Willing Suspension of Disbelief? A Critique of Operational Art
Dr Steven Coulson
Sitting somewhere between the strategic and the tactical, the operational level is a somewhat abstract, intangible concept. Indeed, one commentator has dismissed it as a “mere pretension and an artificial creation imposed between tactics and strategy that had no content or merit”. Others have argued that stressing the idea of the operation has come to overwhelm that of strategy.
To begin with let's think about the problem of determining if the operational level really does exist. Is strategy more than the sum of tactics? Or is a successful military campaign really just the aggregation of winning battles to ensure victory?
