A Commoner's View

The marked changed in the types of wars fought over the last ten years in Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated the need for commanders at echelons below the campaign level to develop and continuously refine operational approaches to guide their decisions and tactical actions within an assigned area of operation. Modern doctrine and most military literature regarding these wars have been deficient in fully explaining the significance of this new requirement and fail to recognize this as the application of operational art. The monograph explores this issue by investigating the concept of operational art and its application in modern counterinsurgency operations. The monograph demonstrates that U.S. counterinsurgency operations aim to achieve stability within an extremely complex environment. Because of this complexity, units must develop unique approaches and tailor solutions to the many different local areas. As such, subordinate commands employ operational art to achieve local stability by developing and refining long term plans that drive the development and execution of tactical action. Modern Army doctrine should refine its definition of operational art to reflect the essence of this concept. The findings also highlight the need for further research on synchronizing the application of operational art across multiple levels of command.