pulled operational thought in a more tactical direction; the latter gave it a more
strategic—and even political—aspect.
Dr Antulio Echevarria’s point of departure is that US operational art has
essentially focused on perfecting war’s ‘first grammar’—the principles and pro-
cedures related to defeating an opponent by armed force—while struggling to
come to grips with war’s ‘second grammar’—the handling of insurgencies,
guerrilla warfare, and irregular warfare. In Echevarria’s opinion, a preoccupation
with destroying the enemy’s military forces has led the United States to adopt a
battle-centric view of warfare. Consequently, American operational art over the
last century has concentrated on fighting battles rather than on waging wars, and
rests on the flawed assumption that winning battles can easily translate into
winning the peace for which the wars were waged. By tracing doctrines and
manuals, as well as actual operations from the First World War to the present,
Echevarria demonstrates that all US armed services—land, sea, and air—shared
this outlook.
It was during the Cold War era, when scholars and practitioners were about to
lose faith in the relevance of operational art, that the concept actually blossomed
in the US: introduced in 1982 in the form of AirLand Battle, revised and
improved in 1986, and executed with great success (albeit against an opponent
who proved much weaker than expected) in the Gulf War of 1991. Echevarria
notes that US forces performed operational art with excellence during the inva-
sions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, as these campaigns were based on
an understanding of war’s ‘first grammar’, only to falter as these campaigns made
the transition from regular warfare to war’s ‘second grammar’, which demands
knowledge of how to design, plan, and conduct counter-insurgency operations.
Supplementing the Euro-Atlantic perspective, Dr Avi Kober examines the rise
and fall of operational art in the Israeli armed forces. Chapter 6 argues that until
the early 1970s the dominance of high-intensity conflicts, with their relatively
favourable conditions for battlefield manoeuvre, enabled Israeli operational art to
flourish. Combining an indirect approach with a domestically developed form of
Blitzkrieg, Israeli operational art reached its high points in 1956 and 1967. Since
the early 1970s, however, new conditions have affected Israeli operational art
negatively. First, with low-intensity conflicts becoming the only type of warfare in
which Israel has engaged since the 1980s, the importance of the operational level
of war has decreased, primarily because such confrontations tend to take place at
the two extremes of the levels of war spectrum—tactics on the one hand, and
strategy, or even grand strategy, on the other. At the same time, experience in
high-intensity conflicts, which traditionally provided the central source of inspi-
ration for Israeli commanders and their operational art, has almost disappeared
among the military leadership. Second, given the close linkage between opera-
tional art and manoeuvre, the ascendancy of firepower over manoeuvre and the
strong belief that superior weapon-system technology can decide battles, cam-
paigns, and even wars have had a detrimental effect on Israeli operational art. A
by-product has been a greater tendency to think linearly at the expense of the
non-linear and creative thinking on which Israeli operational art at its finest was
6 The Evolution of Operational Art