linked operations Bagration and Lvov-Sandomierz in the summer of 1944 an
‘outstanding example of Soviet operational art’.
Although all of these operations included elements of manoeuvre, deep opera-
tions, envelopments, encirclements, shock and awe, surprise, and other features
of operational art, there is no doubt that mass was significant in distinguishing
victory from defeat: the Soviets simply overwhelmed the Germans with superior
numbers of aircraft, tanks, artillery, and men. Neither can there be any doubt that
the objective of the campaigns was the enemy army: when Stalin spoke of
breaking ‘the spine of Japan’ at the very end of the war, he was referring to the
Kwantung Army. Like Showalter, Kipp concludes that operational art found its
place in the Second World War at various fronts, but, as happened in Germany,
has become a lost form of art in post-war Soviet-Russian armed forces, which
have never engaged in large-scale operations against a regular enemy.
In Chapter 4, Professor Hew Strachan examines the origins, development, and
implications of operational art in the British armed forces. During the nineteenth
century, most British officers used the word ‘operations’, as Clausewitz did, to
describe military activity in general. Some, however, followed Jomini, who had
begun to develop a specific vocabulary to describe the links between ‘strategy’ and
‘tactics’. Jomini’s most obvious influence on British military theory was found in the
notion that operational thought rested on the application of principles. Caught
between the expectations of major European wars and the realities of colonial
soldiering, the British army was wary of adopting a fixed doctrine, but welcomed
the ‘principles of war’ asaway ofacknowledging its need tobe flexible and adaptable.
TheField Service Regulationsof 1909 represented the first official attempt to encap-
sulate this approach within operational art—one that survived the First World War
and was endorsed by J. F. C. Fuller. But the war also made clear that traditional
definitions of strategy did not apply during a coalition conflict requiring full
national mobilization. Fuller, who introduced the term ‘grand strategy’, therefore
opened the way for ‘operations’ to be recognized as an independent and subordinate
level of war. Nonetheless, the establishment of doctrine remained anathema, and
without it operational art was driven by tactics rather than by strategy. This,
according to Professor Strachan, was a key reason why the British army tended to
perform poorly at the operational level in the Second World War.
When the operational level of war re-emerged in Great Britain during the
1980s, it was accompanied by doctrine for the first time. The linkage between
doctrine and operational art was inspired less by the US army’s response to
Vietnam than by responses to Soviet and German practice and theory going
back to lessons from the First and Second World Wars. During the 1990s,
doctrine, originally based upon Britain’s need to compensate for inferiority in
numbers in the Cold War, became the basis of dogma. ‘Manoeuvre’ became
applicable to almost all aspects of war at many different levels, and was increas-
ingly applied in contexts where Western forces now enjoyed overwhelmingly
superior firepower. The old tensions between building capacity for large-scale
war (army corps) and smaller actions (Northern Ireland, Bosnia, etc.) reappeared
as the British armed forces strove to become truly joint. The former requirement
Introduction 5