operations were closely aligned. Even if operational art came close to conceptual
birth in the hands of Jomini and Hamley, neither would have been entirely happy
with a hierarchy of warlike activities which both separated out operations from
strategy, and then subordinated the former to the latter. In thePre ́cis, Jomini said
that war consisted of five parts: strategy, grand tactics, logistics, tactics of the
different arms, and the art of the engineer; operations, his discussion of which
was subsumed under strategy, was not one of them. 21 Hamley represented an
advance only in that he did not define strategy or tactics, and eschewed all such
categorization. Maurice focused on tactics, and saw them as changing. This was
the principal reason for his dissatisfaction with Hamley, not his aspiration to
address the operational level of war, and Maurice went on to ask whether changes
in tactics had also altered strategy. His answer was affirmative but precisely
because his understanding of strategy lay not at the interface of military and
political activity, but was set by what today would be called operational con-
siderations: ‘The campaign, the large field of war which concerns the marches and
movements of armies striving against one another to obtain positions of vantage
for the actual combat, is the province of strategy’. 22
It is, therefore, not quite true to say that the British army did not consider the
operational level of war in the nineteenth century. It did, but mostly, when it did so,
it called it strategy. Strategy was the business of the general, not the politician; the
distinction between it and operational art was moot. In this, Britain was fully in
accord with more general European practice. Clausewitz defined strategy as the use
of the battle for the purposes of the war. He saw much of the tactical activity of his
own day as indecisive, and went on to argue that it was the aftermath of battle, the
pursuit, that determined its wider outcome. His successors, particularly in France
and Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, mostly inverted the relationship.
Henderson assumed that the battle itself, not its exploitation, would be decisive.
‘Strategy’, he wrote, ‘is the art of bringing the enemy to battle’, and ‘the end of
strategy is the pitched battle’. 23 Crucially, however, for both sets of interpretations,
the relationship between tactics and strategy was the central issue in war.
Definitions of strategy which were limited, professional, and Continentalist
were not just responses to the dominance of French and German role models, like
Napoleon or Moltke, or of French and German literature (although they were
certainly both those things). They were also an acknowledgement that a British
national strategy would, because of Britain’s status as an island and as an empire,
look very different from a French or German one. For mainland European armies
after 1871, the slide from strategy in the sense of operational art to strategy as a
system of national defence was logical: the likely theatres of campaign and the
best methods of operating within them were clear enough. Alsace and Lorraine,
the Ardennes, and the Vosges were probable battlegrounds and their armies
would be their principal instruments in war. The problem for Britain was that
there was no such easy transition from Continental modes of operating to likely
scenarios for actual war. If Britain fought any one of France, Germany, or Russia,
its primary weapon would be the Royal Navy, and decisive battles seemed more
likely to be fought at sea than on land. Hamley may have suppressed the
102 The Evolution of Operational Art