The conduct of war is among the most important acts of the state. In the last century alone, failure in this undertaking has toppled governments and imposed hostile occupation under a conqueror's rule for hundreds of millions from Paris to Warsaw and Tokyo to Jakarta. Military failure in World War I destroyed the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires and created a host of new states in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in their stead. Allied military victory in World War II made global superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union, and split Germany into two countries; the success of Soviet arms ended Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian independence, and resulted in a generation of subjugation under Soviet satellite rule for the peoples of Eastern Europe. Pyrrhic victory in two world wars exhausted Britain and brought an end to its global economic hegemony. Failure in internal war has toppled governments from Afghanistan to Vietnam; variations in the conduct of such wars can mean the difference between decades of misery in grinding stalemates as in Lebanon or in a rapid, decisive conclusion as in Rwanda's.
But although its effects on international politics are profound, the conduct of war is often neglected by political scientists, who instead focus chiefly on its causes. This overlooks a rich—if undertheorized—literature by historians, soldiers, and strategists. A more systematic engagement with this literature would enable a more sophisticated treatment of war both in research and in teaching on international relations.
A comprehensive review of this enormous literature is beyond my scope here.1
For partial but useful overviews, see, e.g., Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); John Baylis et al., eds., Strategy in the Contemporary World: An Introduction to Strategic Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Colin McInnes & G. D. Sheffield, eds., Warfare in the Twentieth Century: Theory and Practice (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988); John Collins, Military Strategy: Principles, Practices, and Historical Perspectives (Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2001).
A useful place to begin is with a distinction between what strategists term the levels of war. Much as international relations observes a distinction between levels of analysis (system, unit, individual), so strategic studies distinguishes the grand strategic, military strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war. Each involves a different set of issues, a different range of variation in state practice, and different considerations for success. Proficiency at one does not necessarily imply proficiency at another, and no one dominates the others as a determinant of success or failure in war.
Grand Strategy
Grand strategy is the level of war most familiar to most political scientists. It defines the state's ultimate security objectives and prescribes means for pursuing them that extend beyond the strictly military to include economic, diplomatic, social, and political instruments of national policy. Unsurprisingly, such a rich and complex array of components can be combined in many ways.
American grand strategy in the Cold War, for example, defined U.S. objectives as fundamentally defensive (the containment of what was seen as an expansionist Soviet opponent). To this end, the United States employed, inter alia, a combination of alliances and a large peacetime military establishment to balance Soviet power; the use of free trade and economic expansion at home to ensure an economic base sufficient to sustain a large ongoing military program; economic and diplomatic isolation of the Soviet bloc; and a political effort to maintain domestic support for international engagement by emphasizing the perceived threat from the Soviet Union.2
See, e.g., John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
See, e.g., Norman Rich, Hitler's War Aims (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).
Grand strategic choices are frequently controversial. In the United States, for example, the Cold War saw a debate between advocates of the containment doctrine sketched above and supporters of rollback, who sought to shrink the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe rather than merely prevent its expansion.4
See, e.g., Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 128–9, 155–6.
Christopher Layne, “Offshore Balancing Revisited,” Washington Quarterly, 25: 2 (spring 2002), pp. 233–48; Barry Posen and Andrew Ross, “Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy,” International Security, 21:3 (winter 1996/97), pp. 5–53.
Today, the U.S. grand strategic debate focuses on the role of democratization, unilateralism, and preemptive warfare. Since 2001, neoconservatives have often advocated a non-status quo policy of transformational democratic change in hostile regimes, to be pursued multilaterally and peacefully if possible but unilaterally and militarily if necessary.6
See, e.g., Robert Lieber, The American Era: Power and Strategy for the 21st Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2003); Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment Revisited,” National Interest, winter 2002/03, pp. 5–17.
