Operational art
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Operational art is a methodology in military art that ultimately translates strategic aims into a coherent series of tactical missions. It has traditionally been associated with the operational level in the military hierarchy, which is situated between the strategic and tactical levels. Operational art, and the operational level, were first articulated by Soviet military theorists following the Russian Civil War. In the 1920s and 1930s, such military specialists as Sergei Kamenev, Georgii Isserson, Pavel Varfolomeev, Alexsandr Svechin, Vladimir Triandafillov, and Mikhail Tukhachevsky helped to define and develop these principles of the operational level.
Early writers and practitioners in the domain of Operational Art include Sun Tzu, Napoleon Bonaparte, Baron Antoine-Henri de Jomini, and Carl von Clausewitz. More modern writers and practioners of Operational Art include B.H. Liddell Hart, J.F.C. Fuller, and Richard Simpkin.
[edit] U.S. Department of Defense Definition
Operational level as defined by the United States Department of Defense in the Joint Publication 1-02, is the level of war at which campaigns and major operations are planned, conducted, and sustained to accomplish strategic objectives within theaters of war or other operational areas.
Activities at this level link tactics and strategy by establishing operational objectives needed to accomplish the strategic objectives, sequencing events to achieve the operational objectives, initiating actions, and applying resources to bring about and sustain these events.
These activities imply a broader dimension of time or space than do tactics; they ensure the logistic and administrative support of tactical forces, and provide the means by which tactical successes are exploited to achieve strategic objectives.
Opposed to the term tactical level, operational level does not have a similar meaning in a non-military context and is likely to be misunderstood for "functioning".
[edit] Operational Art
Operational art is, at its core, a methodology for fighting systems. A system by definition is a group of interdependent elements forming a complex whole. The very rapid economic, political, and technological developments that occurred from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries had a great impact on warfare, making way for million-man armies armed with highly destructive weaponry. Nations themselves required total commitment of their resources and citizens to make war, in turn, total. Thus, war became larger than ever before, and armies possessed incredible resiliency due to their greater size, the interdependence of weapon systems, and the increased pace of transport due to rail and other modern technological means. Also, the complex infrastructure between the military front and the industrial base of the civilian rear became the strategic engine for total war. Because of all these factors, tactics alone could not be expected to achieve decisive strategic success—as the First World War was to prove. Only by viewing enemy armies as systems, and finding ways to isolate, freeze, or shock them, could an army be fragmented into its separate parts, and more easily destroyed through tactical attrition.
This is not to say that operational art was not practiced before the twentieth century. It may have not been a cognitive concept before Soviet military theorists put words to the principle, but examples of its use in warfare exist throughout history. For example, the Mongols were astute practitioners of operational art.
Also, operational art is not necessarily limited to the operational level. So long as strategic aims can be met, operational art can be practiced at whatever level is most useful or advantageous.
