whole was not understood. For example, an examination of the Peloponnesian
War (431–404 BC) will show that, at times, it was waged in several separate
theatres at once. The chain of command went down from theecclesia, or popular
assembly, which made all the most important decisions, to thestrategoi,or
commanders on the spot. From them, it extended to thehegemonoi, or officers,
of the tactical units. The same is true of the Second Punic War (218–201 BC). The
Senate in Rome sent instructions to the theatre commanders, who were either
consuls or proconsuls, in charge of the armies in such places as northern Italy,
southern Italy, Spain, and, later, North Africa. The theatre commanders, in turn,
had legionary commanders (either praetors or legates), military tribunes, and
centurions serving under them. An examination of the fifth-century-BC Greek
historian Thucydides and the first-century-AD Roman one Livy will show that
neither of them had any difficulty in understanding the difference between the
overall direction of the war on one hand and exercising command over one of its
theatres on the other.
Instead, what prevented operational art from developing wasthe inability of
most forms of information to move much faster than the troops themselves. Consider
an army commander—we shall not deal with navies here—preparing to wage a
campaign at any time and place before 1800 or so. Let us ignore the question of
how to acquire information concerning the theatre itself. In case he was operating
in friendly territory he would, of course, be expected to be familiar with it. In case
he was planning to invade enemy territory, he would have to prepare ahead of
time by reading the available books, interviewing travellers, and the like. 1 A
commander who did not study the country ahead sufficiently thoroughly could
very well put his army at risk. This was what happened to Alexander the Great
when he marched back from India in 322 BC and to Napoleon when he marched
across the Sinai in 1798 AD; on both occasions, a lack of the appropriate
information all but caused the troops involved to die of thirst along with their
commander.
More pertinent to our topic, such a commander would need enemy informa-
tion: his whereabouts, his numbers, his composition, his capabilities, and, per-
haps most important of all, his intentions. Supposing the enemy to be beyond
immediate visual range, such information might reach him from one of two
sources. On the one hand, there was ‘passive’ information in the form of the
reports of travellers, deserters, etc. Its principal advantage was that it might (but
need not) reach him while the enemy was still a considerable distance away; its
principal disadvantage, in that its contents, instead of being tuned to meet the
commander’s exact requirements, were the product of accident. In addition, the
very real possibility that travellers and deserters, acting either deliberately or out
of ignorance, might bring false information had to be taken into account.
To overcome these problems, any commander worth his salt would engage in
an active quest for information of the kind that, in Rome, was known as
exploratio. Spies, often wearing some kind of disguise, would be dispatched. If
they succeeded in entering the enemy camp and emerging alive, they might report
back with many kinds of useful information. Patrols might be sent out and
10 The Evolution of Operational Art