See, e.g., Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World (New York: Pantheon, 2006); Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
For official articulations, see The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: The White House, September 2002); National Strategy for Countering Terrorism (Washington, D.C.: The White House, September 2006). For a critique of U.S. grand strategy as underspecified, see Stephen Biddle, American Grand Strategy after 9/11: An Assessment (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, April 2005).
Military Strategy
Military (or Theater) strategy prescribes how military instruments per se are to achieve the goals set for them by grand strategy in a given theater of war. The United States in the Cold War, for example, employed a number of complementary military strategies to achieve the end of balancing Soviet power in Europe and Asia. Nuclear deterrence aimed to dissuade the Soviets from aggression by threatening overwhelming retaliation. A continental strategy of defending key European and Asian allies with conventional ground and supporting air forces aimed to defeat aggression if it occurred, or failing that, to provide time for nuclear compellence to reverse an invasion and restore the territorial status quo. At times these were complemented with a maritime strategy of using U.S. naval action to threaten horizontal escalation against the Soviet periphery and to pressure Soviet client states overseas.9
On American use of continental and maritime strategies in the Cold War, see Robert Komer, “Maritime Strategy vs. Coalition Defense,” Foreign Affairs, summer 1982, pp. 124–31; John J. Mearsheimer, “A Strategic Misstep: The Maritime Strategy and Deterrence in Europe,” International Security, Vol. 11, No. 2 (fall 1986), pp. 3–57; Joshua Epstein, “Horizontal Escalation: Sour Notes of a Recurrent Theme,” in Robert Art and Kenneth Waltz, eds., The Use of Force, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), pp. 649–60. On nuclear strategy and European defense, see David Schwartz, NATO's Nuclear Dilemmas (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1983); J. Michael Legge, Theater Nuclear Weapons and the NATO Strategy of Flexible Response (Santa Monica: RAND, 1983), RAND R-2964-FF.
As with grand strategy, military strategy is often controversial. Among the more prominent debates at this level of war have been the recurring disagreements between advocates of strategic bombing (which relies on coercive attacks against enemy centers of industry, population, and political control to secure national aims) and more conventional continental strategists.10
Cf., e.g., Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win (Cornell University Press, 1996); Barry D. Watts, “Ignoring Reality: Problems of Theory and Evidence in Security Studies,” Security Studies 7, no. 2 (winter 1997/98), pp. 133–49; Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (London: Pimlico, 2006 ed.).
On the history of Cold War U.S. nuclear doctrine, see, e.g., Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 ed.); Tami Davis Biddle, “Shield and Sword: American Strategic Forces, 1945 to the Present,” in Andrew Bacevich, ed., The Long War: American National Security Policy, 1945 to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
See, e.g., Philip A. Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan,” in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 444–77; Alfred Thayer Mahan, “Commerce Destroying and Blockade,” in Allan Westcott, ed., Mahan on Naval Warfare (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), pp. 91–9; Julian Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1988 ed. of 1911 orig.); Michael Howard, “The British Way in Warfare: A Reappraisal,” in Howard, The Causes of Wars (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 169–87; Geoffrey Till, Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-first Century (London: Cass, 2004); Norman Friedman, Seapower as Strategy: Navies and National Interests (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2001); Andrew Lambert, Foundations of Naval History (Greenhill, 2006).
Unlike grand strategy in the Cold War, where the United States made a reasonably clear, consistent choice of one among several competing alternatives, U.S. military strategy for major war has usually been Service-specific; hence at any given time, multiple military strategies have been officially sanctioned. Typically the Army favors continental strategies. The Air Force normally favors strategic bombing (as opposed to “tactical” bombing in support of a land war). The Navy had long preferred Mahanian approaches, but has now shifted toward a Corbettian emphasis on power projection ashore, which has been the Marine Corps' traditional preference. This military strategic pluralism probably conduces to better policy because of the vigorous competition of ideas. However, it also promotes inter-Service conflict as advocates of fundamentally different means of securing military ends contend over peacetime budgets and wartime conduct.
