U.S. Army Operations Field Manual

The U.S. Army believes our nation’s future is one of “persistent conflict”— protracted confrontation among state, nonstate, and individual actors willing to use violence to achieve their political and ideological ends. Operations, required reading for Army leadership, provides the intellectual core of how our Army will organize, train, equip, and conduct operations in this environment. In other words, this manual explains how to run the best army in the world.

Operations breaks down:

• The Army’s expeditionary and campaign capabilities, its personnel as its most important advantage.
• “Conflict” from stable peace to general war, and establishes five operational themes.
• The Army’s operational concept—full spectrum operations, which seize, retain, and exploit the initiative and achieve decisive results through offense, defense, and stability or civil support operations.
• Combat power, the means by which Army forces conduct full spectrum operations.
• The principles of command and control and how they affect the operations process—plan, prepare, execute, and assess.
• The divide between military theory and practice.
• Information superiority.
• And, the requirements for Army forces in international joint campaigns.

This is the fifteenth edition of the Army’s capstone operations manual. Its lineage goes back to the first doctrine written for the new American Army, Baron von Steuben’s 1779 Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States.