Operational Art Unbound: Expansion, Competition, and the Discipline of Restraint Published June 17, 2026 By Gene Kamena "Operational art occupies an intermediate position between tactics and strategy." — Aleksandr Svechin, Strategy (1926) Introduction Operational art was invented to solve a specific, industrial-age problem: how to arrange masses of men and materiel across a continental front so that the sum of many tactical actions would produce a strategic result. [1] A century later, the same term is invoked to describe a cyber effect delivered in milliseconds, a constellation of satellites contested in orbit, and a peacetime campaign of partner engagement conducted years before any shot is fired. The vocabulary has remained constant while the practice it names has expanded almost beyond recognition. This expansion is real, and it is necessary. The character of war has changed, and a concept that could not stretch to accommodate space, cyberspace, the electromagnetic spectrum, and the long competitive periods that precede open conflict would simply be left behind. But expansion carries a hidden cost. The further operational art reaches—across every domain, across the entire continuum from cooperation to combat, and beyond the ground maneuver that once defined it—the greater the risk that it becomes everything and therefore nothing, and the greater the danger that it quietly incorporates the strategic realm it was meant to serve. This article traces the expansion in three directions, confronts the tension that expansion creates, and argues that the future utility of operational art depends less on how far it can stretch than on the discipline with which we keep it anchored to its essential purpose – linking tactical action to strategic purpose without supplanting strategy itself. The Classical Foundation The phrase belongs to the Soviets. Aleksandr Svechin is generally credited with coining operativnoe iskusstvo—operational art—in the 1920s to name the intermediate level of military activity that linked individual tactical engagements to the strategic aims of the state.[2] The problem he and his contemporaries faced was concrete. The Napoleonic dream of a single decisive battle had died on the industrial battlefield, where armies numbered in the millions, fronts stretched for hundreds of miles, and no one engagement could compel an enemy to quit. Victory now required a series of operations, sequenced and distributed in time, space, and depth - campaigns. The interwar Soviet theorists turned this insight into a body of theory. Vladimir Triandafillov analyzed the mechanics of modern mass operations; Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Georgii Isserson developed deep operations and deep battle, the simultaneous attack of the enemy's entire depth rather than merely his forward edge.[3] [4] That most of these men were executed in Stalin's purges did not erase the theory, which the Red Army relearned at terrible cost and applied with devastating effect by 1944. [5] The United States arrived late. Through Vietnam, American doctrine recognized tactics and strategy but had no formal language for the level in between. That changed in the post-Vietnam intellectual renaissance, catalyzed in part by Edward Luttwak's reintroduction of the operational level to Western audiences at the start of the 1980s.[6] The 1982 and especially the 1986 editions of FM 100-5 introduced AirLand Battle and codified the operational level of war, driven by the urgent need to counter echeloned Soviet forces in Europe. The School of Advanced Military Studies, founded at Fort Leavenworth in 1983, institutionalized the study of operational art, and a generation of thinkers—building on Luttwak and later on Shimon Naveh's systems-theoretic treatment—gave it theoretical depth.[7] The 1991 Gulf War, with its theater-spanning envelopment, was widely received as operational art's vindication. [8] Underneath all of this lies a single, stable function. Operational art is the mental bridge between tactical action and strategic purpose; current joint doctrine defines it as the “cognitive approach by commanders and staffs – supported by their skill, knowledge, experience, creativity, and judgement – to develop campaigns and operations to organize and employ military forces. Operational art aids the joint force to link tactical employment of forces to strategic objectives.” [9] Strip away the doctrinal vocabulary of centers of gravity, decisive points, lines of operation, and culmination, and that bridging function is what remains. Holding onto it is the thread that runs through everything that follows. The First Expansion: Across Domains The most visible change is the addition of new domains. Land, sea, and air were joined by space and cyberspace, and increasingly the electromagnetic spectrum and the information environment are treated as operational terrain in their own right. [10] Multi-Domain Operations, established as the Army's operational concept in the October 2022 edition of FM 3-0, and the joint force's pursuit of all-domain operations and the command-and-control architecture to enable them, reflect a doctrine straining to synchronize effects across a far wider battlespace than AirLand Battle ever contemplated.[11] It would be easy to treat this as mere addition—more domains, more boxes on the synchronization matrix. That framing misses the genuinely hard problem, which is not the number of domains but their radically different physics. A ground maneuver unfolds over days; an air tasking cycle runs on a daily rhythm; a cyber effect may be instantaneous and global yet require months of clandestine access to set up and evaporate the moment it is used. Space effects operate on orbital mechanics indifferent to a commander's timeline. The operational artist must now converge effects whose natural tempos differ by orders of magnitude and must do so knowing that some of the most powerful effects are single-use and perishable. This tempo disparity is the analytic core of all-domain operational art, and it is where the concept is doing real new work rather than simply expanding its inventory. Here lies the first hazard. When every domain becomes operational terrain, the temptation is to declare that operational art now governs everything, which drains the term of discriminating power. The expansion is legitimate insofar as it remains about the arrangement and synchronization of effects toward a campaign aim. The moment "multi-domain" becomes a synonym for "modern" or "important," it has stopped describing operational art and started describing a mood. The Second Expansion: Across the Competition Continuum Classical operational art assumed war was underway. It began when conflict began and ended when conflict ended. The second expansion dissolves that assumption. Doctrine now describes a competition continuum running from cooperation through competition below armed conflict to armed conflict itself, and the 2025 version of Joint Publication 5.0 emphasizes planning across the competition continuum and persistent campaigning treats the application of military means as continuous rather than episodic.