Operational Art
Operational art prescribes how military forces are to achieve theater strategic ends by interconnecting a series of battles or engagements or airstrikes (sometimes called a “campaign”). During the Cold War, for example, the theater strategy of continental defense in Europe was implemented via a number of successive operational-level doctrines. The doctrine inherited from World War II conceived U.S. offensive campaigns as a sequence of battles and actions in three to four phases: 1) concentration of a disproportionate fraction of U.S. forces on a narrow front; 2) one or more breakthrough battles, in which this concentrated force fought its way through the enemy's prepared defenses on that front; and an ensuing 3) exploitation and 4) pursuit, in which the attacker's forces, now free of the need to overcome prepared defenses, accelerated and fanned out to overrun less-protected supporting infrastructure many miles behind the front, causing systemic collapse of the defense as a whole.
U.S. defensive campaigns, by contrast, were designed to thwart an enemy's use of an approach like that described above. This would be accomplished via the use of deep dispositions that would forestall breakthrough in a series of delaying actions at the threatened point, while withheld reserves were counter-concentrated to that point from elsewhere in the theater. These reserves could then be used to set up a climactic counterattack, or to reinforce local defenses at the threatened point.13
Robert Doughty, The Evolution of US Army Tactical Doctrine, 1946–76 (Ft. Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute, 1979), pp. 2–12; Field Manual FM 100-5, Field Service Regulations, Operations (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1949), ch. 8. Army field manuals represent an important resource for official descriptions of operational art and tactics, yet one that is typically overlooked in political science scholarship. They can now be obtained online from a variety of sources. Many historical manuals have been digitized by the U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Library at Ft. Leavenworth and posted at: http://cgsc.leavenworth.army.mil/carl/contentdm/home.htm (under “Obsolete Military Manuals”). Current manuals are sometimes made available to the public online by the Army and sometimes not; the site is open as of this writing (January 2007), and can be found at: www.army.mil/references/ by following the links for “Army doctrinal and training publications.” Nonofficial sources include www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/index.html; and www.enlisted.info. Non-official sources are not necessarily as current, but are more consistently available.
This orthodox approach was replaced in 1956 by what is now called the Pentomic Doctrine, which relied on tactical nuclear weapons to destroy the enemy without the series of maneuver battles called for in orthodox doctrine. Concentration was judged too dangerous in the face of nuclear firepower, which in friendly hands was deemed sufficient to breach enemy lines or destroy enemy assaults without conventional breakthrough battles. Instead, dispersed ground forces were to direct nuclear fires and exploit their effects via widely distributed small unit actions at many points across the theater.14
Andrew Bacevich, The Pentomic Era (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1986); Doughty, The Evolution of US Army Tactical Doctrine, pp. 12–9.
The Pentomic Doctrine was found to be impractical, however, and was abandoned by 1962 in favor of a return to doctrinal orthodoxy in the Reorganized Armored Division (ROAD) system, which closely resembled previous doctrine. The ROAD doctrine was in turn displaced by the “Active Defense” of 1976, in which a new firepower source—early-generation guided antitank missiles—was judged to render traditional breakthrough battles impossibly costly and defensive depth superfluous. Instead, defensive campaigns were to be waged by concentrating antitank weapons near the initial point of contact for an early decisive battle before the attacker could penetrate in depth; the withholding of reserves was discouraged in order to maximize forward combat strength, and counterattack was all but forbidden in the face of the defensive firepower expected from the enemy's guided weaponry. Maneuver was limited to lateral displacement of forward defenders to match the attacker's local concentration at the point of attack, and theater campaigns as a whole were designed to avoid the need to retake lost ground or to penetrate into enemy territory.15
Paul Herbert, Deciding What Has to Be Done: General William E. DePuy and the 1976 Edition of FM 100-5, Operations (Ft. Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute, 1988); Doughty, The Evolution of US Army Tactical Doctrine, pp. 19–25, 40–6.
