Quotulatiousness

March 18, 2022

QotD: Tactics, operations, and strategy

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Military thinking is like ogres are like onions – they have layers. (I am pretty sure this joke dates me worse than basically anything else I have written here, including the repeated 300 references or the fact that I read dead languages and study ancient civilizations.)

We break these layers into tactics, operations and strategy. Put very simply, tactics is the layer of military thinking that concerns how an army fights; […] Operations is the layer of thinking that is concerned with getting the army to the fight – large-scale coordination and logistics live here. Strategy is concerned with bigger picture questions: what wars are worth fighting and for what objectives? Grand strategy extends this thinking to cover not only the military, but also political, cultural and economic institutions.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.

Related posts:

  1. QotD: Tactics, operations, strategy, grand strategy … let’s call the whole thing off
  2. Rebecca Jensen on strategy, tactics and the need for a Canadian approach to “operational art”
  3. Naval strategy versus naval tactics in the Battle of the Atlantic
  4. QotD: Strategy’s underpinnings
  5. QotD: The Anglo-Saxon encirclement strategy

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