The Committee of Public Safety

Operational virtuosity but at what cost?

Operations is the fourth highest layer of functionality in the CPSOT stack:

1. Culture: divides priority between desires.
2. Politics: divides power between desires.
3. Strategy: reconciles power and desire.
4. Operations: arranges power and desire in time and space.
5. Tactics: directs the interaction of power and desire with external forces.

Like culture, politics, and strategy, operations is an OODA loop. As a continuous feedback cycle, operations is a learning machine. Learning is study for success, success being measured in how far from the edge of survival you can get in the face of stiff opposition from external forces. The road to survival and even a measure of prosperity is correctly adapting to external forces, meeting their demands as closely as possible. Operations adapts by arranging the desires of culture and the divisions of power made by politics, joined in a reconciliation negotiated by strategy, in time and space. If this arrangement successfully meets outside demand, success is at hand. If not, success will slip away.

Each new arrangement is a hypothesis, a decision, prediction, and moralizing about how well an arrangement will work. Action is taken; the arrangement is made. External forces cast their vote. The results are counted by observation. The vector of the arrangement is reoriented based on observation and a new orientation/hypothesis/arrangement either sallies forth to try the outside world again or it is held for further decision.

Operations is the tool of strategy, the means by which strategic reconciliation is made. Operations moves desire and power into the configuration that strategy determines will make reconciliation of their particular qualities most effective when coping with external forces. Operations experiences more friction and willful opposition from competitors than strategy, politics, or culture. It is far closer to the edge of survival and further from the luxury of abstraction than higher layers on the stack. This has advantages and disadvantages. Operational learning is faster because feedback comes faster. However, the margin of safety is narrower, the scope for rapidly cascading disaster higher. Spacing may be wrong. Timing may be off. Operational outcomes teeter on the edge of a knife.

Operations uses tactics to effect the best arrangement in time and space. Tactics is the leading edge that makes direct contact with external friction and wills. Operations maneuvers desire and power to the point of contact with the outside; tactics engages and interacts with the outside once power and desires are arranged in time and space. To paraphrase Clausewitz in On War:

If [adaption] consisted of a single act, no further subdivision would be needed. However, it consists of a greater or lesser number of single acts, each complete in itself, which… are called “engagements”. This gives rise to the completely different activity of planning and executing these engagements themselves, and of coordinating each of them with the others in order to further the object of [adaption]. One has been called tactics, and the other [operations]… According to our classification, then, tactics teaches the use of [power and desire] in the engagement; [operations], the use of engagements for the object of [adaption].

Clausewitz ultimately had to make these distinctions. He was a witness to different OODA loops moving at different times. How else to explain the strange destiny of illegitimate Corsican adventurer Nabulione Buonaparte, who carried all before him in the “engagement” (operations and tactics) but failed to win on a higher level (politics and strategy). How do you get stuck up to your neck in Russia, occupying the burned out husk of Russia’s ancient capital, beating an enemy that refuses to stay beat. And then the snow starts to fall. Hannibal, who shared Buonaparte’s fate of dying, poisoned, in the hands of an implacable enemy, in exile, far from home, shared this dilemma. After the most aesthetically pleasing battle of history (the battle that destroyed European civilization in 1914), Maharbal, Hannibal’s calvary commander, had the following exchange with Hannibal (as reported by Livy):

…after Maharbal expressed interest on marching to Rome immediately: “I commend your zeal,” [Hannibal] said to Maharbal, “but I need time to weigh the plan which you propose.” “Assuredly,” Maharbal replied, “no one man has been blessed with all God’s gifts. You, Hannibal, know how to gain a victory; you do not know how to use it.”

Operation Bagration

The Russians were the first to explicitly identify operations as a distinct layer in the 1920s. Russia’s vastness allows for the interplay of desire, power, time, and space in ways that are beyond an imagination constrained within the bounds of the North European plain. Germans had no lebensraum of the imagination, somehow thinking Russia was a slightly larger France when they planned and executed Barbarossa. Their planning and execution showed no appreciation for time or space. Russia had so much space that it was almost inevitable that it would take time to conquer it. Space demands a power sufficient enough to garrison its vastness and the Germans fell short. The Russians could trade space for time and gather sufficient enough resources in the meantime to fill space.

After Russia finally gathered its power, its operations showed a combination of power, timing, and spacing that dwarfed the Germans. Bagration did not aim at cutting off a mere pimple of territory like Kursk. It aimed at an total arrangement in time and space that would destroy Army Group Centre as an incidental detail while pushing the Germans past the distant Vistula River. All movements in space and time were coordinated together, aimed at distant points behind German lines. These simultaneous movements obliterated German units as small rounding errors along the way.

Operations is where the more abstract notions of culture, politics, and strategy have to prepare for meeting the real world with its real pressures. Abstractions begin to break down and the mess starts to leak in. Operations moves desire and power within range of opposition. The rest is tactics.