Prologue
Professor Sir Michael Howard
‘Operational art’, so the editors of this book point out, ‘is the grey area between
strategy and tactics’. Recently, this grey area has been the subject of intensive
study, but, for the best part of two centuries, military theorists ignored it. They
concentrated on ‘strategy’, the business of the high command, and ‘tactics’, the
means of defeating enemy forces once battle was joined, which was the concern
of the commander in the field. For many of them, indeed, ‘strategy’ and
‘operations’ were the same thing: deciding where to give battle, and then, in
the immortal words of Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, ‘gitting tha fustest with the
mostest men’. Antoine de Jomini phrased it more elegantly: ‘to operate, with the
largest number of forces, in a combined effort on the decisive point’. In any
event, the object of the strategist was to bring his forces to battle under the best
possible circumstances. It was ‘the battle’ that ultimately counted.
But strategy is aboutthinkingandplanning.Operations are aboutdoing:
hence the phrase ‘operational art’. It has been truly, if unkindly, said that
amateurs do strategy but professionals do logistics. Without logistics, there
can be no operations, and, without operations, strategy remains so much hot
air. But further, without effectivetacticseven the most effective operations are
a tragic waste of effort. To take an example from the Second World War:
Winston Churchill might conceive strategies for the defeat of the Axis powers
but his military advisers had to determine which were operationally possible.
Even when they were possible they came to grief, whether in Norway in 1940,
the Western Desert in 1941–2, or Anzio in 1944, because of tactical failure
once battle was joined. Churchill’s American allies may have been less imagi-
native so far as strategy was concerned, but they were brilliant at logistics. As
Dr Echevarria points out in this volume, the American way of warfare was,
and remains, as ‘battle-oriented’ as that of Napoleon. For General George
Marshall in 1942, strategy consisted simply in identifying the main enemy
force and destroying it in a ‘decisive battle’. Its style, as he puts it, is ‘more
about winning battles than winning wars’. ‘Operations’ were thus largely a
matter of logistics, which itself was largely a matter of management. If the
logisticians can deliver a sufficient superiority of force, tactical incompetence
does not matter all that much. American forces could afford to learn, however
expensively, on the job, and wear down their adversary through sheer force of
numbers. This perhaps explains, as Avi Kober points out in his critique of the