A Critical Perspective on Operational Art and
Design Theory
By Adam Elkus
Journal Article | Apr 30 2012 - 4:50am
Counterinsurgency’s apparent sunset has left the military struggling for a new mission, but it will always
have operational art. Once an arcane subfield dominated by specialists in Soviet and German history,
doctrine and rhetoric about the design of operations and campaigns reached its zenith in large stabilization
and state-building missions.
Rhetorical and practical reliance on operational theory did not end with the Warsaw Pact. Military
professionals’ criticism of traditional operational planning methods, the uncertainty induced by unclear
political and strategic guidance, and expansive state-building operations all fueled an ongoing
reconsideration of the operational art. The result was Design, a new philosophy of operations that
challenges traditional modes of operational planning.
The sunset (for now) of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan presents Design practitioners with both
a challenge and an opportunity. Will Design adapt to the changed strategic and geopolitical context of
American operations? Or will it become sidelined to the netherworld of “operations other than war,”
advisory and training missions, and paramilitary operations? The answer depends precisely on what
defines as “Design.”
Operational Theory, History, and Praxis
Design is conceptually linked, though not identical to, operational art. But what is operational art? Ideas of
operational art and the alleged “operational level of war” are heavily contested in military doctrine and
theory. The preeminent questions guiding the study and practice of the operational art have hardly been
resolved. Is operational art a cognitive process that links tactics to strategy, as Huba Wass de Czege has
argued? Or is the operational level an empirically valid evolution in the structure of the military art?
James J. Schneider has observed a qualitative difference in pre-industrial warfare, governed by
concentration into a small space to achieve tactical effect, and the industrial practice of distributed
campaigns and massed firepower. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. Operational art could be
both cognitive device and historical fact. But Schneider, and landpower specialists like Christopher
Bellamy discuss landpower in strikingly different terms than Wass de Czege, emphasizing the physical
element of operational art over the cognitive emphasis of campaign planning.
For the purpose of argument, let’s suppose operational specialists agree on what operational art
constitutes. But when did it begin? Martin Van Creveld and Claus Telp both posit operational warfare
as a trend with broadly Napoleonic origins. Other authors, such as Schneider, focus their operational lens
towards the mid-19th century or later. Most operational history also mostly neglects naval and air
campaigns, to say nothing of small arms. If operational art is a product of the industrial revolution, it is
hard to justify a focus on wars dominated by small-unit actions between guerrillas and light infantry. The
continental bias of operational theoreticians also colors the neglect of naval warfare and airpower.
Assuming we can agree on what operational art is and when it began, one last remaining historical dispute
remains: did America have an operational art before the 1980s? Those familiar with distributed campaigns
in the Civil War may find the question silly, but the narrative of American operational art places AirLand
Battle as the beginning of American operational doctrinal consciousness. The historical consensus in
operational history commonly depicted pre-1980s American commanders as operational neophytes.
Russell Weigley, for example, uses the failure of American forces to achieve a complete annihilation in
the Normandy campaign as evidence of the essentially tactical focus of the American military art. But this
operational consensus may no longer hold true.
Michael Matheny makes a convincing case in his book Carrying the War to the Enemy that America
prepared its officers well for the operational dimension of World War II. American forces successfully
executed complex combined operations in North Africa, France, the Phillipines, and Okinawa as a result
of the operational education they received during the interwar period. American operational art emerges
not as a pale imitation of Soviet Deep Operations or German blitzkrieg but an original synthesis of
logistical feats of genius and synergistic coordination of complex combined expeditionary operations.
Cyber warfare is emerging as a significant addition to the American operational suite.
Combined operations and power projection are the raw material of American strategy. Without them,
America could not hope to operate globally. It is precisely these kinds of difficult operations that are most
challenged by the “anti-access” threat in Asia and the Middle East. But do American commanders design
operations and campaigns to further strategy, or does the US simply do grand tactics? Merely being able
to coordinate large, air-land-sea operations does not mean they will realize the political object.
Elements of Design
The military concept of Design, like operational art itself, is also contested. Merely the word “Design”
involves a conceptual choice—are we talking about Design in the Army, the design of operations (an old
notion), or the Israeli Systemic Operational Design? While the conceptual roots of Design may partially
lie in Shimon Naveh’s study of Soviet theory and operations on the Eastern Front and his identification
of operational art as a “cognitive tension” between strategy and tactics, Design has evolved significantly.