[12] On this view, operational art is practiced in peacetime. Setting the theater, positioning forces, building partner capacity, shaping the information environment, and conducting the patient logistical and diplomatic work of access and basing are no longer preliminaries to a campaign—they are the campaign, designed to set conditions so favorable that an adversary is deterred, or so that if deterrence fails the force fights from a position already won. The decisive operational work may be finished before the first round is fired. This is perhaps the most contemporary of the three expansions and adds the long “peace” that precedes the war onto the canvas of the operational artist. [13] But this is also where the deepest danger lives, and it is a danger that should resonate with anyone who studies civil-military relations. When military campaigns run continuously in periods of competition, its operational design begins to overlap with the work of diplomacy, development, and statecraft—instruments that belong to civilian authority. Justin Kelly and Mike Brennan argued in Alien: How Operational Art Devoured Strategy (2009) that the operational level had already become an autonomous zone that displaced civilian strategic direction even in wartime.[14] Extend operational art across the entire peacetime continuum and that critique grows sharper. A military that "campaigns" against rivals during nominal peace may, with the best intentions, foreclose political options, generate commitments, and shape the strategic environment in ways elected leaders never chose. The expansion of operational art into competition is not merely a doctrinal development; it is a civil-military question about who designs the nation’s behavior short of war—and under what authority. If operational art extends into persistent competition, then military planners may effectively shape national policy through campaign design, raising fundamental questions about civilian control and strategic accountability. The Third Expansion: Beyond the Ground The classical concept grew out of ground campaigns, and for much of the twentieth century operational art and the maneuver of armies were nearly synonymous. The third expansion severs that identification. A long line of Air power theorists, with John Wardon being one of the latest, argue that an air campaign could be designed as an operational whole, attacking an enemy system directly rather than through the destruction of his fielded forces.[15] Naval campaigns, space operations, and cyber operations can likewise be objects of operational design. The counter-ISIS air campaign, the 2011 Libya intervention, and the long history of standoff strike all demonstrate that operational and even strategic effect can be sought without committing ground forces to seize and hold terrain. Recent and ongoing operations against Iran (Midnight Hammer, Epic Fury, Project Freedom, and Operation Economic Freedom) are examples of multi/all-domains operations that have not, at least at the time of publishing this article, committed ground forces. Thus, as a matter of strict definition, the assertion that operational art does not necessitate ground forces is valid. Operational art is no longer the exclusive property of the land component and treating it as such would blind the joint force to the ways air, maritime, space, and cyber forces can carry the operational main effort. The honesty of this argument depends, however, on confronting the counterargument directly, and the counterargument has a name: Ukraine. The war that began in 2022 is the most instructive case available, precisely because it cuts both ways. It has confirmed the salience of the cross-domain, non-ground effects this article celebrates—commercial satellite imagery, resilient space-based communications, ubiquitous drones, electronic warfare, and cyber operations have all shaped the fight. [16] And it has simultaneously delivered a brutal corrective to the standoff school's recurring promise that precision and reach can substitute for mass. Terrain still had to be taken and held by infantry. Attrition returned. Industrial-scale artillery and the capacity to replace losses proved decisive in ways that would have been entirely familiar to Svechin. The defensible position, then, is not the maximalist one that ground forces are obsolete, but the precise one: operational art is no longer defined by ground maneuver, even as ground forces remain in many conflicts, necessary to convert military effect into the durable control of terrain and population that durable political outcomes require. Decoupling operational art from ground troops is a conceptual liberation; mistaking it for the obsolescence of ground forces is a strategic error that the present war in Ukraine has already punished. The Tension: When Expansion Devours Its Purpose Set the three expansions side by side and a pattern emerges. Operational art now spans every domain, the entire continuum from peace to war, and every component of the joint force. Each expansion is individually justified. Together they create a concept of extraordinary reach—and a concept of extraordinary reach is in danger of two related pathologies. The first is dilution. A term that applies to everything discriminates against nothing. If shaping a partner's defense institutions in peacetime, defending a satellite constellation, and storming a trench line are all "operational art," the phrase risks