The Military Soundness of Angel's Final Plan
by RosFod
Note: Many thanks to swmbo for making my brain dump more comprehensible, and to flowery_twat for the support.

stra•te•gy n. - (a) The science and art of using all the forces of a nation to execute approved plans as effectively as possible during peace or war. (b) The science and art of military command as applied to the overall planning and conduct of large-scale combat operations.

op•er•a•tion n. - A military or naval action or campaign.

tac•tic n. - (a) An expedient for achieving a goal; a maneuver. (b) A plan for attaining a particular goal.

tac•tics n. - (a) The technique or science of securing the objectives designated by strategy, esp. the art of deploying and directing troops, ships and aircraft in coordinated maneuvers against an enemy. (b) The skill or art of using available means to achieve an end.

[Emphasis mine]

In military-speak, the corresponding adjectives for these nouns, strategic, operational, and tactical, are used to signify the three layers of planning, coordination and execution that are required for the three different levels of warfighting.

Tactical warfighting is constrained within a specific physical location and against specific threat units that have the time and the mobility to enter the Area of Operation (AO). Los Angeles is home. The Home Office. The home base of operations. The AO is marked by easily identified threat combat forces. Demons living off the local population, underneath the streets of LA, in the suburbs and in the sewers. W&H is not in the business of covert operations at the tactical level. Even actresses know who they are. So do the police. Lindsey McDonald, Lilah Morgan, Lee Mercer – not only are they unequivocally members of the enemy, they do AI the favor of having identical initials, just to make it easier. Known evils, difficult to kill, but easily monitored.

This is the level of warfighting that Angel begins with. A vampire with a soul walks into a bar. The team drive to combat areas, they use weapons that are locally manufactured to defeat the enemy. Their objective – help the helpless. Specific cases, specific people, specific organizations.

Somewhere else, everywhere around them, the Powers that Be are waging a campaign of which Angel is only one player. He’s given a resource – the visions, and these visions are both forms of communication and transmissions of orders. The Powers decide which battles to fight, when to fight them. They develop the strategy, decide on the operations.

They deploy Angel and his team as resources at the tactical level to conduct the mission, and the missions are a success. The missions are a tactical success.

Things change. A portal opens up to a different dimension. A world so strange that it has two suns. A different geographical location, a different set of combatants, different rules and different objectives. The AO is now beyond the borders of LA. This is the place where Wes learns that in order to save the many, sometimes you must sacrifice the few. This is warfighting at the operational level. The enemy can not be found in a database, within the building of an office downtown. The princess who will pass judgment on them turns out to be one of their own. The warrior who will defile her and kill Angel is revealed to be a goodhearted hero. The command structure in this new land must be destroyed in order to gain freedom. Information is sketchy, confusing. Intelligence is scrambled.

The three books must be read concurrently, and in the correct order.

The playing field expands. The team’s actions have regional, and then global repercussions. There are more dimensions than one can count, and the team has never heard of any of them before. Pylea, Quor’Toth, holding cells for the truly evil and the guardians that secure them. Higher planes. The rules keep changing. W&H can tap into Cordelia’s visions and control them, Sahjahn can lay false prophecies down and remove true ones, Jasmine can change the feelings of the world. Now the threat units have to be hunted down and located. If they can be identified. The Destroyer rips his way through the fabric of space and time, and he wants vengeance. The Destroyer is a child, and he wants to be held close. The Beast must be researched, but all the information has been deleted. The Beast’s Master must be identified. Who is the man kidnapping your infant? Who is woman fucking your teenaged son?

Once the threat is identified – laying in the hospital bed with a hole in his throat, laying on the cement floor of a slaughterhouse birthing evil, laying on the cold tiles of a sporting goods store – how is the threat neutralized? What are the weapons? Pillows, swords, knives. Love.

The support structure for the one known enemy spans dimensions. Any place Angel goes, the Wolf, the Ram, and the Hart are there. They are everywhere.

