Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszely is
Director of the Defence Academy of
the United Kingdom. The views
expressed in this article are personal
and do not necessarily reflect
Government policy.
What was the impact? And what do we
have to learn from the experience? This
article sets out to answer these questions.
The intuitive application of what we
now call operational art can be seen in
the method of many commanders in
history – perhaps most notably
Napoleon – but identification and
articulation of a level between the
strategic and the tactical can be traced
back in Prussia to Moltke the Elder, and
in Russia to the General Staff Academy
in the early years of the twentieth
century, with subsequent development
by former-Civil War leaders who were
also military thinkers, such as
Tukhachevskii and Triandafillov, and
their contemporaries. A level between
the tactical and strategic had also been
identified by Baron Jomini, writing in
the 1830s: a level he termed grand
tactics. Jomini was much admired and
quoted by many British military writers,
such as E. B. Hamley, so that Jomini’s
concept of ‘grand tactics’ was well
known to the military establishment:
for example, at the Staff College where
Hamley was the commandant from
1870 to 1878. An instructor there at
the end of the nineteenth century was
the military historian, Colonel G. F. R.
Henderson, who developed his own
ideas of ‘grand tactics’ which he defined
as ‘the higher art’ of generalship, ‘those
stratagems, manoeuvres and devices by
which victories are won’.
4
But the
greatest development of thinking in
Britain about this level resulted from
the work of J. F. C. Fuller. He, too, used
the term grand tactics, which, in his
1926 book, The Foundations of the
Science of War, he described as ‘the plan
of the war or campaign…[which]
secures military action by converging all
means of waging war towards gaining a
The operational level is one of the four
levels of war or conflict identified in
British Defence Doctrine: grand-strategic,
military-strategic, operational and
tactical. Sometimes referred to as the
theatre level, the operational level is that
‘at which campaigns and major
operations are planned, conducted and
sustained to accomplish strategic
objectives within theatres or areas of
operations’.
1
The skilful orchestration of
military resources and activities for this
purpose is called operational art. The
operational level is the vital link between
tactics and strategy. As the Soviet
theorist Aleksandr Svechin neatly put it,
‘Tactics make the steps from which
operational leaps are assembled; strategy
points out the path’.
2
Without
consideration of the operational level, it
is easy to see the achievement of
strategic success as merely the sum of
tactical victories, and but a small step
from there to believing that every
successful battle fought leads to strategic
success. But, in the words of Bernard
Brodie, ‘War is a question not of winning
battles, but of winning campaigns’.
3
Without consideration of
the operational level, it is
easy to see the
achievement of strategic
success as merely the sum
of tactical victories
Yet the British military only incorporated
this ‘vital link’ into its doctrine in the
1980s, over half a century after the
militaries of some other nations, notably
the Soviet Union, did so. Why was this?
RUSI JOURNAL DECEMBER 2005
FOCUS: British Defence Policy and Doctrine
Thinking about the
Operational Level
John Kiszely
