Piercing the Veil of Operational Art

Since the term "operational level of war" was added to the US Army's lexicon with the 1982 edition of Field Manual 100-5, Operations, many soldiers, scholars, and other students of war have struggled to understand it.Attempts to define or describe it, to show its linkage to strategy and tactics, or simply to describe the activities which take place there have been frustrating intellectual exercises.These efforts have been at times difficult, but they have strengthened students, scholars, and the Army professionally.Even now we see the other services, as well as many of our allies, joining the intellectual pursuit to better conceptualize warfare in the modern era.The May 1986 revised edition of FM 100-5 reflects some of the progress of these discussions both within and outside the Army.In the new FM, the broad divisions of war have been revised to military strategy, operational art, and tactics.This slight change in terms should cause students of war no real conceptual difficulty if we keep in mind that our central concern is with the perspective involved within each of these three divisions.This article is based on the assumption that certain stumbling blocks have been commonly encountered in pursuing an understanding of these three perspectives of war, and especially in chasing the concept of the operational art.These stumbling blocks include:A failure to examine and understand war as a whole before trying to understand its individual parts.An inability to distinguish military science from military art and to see how the creative-intellectual process of the commander becomes the linchpin between the two.A deficiency in the analysis of most military historical accounts of wars and campaign studies, particularly with respect to military strategy and operational art

Political science · Law · Military History and Strategy · Military, Security, and Education Studies · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact

• Whither the RMA

  Christopher Schnaubelt, Christopher M Schnaubelt•The US Army War College Quarterly…•2007

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