The Powers are no where. Days, weeks, months, years pass without a vision, without a real vision. The enemy is identified – it is the Beast. The Beast annihilates the old enemy, the local infrastructure of W&H is dust. The Beast is destroyed by a weapon that the team could not find – himself. The team is fractured. They accomplish almost nothing. Tactical warfare at the operational level, and they flail, their old weapons useless, their intelligence corrupted. Cordelia is lying, Angelus can not be trusted. The real, useful intelligence comes in the form of an old enemy, a book from outside their dimension, held in the hands of a woman who is a mercenary. Lilah is far more experienced at this, she’s a seasoned soldier. When the threat environment changes, a soldier must change with it.

A Little Power that Was arrives, offering peace and instilling destruction. Angel learns. Angel takes the battle to the previous home of Jasmine. Brings back the key to her defeat in the shape of a demon’s sewn mouth. He leaves his friends to die. Information and intelligence from outside the local threat environment leads to Jasmine’s downfall. The defeat of Jasmine leads to global chaos. Chaos garners respect, and fear. A deal is made. The enemy's local infrastructure always springs back up, better than new. The enemy offers a deal - all of LA at the team’s disposal. This particular battle is won. This is success at the operational level.

Things stay the same. More money, more cars, but the team insists on going out to each case, hitting the streets themselves. More resources, more cases, and they continue to fight at the tactical level, as if they never learned. They forget.

Trips to hospitals where a psychotic girl has just escaped, trips to studios where puppets are taking over. Don’t touch the sarcophagus, get someone else to do that. The AO is narrowed down to LA again, but now they don’t have the ability to deal with anything successfully, at any level. There’s a Branch in Italy over which Angel has no operational control. It’s led by someone who is everything that Angel is not. They do things differently there.

The team has made some gains, but they’ve lost more. They don’t have the time. Everywhere around them, underneath them, the war is still being waged. And they’re drowning in paperwork, too busy signing checks. Initialing documents that aren’t carefully read. They don’t understand the bureaucracy, they can’t identify the enemy. The enemy is them. Who do you trust? A window breaks and Wes finds out the he can’t trust himself. One of their own literally transforms into the enemy, angry and blue. Gunn is responsible for Fred’s death. Information is lost, hidden. They can’t even rely on their own memories. They’re losing the battle.

Every where that Angel isn’t, or can’t be, the vacuum is filled with other players. He’s the company commander of just one unit, and that stands whether the unit is Angel Investigations, or the LA Branch of W&H. Angel history is peppered with leaders of groups that the team knew nothing about, soldiers of elements of the fight that he had no visibility into. The Chinese herbalists. The Keymaker. Ninja robots. A cadre of Slayers dispersed throughout the world, taking on Evil on a global scale. How much difference can they make? Only the amount of difference that they can. Without Angel, without his team, the war will go on.

The war has been going on. The Powers that Be continue to play. They send a girl with a vision and a kiss. They have a plan. At the strategic level, there is a plan. The team remembers.

War is a combination of battles, a confluence of events. The paratrooper in Germany doesn’t know about the Manhattan Project, and the scientist at Los Alamos has no visibility into a raid in the Philippines. But all of those events combined lead to something substantial, and each of those elements, from bunkers to labs to jungles, contribute to maintaining ground cover, progressing into enemy territory, developing a new weapon – winning the war.
The Circle of the Black Thorn is a bridge. The bridge is on a road. The road is a key transportation route. Without it, the enemy has no ingress, no egress. The enemy is not knowable, but the bridge is. Taking down the Circle of the Black Thorn is a dangerous maneuver. But it’s warfighting at all three levels – Take the strategy that the Powers have designated. Take the resources that owning the LA Branch offers, and gain the intelligence to plan an operation. Use the available means to conduct a specific mission. Use the enemy against itself. Because in the long run, the difference they make may be all the difference that’s needed. They might die. If they do, it’s a minor failure in the overall war.

But if they succeed while dying, it will be a spectacular military success.

(Reposted with permission from Here.)