or war. Finally, tactics are the battles, the fighting. Operational art sits below strategy and focuses on executing tactics in order to achieve the political goals. Strategy, the highest level, represents the political goals of the state orchestrated by the leaders. When I started my degree in military history, one of the first tenants I learned was that there are three distinct levels of war-strategy, operational art, and tactics. I had thought the concept was older than that, but never gave it much thought until now. Most interesting was how the term and its current meaning came into the English-speaking world during the 1980s. Today, it has become a barrier in between strategy and tactics, especially in American wars. In it, they trace the evolution of the term from the industrial period, as it gained prominence in the Soviet and German armies after World War I.
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Justin Kelly and Mike Brennan have produced a convincing monograph on the need to reign in the influence of operational art in American war planning and execution ( Alien: How Operational Art Devoured Strategy).