military policy, and that ‘civilian strategists’ focused on nuclear deterrence. 79 It
made no mention of operational art, and nor, two years later, didWarfare as a
Whole, the work of General Sir Frank Kitson, who had just finished his career as
commander-in-chief, United Kingdom Land Forces. Having publishedLow In-
tensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeepingin 1971, the distilla-
tion of lessons learnt over the two decades of colonial withdrawal, Kitson was one
of the army’s most distinguished commentators on counter-insurgency. But
Kitson’s use of the word ‘operations’ in his title had been Clausewitzian, not
Jominian, and, although some of those campaigns had been characterized by
joint political and military planning at the theatre level, most famously and
successfully in Malaya, Kitson had not equated the resulting strategy with opera-
tional art. Even he saw the extensive campaigning outside Europe as separate
from, and at a subordinate level to, the possible war within Europe.Warfare as a
Wholebemoaned the army’s lack of doctrine, but its focus on tactics and training
suggested that Kitson understood doctrine as Clausewitz had, not as a source of
inspiration for commanders. 80
The central concepts underpinning NATO war games designed to prepare for
the defence of Western Europe against a Soviet invasion were also tactical,
emphasizing firepower at the expense of manoeuvre. Committed to the forward
defence of the inner German border, commanders could not trade space for time
because that would involve the sacrifice of the very territory which they were
seeking to protect. Soviet conventional superiority meant that such exercises
almost invariably concluded with the use of nuclear weapons, so rendering the
operational level of war entirely redundant. But by the early 1980s, the revival of
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, sustained in part by the debate sur-
rounding the basing and deployment of cruise missiles, made the early use of
nuclear weapons increasingly unacceptable to politicians, some of whom advo-
cated a declaration of no first use by NATO, a principle which struck at the roots
of nuclear deterrence strategy. At the same time, the missile technologies appro-
priate to lower-yield nuclear warheads could also deliver conventional munitions
with increasing accuracy. This created the possibility of striking Soviet second
echelon forces deep inside Warsaw Pact territory, so disrupting their capacity to
sustain a conventional armoured breakthrough. The urgency of looking at con-
ventional options which gave depth rather than linearity to the shape of the
battlefield was heightened by the recognition that, under the leadership of
Marshal N. V. Ogarkov as chief of the general staff, the Soviet army had developed
a new doctrine, designed, in the words of Christopher Donnelly, the director of
the Soviet Studies Research Centre at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, to
‘present NATO with a problemat precisely that level with which it is at present least
well organized to cope—the operational level’. 81 Accepting the Soviet policy of no
first use of nuclear weapons, it seemed to make inoperable the early use of even
limited nuclear options. ‘Operational manoeuvre groups’ would engage NATO
forces so intimately, to such a depth, and with such suddenness that any nuclear
munitions would inflict massive casualties on NATO’s own forces, as well as on
those of the enemy. 82
118 The Evolution of Operational Art