MERGER OF LEVELS OF WARFARE

1. Levels of warfare are compartmentalized into three silos, strategy, operational art and tactics. Each level is to be acted upon and ideated upon by a stratum of leadership, these levels also provide the military mind with the classic division of warfare into philosophy, art and science of warfare. The military mind is tuned to order and discipline classical embodiment of straight lines and well-defined boundaries but in psychological terms, this is a short-term coping mechanism called compartmentalization[1]. It is how our minds deal with conflicting internal standpoints simultaneously. A military mind isolates the issue that has to be handled and applies extreme focus on one compartment at a time allocating temporal windows to each step and stage forward in incremental steps. Close one compartment and then only open the next one and surely reject things that don’t deserve/fit a defined compartment. However, the evolving battle space doesn’t allow future military leaders the luxury of compartmentalization as it becomes more transactional horizontally and vertically. Domains of warfare have evolved beyond the traditional, land, sea and air to non-traditional domains (NTD) cyber, space, electromagnetic spectrum and cognitive. Warfighting is no more a mandate of combatant soldiers and neither are combatants the only target for the adversary. The battle space is not definable and the civilian population in the hinterland is as much a part of the combat potential of the nation-state as are the armed forces. A fallback to Gulio Douhet’s concept he articulated; a vision glorifying the “knockout blow” with fleets of bombers prowling the skies, burning cities, and causing mass death.[2] That proverbial knockout blow does not even need air power, it can be delivered by non-kinetic means like cyber-attacks. It is quite evident that the complexity of warfare in the future would demand the military mind to break free from the concept of compartmentalization and handle abstract thoughts which do not conform to the stratum that have been created.

2. If such silos are fit to be consigned to history books, one more concept which merits attention is the levels of warfare; strategy, operational art and tactics. Can they be so well defined and while they are supposed to interact with each other, recent conflicts have shown that success at one level does not necessarily mean success at the other. Here in comes another defense mechanism of the military mind which prefers to attribute failure to a level that is not exclusively military in nature. The common refrain one hears from the US Armed Forces is that Op Iraqi Freedom and Op Enduring Freedom were operational and tactical successes but debacles at a strategic level. The military leader is to offer the ‘best military advice’ to the political hierarchy and it is up to the political dispensation to make the most of it. It may be incumbent on higher leadership to take ownership of this level of warfare and not let it be wrested from them to the political level. “War is too important to be left to the generals” is an oft-quoted comment of Georges Clemenceau but Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper the main antagonist of the 1964 black comedy film, Dr. Strangelove (or how I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) has an interesting repartee; ‘But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought.’[3]

3. Gen Charles Krulak had postulated the concept of ‘Strategic Corporal’[4] where in the actions of the sub-tactical leader had strategic effects. Following it up, one had written an essay on ‘Sub-tactical General.’[5] Technology may have helped move senior leaders off the actual battlefield, but now it allows them to become more involved in the real-time fighting of war. Unfortunately, the thin line between timely intervention and micromanagement is blurred with technology. More and more frequently, generals insert themselves into situations inappropriately and their leadership role mutates to command interference. The argument I offer is that there is a need to review the siloed system we are operating in and look at these three levels of warfare as a transactional process with the ability of commanders to move along the spectrum with relative ease and it is not incumbent only for senior officers to scale down but also for junior officers to scale up and understand the higher order effects that may get generated because of their actions. Nothing new one may say and I would agree, after all, mission command is all about this.