There is the Army’s version of Design, which has aimed to improve critical thinking in the design of
operations by emphasizing different concepts of organization, methodology, and operational art. Other
versions of Design have drifted throughout the joint community and professional military journals.
Building a synthesis for discussion starts with Schneider and Naveh’s metaphor of the operational
commander as creative designer, using individual battles to build a distributed campaign. This idea, in
turn, can be linked with Donald Schon’s The Reflective Practitioner, which advanced a similar notion of a
broadly self-aware professional who used “reflection-in-action” to bridge the at times cavernous gap
between artistic and technical aspects of a discipline. (Schon is discussed in this Military Review article
).
Ben Zwiebelson describes Design as a theory that is simultaneously skeptical of dominant theory.
Zwiebelson explains that Design is not a doctrine, concept, or methodology. The Designer is simply
someone who broadly rejects any one narrative of conflict, using multiple systems of logic—broadly
defined as ways of seeing the world—to cope with the operational environment. “Systems of logic”
consist of empirical material (brute material facts), theoretical concepts such as language, mathematics,
ideologies, and other processes that interact with empirical material to explain the world, and metaphors
that promote new ways of thinking. These ingredients combine into narratives and scripts that explain the
world within the system of logic’s limiting framework. Narratives and scripts also anticipate how external
reality will react to an individual or organization’s action and manifest themselves in organizational
behavior.
Despite Design’s theoretical pluralism, most theorists reject reductionism. Most, however, disagree about
what it constitutes. Ketti Davison describes both Effects-Based Operations and Design as reactions
against the industrial-era methods of decomposition inherent in the MDMP. Zwiebelson argues that the
MDMP no longer reflects the complex realities of modern military operations. Drawn from the empirical
material of enemy, geography, technology, population, space, and time, reductionism employs generally
agreed tactical, operational and strategic vocabulary such as the principles of war, centers of gravity, and
end states as theoretical content. Metaphors, in turn, are generated through lessons-learned reports and the
culling of historical anecdotes to explain how future conflicts will occur. Narratives and scripts manifest
in the form of the MDMP and the Joint Operation Planning Process (JOPP).
Design theorists criticize reductionism for its engineering framework and assumption that operational
problems will be neatly defined by planning guidance. Others argue that the concept of an end-state and
backwards planning represent the military’s hubristic assumption that it can use an engineering process to
bend reality to its will. In other words, planners expect operational and strategic problems will end
because Phase IV ordains it so. Zwiebelson argues that increasing complexity and self-organization in the
operating environment make reductionism problematic. Design can promote an unlimited variety of
alternative logics that may manifest themselves in genuinely new and useful ways of knowledge and
practice. These logics range from systems approaches borrowed from ecology to broadly postmodern and
poststructuralist philosophy.
Key to the concept of Design are, as the Commander’s Appreciation And Campaign Design states, the
attendant concepts of structurally complex and interactively complex systems. A car is a structurally
complex system: closed and elaborate, but driven entirely by internal dynamics. Cities and social groups,
on the other hand, are interactively complex. Their dynamics are difficult to product and more
characterized by nonlinearity. The Design critique of reductionism is that it emphasizes structural
complexity at the expense of interactive complexity.
Design Theory: Context and Critique
It is unlikely that Design would have advanced without the intellectual shock that the post-9/11 conflicts
inflicted on the American defense intellectual base. September 11, Iraq, and Afghanistan were direct
epistemological threats to the way of war that the United States military had painstakingly developed in
the aftermath of Vietnam. Concepts such as Effects-Based Operations (EBO), Rapid Decisive Operations
(RDO), and the expansion of Network-Centric Warfare (NWC) from the mere networking of forces into a
means of using American military force to shift global “rule sets” all were rooted in a set of assumptions
that ultimately proved to be fallacious. The enemy was deprived of agency, and the resulting chaos created
room for radical new approaches. Hew Strachan also has noted that the operational level dominates
because the strategic and policy threads above it have frayed and decayed.