Like the Pentomic Doctrine before it, Active Defense was soon found to be too static and too dependent on firepower, yielding another return to orthodoxy in the form of the “AirLand Battle” Doctrine of 1982. AirLand Battle restored the traditional emphasis on orchestrating a series of sequential battles fought in depth, heavier reliance on counterattack to regain lost ground, and larger reserves. It added to this an increased reliance on deep air strikes against military targets on enemy territory in order to facilitate breakthrough and exploitation when on the offense, and to disrupt the same when on the defense.16
John Romjue, From Active Defense to AirLand Battle: The Development of Army Doctrine 1973–1982 (Ft. Monroe, VA: U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1984); Huba Wass de Czege and L. D. Holder, “The New FM 100-5,” Military Review, July 1982, pp. 53–70.
AirLand Battle, though revised several times after 1982, remained the heart of U.S. Army doctrine through the 1991 Gulf War. Since then, however, it has been subject to challenge from advocates of a related series of ideas often termed “network centric warfare” (NCW) or “rapid decisive operations” (RDO). NCW/RDO advocates see the potential of long-range precision strikes based on new networked information technologies as obviating the need for both traditional massed ground battles and sequenced campaigns of successive concentration, breakthrough, and exploitation phases. Instead, they believe that standoff precision firepower delivered simultaneously throughout the depth of the theater by air and missile forces can destroy an opponent's ability to resist, with ground forces reduced to a secondary supporting role.17
For current U.S. Army operational doctrine, see FM 3-0: Operations (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters, Department of the Army, 2001). On NCW/RDO, see, e.g., Arthur Cebrowski and John Garstka, “Network-Centric Warfare,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (January 1998); U.S. Joint Forces Command, A Concept for Rapid Decisive Operations (Norfolk, VA: Joint Forces Cmd. J9 Joint Futures Lab, 2001).
Though commonly described as radically novel, today's NCW and RDO doctrines bear a striking resemblance to the two earlier postwar responses to apparent increases in firepower in their rejection of both concentration for breakthrough and sequential campaign design. Whether NCW and RDO will go the way of the Pentomic Division and the Active Defense remains to be seen, but a renewed doctrinal debate is certain.
Operational doctrine for interstate continental warfare, however, is far from the only subject of debate at this level of war. The proper conduct of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaigns, for example, is attracting increasing attention.18
See, e.g., John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2002); T. X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: Warfare in the Twenty-First Century (Zenith, 2004); Kalev I. Sepp, “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, May-June 2005, pp. 8–12; Stephen Biddle, “Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006; Andrew Krepinevich, “How to Win in Iraq,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2005; Kenneth Pollack and the Iraq Working Group, A Switch in Time: A New Strategy for America in Iraq, Analysis Paper No. 7 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, February 2006). For official U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine, see FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters, Department of the Army, 2006).
See, e.g., Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), chs. 3–5; Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air War Against Germany (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1961)
Bernard Brodie, Sea Power in the Machine Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1943); Theodore Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy, 1871–1904 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1987 ed. of 1937 orig.), edited by Stephen S. Roberts; William McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 262–5.
See, e.g., Till, Seapower; Friedman, Seapower as Strategy.
Tactics
Tactics prescribe how the individual battles or airstrikes that make up a campaign are to be conducted, and ordinarily dictate how small units are employed (e.g., platoons, companies, battalions, ships, or squadrons). By contrast, operational art concerns the activities of large formations (such as army divisions or corps, naval task forces, or wings of aircraft), and theater strategy concerns the direction of the largest formations such as armies and army groups, fleets, and “numbered air forces” (i.e., multiple wings of aircraft).
