Understanding Military Strategy and the Four Levels of War

SOURCE:
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a39985/four-levels-of-war/

      Understanding Military Strategy

                               and

               the Four Levels of War

When "strategy" gets thrown around by politicians and the                       media, you can bet it's being misused.                                          By   

                              Robert Bateman

NOV 25, 2015

In my sustained effort to help others understand the news, there is one important area that really must be addressed, both because this is an election period and because some of these words are so widely confused and conflated in modern journalistic usage they now have little to no meaning. Specifically, I am referring to what we know as the "Levels of War," and the way that terms like "tactics" and "strategy" and "campaign" (and several other related concepts) are thrown around as though they are synonyms. They are not; and how they are used, both by reporters and the candidates themselves, appears to be a reliable way to separate the wheat from the chafe.

 

But why does this matter in reporting on—or in speaking/proclaiming about—news coming from the Middle East or any other conflict zone you might want to know about?

Simply put, if a candidate mixes and matches these words in very non-specific ways, it is a pretty clear indicator that both his national security advisors and perhaps even his international relations advisors are either rank amateurs or are flatly ignored by the candidate.
 

 

So down to brass tacks: There are four levels of warfare. These are the Political, Strategic, Operational, and Tactical levels of war. I will use examples from World War II in order to level the playing field and convey these ideas in their most basic (and least confused) form. For our purposes, we will only address three in detail: the tactical level, the operational level, and the strategic level. I believe that the "Political" level is self-evident, but for clarity I will address it briefly. It is perhaps the most important, because decisions at the political level have the ability to directly or indirectly affect the other three.

Tactical Level

A simple definition, though not an ironclad one, of the tactical level of warfare might read (my words): 

"The tactical level of warfare is that level where men meet and fight from the individual level through the division. It is the realm of skirmishes, engagements, and battles. Planning at the tactical level starts at 'now' and occurs out to roughly 48 hours in the future, or at most a few weeks. The tactical level of warfare is where one sees the face of battle." 

Most weapon systems used in war operate at this level. Knives, bayonets, guns, cannons, bombs, and torpedoes—the actual tools of personal destruction are mostly tactical. (Nuclear weapons, obviously, transcend this area.) Some information systems operate at this level as well. Speed at this echelon is sometimes measured in yards per day, but usually in miles per hour. Tactical combat for infantry on foot rarely moves faster than 2.5 m.p.h., but even jets moving to conduct an individual bombing raid rarely move faster than a few hundred miles per hour. This is the popular conception of war. This is war at the level of Saving Private Ryan. This is fighting by privates and sergeants, lieutenants, captains, and colonels. The battles on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 were tactical.

 

Operational Level

The operational level is somewhat more difficult to define and understand. Operational level planning occurs with the intent of setting missions and objectives that will bend the enemy to your will in an entire theater of operations. Think of this as the blueprint that helps you build a house from a bunch of bricks. Each brick is a tactical engagement. You put them together to make a wall, and then a house. Operational level plans are known as "campaigns," and by design each consists of a series of battles and engagements (ie. the 'tactical level') designed to win some larger objective. The operational level of warfare is the realm of generals. Plans begin with the intent that they will start a few days or weeks in the future and may stretch out to cover months of time and thousands of square miles. This level of war deals with the movements of entire corps, armies and army groups, or whole fleets at sea. Again, referring back to June 1944, the overall plan for invading the beaches and the entire province beyond the beaches, Operation Overlord, was an operational level plan.

Strategic Level

Thirdly, there is the strategic level of warfare. Over time there have been various definitions and subsets of this overarching term. There has been "Grand Strategy" and "National Strategy" and "Military Strategy," all of which address slightly different aspects of the same general concept. This level concerns the planning and conduct of the war at the highest levels. Strategic plans aim for objectives that lead directly to, or at least significantly toward, peace. In other words, these plans seek to answer the question, "How will we win this war?" It is easier to understand strategic concepts not by assigning a force level as a definition, but by understanding the level at which decisions occur. Within the U.S. Army, strategic level decisions occur at the highest level headquarters in the field, most often in conjunction and with the approval of the National Command Authority. This is the echelon that approves changes in force structure.

