The Levels of Warfare

Mar 29, 2023
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The Bazaar of War
The Levels of Warfare, Part 1: The Ancient Legacy
Among the most enduring innovations of 18th-century theory was the division of warfare into the formal levels of tactics and strategy. This has influenced our understanding of war, the division of command, and how military objectives should be selected—it is one of the most fundamental abstractions in military thought. Yet this conceptual division emerg…
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2 years ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · Ben
The Bazaar of War
The Levels of Warfare, Part 2: The Birth of Tactics and Strategy
We left off in part 1 in late antiquity with the Strategikon, which marked a shift in ancient military thought. Classical antiquity held tactics to mean the arrangement of soldiers for battle, one of the skills which made up strategy, meaning generalship more broadly. By the end of the 6th century, these words took on more precise definitions: tactics r…
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2 years ago · 7 likes · Ben
The Bazaar of War
The Levels of Warfare, Part 3: Operational Art
As we saw in Part 2, strategy and tactics had acquired more-or-less well-defined meanings by the beginning of the 19th century. Tactics referred to actions in battle, strategy to the large-scale maneuvers of a campaign—a simple two-part division of all warfare, further subdivided into elementary and grand tactics. Through the course of the century, thes…
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2 years ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · Ben
The Bazaar of War
The Levels of Warfare, Part 4: Operational Confusion
Operational art had a troubled birth in the English-speaking world. Although the concept had existed since the beginning of the 20th century, American officers did not come to it until the 1970s. This was the period of post-Vietnam reorientation toward a conventional war with the USSR, which entailed much greater interest in Soviet doctrine. The US Army…
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2 years ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Ben