(Source: Wikipedia)
Enshrined in doctrine, operational phasing dominates U.S. and NATO thinking on operational art. This concept imagines conflict as essentially six sequential and somewhat overlapping phases:
Some then append a renewed Phase 0 after Phase 5. This model forms the archetype of a post-Cold War military operation and allows deescalation in media res if success is achieved without destruction.
NATO officers learn to construct joint operations with elaborate sync matrices applying resources from across sundry services in each phase. It teaches them to remember to use the Navy if they are an Air Force officer and ensure SOF gets the appropriate amount of attention. It reminds officers that war depends on a vibrant orchestra of submarines, artillery, logistics, and special operators among very many other components.
However, expecting to deploy an orchestra of war for a predetermined series of operational phases leads to a fallacy I term “war as a ballet” or simply “war ballet.” When attending the ballet, one purchases a ticket of admission, receives a program detailing the entire plot in advance, and then observes a pre-planned and extensively rehearsed performance usually in multiple acts. Frequently, the attendee has already seen the ballet before and simply wants to see it again or especially loves a featured director or performer.
Planning war around distinct and sequential phases creates this exact phenomenon in NATO officer corps: each service rehearses to perform a set of tactics comprising a menu for superiors in a joint headquarters to arrange in a special order for each curated phase, altering it about as much as Tchaikovsky has edited his works since his death. On the one hand, it allows each service to keep tactical innovation internal and facilitate greater operational effects among themselves as experts while limiting joint command’s propensity to micromanage. On the other, it incentivizes joint staffs to assume that they need more of the capabilities they already possess or have observed to ensure certain effects without imagining how future conflict may deviate from the pattern of recent years.
Trapped in this ballet complex, joint staffs imagine how the world might be improved if Poland had a stronger navy or Slovakia a larger air force to supply more capacity for “maritime supremacy” or “defensive counter air” respectively. These assumptions further play into officers’ understandable perception that their particular expertise cannot be replaced or changed and indeed probably will be decisive in the next war.
As any officer – NATO or otherwise – can tell you, modern war of any size is not a ballet. Politicians’ delays and misunderstandings force rapid military-driven strategic decisions. Rapidly-changing intelligence requires constant answers as described in such models as the OODA loop. Operational planning clashes with tactical realities and all is circumscribed by logistical and political constraints.
In short, expensive equipment (or more often “capabilities”) may perform beautifully in scripted events but uncertainty reigns whether the world will ever call for or even allow that script to be performed. Many decent ballets written decades or centuries ago are no longer performed for want of popular or political demand.
Instead of imagining war as a series of deployed capabilities in reasonably well-defined phases, state and military leaders (i.e. both politicians and officers) must learn how the changing nature of modern warfare affects the likely future needs for capabilities. If, for example, political constraints make “seizing the initiative” impossible in more likely instances of future conflict, what is needed is not more “capabilities” but resilience and counteroffensive contingencies. These contingencies do not necessarily require more sophisticated “capabilities;” frequently, they only require officers to understand how to respond to certain conditions.
The armored officer’s longstanding claim that “sometimes you need a dinner jacket” to justify procuring more main battle tanks may be true. But if conflict is likely to protract beyond a week or two, investing a massive portion of a defense budget in a small number of tanks that will rapidly run out of ammunition if they are not destroyed, then procuring the most sophisticated tanks in order to offer “capabilities” when the time comes to “dominate” makes little sense. Far more important in this scenario would be ensuring that those tanks could be protected from enemy strikes long enough to be deployed at the decisive moment, yet this is debated vanishingly rarely compared to competing news articles and bureaucratic debates about which and how many tanks to procure.
Operational phasing is simply rehearsing for a ballet that won’t be performed. It should be scrapped in favor of teaching officers how to achieve effects rather than remember to employ joint capabilities. If the Prime Minister wants to prevent an enemy from being able to attack his country, he doesn’t need the officer corps to begin “deterrence” actions but simply be ready to disrupt the opponent’s logistics and communicate this no through an immaculately sync matrixed O-Plan but via signalling to adjust the enemy’s OODA loops.
In modern crises, actions will occur across many domains. Some are classic (sea, land, and air), others novel (cyber and space), and still others historically consistent but militarily uncontrollable (political and economic). No single ladder of escalation will enable even the most gifted of politician or officer to navigate these actions as actions, reactions, and counteractions must seek to surprise and unbalance opponents. If no single pathway of actions is possible due to the need to cross multiple domains even during a non-violent crisis, no pre-set ballet of operational phases will be understood let alone implemented in the decisive moment.
Autor
Nicholas Myers
Analyst of great power competition; Russian, US, and Chinese foreign policy; and the Russian and Belarusian militaries. He has been studying policy and statecraft for over 10 years, focusing especially on Russia. He has written a number of reports on the operational capabilities of the Russian military and overseen a wide variety of wargames of potential conflicts in the European Intermarium and Asia-Pacific regions. He is currently starting a PhD in Politics at the University of Glasgow, having just completed an MLitt in War Studies at the University of Glasgow and received his undergraduate degree from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in 2011.
Strategy&Future
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