(Extracted with small changes from Brilliant Manoeuvres: How to Use Military Wisdom to Win Business Battles.)
By Richard Martin
Strategy and the Strategic Level of War
There are three levels of war: strategy, operational art, and tactics and these play out in the physical and moral planes. This paper explains these concepts and their relationships.
In its purest form, strategy is the theory and practice of raising and employing military forces to achieve political ends. Historically, it is only in the modern period that states have consistently raised and maintained large standing forces. There were exceptions in the past such as in ancient Rome, but they were few. To raise and maintain an army for any length of time, one must be able to both justify its existence and to finance it. The first need is largely political in nature; this means you must have a good reason to create and maintain the army. The second need follows logically from the first because soldiers, weapons and their upkeep require huge amounts of capital, labour, time, and money. They are a huge drain on a country’s treasury and resources.
As Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “Warfare is the greatest affair of state; it must be thoroughly pondered and studied.” The raison d’être of the army and its payment, equipping and financing require considered attention from politicians and the highest military commanders. However, it isn’t enough to have an army or any other type of armed force. One also must know how to employ it judiciously. Theorists usually distinguish between “grand strategy,” which involves the political leadership of the country in making fundamental existential decisions and setting goals, and “military strategy,” the realm of military leadership, which involves the actual employment of military forces to achieve political ends. In other words, grand strategy is about setting war aims and broad parameters for action including the political, social, and financial mobilisation of the country, and military strategy is about actually fighting the war, whether it is all-out war or a more limited form of conflict or deployment of forces.
Tactics and the Tactical Level of War
Tactics are the theory and practice of achieving immediate aims in the heat of battle. One way to remember the distinction between strategy and tactics is to look at their etymologies. As noted previously, strategy comes from the Greek word for general. Generals usually aren’t involved in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy unless something has gone terribly wrong. Tactics comes from the Greek term taktike, which means to arrange or order things. In other words, tactics refer to how to arrange troops on the field of battle and manoeuvre them to achieve success. I sometimes use a mnemonic device that helps to distinguish between the two and explains their inherent meaning. When thinking of strategy, think of “stratosphere,” in other words, strategy implies one is at an altitude, overlooking the battlefield but not getting bloodied or muddied. When thinking of tactics, think of the word “tactile,” in other words, actual contact, and combat with the enemy.
Strategy and tactics also differ in terms of how they are conceived, developed, and communicated. Strategy is somewhat amenable to systematization, but it is ultimately very artful. No two situations or organizations will ever call for the same strategy. It also requires great intelligence and opportunism. Tactics, on the other hand, are inherently repetitive, mechanical, and process oriented. Should such-and-such occur, or the enemy follow a course of action, then take the following action. If that doesn’t work, then try this other action. Tactics are therefore easy to systematize and indeed must be systematized and as a result, tactics can be taught and evaluated. In summary, we can say that each strategy is ultimately unique, whereas tactics are repeatable.
Operations and the Operational Level of War
In centuries past, the levels of strategy and tactics covered the whole of warfare. This was because military forces were smaller, more ephemeral, and less capable with shorter range of action and less staying power. Armies were raised for purposes of war when there was a clear threat or when a ruler wanted to conquer another state. Soldiers were often paid from the proceeds of campaigning, even by rape and pillage, and were expected to live off the land, at the expense of its inhabitants. There was no personnel management, discipline was harsh and inhumane by modern standards, and logistics basically involved raising taxes or stealing money to pay for the war or goods to feed and arm the soldiers. In addition, armies were poorly articulated. This meant that units had few sub-divisions, were mostly uniform in form and function, and tended to be deployed in simple close-order formations using only mechanical manoeuvres learned by rote.
The wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon changed all of that. Probably for the first time in history, a country raised huge armies consisting of untrained conscripts armed with standard weapons and formed into large articulated units with fairly consistent leadership. Napoleon’s Grande Armée also included large artillery forces, heavy and light cavalry, engineers, and a corps d’intendance, an administrative element that accompanied armies to ensure their supply and maintenance in the field. The French army was huge by existing standards. It therefore required a whole different level of organization and structure. Consequently, balanced divisions consisting of all arms were created, and these were then grouped into army corps and field armies, under generals of progressively higher rank. Senior command was attributed almost solely based on competence in battle. Furthermore, political ideology and propaganda became part of the armoury of the French nation at arms. This was truly a formidable and frightful force.
The French had multiple enemies in different directions and had to fight enemies on many fronts simultaneously for years on end. Whereas wars had until then tended to be rather short, they were now protracted, intense, and costly. The old strategy and tactics were clearly insufficient. The French, therefore, developed the first notions of “operational art,” and this level became increasingly elaborated throughout the 19th century, reaching its full development in the world wars and modern theories of war. In a nutshell, operational art is the theory and practice of combining campaigns and battles to achieve war aims and to create the conditions for battlefield success, whether these are material, human or technical. To do so, you need to develop clear war aims, campaign plans, permanent staffs of specialized planners, communication methods, intelligence analysts, and logisticians to create detailed operational plans and orders.
These domains all support the aim of achieving strategic success by enabling and supporting successful tactical execution. Operational art and its various technical and managerial manifestations are the conceptual glue that links strategy and tactics.
Planes of War
War and conflict must also be considered in terms of the physical and moral planes. The physical plane comprises the material underpinnings of war and conflict: force ratios, weapons characteristics, material resources, money, people, etc. However, every historian, theoretician and practitioner of war and conflict knows that war and conflict occur just as much in the head and heart as on the field of battle. History is full of examples of large armies being defeated by much smaller forces. This is because psychological forces can sometimes be just as effective and efficient as physical forces. This is why leadership, morale, cohesion, subterfuge, surprise, and cunning are so fundamental to success in battle and in conflict in general.
© 2012-24 Richard Martin
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