Restore Tactics as a separate tag from warfare

Question

I just noticed that tactics is now a synonym of warfare instead of being a separate tag.

As someone who spent 3 years involved in planning the tactics of warfare, 3+ years involved in determining the actual tactics of police operations, and more than 10 years involve in developing tactics for business operations - I cannot see the reasoning in including tactics and warfare as absolute synonyms.

Before even moving into the ability to ask about tactics in areas outside of warfare I must point out that warfare strategy does not equal tactics. I have a full argument in a separate post but the main gist is:

There is a difference between operational planning, tactical planning, mission or course of action (COA) planning, and actual orders.

This means that for questions involving warfare the more appropriate response would not be making this a synonym but adding the actual levels of planning (as tags) that organizations use. Or leave strategy & tactics separated (strategy is open-ended most of the time but that is a different conversation).

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To add my argument, beyond warfare strategy, the tactics I had as a military police officer vs. as military member (Marine) in warfare is just a gross miss-interpretation of tactics in a general sense - and yes, I still have orders from both instances and the variance is immense.

I can expand on length & with multiple examples if needed but a clear example could be "no warning shots" vs. "disabling shots are the first priority" and "close with and destroy with fire & close combat" vs. "disable & apprehend all suspects involved with incident".

I would link to the discussion on this within meta but I cannot find a single one.

_{I may come off a bit defensive about this but that comes from years and years of experience and the fact that my police actions using police tactics do not equate to my actions as a military member in combat}

Answer 1

status-completed: I deleted the synonym but didn't do anything about the 23 questions that were auto-retagged after the synonym was created.

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Both tactics and strategy apply to contexts beyond war -- police, corporate maneuvers, governments trying to bring about a particular end, resisters trying to bring about a particular end... this synonym should not exist.

From what I've been able to discover, the tag was suggested and approved in December 2018. All of the questions that originally had the tactics tag should get it back again when I delete the synonym. However, the 23 questions where the tactics tag was remapped to warfare because of the synonym will not revert. No retaggings happen when a synonym is broken (source: message from a CM in a mod-private channel). So if we want to fix those 23 cases, someone's going to have to search for warfare questions asked or retagged since then and look to see if any should be retagged back to tactics. (Questions asked since then can be found using search. I don't know how to search for retaggings in that timeframe on-site, though you could do it with SEDE.) Or we could decide to just leave them alone and fix them as we come across them and notice.

I'll hold off on deleting this synonym to give people a chance to object, but if I don't see complaints and the voting is supportive, I'll delete it in a couple days. There's a larger question of how/whether this cluster of tags should be restructured; I'm focusing on the smaller issue of this one IMO incorrect synonym.

Answer 2

I wonder if we need to have three distinct tags :

• Warfare Meaning the politics of warfare, objectives and even the process of starting and ending a war (e.g. negotiations, diplomacy as it leads to and end war).

• Strategy The art or skill of deploying resources to achieve a large scale goal, even an over victory. Specifically excludes political considerations.

• Tactics The art of deploying military and police resources on a small scale. Specifically excludes military strategy and politics.

These can/should be combined with these tags :

• Military referring to situations where a trained military is the main forces, or one of the keys ones.

• Policing referring to situations where a trained police force is the main force of one of the key ones.

• Politics referring to issues related to political aspects of a scenario.

There's no reason why both military and policing tags could not be used together (e.g police must defend against/attack military units or the politics of a specific policing tactic).

I am not entirely convinced by your argument that police tactics should bee seen as different from military tactics. Modern military tactics do not exclude non-lethal policing style techniques. Many countries now deploy military units in peace-keeping roles and not simply as a military force. On the other hand police forces rarely need to employ large scale strategic thinking (outside of the logistics of scares resources).

To add my argument, beyond warfare strategy, the tactics I had as a military police officer vs. as military member (Marine) in warfare is just a gross miss-interpretation of tactics in a general sense - and yes, I still have orders from both instances and the variance is immense.

While this is not an unreasonable statement, we're talking about a tag and proper combinations of tags are what is needed, not dedicated specific tags, which lead to "tag bloat".