The Post Operational Level Age of War

The movement continues.

The fantastic Military Strategy Magazine, formerly Infinity Journal, who I’ve published with before here, has a new special edition out called The Post-Operational Level Age of War.

In it, the authors argue that the conception of an operational level between strategy and tactics is no longer suitable in modern warfare. They describe a number of reasons for this, including the immediacy of strategic effect when a tactical action, such as a missile strike, can be observed and discussed worldwide within minutes.

This is a bit different than my view of the operational level. I don’t maintain that it has lost its utility but rather that 1) it never had any to begin with; and 2) never actually existed in Soviet military thought as claimed by the U.S. military. The former is debatable. The latter isn’t.

The authors here don’t cover the Soviet angle but instead examine the works of Shimon Naveh. Naveh linked the need to create an operational level to a rise in scale and complexity, specifically citing Ludwig von Bertanlaffy’s General Systems Theory. However, Bertanlaffy published that theory in 1968 and Naveh in 1997. We’ve learned A LOT about complex adaptive systems since 1968, and indeed since 1997. One point is that a new level of complexity can be identified by the need for a new rule set, new parameters, and new boundaries. In no way shape or form does the operational level meet that requirement whereas the tripartite policy-strategy-tactics formulation which the authors of this edition propose clearly does. Each has its own logic, its own principles, its own rules. This formulation is originally Clausewitz’s, of course, as the authors do note.

There seems to be now four schools of thought why the operational level is such a ruinous concept. The Kelly/Brennan school believes that the operational level consumes a healthy understanding of strategy. The William F. Owen school believes that focusing on the operational level took the eyes of military professionals off the study of tactics. The Bengo/Shabtai/Segal school sees it as no longer useful. And I see it as never being useful and never having existed at all. So who’s right?

Perhaps all four.