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Paul Van Riper on Strategic Thinking and Operational Art
There's two things I eagerly await every summer: a new Batman movie and a new edition of Infinity Journal. There is much discussion of strategy scattered across the blogosphere, military journals, and international affairs forums. But IJ is where you can find strategy--the use of military engagements for the purpose of war--in one place, edited and written in an rigorous fashion by contributors from all over the world. That's why I publish in IJ, and always read it. This year's summer edition has a host of delights, from discussion of maneuver warfare vs. attrition to a reconsideration of Mahan's strategic importance, but there is one article that demands extended comment.
I gather most reading Abu M will be familiar with the name Paul K. Van Riper, but for those who are not Riper is one of America's greatest strategic thinkers. Van Riper, a retired Marine Lt. General, is one of the few that has really mastered the difficult art of joining together new scientific methods and concepts with military doctrine and thinking. From Robert McNamara to the untimely Effects-Based Operations, we've seen a parade of people come and go with concepts that sound nice in theory but run counter to the experience of military history.
Van Riper's piece looks at the relevance of systems theory, complex adaptive systems, and other similar scientific concepts to strategy. Van Riper ties it to Carl von Clausewitz and explains how and why previous military thinkers got the relevance of complexity to strategy wrong. One particular area of interest is Van Riper's discussion of operational art:
Properly designed campaigns and operations were to overcome a serious and accurate charge that U.S. forces won every battle and engagement of the Vietnam War—on occasion at tremendous cost—even though they were unable to win the war itself because there was no overarching plan. Political and strategic failures negated tactical successes in that tragic war. Regrettably, introduction of the operational level of war did not bring about the desired results. Rather than center attention on operational art, too many officers focused on mundane issues like what types of units were to deal with the operational and tactical levels, and the creation of new and more complicated planning techniques based on formal analyses. Noted historian Hew Strachan sees an even more pernicious fault with the so-called ‘operational level’ of war, that is, it “occupies a politics-free zone” where military officers are able to concentrate on maneuver while ignoring strategy and policy.
The problem with the post-Vietnam (mostly Army-led) focus on operational art as a salve for political failures is that this motivation (better operations and tactics to compensate for bad strategy) contributed to the general strategic malady it was intended to cure. The creation of a new level of war--in a manner very different from the way its Soviet theoretical originators intended it--could not help but focus planning energies on principles of warfare rather than war. Properly planned campaigns and operations, no matter how well-Designed, will not provide an overarching plan capable of winning wars.
Van Riper recommends that operational art be seen as a cognitive means of connecting strategy to tactics, which surely can help focus attention back on the strategy and make operational art simply a means of arranging tactics in space and time. Van Riper is on solid ground, but in order to truly make the operational demon managable we also have to historicize it. James Schneider and others have made a case that the idea of operational art not only did not exist prior to the early 20th century, but there was no need for it to be practiced prior to the mid-1800s. The idea of operational art, as opposed to grand tactics or posting troops in the field of battle, serves a need because of political, economic, informational, and geographic realities of 140 years of warfare.
Strategy and tactics as fundamental aspects of war have always existed, and it could be plausibly argued that collections of military activity can always be described as operations. But the notion of operational art, while by today's standards old wine in new bottles, is still nonetheless a beverage of a distinctly recent vintage. Context dictates whether the notion of operational art is useful. In some wars it is essential--in others it is of limited use. In this, it is similar to the much-misunderstood Center of Gravity.
Adam: Nice piece. I would
Adam:
Nice piece.
I would only add that even if the US Army fixed the dysfunction of the concept of operational level or art thereby sorting out clearly the differences between strategy, tactics, and policy I submit we would still need to take one more decisive step by acknowlding that in war sometimes there is NO operational/tactical solution to the problem at hand. The problem with the Army that the coin crowd has made worse (not better!) is the never ending fetish that emerged in full force after Vietnam that any problem in war can be solved by an optimal operational solution. Such thinking was embodied in the revisionist works after the vietnam war from Summers through Krepinevich through Nagl and carried through to today with McChrystal et al.
gian
Gian, While I used to agree
Gian,
While I used to agree w/ this line of argument, reading Gray's "Strategy Bridge" has made me more dubious.