 

Strategic decisions also determine the allocation of portions of national resources. Decisions about production of material and allocations of raw material and personnel occur at this level. Strategy plans lay out what the lower level campaign objectives should be, allocate forces, and choose the "theaters" in which campaigns occur. The decision that the primary invasion of Occupied Europe in 1944 would take place at Normandy (as opposed to southern France, on the coast of Germany, or up from Italy and around or through the Alps) was a strategic-level decision. The decision to defeat Germany first, and then Japan, might also be considered strategic in nature. Decisions regarding the allocation of resources available to the nation ("Do we build 10,000 tanks and 2,000 planes and 100 ships, or should we devote our industrial base to making 3,000 ships and 1,000 tanks and 500 planes?") are strategic in that they indirectly determine the course and direction of the lower levels of warfare. You cannot fight a land war without land forces, and you cannot win at sea without ships. But you can never have all the things that the different services want, so choices have to be made, and these decisions, by their nature, are strategic.

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Political Level

Finally, as I mentioned, there is the political level of warfare. In our society, the civilian government retains control over decisions to go to war, whom to fight, and with whom to ally.

  Decisions at this level involve the interrelationships between allies, decisions regarding the factors of production, the national will, and societal issues. And it is here that another profession holds great sway, one that operates in the realm of influencing civilians. Here, one of the most critical tools—"weapon" in all but name—is the power which is held by the press, by reporters.
 

Obviously, all four levels are interrelated. There was no way to avoid that in the 20th Century, and probably less so in the 21st.

 A political decision may directly result in a tactical engagement and even have bearing upon the conduct of that engagement. For example, and to return to our Normandy example, it was a political decision made at the War Department that resulted in a new rule that pulled sole surviving siblings out of combat zones. (Yes, Saving Private Ryan is at least partially based upon a true story.)

A political decision about something like Rules of Engagement or a desire not to seem too militaristic—such as the idea not to send U.S. armored vehicles to Somalia early on—can also have an effect on the nature of these fights. The reverse may also occur; for example, tactical events in South Vietnam pushed President Nixon towards a political decision to conduct bombing operations over Hanoi and Haiphong in North Vietnam. Cross level influence is even more common between adjoining levels, but, in general, these distinctions remain valid as mental constructs with which we may subdivide war for the purpose of discussion, decipher the news, and deconstruct the candidates' statements. The lines between these divisions may blur along the boundaries; this is to be expected.

 The separation between tactical and strategic warfare might become confused because these lines depend upon numerous factors, such as forces in theater and the geographic scale of the theater itself. Yet for our purposes, these divisions serve as an adequate starting point.
 

Now, for some examples of how terms like "Strategy" can be misused.
 

Donald Trump is often cited by journalists for having an ISIS "Strategy." But what you see, when you look at any of his actual statements, is not a "Strategy" linking Ends, Ways, and Means, but instead a grocery list of things that he thinks should be done. Most of it is quite tactical in nature. A grocery list of military buzzwords does not a strategy make.

 Journalists should know better, because words mean things.
 

Jeb Bush is even more egregious in that he himself uses the word "Strategy" over and over again, without apparently any actual idea about what the term might mean. Here you see him decrying the current President for a "lack of strategy" without ever actually explaining what he means, either in his critique or in his use of the term. Straight from Fox and Friends:

"What I would do is to do what I proposed two months ago at the Reagan Library, which is to defeat ISIS, and to defeat Assad, to bring stability because it's in our national security interest to do it…We don't have a strategy right now. This president is incrementally getting us into a quagmire without having a strategy to defeat ISIS."

We could go on, but now at least you have some ammo of your own to help you knock down the easy targets.