Introduction
John Andreas Olsen and Martin van Creveld
Operational art emerged as a new and distinct component of warfare in the
nineteenth century. 1 Broadly defined as the grey area between strategy and
tactics, operational art spans the theory and practice of planning and conduct-
ing campaigns and major operations aimed at accomplishing strategic and
operational objectives in a given theatre of operations. 2 An intermediate link
between strategy and tactics has always existed, but a distinct concept that
encompasses a systematic and deliberate plan of campaign for major operations
is a mere 200 years old.
The forces unleashed in 1648 by the Treaty of Westphalia and the creation of
the modern state, combined with the political, social, and economic upheaval of
the French Revolution and the age of Napoleon, contributed in no small part to
creating the conditions that in turn led to a new approach to the conduct of war.
Napoleon’s extraordinary ability to mobilize his forces, deploy them into the
theatre of war, and then manoeuvre large independent formations to concentrate
them at the critical moment of battle set a new operational tone. 3 The Napoleonic
Wars, based as they were on armies so large that they had to be divided into
separate corps, came to represent a transformation of war in terms of goals, broad
participation, scale, accelerated tempo, and the roles that battle and manoeuvre
played in the operational repertoire.
Throughout the nineteenth century that repertoire was extended by technological
advances: most notably the railroad, but also new means of communication in the
form of the telegraph and the telephone, as well as weapons such as rifled small arms,
breech-loading rifled guns, and machine guns. 4 The cumulative effect of technolog-
ical progress, together with organizational improvements based on corps-sized
formations, revealed that the tactical framework was too narrow, and strategic
perspectives were too broad, to ensure effective orchestration of military forces.
This realization, and the resulting institution of an intermediate level of
military theory and practice, came about at different times and in different
forms in various states around the world. In Europe and the United States they
were influenced, directly or indirectly, by the writings of Carl von Clausewitz and
Henri Antoine Jomini, both of whom took the Napoleonic Wars as their point of
reference for their analyses. Neither of them used the term ‘operational art’, or
referred to a separate level between strategy and tactics, but they did discuss