Pick a Level. Any Level.
Three levels of war, one war at a time, and a lot of people fencing off their part of it.
The Eisenhower School auditorium, late morning. A retired general at the podium in a gray suit, lapel pin, water glass placed with care. The script the audience came for. “We won every tactical engagement of the Global War on Terrorism,” he says, pausing for the line. “And we still lost the wars. Because we forgot how to think at the operational level.” Nods around the room. Notes taken. He believes it. He has shaped reading lists around it. He has briefed it to senior leaders who briefed it back. The wars he is describing ended in one outcome, not three. He is doing arithmetic on “levels” that the war did not respect.
The tactical, operational, and strategic framework is useful for describing nested operations. These happen at different scales and involve different scopes. That part is intuitive and uncontroversial. The framework becomes incoherent when it is used to describe outcomes. Wars do not produce a tactical outcome, an operational outcome, and a strategic outcome. They produce one outcome. The framework’s institutional value is that it lets the loser of an indivisible war fence off the parts that went well and assign the loss to whichever level the speaker did not personally occupy.
The framework cannot define itself.
Joint Publication 1 introduces the three levels of warfare and immediately concedes there are “no finite limits or boundaries between these levels.” That is the doctrine. A 2021 piece in Military Review by an instructor at the Command and General Staff College reported that students cannot reliably distinguish the levels because the doctrine has an inherent epistemological problem. An author who teaches the framework published, in a professional journal, that the framework cannot be reliably applied.
The institutional response was not to fix the framework or replace it. Students who finish CGSOC having never resolved the distinction graduate anyway, get promoted anyway, and eventually teach it to the next class. The framework persists not because it works but because abandoning it would require admitting that several generations of officers built careers on a distinction doctrine has never drawn.
The responsibilities do not respect the bins.
What officers do at every level is mostly the same. Understand the situation. Communicate clearly up and down the chain. Translate intent into executable tasks. Resource the people doing the work. Hold subordinates accountable. Maintain the trust of the commander above. These responsibilities do not stop at a level boundary. A platoon leader who cannot communicate intent has the same problem as a combatant commander who cannot communicate intent, scaled differently.
The framework’s defenders insist otherwise. Operational planners do something different than tactical planners. Strategic thinking is a distinct cognitive activity. A Robbie Risner Award graduate is alleged to leave with only tactical skills - something a School of Advanced Military Studies graduate does not have. The graduates themselves, asked to describe the difference, generally cannot. They will gesture at it. They will name the program. They will not produce the skill. The reason is that the skill is the same skill, dressed differently for accreditation and funding purposes.
A war is one thing. The framework lets it be many.
“We won every tactical engagement and lost the war” is the framework’s most repeated sentence. It is also incoherent. Tactical engagements do not have outcomes independent of the wars they occur in. A raid that achieves its assigned objective inside a war that fails has not won anything. The framework lets the speaker fence off the actions his command was responsible for, label those actions tactically successful, and assign the larger failure to a level above his own. Perhaps the we won at the wrong tactical tasks if the operational and strategic objectives were not met.
This is the framework’s actual function inside the institution. It is not analytical. It is jurisdictional. A January 2025 piece in War on the Rocks argues the Air Force suffers from a missing operational middle. An April 2026 piece in the Modern War Institute argues the Army got too tactical during the Global War on Terrorism. Neither piece defines the terms. Neither piece needs to. The category does the work. Each author writes from a vantage that locates the deficiency elsewhere.
An arbitrary level of war did not lose the war.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ended as unitary outcomes. Both produced enormous losses absorbed by the institutions that fought them. They were lost by specific commanders making specific decisions in specific moments, and populated by many officers who had never set foot where their orders applied. Understanding is the commander’s first responsibility, and understanding does not travel well across continents and command echelons.
That is a diagnosis. “We lost because the operational level was underdeveloped” is not. It is a way of describing the loss as something the speaker was not present for. The framework’s contribution to twenty years of war was not analytical. The framework is a scaffold. Simple to introduce, intuitive to teach, useful to a captain trying to understand why a theater campaign is not just a bigger raid. It earns none of the weight currently placed on it. Its vagueness is not a flaw. It is the reason it survives every doctrine update and every honest attempt to clean it up. The people who keep invoking it have figured this out. The rest of us should stop pretending we haven’t.