Although the US military encountered a second grammar of war during this
conflict, it left that grammar behind, eagerly turning it over to special forces
which were intentionally designed for that purpose. In the meantime, conven-
tional operational doctrine turned its attention to the Herculean task of defeating
Warsaw Pact forces in Europe.
LIMITED WAR, NUCLEAR WAR, AND THE
CRISIS FOR OPERATIONAL ARTThe advent of nuclear weapons gave rise to an important debate within American
defence circles, one that would also have crucial implications for operational art.
The issue was the continued utility of war in the rapidly unfolding atomic age or,
more precisely, whether and how armed conflict could be used if escalation was
not desired. To many scholars and defence intellectuals, it appeared that conven-
tional warfare had become obsolete. As Bernard Brodie argued, atomic weapons
seemed to have created a new strategic environment in which armed conflict had
to be either avoided or contained. 64 Other influential scholars, such as Robert E.
Osgood, the leading proponent of limited-war theory, and Thomas C. Schelling,
the principal advocate of coercive diplomacy, agreed. Osgood maintained that in
any war, an array of acceptable outcomes existed short of total military victory. 65
Schelling went so far as to suggest that the application of military force could be
adjusted like a rheostat, increasing or decreasing the level of pain for an opponent
until concessions were extracted. 66 In other words, they appeared to say that war’s
grammar needed to become as flexible as its logic.
Whereas Brodie, Osgood, and Schelling put a premium on limiting violence to
avoid escalation, other notable theorists, such as Herman Kahn, gave consider-
able thought to ‘thinking the unthinkable’, namely how to fight and possibly win
a nuclear war. 67 Kahn did not eschew escalation, but rather assumed it would
happen; he analysed hypothetical cases in detail, finally creating an escalation
ladder that both anticipated responses and prescribed them. This approach to
war did not entirely eliminate operational art, but did change it into something
military professionals found disagreeable; the kind of grammar Kahn envisioned
did not need artists, only technicians.
As a result of this debate, American operational artists found that the very
grammar they had refined over the course of three major wars was now suddenly
too risky to employ. 68 They were, in a manner of speaking, caught on the horns of
a dilemma. If they countered the limited-war school of thought, as many did, on
the basis that it violated critical principles of war’s first grammar, they ran the risk
of moving towards Kahn’s school of thought, which would ultimately make them
irrelevant. 69 Yet, by defining themselves against Kahn’s clinical, technician-like
approach, they moved in the direction of admitting that war’s first grammar was
not sacrosanct.
154 The Evolution of Operational Art