I think the larger problems with the wars today has not been the tactical or operational methods substituting for policy, but the fact that they are actually executing policy (used in the sense of "politik" in Clausewitz as combination of politics and policy) and a theory of victory. The problem is that the policy, theory of victory, and strategy that flows from both doesn't make sense. Of course, the fact that all three have not been laid out in clear terms makes piecing them together more speculative than I would necessarily like.
I still agree with Echevarria and others about the "American Way of Battle," especially when most people talk about war. But that amplifies the trend I impute above. if Keynes was right about practical men being possessed by "defunct economists," operational men and women are possessed by defunct strategists or policymakers.
Interesting. Think I would
Interesting.
Think I would like to continue Gian's line of thought.
Some things should be done. It really isn't about fining a solution, it is about the expense of the solution and being willing to walk away if the cost is too high. Would Americans have jumped on AQ if we were told the increasing cost to liberty and treasure? (Drone bases, TSA, proxy wars, Iraq, etc)
For Afghanistan COIN was the right strategy, it just should not have happened. In other words there is a question about the amount of resources spent and the gains won. Problem is when the Pentagon is given a task, "I wouldn't do that" is not an option for the chain of command. The command structure flows down hill, solutions flow up hill.
We are jumping to strategy of war, right over the strategy of avoiding war all together.
Reasons Americans have been stepping on their dicks for the last fifty years is because we are too proud to say no.
Afghanistan should have been a low resource CT solution to deny AQ a training area.
Visitor, The solution is the
Visitor,
The solution is the strategy, but the expense of the solution and considerations surrounding that is the policy.
We have policies about Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc that strategies flow from.
Right Adam, and our core
Right Adam, and our core policy obective in Afghanistan from the start has been quite limited and narrow: al Qaeda. This has been stated over and over again by senior american military and political leaders. Yet the strategy devised has sought to achieve it by armed nation building which has been the operational method that strategy employs in astan from the start.
Since the american army cannot get out of its straightjacket belief that in war there is always an operational solution as long as we try harder, tweak the tactics, and get the right general in charge; thus my point that coin has drawn on all of the bad habits of the american army in the 80s and certainly has not made things better.
gian
Well, here's where the dual
Well, here's where the dual meaning of "politik" in On War comes into play. "Policy" as Clausewitz states it does not necessarily mean the policy of the government, but the political result that emerges from the conflux of politics and policy. I'm not sure we can consistently say that policy has always been focused around dismantling al-Qaeda---especially since al-Qaeda and the Taliban were, for a couple years in most policy debates, regarded as essentially the same thing. Moreover, policy is a condition or behavior rather than a action, which means that "disrupt, dismantle," etc isn't actually a policy. To rephrase it: what is the political condition we sought to achieve in Afghanistan with our use of force, as we have made ourselves a domestic political actor in their system of politics? That is closer. It may seem like semantics, but it's pretty important. Our use of force has--haltingly--been directed around that political vision.
When I talk about a theory of victory, I also mean the vision of how we achieve that goal. That, and the policy, is where we should look at where went wrong. The strategy is important but it is closely related to the theory of victory and policy.
Dont over think and
Dont over think and complicate this Adam, trust me, i have done the research, i have read hundreds and hundreds of transcripts of congressional testimony where the core policy goal has been stated clearly with regard to afghanistan. And it is al qaeda. We have only made ourselves as you say a domestic actor in their politics because the prefered operational method has been nation building which by tactical nature therefore requires us to be that way. But that political aspect of the occupation and nation building is logically diferent from the strategy that put it into place and the core policy goal it sought to achieve.
remember what St Carl said: everything in war is simple, but even the simplist thing is very difficult. Studies on strategy have tended sometimes to overthink the problem and make the understanding of it more complicated than it deserves. This, at times, has been Gray's problem with his work on strategy.
gian
Dont over think and
Dont over think and complicate this Adam, trust me, i have done the research, i have read hundreds and hundreds of transcripts of congressional testimony where the core policy goal has been stated clearly with regard to afghanistan.
I wish I had seen this thread earlier. I may blog it (I always say that these days and never get around to it).
The problem with this is that we have other policies that overlap with this core policy objective. We have policies and ideas and strategies regarding Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India, China, etc. It is those policies that muddy the waters on the "core policy objective." I've done this research, too, in that I've read tons and tons public statements by officials on these themes. If you narrow yourself, you miss the larger picture.
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