{"id":69410,"date":"2022-03-18T01:00:46","date_gmt":"2022-03-18T05:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=69410"},"modified":"2022-03-17T10:03:17","modified_gmt":"2022-03-17T14:03:17","slug":"qotd-tactics-operations-and-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/03\/18\/qotd-tactics-operations-and-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Tactics, operations, and strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 15px 10px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>Military thinking is like ogres are like onions \u2013 they have layers. (<em>I am pretty sure this joke dates me worse than basically anything else I have written here, including the repeated <strong><em>300<\/em><\/strong> references or the fact that I read dead languages and study ancient civilizations.<\/em>)<\/p>\n<p><strong>We break these layers into <em>tactics<\/em>, <em>operations<\/em> and <em>strategy<\/em><\/strong>. Put <em>very<\/em> simply, tactics is the layer of military thinking that concerns <em>how<\/em> an army fights; [&#8230;] Operations is the layer of thinking that is concerned with getting the army <em>to the fight<\/em> \u2013 large-scale coordination and logistics live here. Strategy is concerned with bigger picture questions: what wars are worth fighting and for what objectives? <em>Grand<\/em> strategy extends this thinking to cover not only the military, but also political, cultural and economic institutions.<\/p>\n<p>Bret Devereaux, <a href=\"https:\/\/acoup.blog\/2019\/09\/27\/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vii-spartan-ends\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">&#8220;Collections: This. Isn&#8217;t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends&#8221;, <em>A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2019-09-27.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Military thinking is like ogres are like onions \u2013 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. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5,41],"tags":[31,1457],"class_list":["post-69410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-military","category-quotations","tag-army","tag-bretdevereaux"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-i3w","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69410"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72353,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69410\/revisions\/72353"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}