On Operations by Brett Friedman

Author:Brett Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

Defeat is a decision, a decision that the cost of achieving the goal is too high. Campaigns and battles are not decisive in and of themselves. Both terms are simply heuristics to describe organized groupings of tactics. Again, tactics is the use of armed forces in engagements. Operational art is the planning, preparing, conducting, and sustaining of tactics aimed at accomplishing strategic effect. Tactics produce strategic effects, positive or negative. Strategy seeks to harness these effects to achieve the political aim. The meaning of tactical events—be they battles or campaigns, be it attrition or decision—cannot be found in and of themselves but only in the effect they produce for strategy.

Confusion about these terms arises from an undue focus on means rather than aims—or more accurately, logic. Attrition may well and usually does help convince an opponent to make that decision, though not always and rarely, if ever, by attrition alone. Theory must avoid and alleviate confusion. Conceptions of the operational level of war, lacking an independent logic of their own, contribute to a focus on means, which only introduces confusion. Referring to groupings of tactics as campaigns is imperfect but introduces less confusion than either operations or battles. The terms “battle” and “decisiveness” both have too much baggage to be useful in theory, and in any case, these are more historiographical concepts than theoretical ones. The theorist and the practitioners should be exceedingly wary of terms and concepts that have grown and ossified on the theory of war, seeking instead to prune them away.

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