There has been "Grand Strategy" and "National Strategy" and "Military Strategy," all of which address slightly different aspects of the same general concept. Over time there have been various definitions and subsets of this overarching term. Thirdly, there is the strategic level of warfare. Again, referring back to June 1944, the overall plan for invading the beaches and the entire province beyond the beaches, Operation Overlord, was an operational level plan. This level of war deals with the movements of entire corps, armies and army groups, or whole fleets at sea. Plans begin with the intent that they will start a few days or weeks in the future and may stretch out to cover months of time and thousands of square miles. The operational level of warfare is the realm of generals. the 'tactical level') designed to win some larger objective.
Strategic war series#
Operational level plans are known as "campaigns," and by design each consists of a series of battles and engagements (ie. You put them together to make a wall, and then a house. Think of this as the blueprint that helps you build a house from a bunch of bricks. Operational level planning occurs with the intent of setting missions and objectives that will bend the enemy to your will in an entire theater of operations.
The operational level is somewhat more difficult to define and understand. The battles on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 were tactical. This is fighting by privates and sergeants, lieutenants, captains, and colonels. This is war at the level of Saving Private Ryan. Tactical combat for infantry on foot rarely moves faster than 2.5 m.p.h., but even jets moving to conduct an individual bombing raid rarely move faster than a few hundred miles per hour. Speed at this echelon is sometimes measured in yards per day, but usually in miles per hour. (Nuclear weapons, obviously, transcend this area.) Some information systems operate at this level as well. Knives, bayonets, guns, cannons, bombs, and torpedoes-the actual tools of personal destruction are mostly tactical. Most weapon systems used in war operate at this level. The tactical level of warfare is where one sees the face of battle." Planning at the tactical level starts at 'now' and occurs out to roughly 48 hours in the future, or at most a few weeks. It is the realm of skirmishes, engagements, and battles. "The tactical level of warfare is that level where men meet and fight from the individual level through the division. Tactical LevelĪ simple definition, though not an ironclad one, of the tactical level of warfare might read (my words): It is perhaps the most important, because decisions at the political level have the ability to directly or indirectly affect the other three. I believe that the "Political" level is self-evident, but for clarity I will address it briefly. For our purposes, we will only address three in detail: the tactical level, the operational level, and the strategic level. I will use examples from World War II in order to level the playing field and convey these ideas in their most basic (and least confused) form. These are the Political, Strategic, Operational, and Tactical levels of war. So down to brass tacks: There are four levels of warfare. Simply put, if a candidate mixes and matches these words in very non-specific ways, it is a pretty clear indicator that both his national security advisors and perhaps even his international relations advisors are either rank amateurs or are flatly ignored by the candidate. They are not and how they are used, both by reporters and the candidates themselves, appears to be a reliable way to separate the wheat from the chafe.īut why does this matter in reporting on-or in speaking/proclaiming about-news coming from the Middle East or any other conflict zone you might want to know about?
Specifically, I am referring to what we know as the "Levels of War," and the way that terms like "tactics" and "strategy" and "campaign" (and several other related concepts) are thrown around as though they are synonyms. In my sustained effort to help others understand the news, there is one important area that really must be addressed, both because this is an election period and because some of these words are so widely confused and conflated in modern journalistic usage they now have little to no meaning.
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