Obama’s decision to dismiss McChrystal from his post as commander of ISAF in June 2010 has been interpreted as a clash at the interface of civil–military relations. But it has more profound underpinnings which reach into understandings of what strategy is and how it is made. Since the 1980s the armed forces both of the United States and its NATO allies have focused their intellectual attentions on the operational level of war. During the Cold War, the focus lay on the relationship between operations and tactics, not least because the Cold War itself defined the strategic context. After the end of the Cold War, the framework provided by strategy weakened, and the operational level of war assumed strategic significance, not least in the development of counter-insurgency theory. McChrystal’s behaviour is only the most obvious manifestation of the military frustrations that follow when strategy is unclear.
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Hew Strachan (2010) studied this question.