In fact, there was a real possibility that weapons of mass destruction might be
used in the next war; so both civilian schools of thought made some valid points.
During the 1960s and 1970s, it became clear that Soviet operational thinking did
not eschew the use of such weapons, and, instead, had thoroughly integrated
them into its doctrine. Military training in the United States and across NATO
thus had little choice but to include instruction in how to react to and fight in
biological, chemical, and nuclear environments. In important respects, then,
arguments for a more flexible grammar could not be ignored.
American operational art delivered a dual response. The first response was to
continue to refine the art itself from a largely conventional standpoint, integrat-
ing air, ground, and naval power, into a more sophisticated first grammar. At
times, the admonitions of nuclear theorists were set aside completely, as with the
debates between ‘manoeuvrists’ and ‘attritionists’ in the 1970s and 1980s, which
blissfully proceeded as if a confrontation with the Warsaw Pact would remain
conventional; the debates did yield interesting insights, nonetheless. 70 This re-
sponse formed part of the intellectual background behind the 1982 version of the
US army’s operations manual, FM 100-5, which introduced the AirLand Battle
concept. The manual did not overlook the role of weapons of mass destruction,
but it did reinforce the importance of war’s first grammar to American opera-
tional art with statements such as ‘the object of all operations is to destroy the
opposing force’. 71 That emphasis was even stronger in the 1986 edition of FM
100-5, which declared that the ‘essence of operational art’ was ‘the identification
of the enemy’s operational centre of gravity and the concentration of superior
combat power against that point to achieve decisive success’. 72 It also stressed the
synchronization of mobility and firepower, not only across the forward line of
friendly troops, as the active defence concept of the 1976 version of FM 100-5 did,
but also throughout the depth of the battle area. The idea of the ‘deep attack’ was
clearly not new, as it had existed in Soviet doctrine for some time. However, what
was new for the American operational art, and what some have called revolu-
tionary, was the idea of conceiving the entire depth of an opponent’s attacking
formations as one ‘integrated’ battle. 73
The institutionalization of the operational level of war by the United States and
other NATO members also came, in part, as a response to the organizational and
doctrinal challenges posed by the Warsaw Pact. The operational level of war
provided a way to integrate the various national doctrines and command and
control structures of NATO members into something resembling a coherent effort.
The second response involved moving towards an alternate grammar of war
with a body of doctrine referred to as military operations other than war
(MOOTW), with missions ranging from show of force to humanitarian assis-
tance. 74 The number of such operations rose dramatically after the Cold War. In
1990, the United Nations had five peacekeeping operations under way, excluding
those on the Korean Peninsula, involving about 10,000 troops; whereas, in 2006,
it listed eighteen such operations employing nearly 73,000 troops, while the costs
of such operations had risen from $800 million in 1990 to $41 billion in 2006. 75 It
is hardly surprising that such operations, whether called MOOTW or something
American Operational Art, 1917–2008 155