Strategy

Introduction: Bringing Strategy to Life

The reasons why strategy matters are stark. We live in a world in which others are willing to kill us. Moreover, all of us cherish goals which have the potential to involve us in conflict. These goals may be as visceral as the drive to live and protect our families or they may be as intellectual as the mandates of a religion or political ideology, but few of us would choose to leave such aspirations hostage to the forbearance of our rivals, and most of us would be willing, under certain circumstances, to use force ourselves as a tool for advancing them. If we are to realize our hopes for any period of time, this will to fight for them is a logical necessity. Moralists throughout time have recognized it as conditionally honourable and just.

Securing one's goals through force is easier said than done. This is obvious for those who are weak, but true even for those who appear strong. Goliath has fallen so many times in the course of human history that political thinkers from Machiavelli to the contemporary international relations scholar Kenneth Waltz have taken it as axiomatic that those who rise are doomed to decline. Waltz adds that attempts to defy this principle will only bring on one's collapse all the sooner (Waltz 2000: 36–8). If this proposition is true, even our moments of success are but precursors to failure, and all of our hopes are ultimately futile.

Nevertheless, with the will to fight for our goals comes the hope that our ingenuity will permit us to succeed in them, if not absolutely and eternally, at least satisfactorily and renewably. Without this hope, David would not have bothered.1 David, one may also recall, exchanged his sling for Goliath's mighty sword and went on to found a kingdom. Strategy is the skill which permits David to discern the uses of sling and sword alike, and to combine them for such purposes. This book aims to help readers understand this faculty, so that they might use and develop it.

The first step towards understanding anything is to clarify the concept which one wishes to grasp. The highly esteemed scholar Colin Gray has defined strategy as a bridge between military power and political goals (Gray 1999a: 17, 2010: passim). Edward Mead Earle might add that, even in the midst of war, an effective strategy must also connect one's goals with one's economic means, one's form of government, one's diplomatic relations, one's broader culture and an open-ended variety of similar considerations (Earle 1943: viii) Rather than thinking of strategy as a bridge, we may wish to picture it as a busy airport terminal. Earle adds that strategy involves long-term efforts to secure future aspirations, as well as short-term attempts to achieve immediate ones, perhaps stretching such metaphors to absurdity.

This book will amalgamate Gray's and Earle's thoughts by defining strategy as people's efforts to take control of their political destiny. Since Goliath's physical strength does not seem sufficient for those purposes, this book will treat strategy as primarily a mental activity. Although strategic thinkers must pay attention to material factors such as the size of armies and the effects of weapons, they are primarily interested in the challenges of using military instruments effectively, not in the instruments themselves. This statement requires a caveat – the fact that strategy is an intellectual endeavour may not mean that it is a coldly rational one. Carl von Clausewitz, perhaps the best-known strategic thinker of all time, reminded readers that the genius of a great general was not the genius of a great physicist, and that success in war depends on intangibles of will, charisma, experience and intuitive judgement, at least as often as it depends on logical analysis. With those points in mind, this book will focus on strategy as it pertains to states and other organized political communities, and on strategy in situations which involve a meaningful likelihood of violence. Accordingly, this book is primarily concerned with military strategy, although it does not limit itself narrowly to that.

Once one has defined the word strategy, one must ask how it works and how to practise it. There may be bodies of knowledge in which one can catalogue answers to such questions and trace the ways in which researchers have improved upon them over time. Strategy does not work like that. Although a physician can apply specific and widely recognized treatments to specific and widely recognized conditions with confidence that today's established methods are more reliable than earlier or poorly tested ones, a strategist would be foolish to take this approach.

Not only does strategy involve a far broader range of issues than medicine, the fact that strategists must pit their abilities against thinking opponents makes the techniques which are known to have worked in the past particularly unlikely to succeed in the future. The pitfalls of attempting to fight the last war are proverbial. If one's enemies are competent, they will have studied previously successful methods as well and will be prepared to counter them. One student of this subject, Edward Luttwak, suggests that this paradox is the defining feature of strategy (Luttwak 1987: 3–5). For these reasons and others, every wise strategic decision must involve an exceptionally large element of improvisation, even if the strategist ultimately concludes that, under his or her particular circumstances, the familiar approach actually is the most promising one.

Strategists require factual information about their goals and their means for achieving them. Such material is the anatomy and pharmacology of their art. Nevertheless, to perform the crucial improvisation, strategists benefit from guidance of a different kind. Over time, a variety of authors have distinguished themselves for their offerings in this regard. We know their works through their ability to clarify the issues which concern us, through the testimony of successful strategists who have acknowledged their value and perhaps through the intuitive response we experience when we encounter insight.

Insight comes from the mind, which means, for most practical purposes, that it comes from the minds of particular humans. For this reason, our understanding of strategy is largely based upon the writings of individual thinkers. Moreover, strategic insights appear to be timeless, at least in considerable part. Therefore, classic works by long-dead authors often seem more useful than competing offerings from those writing today.

Indeed, Gray described his 2010 opus on the nature of strategy as a mere exercise in ‘rearrang[ing] the deck chairs’ on a metaphorical ship built by writers dating back to the fifth century bc2 (Gray 2010: ix). Gray justified his efforts by noting that deck chairs do, from time to time, need to be rearranged. One should note that Gray's reverence for ancient works is controversial (Gray 2010: 6). Certainly, those who wish to benefit from older works of strategic thought must be alert to the possibility that times may have changed. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the classic works remain essential to understanding stra­tegic issues today, and no doubt whatsoever that they remain essential to understanding the origins of contemporary strategic thought.

Gray identifies the most valuable strategic classics as Carl von Clausewitz's On War, Sun Tzu's The Art of War and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, in that order of importance (Gray 2010: 6). Later, Gray notes Niccolò Machiavelli, Antoine-Henri Jomini, Basil H. Liddell Hart, J. C. Wylie, Edward Luttwak, Bernard Brodie and Thomas Schelling as strategic thinkers whose works also demand at least some degree of attention (Gray 2010: 6). This author, as readers of later chapters will see, draws on roughly the same canon, with inevitable additions and changes in emphasis. All such lists are subjective and potentially arbitrary, but this author hopes that he has uncovered enough useful ideas within his chosen works to convince readers that he has made valid selections.

Where Gray reconfigured insights taken from older classics, this book attempts to illuminate the insights themselves. This author's project, like Gray's, owes heavy tribute to the earlier authors. Nevertheless, this author's project, again like Gray's, rests upon a foundation of fresh analysis. Although scholars have had centuries to study the classic works of strategic thought, no one has definitively established what those well-studied texts actually mean.

Authoritative interpretations of the strategic classics often contradict each other. Thus, historian Azar Gat can accuse Machiavelli of dull adherence to obsolete concepts while political thinker Leo Strauss encourages readers to see Machiavelli as perhaps the most radical innovator of all time (Gat 1989: 2; Strauss 1958: 290–9). The twentieth-century strategic thinker Michael Handel can portray the ancient Chinese thinker Sun Tzu as a rationalist, whereas the contemporary religious scholar Thomas Cleary, commenting in his role as translator of Asian military classics can characterize the same Chinese thinker as a mystic3 (Handel 1996: 174; Zhuge and Liu 1989: 14). As Colonel Philip Meilinger has noted, the variety of different ways in which scholars and practising strategists have interpreted – or, perhaps,...