Among the more important issues in the history of tactics for continental warfare have been the balance of arms and the use of terrain. Prior to World War I, European armies saw infantry as the decisive arm, with artillery, cavalry, and other branches serving only to prepare for or support the critical clash of opposing foot soldiers. Terrain was understood to be important, but the emphasis was on large-scale features (such as commanding high ground) and enabling or disabling the maneuver of massed formations which tended to close with the enemy in the open. These tactics yielded slaughter in the opening battles of August 1914.22
Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham, Firepower: British Army Weapons and Theories of War, 1904–1945 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), pp. 7–60; David G. Herrmann, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 59–112; Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 48–52; Antulio Echevarria, After Clausewitz: German Military Thinkers Before the Great War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), pp. 121–81, 213–28; Jonathan House, Toward Combined Arms Warfare: A Survey of Twentieth Century Tactics, Doctrine, and Organization (Ft. Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute, 1984), pp. 7–18; John English, On Infantry (New York: Praeger, 1984), pp. 1–11.
With traditional infantry-centered tactics having clearly failed, European armies abandoned them wholesale by as early as March 1915. In their place came a new system of artillery-centered tactics in which the obviously very lethal firepower of modern artillery was harnessed in an effort to destroy defenses outright before exposing friendly infantry to enemy fire. As the French put it, “l'artillerie conquiert, l'infantrie occupiert” (“the artillery conquers, the infantry occupies”). This was a dramatic reversal—in a matter of months, ostensibly conservative military institutions demoted the dominant arm of the previous century to the role of mere support for an artillery branch that had been considered a minor technical arm before 1915. This stood a lifetime of military experience on its head and constituted, arguably, the most sweeping revolution in the history of modern strategy. Yet it, too, failed, yielding the great trench stalemate of 1915–1917.23
J. B. A. Bailey, Field Artillery and Firepower (Oxford: Military Press, 1989), pp. 130–41; Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, Command on the Western Front (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 154–70; G. C. Wynne, If Germany Attacks: The Battle in Depth in the West (London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1940; Greenwood Press reprint, 1976), pp. 168–318; Timothy Lupfer, The Dynamics of Doctrine: Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During the First World War (Ft. Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute, 1981), pp. 1–36; Bidwell and Graham, Firepower, pp. 61–130.
By 1918 a new system had taken shape, in which the infantry-centered tactics of 1914 and the artillery-centered tactics of 1915–1917 were both replaced with a new combined arms approach in which infantry and artillery cooperated as co-equals. In the new approach, artillery was used not to destroy defenses outright but merely to suppress them, restricting their freedom to fire on advancing infantry. That infantry now dispersed into small, independently maneuvering formations which could use minor local terrain features for cover and concealment, dashing from one small patch of cover to the next while the artillery kept the defenders' heads down. This tight integration of mutually supporting arms and careful use of micro terrain by small subunits made it possible to sustain an advance in the face of enemy fire, and restored movement to the battlefield by the spring of 1918.24
Bailey, Field Artillery and Firepower, pp. 141–52; Bidwell and Graham, Firepower, pp. 94–130, 139–46; Prior and Wilson, Command on the Western Front, pp. 311–15, 362–6; Lupfer, The Dynamics of Doctrine, pp. 43–6; Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front, pp. 93–100, 120–58; Bruce Gudmundsson, Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914–1918 (New York: Praeger, 1989); English, On Infantry, pp. 17–26; Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory (London: Review, 2002 ed.), pp. 221–63.
The resulting “modern system” of tactics proved both effective in enabling ground forces to win battles in the face of enemy fire, and remarkably robust over nearly a century of technological change. Since 1918 it has become something approaching a transnational norm for sound tactics. But while it is militarily effective when implemented fully, it has the disadvantages of extreme complexity and political unattractiveness that have prevented some states from full implementation, yielding significant variance in the actual conduct of battlefield tactics.25
Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), ch. 3, which also treats the modern system at the operational level of war.
