A metaphoric realm of military action lying between strategy and tactics. The latter are ancient concepts, referring on the one hand to the highest forms of military command (Gr.: strategos, the [art or office of] general-in-chief), and on the other to the methods and means of combat (Gr.: taktika, matters pertaining to arrangements). The ‘operational’ level of war, in contrast, is a reflection, at the level of theory, of the decentralized command structures made necessary by the expansion of military institutions in the industrial era. In the middle decades of the 19th century, military writers began to refer to complex military tasks as ‘operations’, a term that initially did little more than capture the technocratic spirit of the age. In time the word became associated with the actions of large but subordinate military commands. In the 1920s Soviet theorists, influenced by German precedents, coined the expression ‘operational art’ to refer to the handling of formations above a division, and to the conduct of campaigns as distinct from battles. In 1939 the US army appended the term ‘Operations’ to the title of its capstone publication, the FM 100-5 field manual—though it was only in 1982 that it officially accepted the ‘operational level of war’ as coequal to strategy and tactics.
The rising significance accorded the operational level of war reflects the degree to which military success has become associated with the co-ordinated action of independent, mobile forces; with the use by senior commanders of aircraft and other deep-strike weapons to avert tactical stalemate; and with logistics, intelligence, planning, and staff work as core military functions. Tasks like these resist the kind of prescriptive solutions that are normally applied to tactical problems. Yet they are distinctly military in character, and exist at some perceptible remove from the exigencies of policy and strategy, both of which, in the modern era, have been dominated by civilians. It is thus at the operational level of war that military officers have increasingly sought their professional identity. It is, proverbially, the level where generals fight.
This is less true of admirals or air marshals. Navies and air forces have paid far less attention to the operational level of war than armies have, in part because they have envisioned themselves exerting direct strategic influence of a kind that is supposed to make the application of operational art unnecessary. Much of the current interest in ‘joint’ operations, in which land, sea, and air forces act in close co-operation with each other, has been stimulated by the apparent vanity of such hopes, and by the realization that operational effectiveness on land requires mastery of all the media in which combat can occur. In the final analysis it is hard to say whether the idea of an operational level of war represents a permanent improvement in our understanding of war, or a response to transient conditions. The massive military organizations created by the industrial revolution and the advent of the mass mobilization, which called the operational level of war into existence, may themselves be supplanted by other military forms, employing such fine-grained communications technologies, or such precise and devastating means of attack, that abstract distinctions between strategy, operations, and tactics will lose their saliency.
— Daniel Moran