4. In most fields of military endeavor, the theory has had only a modest influence on praxis. Faced with real problems, the leaders would set about contriving practical solutions in a more or less theory-free environment, generating the seeds of new theory as a by-product. Theory, however, is influential in the preparation for war; bad theory risks leading us to poor preparations. As originally proposed by the Soviets, operational art was confined firmly within a context provided by a campaign plan arrived at by strategy and was constrained in its responsibilities to the attainment of discrete identifiable objectives within that campaign. In western usage, adopted by Indian Armed Forces it has come to encompass both that meaning plus the design, planning, and conduct of campaigns. One can reasonably argue that “a rose by any other name is still a rose” — that, for example, campaigns clearly need to be designed and that if we call this process “operational art” but at some level even tactical operations have to go through the process of a design, COPP introduced as the indigenous version of JOPP/MDMP is valid at both operational and tactical level. It does not matter that we are diverging from the classical usage of the term. But such an argument ignores the subsequent questions of who then designs and executes “operations” in the classical meaning of the word and what is the residual role of strategic leadership. Arguably, the concern occasionally aired about the “compression of the operational level of war” is a symptom of this theoretical confusion and demonstrates strategy reasserting its traditional and proper role in the face of a usurper which is a mix of operational art and tactics. Recent Western military exploits in Iraq, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Russian operations in Ukraine, all represent, like mentioned earlier if not strategic failure, at least failures of strategy. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether this weakness is endemic or at least partially a result of our own theoretical failings by allowing operational art to escape from any reasonable delimitation and, by so doing, subvert the role of strategy and hide the need for a strategic art? Also to the point, how well does our existing theoretical framework enable us to adapt to the demands of contemporary conflict?

5. Wars are fought to achieve a political solution that is satisfactory to the victor and feasible for the defeated. Political power rests on the acquiescence of a population, however, that is attained. Therefore, the fundamental challenge in war is to assemble a sequence of actions that seems likely to change the minds of a hostile dispensation. Some stratagems, tactics, or weapons may be, or become, inimical to that shift in the popular consensus and be counterproductive. Some may have mixed impacts; influencing different parts of the target community in different ways. Actions to overcome armed resistance may alienate sectors of the population, while failing to do so may be a path to defeat. Shifts in the circumstances on the ground, in the domestic politics of the belligerents, or in the wider international community may validate, invalidate, or alter the strategic objectives being sought, the campaign plan being pursued, or the tactics being employed. Although these complexities are not new, they are becoming increasingly salient in our contemporary setting. The aphorism that “strategy proposes but tactics disposes” is valid. Unless strategy includes a tactical view, it may seek objectives that are practically unachievable, or it may miscalculate the costs and benefits likely to emerge from a conflict. These costs are not limited to the direct economic and social impacts of war on the belligerents but extend to international public opinion and international politics. The consequences of tactical actions can, more than ever, now decide not just who wins the war but also the shape of the peace that follows it, notion of victory and parity in effects are terms that conform to this idea. Equally, tactics need to serve strategy, and tactical action without strategic purpose is merely senseless violence. The strategic direction of a war needs to be intimately sensitive to the details of the warfare being conducted so as to ensure both that it is making realistic demands, and that the military action remains in keeping with the wider conduct of the war. Moreover, tactics needs to be constantly seeking to contribute to the ends laid down by strategy with economy, efficiency, and nuance, the latter being shaped by an awareness of the wider conduct of the war. A three-way conversation between strategy, operational art and tactics is fundamental to the successful prosecution of any war.

6. By taking a hierarchical view and linking discrete responsibilities to specific levels of command, we risk degrading the intimacy of the conversation among ends, ways, and means, making it easier for strategy to make unreasonable demands; for example, in Iraq in 2003, with ways overtaking ends; or in 1950, MacArthur’s precipitate pursuit to the Yalu, with tactics to taking on a life of its own. The reason the strategic corporal is strategic is that his world — tactics — is, and always has been, organic to strategy. This idea of the unity of war is especially important as we try to understand operational art. If we want to drag it into the sunlight to examine it in detail, we necessarily have to drag its strategic and tactical contexts with it. There are no quick fix solutions but one pre-requisite that leaders have to be equipped to handle this three-way interaction and not address it in silos.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanblair/2012/06/26/5-steps-of-compartmentalization/?sh=774d04091a62 accessed on 10 Sep 23.

[2] https://www.airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Documents/2011/April%202011/0411douhet.pdf accessed on 29 Aug 23.

[3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/quotes/ accessed on 10 Sep 23.

[4] Gen. Charles C. Krulak “The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War” Marines Magazine, January 1999. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA399413.pdf accessed on 19 Aug 2006.

[5] https://www.claws.in/sub-tactical-general/ published on 23 May 2020.