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Friedman’s observations of the American experience are rather damning. While brief, Chapter 5, “The Operational Level and the Civil-Military Relationship,” explores German, Russian, and American experiences with civil-military relations.
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This is nothing new, according to Friedman. “finds itself unable to translate tactical success to strategic effect, the false idea of an operational level of war as a necessary linkage between the two being shattered by contact with the reality of warfare.” Tragically, recent events tend to prove this point. military experience demonstrates the failure of the operational level of war as useful in linking strategic objectives and tactical actions in America’s various campaigns in the Global War on Terror. In considering the operational level of war, Friedman argues it is “problematic at best and ruinous at worst.” To support this proposition, Friedman cites scholars tying differing definitions of the operational level of war to such diverse components as level of command, scope of personnel or materiel involved, or geographic distances. For readers schooled in the “three levels of war” model with the so-called “SOT Snowman” depicting the strategic, operational, and tactical (SOT) levels of war as circles stacked upon one another, Friedman presents something of a modern heresy. Connecting both sections are the author’s frequent references to ideas described in Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. The second is a constructive section that cogently defines operational art and offers insights into its practice. To accomplish these tasks, Friedman essentially breaks his work into two sections: a destructive section that examines the operational level of war and its various points of origin. The second is to provide a new and practical definition of operational art. The first is to advance the notion that an operational level of war needlessly and counterproductively severs the connection between strategy and tactics. Friedman simultaneously-and successfully-tackles two interconnected challenges.