Blasphemy: How the U.S. Government Practiced a Type of Operational Art to Defend Latin America During the Cold War.

摘要

Two centuries of philosophy and war have informed the latest evolution of the definitions of strategy and operational art defined in the Department of Defense's Joint Publication 1-02. By harmonizing the relationship between strategy and operational art, doctrine logically links the organization and employment of military forces to strategy. However, joint doctrine fails to identify where the instruments of diplomacy, information, and economic power are organized, employed, and integrated through ends, ways, and means to achieve national objectives. Although strategy provides a prudent idea or set of ideas for how one might employ the instruments of national power, the actual implementation of strategy occurs through the development and execution of a campaign that deliberately organizes, employs, and integrates all the instruments of national power to achieve theater and/or national objectives. By replacing the term 'military forces' with 'the instruments of national power' in the current joint definition of operational art, this monograph increases the definition of operational art in scale to demonstrate how the U.S. government practiced a type of operational art to deny communist penetration of the western hemisphere during the Cold War. Although it remains difficult to identify whether the synchronicity between various U.S. governmental agencies during discreet events in Latin America was deliberate or serendipitous, this monograph reveals that when the U.S. government's actions resembled what can be construed as a type of operational art, it was successful in achieving its theater and national objectives. Accordingly, if our government designs to be deliberate in the future it can purposefully harness the power of this concept to preserve U.S. national interests in Latin America and Africa as it attempts to maintain, and potentially expand, American influence in Asia-Pacific and the Middle East.