Military Review English Edition July-August 2015 | Page 96

(Photo by Bob Harrison, FORSCOM PAO)

Spc. Federico Arce passes along his input as he and his fellow soldiers provide key information during a practical planning exercise
10 April 2012 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Arce and his fellow soldiers, all assigned to the Fort Bragg Warrior Transition Battalion,
completed training for Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification.

Operational Art by the
Numbers
Lt. Col. David S. Pierson, U.S. Army, Retired

C

onventional warfighting is grounded in tactics
and techniques; it is part science and part art.
Most soldiers and many civilians can intuitively interpret the graphic associated with a conventional
brigade attack. Friendly and enemy units, axes, objectives, and tactical mission tasks combine to show the
flow of a fight in a single picture. However, ask the same
soldiers and civilians how to create a similar graphic
for a stability operation, showing the flow of the brigade operation over time with nested tasks leading to

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objectives, and they will hesitate or even stop cold and
ask what you mean.
The science of moving men and machines along
routes toward ground objectives is intuitive. It is a
logical flow of actions over time and space. Stability
operations seem to defy that level of visualization
and the corresponding ability to display the operation
sequentially and graphically. Yet, we have a method for
displaying stability operations in a sequential, graphic
manner; we do this through an operational approach,
July-August 2015  MILITARY REVIEW