what we would now call joint maritime operations became a possibility. Hitherto
the use of naval and land forces were essentially sequential: now they could be
used in concert. Under skilled hands, this could achieve a synergy of effects but
their use in this way produced a complexity in planning and conducting the
operation.
In 1588, the Spanish were at war with England. Seeking to invade England with
an army being assembled in the Low Countries, the Spanish dispatched the
Armada to transport the army across the Channel in the face of the English fleet
and then to sustain it. The operation was defeated. The Armada failed to defeat
the English fleet in the Channel and was badly mauled by the time it was
anchored off Calais. The defeat turned into a catastrophe as the Armada headed
north around the British Isles in storm-force winds. I give this example to show
how these joint operations have an inherent complexity. The Spanish seem to
have seen the operation as a series of discreet steps: assemble and sail the Armada,
load the army, sail the army to the invasion beaches or port, support the army
while it is established ashore, and then sustain it. All the steps would be resisted by
the English. The Armada made no apparent effort to defeat the English fleet; the
commander appears to have seen his primary effort as being to transport the
army and presumably land it against opposition. Perhaps he thought this because
if he had tried to bring the English fleet to battle, he would have lost ships and
might not have had enough to carry out his other tasks while the English, being at
home, would have been more likely to find replacements for any they had lost. In
any event, he does not appear to have understood that gaining and maintaining
control of the Channel was a necessary condition for a successful invasion in all its
stages. Thus, the force as a whole is always divided by the separate environments
of land and sea and the unique capabilities required to operate in them, and this
introduces complexity. The complexity lies at its simplest in striking a balance
between the allocation of resources and forces to apparently sequential events in
the knowledge that the sequence is only measured in time and not effect. In other
words, having gained control of the sea one must continue to maintain it. Thus,
the allocation of resources or forces must be understood less as a subtraction
from the whole but more as a division of capability. On the other hand, com-
plexity has the potential advantage of being a multiplier of effects. The English
were able to take advantage of the complexity. As much by the ineptness of the
Spanish as their own actions, they were undefeated. The Armada sailed for home,
unable to embark the army, transport it, and defeat the English simultaneously.
The Spanish Army was rendered irrelevant, and the weather completed the
destruction of the Spanish fleet. The English gained the product, not the sum,
of the failure to defeat them in the Channel.
By the early nineteenth century, forces are larger, operating at ever greater
distances from their strategic base, and wars are on occasions conducted in a
number of separate but related campaigns. In order to describe what is happening
or happened, phrases were used like ‘grand strategy’ to denote decisions and
actions above the strategy of a campaign, or ‘grand tactics’ to denote something
more than just tactical considerations. In each case, the user is seeking to define
230 The Evolution of Operational Art