there is not much art in that. The exceptional commander rises above doctrine,
and, indeed, many commanders of armies, from Alexander the Great to Gustavus
Adolphus, have never been ‘indoctrinated’. Those possessed of military genius
may or may not know the rules, but more importantly they have the imagination
to know when to waive them, disregard them, or reinterpret them. The progeni-
tor of what we now call operational art, Napoleon, did not employ the term and
was not the product of doctrine in the sense in which it is understood today. He
only rarely used the word strategy, perhaps the nearest synonym for operational
art in most nineteenth-century military minds. For Napoleon, war was a matter
of tactics, grand tactics, and, above them both, policy. His successors, anxious to
rationalize what he had done into procedures, to change it from an art to a
science, and to make it into doctrine, began to formulate a theory of operations.
And so there is a further distinction between operational art and doctrine: the
former can be an individual matter, whereas the latter is collective.EUROPEAN INFLUENCES AND BRITISH STRATEGYClausewitz eschewed the word ‘operations’ inOn War; the regular appearance of
it or its derivatives in the 1976 English translation by Michael Howard and Peter
Paret is a concession to the debates and proclivities of their era, not those of the
original author. Although centrally concerned with the interaction between
strategy and tactics, he maintained a clear conceptual division between the
two. 8 The German word inOn Warmost frequently rendered as ‘operations’ by
Howard and Paret isHandeln, the ‘business’ of war. This is in itself a salutary
reminder for historian and theorist alike: neither should necessarily attribute to a
word used 100 or 200 years ago either the same meaning or the same precision
applied to it today.
So where does that leave Jomini? His reputation as the principal interpreter of
the Napoleonic era and the most influential strategic theorist of the entire
nineteenth century was founded on hisTraite ́des grandes ope ́rations militaires.
At one level, Jomini was usingope ́rationsnot as armies do today but as Clausewitz
was usingHandeln. Jomini’s fundamental principle, ‘to operate, with the largest
number of forces, in a combined effort on the decisive point’, used ‘operate’ in a
sense from which Clausewitz would not have dissented. 9 He meant no more than
the business of conducting war: most of theTraite ́is a history, a comparative
account of the wars waged by Frederick the Great, the armies of the French
Revolution, and Napoleon, and the title pages of its volumes say as much. But
superimposed onl’histoire critiquewas a grander design, represented by the
overarching title of the book and explained by Jomini in his preface. Earlier
attempts to write didactic books on war had, in his view, lost their way in details,
neglecting ‘the important combinations of military science’. He exempted from
this charge two writers on the Seven Years War, Henry Lloyd and Georg von
Tempelhoff, and credited Lloyd in particular with presenting ‘some profound
98 The Evolution of Operational Art