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Military operation
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This article describes three distinct, but related terms: military operations, Operations as military events, and operational level of war.
ilitary operations is the application of policy, planning, management, and administration principles in employment of military forces and resources (for example in a Military campaign) in daily formation and unit activities to achieve specific goals or objectives.
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This article describes three distinct, but related terms: military operations, Operations as military events, and operational level of war.
Military operations
Military operations is the application of policy, planning, management, and administration principles in employment of military forces and resources (for example in a Military campaign) in daily formation and unit activities to achieve specific goals or objectives. This is a concept, and should not be confused with military Operations as events. It involves the planning, mobilization of forces, the intelligence process of collecting, analyzing and disseminating of information, allocating resources and determining time requirements.
A military operation can involve the carrying out of a strategic or operational manoeuvres through management of logistic movement of forces. In general tactical manoeuvres are used to refer to military combat operations on military missions which are the subset of military operations.
In the process of carrying out the operation the forces may require provision of services, training, or administrative functions to allow them to commence, continue and end combat, including in the conduct of movement, supply, attack, defense, and manoeuvres needed to achieve operational objectives in a battle or a campaign.
Most military operations have distinct process features that must reach achieved milestones for the operation to progress. As a shortlist these features in a strategic operation are:
- Conception through identification of specific goals or objectives
- Intelligence gathering and analysis to identify enemy capability to resist
- Planning of military force and its use
- Administration of mobilisation, equipping, training and staging of forces
- Commencement of the operation, and achieving of initial tactical mission objectives
- Defeating the larger enemy forces in their operational depth
- Ending the operation whether the strategic goals have been achieved or not
Military operations
Military operations are the combat executions of military plans often referred to by a code name for the purpose of security. Military operations are often known for their more generally accepted common usage names then their actual operational objectives.
Parallel to and reflecting this framework for operations are organized elements within the armed forces which prepare for and conduct operations at various levels of war. While there is a general correlation between the size of units, the area within which they operate, and the scope of mission they perform, the correlation is not absolute. In fact, it is ultimately the mission that a unit performs that determines the level of war within which it operates.
Military operations can be classified by the scale and scope of force employment, and their impact on the wider conflict. The scope of military operations can be:
- Theatre: this describes an operation over a large, often continental area of operation and represents a strategic national commitment to the conflict such as Operation Barbarossa, with general goals that encompass areas of consideration outside of the military such as the economic and political impacts.
- Campaign: this describes either a subset of the theatre operation, or a more limited geographic and operational strategic commitment such as Battle of Britain, and need not represent total national commitment to a conflict, or have broader goals outside of the military impacts.
- Operational battle: this describes a subset of a campaign that will have specific military goals and geographic objectives, as well as clearly defined use of forces such as the Battle of Gallipoli, which operationally was a combined arms operation originally known as the "Dardanelles landings" as part of the Dardanelles Campaign, where about 480,000 Allied troops took part.
- Engagement: this describes a tactical combat event of contest for specific area or objective by actions of distinct units. For example the Battle of Kursk, also known from its German designation as Operation Citadel, included many separate engagements, several of which were combined into the Battle of Prokhorovka. The "Battle of Kursk" in addition to describing the initial German offensive operation (or simply an offensive), also included two Soviet counter-offensive operations Operation Kutuzov and Operation Polkovodets Rumyantsev.
Operational level of war
The operational level of war occupies roughly the middle ground between the campaign's strategic focus and the tactics of an engagement. It describes "a distinct intermediate level of war between military strategy, governing war in general, and tactics, involving individual battles." For example during World War II the concept applied to use of Soviet Tank Armies.
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