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The evolution of operational art has seemingly reached a critical point following almost two decades of strategic bewilderment caused by the end of the Cold War, exasperating peace operations, and 9/11. But regardless of the form that future conflicts may take, officers will find themselves tasked with translating short-term operations into a larger operational design that links their near-term actions to the strategic aim of the campaign. Undoubtedly, interpretations and applications of operational art will differ widely in accordance with each commander's mission, personality, and priorities. Yet there is a common thread: from a problem-solving perspective, operational art will make it possible to take an unstructured problem and give it sufficient structure to ensure that further planning can lead to useful action. Understanding operational art improves the fundamental understanding of military operations per se, and therefore underlies all military successes. Consequently, whatever else officers may study and master — organization, leadership, intelligence, technology, logistics — they must have operational art at their fingertips.

This chapter examines the origins, development, and implications of operational art in the British armed forces. The Field Service Regulations of 1909 represented the first official attempt to encapsulate this approach within operational art. Nonetheless, establishment of doctrine remained an anathema, and without it operational art was driven by tactics rather than by strategy. This, according to the author, was a key reason why the British army tended to perform poorly at the operational level in the Second World War. When the operational level of war re-emerged in Great Britain during the 1980s, it was accompanied by doctrine for the first time. The linkage between doctrine and operational art was inspired less by the US army's response to Vietnam than by responses to Soviet and German practice and theory going back to lessons from the First and Second World Wars.

This chapter's point of departure is that US operational art has essentially focused on perfecting war's ‘first grammar’ — the principles and procedures related to defeating an opponent by armed force — while struggling to come to grips with war's ‘second grammar’ — the handling of insurgencies, guerrilla warfare, and irregular warfare. Consequently, American operational art over the last century has concentrated on fighting battles rather than on waging wars: US forces performed operational art with excellence during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, as these campaigns were based on an understanding of war's ‘first grammar’, only to falter as these campaigns made the transition from regular warfare to war's ‘second grammar’, which demands knowledge of how to design, plan, and conduct counter-insurgency operations.

This chapter examines the rise and fall of operational art in the Israeli armed forces. It argues that until the early 1970s the dominance of high-intensity conflicts, with their relatively favourable conditions for battlefield manoeuvre, enabled Israeli operational art to flourish. Since then, operational art became a lost art form, a trend that Israel sought to overcome by establishing the Operational Theory Research Institute in 1995, but the author maintains that the effort failed miserably because it created a postmodern theoretical construct and terminology that few could understand and relate to. Furthermore, in terms of leadership training the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) focused more on equipping commanders with managerial skills than on grooming great captains.

Operational art is currently taught at most command and staff colleges throughout the Western world. Military colleges and operational headquarters abound with manuals, procedures, and checklists for dealing with the operational level of war and operational art. These materials provide a common, coherent set of references covering a logical framework, proven methodologies, and a standardized vocabulary. They must nevertheless be accompanied by records and analyses of campaigns that define important milestones in the evolution of operational art: not only the flashes of genius and intellectual apexes, but also the periods devoid of creative thinking; not only successful campaigns, but also those that lacked appropriate theoretical underpinnings or operational excellence. This book is intended to provide military professionals, officer‐scholars, and graduate students the wider framework and contextualization of operational art by tracing its roots and development in various countries.

This chapter focuses on the rise and fall of operational art in the Prussian/German context. The rise began with Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke and two significant military successes: the defeat of Austria in 1866 by Prussia and the defeat of France in 1870–1 by a Prussian‐led alliance. Erich von Ludendorff's operations on the Eastern Front notwithstanding, it would take another seventy years before the Germans again managed to take full advantage of operational art, in this case in the form of Blitzkrieg. The German invasions in 1939–40 reflected operational art at its best, while Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia in June 1941, marked ‘imperial overreach’ and marked the beginning of the end of German operational art.

The Epilogue argues that ‘war amongst the people’ has replaced traditional industrial war, suggesting that the new paradigm is best characterized by an ebb and flow between confrontation and conflict, where the objectives for military forces are no longer ‘take, hold, destroy, defeat’, but, for example, ‘create a safe and secure environment’. Under the old paradigm the objective was to destroy the opponent; under the new paradigm the objective is to alter the opponent's intentions. Where the old paradigm considered military force supreme, the new accords equal importance to diplomatic, political, economic, social, and legal measures. It concludes that if operational art is to be relevant and useful in the future we must understand it as ‘a combination of a free, creative and original expression of the use of force and forces; a design; and direction, an expression of the character and aptitude of the artist’.

This chapter examines Chinese operational art, taking as its point of departure the rise of the Communist movement in the 1920s and the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Drawing on the writings of Sun Tzu, Zhuge Liang, and Mao Zedong, and on contemporary doctrines and experiences from both conventional war and guerrilla warfare, the author identifies the hallmarks of China's operational art as the combination of orthodox and unorthodox elements, a mixture of human factors and technology, and a blend of offensive and defensive priorities, as well as mobile and positional warfare. In addition, Chinese forces sometimes fight for show, sometimes for military victory, and sometimes for both.

This chapter demonstrates that the emergence of campaigns, made possible by a certain size of military formations, in essence opened the way for the operational level of war, operational warfare, and operational art. The complexity of campaigns, especially those that took place along broad fronts and covered large distances, accentuated the role of effective control, which, in turn, brought into play a new dimension of warfare. The historical factors that ushered the operational dimension into the world were the French Revolution and the levee en masse, and the man who presided over its birth was Napoleon Bonaparte. The revolution in military affairs owed very little to technology per se; it was a result of ‘the God of War’ combining the corps d'armée system and imperial headquarters with the principle of the ‘directed telescope’.

Russian military operations since 1991 have displayed a high degree of continuity. Being tailored to specific situations, these operations reveal a nearly constant mix of tactics, evolving with time but remaining fundamentally the same. Russia’s operational use of ambiguity is predominantly aimed at impeding or disrupting an adversary’s decision-making process. Meanwhile, the traditional ‘conventional’ tactics are always present in any operation, resulting in the omnipresent mix, described as the ‘hybrid-warfare’ challenge to the West. The long Russian experience in exercising hybrid warfare represents significant accumulated hybrid operational skills, which give the Russian forces a substantial advantage over the West in terms of operational art. Russia’s post-2014 actions against the West involving its military carry all the features of previous military operations, which suggests that warnings about a unilateral ‘new cold war’ waged by Russia are not hollow.