Operational Art of Blitzkrieg: Its Strengths and Weaknesses in Systems Perspective

This monograph defines blitzkrieg as a way of operational-level systems thinking that evolved over a twenty-year period. In the on-going debate over whether blitzkrieg was operational or tactical in nature, much of the discourse centers either on the application of narrowly-conceived typologies to a historical phenomenon or to the selective invocation of case studies to reinforce pre-conceived notions. Some students of blitzkrieg admit that it meet operational-level criteria, but fail to press their arguments to broader conclusions. This monograph seeks to avoid the aforementioned pitfalls by viewing blitzkrieg in a broader systems perspective informed and defined by the scholarship of Peter Senge, Dietrich Dörner, and James Schneider. The combining of this perspective with commonly accepted criteria for operational art yields a strong case for understanding blitzkrieg as operational art.