But has war really grown so complex? There is compelling evidence that, contrary to the writings of
everyone from Martin van Creveld to the National Strategic Narrative’s “Mr. Y,” that the structural and
interactive complexity of the contemporary operating environment is exaggerated. As Colin S. Gray has
argued, there is little fundamental difference between conventional and irregular wars. Conventional
wars feature special operations and guerrilla resistance movements, and irregular wars have included
pitched battles. Iraq and Afghanistan are a synthesis of classical, modern, and allegedly postmodern small
wars. Warfare as a whole has always been distinguished by chaos and complexity—indeed the very
nonlinearity of conflict is expressed through Carl von Clausewitz’s metaphor of the “trinity” of
emotion, chance and reason and his ideas on fog and friction
.
The question of whether or not Afghanistan is a special case of complexity depends in part on one’s
willingness to acknowledge the obvious. Afghanistan is complex because the task of building a secure and
legitimate government with a semblance of the monopoly of force is complex. Foreigners are least placed
to marshal what Karl Polayni dubs “tacit knowledge”—information that can only be transmitted
experientially. Or listen to Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 warning to would-be central planners:
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the
fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in
concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently
contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of
society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources—if "given" is taken to
mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather
a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for
ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem
of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.
Hayek discussed the problems in creating a domestic economic order among those who share far more
political, cultural, and social assumptions than the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) share with the Afghans. And, of course, Hayek was writing about a peacetime creation of
economic order. There is little peace to be had in Afghanistan, and little political and social consensus.
This is not to say that Afghans are exotic and unknowable, but that they live in a society ravaged by 30
years of civil war. A society, one might add, that is understandable only to a small minority of Western
area specialists and academics. Everyone else, for better or worse, is walking blind.
Afghanistan is both structurally complex and interactively complex. So was the Normandy campaign.
Injecting force into the European continent was an endeavor rooted in interactively complex political,
military, and operational problems. All of these problems—from weather to the political implications of
who would rule a postwar France—had bearing on the design of the campaign. World War II in general
only appears structured in retrospect. British and American internal debates over international security
policy throughout the 1930s at times demonstrated that all-important criterion of ill-structuredness:
educated professionals did not even agree on the structure of the political-military problem. Deciding on
the future of warfare, against the backdrop of seismic technological, doctrinal, and political shifts was also
far from simple.
The Persian intrusion into Greece, the challenge posed to the European order by the French Revolution
and the fanatical energies it unleashed, security debates of the 1920s and 30s, the global Cold War were
all regarded as highly complex events that shattered old ways of thinking and shifted basic points of
reference. Compared to these titanic events, can it really be said that 1991-2012 was similarly
transformative as to warrant a radical rethinking of the way we plan operations and campaigns?
It is true that the assumptions of linear causality inherent in many aspects of military education do not
serve soldiers well in a world that simply refuses to behave. A tactical and reductionist way of viewing the
operational or strategic issue as simply the sum of its parts is unlikely to yield solid results. But just
because making strategy is difficult does not necessarily mean that strategy itself—as conceived within
the framework of ends, ways, and means—is at fault. Perhaps specific plans, operations, tactics, and a
technocratic way of war failed the US. But no traditional theorist cognizant of war’s eternal challenges
promised the ability to control an outcome. A strategist, as Gray argues, is a “hero” fighting against
chaotic forces that could pull him under at any given moment.
Designing Future Operations
Academic debate aside, the political and operational context in which Design was conceived may be
nearing a close. Iraq (for now) has been emptied of American soldiers. In Afghanistan, American presence
is being downsized. High-end threats, in the form of the elusive “anti-access” opponent have captured the
Pentagon’s imagination. Standoff campaigns and small-scale raiding has become the order of the day from
Pakistan to the Horn of Africa.
The future cannot be conclusively predicted, but large-scale third party state-building is rare in American
history. There are, however, plenty of punitive expeditions and acts of gunboat diplomacy. American
history is replete with maritime and air power projection operations for limited ends. It is the Banana
Wars, not Vietnam or Iraq, that stands as the archetype of American irregular war. To the extent these
campaigns involve operational art, they privilege Matheny’s idea of American operations---expeditionary
joint campaigns. Absent the stimulus of large-scale stabilization, can Design ultimately survive as a
mainstream tool of operational design, or will it be relegated to military niche?
