America’s experience in the Vietnam conflict called that assumption into ques-
tion. Although it won many battles, almost all of them in fact, in the end those
victories were not enough. 98 Still, it would be inaccurate to argue that the
winning (or losing) of battles is irrelevant. Plenty of belligerents have surrendered
after losing major battles. Nonetheless, the Vietnam conflict brought home the
point that war had at least two kinds of grammar; that point was not new, but it
was also not widely understood.
For most of the twentieth century, American operational practice could count
on having time to mobilize and deploy large military forces. The numerical
superiority of those forces typically compensated for lack of training and experi-
ence. The US military could afford to learn on the job, as it were. It is still doing
that, though one has to wonder whether the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan
would have been as protracted had its doctrine and institutional learning been
more complete.
American operational art also confronted a dual crisis in the middle of the
twentieth century with the advent of nuclear weapons. The strategic environment
called for the ability to adjust the application of military power gradually, as one
adjusts a rheostat, to coerce an opponent into compliance, while, at the same
time, avoiding escalation. This way of thinking ran counter to the training and
experience of military professionals, for whom the object of war was to over-
whelm one’s foe as quickly as possible, and to remove the physical and psycho-
logical means to resist.
The response of American operational art was to reaffirm the importance of
battle, and of war’s first grammar. The value of manoeuvre, for instance, was
reasserted, regardless of the likelihood that the next conflict might involve
weapons of mass destruction, which would surely render the principles under-
pinning manoeuvre irrelevant. That reaffirmation proved prescient, however,
as many of the manoeuvre precepts of AirLand Battle doctrine were also validated
in Desert Storm. The US military also published doctrine covering counter-
insurgency operations and military operations other than war; however, these
missions were intended to be dealt with by forces specially trained for the
purpose, or as lower priority missions. In addition, it embraced the operational
level of war, which not only offered practical organizational structures that
facilitated multinational planning, but also established a conceptual space in
which military professionals could develop and discuss tactical concepts and
capabilities without the interference of non-professionals.
The RMA that the first Gulf War seemed to have ushered in took American
operational theory to lofty heights. Precision-strike capabilities and information
technologies combined to inspire new (and old), if unidimensional, attempts to
perfect war’s first grammar. The need for sustained counter-insurgency operations
in Afghanistan and Iraq exposed the limitations inherent in focusing on one
grammar. Yet, it remains to be seen just how far the US will allow itself to develop
war’s second grammar.
To define operational art in terms of ‘creative imagination’, as the official defini-
tion did, is problematic. Creativity, like beauty, is highly subjective, and has little to
160 The Evolution of Operational Art