operational level of war, because it had its own mission; it is ‘a dynamic, closed-
loop system, characterised by speed and appropriateness of response’, and it is
‘synergetic—that is, its whole must have an effect greater than the sum of its
parts’. 88 Manoeuvre now clearly meant much more than mobility; indeed, it
defined the thinking commander, determined to set the tempo of operations
and to use pre-emption and surprise to seize the initiative. When Peter Inge said
of Bagnall’s contribution, that doctrine was not what to think but how to think,
he was not being platitudinous. 89
The same message was reiterated in 1989 inDesign for Military Operations—the
British Military Doctrine, the first military doctrine described as such ever pub-
lished by the British army. The 1988Statement on the Defence Estimatesobserved
that ‘we have not...developed any universally applicable theoretical structure for
the organized study of war’, and it went on to contrast what were at best ‘tactical
principles and regulations’ with the ‘systematic and markedly more comprehen-
sive’ Soviet concept of doctrine. 90 Bagnall realized that a stated doctrine was the
corollary of the Higher Command and Staff Course, and in a very real sense
Design for Military Operationswas its product, written at a whirlwind pace by
Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Granville-Chapman in a room in the Staff College,
adjacent to the course and influenced directly by its debates. The doctrine divided
wars into three sorts: general war, limited war, and low-intensity conflict, and
divided war itself into four levels: grand strategic, military-strategic, operational,
and tactical. Operational art, it said, was the vital link between military-strategic
objectives and the tactical employment of forces: it ‘embraces both decisions
taken at the operational level and the outcome of those decisions, often tactical
activity but bearing on the strategic level’. Although the manual was wary about
being too precise on the nature of operational art, beyond the observation that it
was the business of generalship, its characteristics included freedom of action
through the exercise of initiative, joint activity (particularly air–land coopera-
tion), scale, concentration of force, and ‘total effect’. ‘Without the operational
level military strategy cannot be implemented in the most effective way’, because
without it resources ‘may be squandered in tactical battles fought in the wrong
place and at the wrong time’: the ‘Power of the whole—the operation—is greater
than the sum of its parts—the battles’. The principal means by which these
principles would be applied was manoeuvre, which ‘seeks to inflict losses indi-
rectly by envelopment, encirclement and disruption, while minimising the need
to engage in frontal attrition’. 91
AFTER THE COLD WARBy 1989, therefore, the British army had, almost in one fell swoop, embraced both
doctrine and operational art. However, their adoption had been predicated on the
need to get away from the legacy of, in Bagnall’s own words, ‘the bush fire
emergencies of the Empire’, and to focus on NATO, its deterrence strategy, ‘the
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 121