The Cyber Defense Review

Unified Land Operations

1-1. Unified land operations describes how the Army seizes, retains, and exploits the initiative to gain and maintain a position of relative advantage in sustained land operations through simultaneous offensive, defensive, and stability operations in order to prevent or deter conflict, prevail in war, and create the conditions for favorable conflict resolution (ADP 3-0). Unified land operations is the Army’s operational concept and the Army’s contribution to unified action.

1-2. An operational environment is a composite of the conditions, circumstances, and influences that affect the employment of capabilities and bear on the decisions of the commander (JP 3-0). Commanders at all levels have their own operational environments for their particular operations. An operational environment for any specific operation is not just isolated conditions of interacting variables that exist within a specific area of operations. It also involves interconnected influences from the global or regional perspective (for example, politics and economics) that impact on conditions and operations there. Thus, each commander’s operational environment is part of a higher commander’s operational environment. Likewise, operational environments of commanders at all levels are part of the overall strategic environment, which encompasses general conditions, circumstances, and influences throughout the world that can affect all operations.