Moreover, technological change has periodically tempted tacticians to abandon the modern system canon in favor of heterodox approaches designed to exploit increasingly lethal firepower or, most recently, improvements in information availability. The operational-level doctrines associated with the Pentomic Division and the Active Defense, for example, were accompanied with tactical-level innovations emphasizing passive, static dispositions in prepared defensive positions, with a minimum of forward movement in the face of the apparently too-lethal nuclear and precision-guided conventional firepower. As at the operational level, however, it was found that static tactical defenses could be overcome by combined arms attackers using a proper balance of suppressive fire, maneuver, and covering terrain. In both cases, the conduct of battles returned to the modern system norm when the Pentomic Division and Active Defense were abandoned.26
Bacevich, The Pentomic Era; Doughty, The Evolution of US Army Tactical Doctrine, pp. 12–25, 40–6; Herbert, Deciding What Has to Be Done; Romjue, From Active Defense to AirLand Battle, pp. 23–50. For current U.S. Army tactics, see, e.g., Field Manual 71-1: Tank and Mechanized Infantry Company Team (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters, Department of the Army, 1998).
Today, proponents of standoff precision strike and networked information technology advocate new tactics that strive to avoid giving battle at short ranges on the ground by destroying the enemy at great distances via remotely delivered firepower. The ground forces that remain are to disperse into small, widely distributed elements and act chiefly as scouts to acquire targets for long-range air and missile attack.27
See, e.g., Brig. Gen. David A. Deptula, Effects-Based Operations: Change in the Nature of Warfare (Arlington, VA: Aerospace Education Foundation, 2001); Cebrowski and Garstka, “Network-Centric Warfare;” U.S. Joint Forces Command, A Concept for Rapid Decisive Operations.
In both operational art and tactics, the last century of warfare has thus seen a repeated pattern in which new technologies have tempted militaries to design new approaches around the apparent increase in firepower provided in turn by the new artillery of 1914, the battlefield nuclear weapons of the 1950s, the first-generation precision-guided antitank weapons of the 1970s, and now the standoff precision weaponry and networked information of the 1990s and the twenty-first century. Heretofore, such heterodoxy has proven impractical and orthodox doctrines and tactics have always returned. Whether this will happen again remains to be seen; the utility of orthodox tactics and operational art in a time of technological change is a critical issue in today's debate.
But, of course, it is not the only debate among students of tactics. As with operational art, tactics for counterinsurgency have attracted increasing attention, especially as the war in Iraq has unfolded.28
See, e.g., Bard O'Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism: From Revolution to Apocalypse (Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2005); Ian Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies: Guerillas and their Opponents since 1750 (London: Taylor and Francis, 2005); James Anthony Joes, Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004); and the references in note 18.
On naval tactics, see esp. Wayne Hughes, Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2000 ed.). For accounts of illustrative tactical debates within the U.S. Air Force, see, e.g., Mackinlay Kantor and Curtis LeMay, Mission with LeMay: My Story (New York: Doubleday, 1965); Eliot Cohen et al., Gulf War Air Power Survey, Vol. II, Part I: Operations (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993).
All of these debates are important. And all of the levels of war are important. No one trumps the others. Brilliant tactics and operational art can be undone by errors at the strategic or grand strategic level, as was the case for Germany in World War II, and may yet prove to be the case for the United States' 2003 campaign to topple Saddam Hussein.30
Russell F. Weigley, “The Political and Strategic Dimensions of Military Effectiveness,” in Williamson Murray and Allen Millett, eds., Military Effectiveness, Vol. III (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1988), pp. 341–64; Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2006); Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006).
Paul Kennedy, “Britain in the First World War,” in Millett and Murray, Military Effectiveness, Vol. I, pp. 31–79; Biddle, Military Power, ch. 7; Stephen Biddle, “Speed Kills: Reevaluating the Role of Speed, Precision, and Situation Awareness in the Fall of Saddam,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (February 2007), pp. 3–46.
Success in the conduct of war often requires competence across the levels of war. Similarly, teaching and research in political science and international relations can profit from a familiarity not just with the politics of war at the grand strategic level, but also with at least some of the basic issues in the conduct of war at the military strategic, operational, and tactical levels as well.
