CDS Professional Reading List: Operational Art

Broadly defined as the grey area between strategy and tactics, operational art spans the theory and practice of planning and conducting campaigns and major operations aimed at accomplishing strategic and operational objectives in a given theatre of operations. An intermediate link between strategy and tactics has always existed, but a distinct concept that encompasses a systematic and deliberate plan of campaign for major operations is a mere two hundred yearsold. Based on country specific case-studies, this book describes how the concepts that underpin operational art originated, how they received practical expression in various campaigns, and, how theydeveloped over time. This book is a project of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.

Military commanders turn tactics into strategic victory by means of "operational art," the knowledge and creative imagination commanders and staff employ in designing, synchronizing, and conducting battles and major operations to achieve strategic goals. Until now, historians of military theory have generally agreed that modern operational art developed between the first and second world wars, not in the United States but in Germany and the Soviet Union, whose armies were supposedly the innovators and greatest practitioners of operational art. Some have even claimed that U.S. forces struggled in World War II because their commanders had no systematic understanding of operational art. Michael R. Matheny believes previous studies have not appreciated the evolution of U.S. military thinking at the operational level. Although they may rightly point to the U.S. Army's failure to modernize or develop a sophisticated combined arms doctrine during the interwar years, they focus too much on technology or tactical doctrine. In his revealing account, Matheny shows that it was at the operational level, particularly in mounting joint and combined operations, that senior American commanders excelled--and laid a foundation for their country's victory in World War II. Matheny draws on archival materials from military educational institutions, planning documents, and operational records of World War II campaigns. Examining in detail the development of American operational art as land, sea, and air power matured in the twentieth century, he shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, U.S. war colleges educated and trained commanders during the interwar years specifically for the operational art they employed in World War II. After 1945, in the face of nuclear warfare, the American military largely abandoned operational art. But since the Vietnam War, U.S. commanders have found operational art increasingly important as they pursue modern global and expeditionary warfare requiring coordination among multiple service branches and the forces of allied countries.

In the first half of the twentieth century, both czarist Russia and its successor, the Soviet Union, were confronted with the problem of conducting military operations involving mass armies along the broad fronts, a characteristic of modern war. Despite the ideological and technological differences between the two regimes, both strove toward a theory which became known as operational art-that level of warfare that links strategic goals to actual combat engagements. From the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, through World War I, the civil war, and to the eve of World War II, modern operational art grew from theoretical speculations by a small group of officers to become a critical component of the Soviet art of war. In this first comprehensive treatment of the subject, Richard Harrison shows how this theory emerged and developed to become—despite radically different political settings and levels of technology—essential to the Red Army's victory over Germany in World War II. Tracking both continuity and divergence between the imperial and Red armies, Harrison analyzes, on the basis of theoretical writings and battlefield performance, the development of such operationally significant phenomena as the "front" (group of armies), consecutive operations, and the deep operation, which relied upon aircraft and mechanized formations to penetrate the kind of intractable defense systems that characterized so much of World War I. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, including memoirs, theoretical works, and materials from the Russian military archives (many presented here for the first time), Harrison traces the debates within the Russian and Soviet armies that engaged such theorists as Neznamov, Svechin, Triandafillov, and Isserson. The end result is an exemplary military intellectual history that helps illuminate a critical element in the "Russian way of war."

Shimon Naveh offers a scientific interpretation of the field of military knowlege siguated between strategy and tactics, better known as operational art, and traces the evolution of operational awareness and its culmination in a full-fledged theory. The author clarifies the substance of operational art and constructs a cognitive framework for its critical analysis.