Operational Art: The Salvation Against AI

Foreword Artificial intelligence calculates everything, predicts everything. But when confronted with the unexpected, can it still prevail? The word “strategy” is everywhere. It captivates, galvanizes, and obsesses. Politicians, business leaders, military officers, and self-proclaimed experts all seize it, twisting it until it is stripped of meaning. Doctrine intimidates. Operational art remains an enigma, confined to a select few. These essential concepts, distorted by commercialism and media shortcuts, have lost their clarity. As early as 1962, André Beaufre wrote in Vue d’ensemble de la stratégie (Overview of Strategy): “While the term ‘strategy’ is often used, the realities it encompasses are generally overlooked.” More than sixty years later, this observation still holds true. Ask around: What is strategy? What is operational art? Answers vary, often contradicting one another, even among the most knowledgeable. In 2017, our book Stratégie, Doctrine: des doxas claires et sombres (Strategy, Doctrine: Clear Obscure Doxas) sought to restore these concepts to their original meaning. Since then, a new player has reshaped the battlefield: artificial intelligence. Consider a Ukrainian general in March 2022, near Kharkiv. Facing a swarm of Russian drones guided by AI, he senses a ruse, moves his troops into a dense forest, and deploys decoys. The drones strike empty ground. Where algorithms falter, intuition triumphs. This book, Operational Art: Salvation Against AI, is not a mere revision of our 2017 work. It extends our thinking to confront a new reality: AI, with its prowess and flaws, is redefining strategy, doctrine, and operational art. Our ambition remains unchanged: to clarify without oversimplifying, to demystify without dogma, and to address a broad audience beyond the circles of strategists. Drawing on over forty years of experience, this essay is neither a polemic nor a pursuit of sensationalism. It is a critical reflection on how operational art can serve as a bulwark against the possible hegemony of AI. Our recent research reveals an alarming finding: confusion persists. In military and academic writings—whether from France, the United States, NATO, or the European Union—terms are conflated, and definitions drift. Far from clarifying, AI often muddies the waters. Its algorithms, however powerful, falter when confronted with the unexpected, betrayed by their rigidity in the face of intuition and daring. This is where operational art, blending instinct and experience, becomes indispensable. It does not reject technology but harnesses it to serve strategy, ensuring it remains a living, shared, and accessible discipline. Our approach, consistent since 2017, is rooted in rigorous questioning, free from dogma. This book aims to: • Clarify the relationship between strategy, doctrine, and operational art in the age of AI; • Reaffirm strategy as a holistic discipline, integrating human and technological challenges; • Demonstrate how operational art overcomes the limitations of machines; • Redefine key concepts, such as the center of gravity, in a world shaped by AI; • Simplify Situational Awareness with tools like SPACESHIP-IT; • Encourage strategists and decision-makers to adopt a clear, common language. The field of strategy remains a fertile ground for contradictions. This essay argues that operational art, grounded in creativity and experience, is our best response to AI. It is not about fearing the machine but about mastering it, ensuring human-driven strategies guide our destiny toward a mastered future.