becoming a prestige label attached to any activity a commander wishes to dignify, rather than a rigorous discipline with identifiable content. The second, and more serious, is the annexation of strategy. As the operational art's domain continues to expand, the more it absorbs decisions that properly belong to strategy and policy. An operational design that spans years of peacetime competition is making choices about national ends, not merely military ways and means. The Alien critique was a warning that operational art could become a comfortable place for the military to do something that felt like strategy while sparing both soldiers and statesmen the harder work of actual strategic dialogue. Every expansion described here widens the door through which that substitution can occur. Re-Anchoring: The Discipline of Restraint The answer is not to refuse the expansion. The character of conflict has genuinely changed, and a concept frozen in 1986 would be useless. The answer is to expand the concept's reach while holding fast to its purpose. Operational art earns its keep only as the disciplined arrangement of tactical actions in time, space, purpose, and now domain, undertaken in service of strategy rather than as a substitute for it. The bridging function is not one feature of operational art among many; it is the whole justification for the concept's existence. Three commitments follow. First, operational artists should treat the synchronization problem—and especially the tempo disparity among domains—as the hard intellectual core of their craft, resisting the temptation to let "multi-domain and all-domain" become slogans. Second, when operational art extends into peacetime competition, it must remain explicitly subordinate to and in dialogue with civilian strategic direction, treating the continuum of competition as a space requiring more civil-military integration, not less. Third, the field must hold simultaneously two truths that the recent past has taught at great cost: that operational effect can now be generated far from the ground, and, in the end, that the political object often still rests on the ground. Conclusion Operational art has been unbound from the front line, from the declaration of war, and from the maneuver of armies. This is progress, and a joint force that pretended otherwise would lose the next war studying the last one. But an unbound concept is also an undisciplined one, and the same expansion that makes operational art more relevant makes it more capable of swallowing the strategy it was created to serve. The task for senior professional military education is not to celebrate the expansion or to resist it, but to teach the next generation of commanders to wield a concept that now reaches everywhere with the restraint of practitioners who never forget what it is for. Operational art remains the bridge between what forces do and what nations want. Absent that discipline, operational art risks evolving from a bridge between tactics and strategy into a substitute for strategy itself. Mr. Kamena is a faculty member at the Air War College and serves as the Director for the Joint Warrior Studies Seminar. Notes [1]: B.A. Friedman, On Operations: Operational Art and Military Disciplines, (Annapolis, Maryland, Naval Institute Press, 2021). [2]: Center of Military History, United States Army, Historical Perspectives of the Operational Art, (Washington; D.C., 2005) Page 230. [3]: Ibid, Page 233. [4]: V. K. Triandafillov, The Nature of the Operations of Modern Armies, ed. Jacob W. Kipp (1929; repr., Ilford, Essex: Frank Cass, 1994); and Shimon Naveh, In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory (London: Frank Cass, 1997). For the broader sweep, see John Andreas Olsen and Martin van Creveld, eds., The Evolution of Operational Art: From Napoleon to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). [5] “Tukhachevsky was executed on 12 June 1937. Svechin was executed on 29 August 1938. Triandafillov was spared from the purge only by having died in 1931 in a plane crash.” B.A. Friedman, On Operations: Operational Art and Military Disciplines, (Annapolis, Maryland, Naval Institute Press, 2021) Chapter 3, Page 38. [6]: Edward N. Luttwak, "The Operational Level of War," International Security 5, no. 3 (Winter 1980/81): Pages 61–79. [7]: Headquarters, Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 100-5, Operations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1986); the 1982 edition first introduced AirLand Battle and the operational level into U.S. doctrine. The School of Advanced Military Studies was established at Fort Leavenworth in 1983. On the theory's maturation, see again Naveh, In Pursuit of Military Excellence (Frank Cass Publishers, 1997) [8]: Center of Military History, United States Army, Historical Perspectives of the Operational Art, (Washington; D.C., 2005) Page 440. [9]: Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication (JP) 5-0, Joint Planning (Washington, DC: JCS, 1 July 2025) Page I-V. [10]: “…commanders (JFCs) face the prospect of planning for a protracted war, potentially on a global scale. JFCs increasingly face threats that are transregional, all-domain (land, air, maritime, space, and cyberspace), and multifunctional.” Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication, (JP) 5.0 Joint Planning (Washington, DC: JCS, 1 July 2025) Page I-1 [11]: Headquarters, Department of the Army, FM 3-0, Operations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, October 2022). [12]: Joint Chiefs of Staff, Competition Continuum, Joint Doctrine Note (JDN) 1-19 (Washington, DC: JCS, 3 June 2019); and Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication (JP) 5-0, Joint Planning (Washington, DC: JCS, 1 July 2025) Page V-1. [13]: Author’s Note: The term “peace” is relative and may be more accurately be viewed as inter-war periods. [14]: Justin Kelly and Mike Brennan, Alien: How Operational Art Devoured Strategy (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2009). [15]: John A. Warden III, The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1988); and Warden, "The Enemy as a System," Airpower Journal 9, no. 1 (Spring 1995): Pages 40–55. [16] Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, Meatgrinder: Russian Tactics in Ukraine (RUSI, 2023).