It is concerned with coordination, in that activities removed from each other in time and space support each other. It is conceptual, in that it involves framing and understanding the problem to which military power is being applied. Operational art connects tactical capabilities with strategic goals. Deeply rooted in Soviet military theory and long a mainstay of the grand campaigns envisioned on the plains of Europe, operational art is an inescapable component of large-scale military operations, especially those at the center of any discussion of a potential conflict with another great power. Largely missing from that conceptual visualization, though, is the idea of operational art. ![]() Understandably, debate has raged over the inevitability of military conflict, defense budgets are rising in response, and emergent concepts are framed around a vision of large-scale conflict unimaginable since the fall of the Soviet Union. The competitive norms of the old Cold War have been replaced with those of the new Cold War: the nine-dash line and the South China Sea, conflict across the cyber domain, and widespread diffusion of military technology. Unlike halcyon days bygone, however, the competition to shape the international order is focused mainly on the United States and China, with Russia often left lurking in the shadows. ![]() At the Munich Security Conference in February, US President Joe Biden confidently declared, “We are not looking backward we are looking forward, together.” Yet, even as he foretold a better future, he invoked the ghosts of the country’s Cold War past: “We must prepare together for a long-term strategic competition.” Great power competition, largely now a distant memory of America’s past, was roaring back.
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