It would be a shame if Design theory and practice vanished during the anti-access/area denial era. US
operations in the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia today contain a multitude of complex threats and issues
ranging from high-end conventional technologies to irregular threats such as cyberwarfare and
paramilitary special operations units. Force-on-force warfare is distinguished not only by highly technical
calculations but also by nonlinearity, self-organization, and complexity. The Design critique hits home
precisely because the American approach tends to lead to suboptimal strategic outcomes. As Echevarria
noted in his article on the military’s sometimes-erroneous approach to Centers of Gravity (COG),
military planners can fixate on finding the COG—as defined in their professional military education—at
the expense of losing the larger strategic picture. If such a reductive approach was problematic during a
time of uncontested primacy, it is even more dangerous in what may be a more multipolar age.
Different logics that enable alternative approaches to the design of operations are necessary, as well as
even “anti-approaches” more characterized by emergence and self-organization than top-down orders. At
its heart, Design is simply a way of encouraging alternatives to dominating military practices, or at the
very minimum not taking established practices for granted.
Design and the Canon of Operations
If Design privileges a new language that cannot be integrated into military practice without adopting a
radically different vocabulary, what does this mean for ideas of strategy that we have come to treasure? If
the problem lies in our hesitation to embrace alternative ideas—in their original form, not necessarily the
way they are transmitted in doctrine and organizational behavior—are we at risk of forgetting the
fundamentals?
The Design debate parallels the quarrels over the literary “canon” in the humanities during the 1980s,
despite the deep divide between warfighting and arcane debates about Roland Barthes and the “pleasure of
the text.” Traditionalists such as Harold Bloom believed firmly in a canon and the importance of
preserving a core of tradition that was more or less unalterable. More revolutionary academics wanted to
overthrow this canon, challenge its leading figures, and problematize the epistemic assumptions from
which it was built. Neither side completely necessarily won. The canon was expanded to include more
diverse writers and emphasize a more critical approach to the study of literature. It was difficult to argue
against the contention that certain writers had been unjustly overlooked and certain methods of inquiry
had completely cleared the field of conceptual gaps.
At the same time, the idea of a canon survived for both instrumental and practical reasons. It was easy to
argue that a “common sense” idea of the fundamentals was too restrictive, but too radical to throw out the
idea of fundamentals as ends in and of themselves. Every field has a base from which to build, even if that
base’s support structures did not support a straightforward architecture. A student of advanced character
was trusted to be mature enough to not be frightened by difference or contradiction. More cynically, it
helped to have a central idea of the humanities in order to preserve funding for academic instruction at a
time when education has moved towards more practical ends.
Towards an American Style of Operations
At the end of the day, the foundation of any serious study of the military art will lie in the “canon” of
greats such as Carl von Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, and Antoine-Henri Jomini. The reason why they continue to
dominate is fairly practical: they define the contours of war and warfare as we understand it and no one
has come up with anything better without doing gross violence to military and political history. Fourth
Generation Warfare (4GW) and Unrestricted Warfare (UW), two doctrines that sometimes are offered as
successors to the Clausewitzian vision, cannot meaningfully distinguish between politics and violence, to
say nothing of the problems with van Creveld’s ideas of Trinitarian and non-Trinitarian Warfare and Mary
Kaldor’s concept of New Wars.
The canon, however, has not (and should not) remained stable. Gray’s most recent book on strategy
recognizes multiple concentric rings of strategists whose work comprises a general theory of strategy,
some of whom have not been traditionally recognized by orthodox strategists. As more theorists and
practitioners are recognized as pioneers of the military art, they will be similarly added to the canon of
strategy, operations, and tactics. Some accepted notions will be, undeniably, deconstructed and revised.
While the present moment is not as disruptive as often claimed, all bets about the future are off given the
ways that current macroeconomic trends, emerging technologies, and geopolitics may combine in a
manner that could very well shake the world—and with it, our system of reference.
The foundation for American operational art is operations in complex environments. These environments
have included, for sure, urban warfare and guerrilla operations. But they mostly—from the Barbary Wars
to the Libyan War—have been expeditionary operations. Expeditionary operations require sound thinking
as to how best apply force to realize the political object. Design—or merely a tolerance of operational
pluralism—can help develop the necessary skills if we recognize the complexity of the Fulda Gap in
addition to the ill-structured nature of the battle for Kabul.
About the Author
Adam Elkus
Adam Elkus is a PhD student in Computational Social Science at George Mason
University. He has published articles on defense, international security, and
technology at Small Wars Journal, CTOVision, The Atlantic, the West Point
Combating Terrorism Center’s Sentinel, and Foreign Policy.
Available online at : http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/a-critical-perspective-on-operational-artand-design-theory
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