Strategy: A History

by Lawrence Freedman

By and large, strategy comes into play where there is actual or potential conflict, when interests collide and forms of resolution are required. This is why a strategy is much more than a plan. A plan supposes a sequence of events that allows one to move with confidence from one state of affairs to another. Strategy is required when others might frustrate one’s plans because they have different and possibly opposing interests and concerns.

Strategy is often expected to start with a description of a desired end state, but in practice there is rarely an orderly movement to goals set in advance.

The picture of strategy that should emerge from this book is one that is fluid and flexible, governed by the starting point and not the end point.

So the realm of strategy is one of bargaining and persuasion as well as threats and pressure, psychological as well as physical effects, and words as well as deeds. This is why strategy is the central political art. It is about getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest. It is the art of creating power.

References to business strategy were rare before 1960. They started to take off during the 1970s and by 2000 became more frequent than references to military strategy.

The rise of strategy has therefore gone hand in hand with bureaucratization of organizations, professionalization of functions, and growth of the social sciences.

The best strategic advice in the Bible, however, is to always trust God and obey his laws.

Mētis was of most value when matters were fluid, fast moving, unfamiliar, and uncertain, combining “contrary features and forces that are opposed to each other.” It was suited to situations when there could be no formulaic or predictable behavior, benefiting from a “greater grip” of the present, “more awareness” of the future, “richer experience accumulated from the past,” an ability to adapt constantly to changing events, and sufficient pliability to accommodate the unexpected.

Yet appeals to the gods continued to be made regularly in Athenian affairs. Omens were sought and oracles consulted. Then, during the Athenian enlightenment of the fifth century BCE, an alternative approach developed that rejected explanations for events based on the immortals and instead looked to human behavior and decisions.

Those who took controversial decisions on war tended to portray their decisions as acts of necessity and play down the exercise of discretion.

His approach worked best when followed by only one side: if both commanders were reading Sun Tzu, the maneuvers and deceptions could lead to no decision at all or else an unexpected collision that caught them both unaware.

There was, at any rate, only a limited amount of mystery and subtlety that a leader could cultivate without confusing those being led as much as the opponent.

When Milton referred to “guile,” he connoted fraud, cunning, and trickery. From a strategic perspective, these still could seem preferable to violence—and certainly to defeat—but such methods were underhanded, certainly lacking in nobility and bravery.

Yet, the etymology of plot resembles that of plan. Both originally referred to a flat area of ground, then to a drawing of an area of land or a building, then to a drawing to guide the construction of a building, and eventually to a set of measures adopted to accomplish something.

Many of his maxims revolved around the need to understand the enemy: by fighting too often with one enemy, “you will teach him all your art of war”; never do what the enemy wishes “for this reason alone, that he desires it”; never interrupt an enemy making a mistake; always show confidence, for you can see your own troubles but you cannot see those facing your enemy.

This is why Kutuzov’s best advice before the battle was to get a good night’s sleep: immediate attentiveness to unfolding possibilities was going to be more valuable than forward planning.

This was evident in von Moltke’s definition of victory: “the highest goal attainable with available means.”

Ferdinand Foch, who became supreme allied commander during the Great War, was convinced that the question of losing was about a psychological state of mind. Du Picq insisted that the physical impulse was nothing, the “moral impulse” everything.

An intense debate has developed among military historians as to whether there really was ever a Schlieffen Plan, prepared just before von Moltke’s nephew (known as the Younger) took over as chief of the general staff in 1906.

“A plan, like a tree, must have branches—if it is to bear fruit. A plan with a single aim is apt to prove a barren pole.”

The defensive equivalent was deterrence, persuading an enemy not to attack; the offensive equivalent was “compellence,” inducing withdrawal or acquiescence. Deterrence demanded an opponent’s inaction; compellence demanded action or ceasing adverse actions. Deterrence was about the status quo and had no obvious time limits; compellence projected forward to a new place and could be urgent.

The aim of strategy, it had been supposed, was to exert the maximum control over the course of an unfolding conflict.

Violence, especially in war, is a confused and uncertain activity, highly unpredictable depending on decisions made by fallible human beings organized into imperfect governments depending on fallible communications and warning systems and on the untested performance of people and equipment. It is furthermore a hotheaded activity, in which commitments and reputations can develop a momentum of their own.

The basic principle was that “a pound of threat is worth an ounce of action—as long as we are not bluffing.”

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

Boyd summed all this up as the “OODA loop.” OODA stands for observation, orientation, decision, action.

The lasting importance of Boyd’s work lay in the focus on disrupting the enemy’s decision-making, encouraging uncertainty and confusion.

Boyd’s writings led to the evaluation of strategies in terms of their ability to cause uncertainty and confusion in the enemy’s mind. This could be achieved by undermining the will to fight (“moral warfare”); encouraging distorted perception of reality, by either deception or attacks on means of communication (“mental warfare”); and using the advantages gained to attack war-making capacities so the enemy could not survive (“physical warfare”).

The 1991 Gulf War vindicated this vision, but that was helped by Saddam Hussein’s ignorance of the real military balance. In this respect, the vindication carried its own refutation.

In short, whereas stronger military powers had a natural preference for decisive battlefield victories, the weaker were more ready to draw the civilian sphere into the conflict while avoiding open battle.

Those with backgrounds in political campaigning or marketing who were asked to advise on getting the message out in Iraq and Afghanistan often opted for short-lived projects that had no lasting effect. Moreover, these individuals knew that they would be judged by how their products went down with domestic audiences; thus, those were the groups to which they tended to be geared. Not only did this miss the point of the exercise but it could also blind policymakers, who often fell into the trap of believing their own propaganda.

The idea of a military strategy separate from a political strategy was not only misleading but also dangerous.

The idea of a master strategist was therefore a myth. On the one hand, it demanded an impossible omniscience in grasping the totality of complex and dynamic situations or an ability to establish a credible and sustainable path toward distant goals. On the other hand, it failed to take account of what were often the real and immediate demands of strategy-making.

This question of how minds can be turned, especially in large numbers and in a shared direction, looms large in this section, because that has long been a preoccupation of radicals and revolutionaries determined to upend the existing structures of power on behalf of the masses—though the masses were reluctant participants, if not actively hostile to the whole endeavor.

Unlike Clausewitz, who worked out his theory as a result of the experience of war, Marx developed his theory prior to his experience of revolution, and then at once found its application problematic.

People don’t storm the Bastille because history proceeds by zigzags. History proceeds by zigzags because when people have had enough, they storm the Bastille.

So he dealt with the problem of strategy by not advocating any course that needed one.

For Engels, revolution was “certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon—authoritarian means, if such there be at all.”

On entering government, the CNT paper observed that because anarchists were now ministers, the state was no longer oppressive.

Sociology developed as a discipline in response to Marx.

The state’s authority would come from one of three sources: tradition, bureaucracy, or charisma.

The origins of the word pragmatism lie in the Latin pragmaticus, linked in Roman times to being active and businesslike. For a while it had a negative connotation as excessive activity, in the sense of meddling or interfering. By the nineteenth century, however, pragmatism had become more positive. It referred to treating facts or events systematically and practically, being realistic and factual, aiming at what was achievable rather than what was ideal. Its origins as a philosophical construct go back to the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Nonetheless, in November 1955, it was the secretary of the local branch of the NAACP, Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested.

He had an understanding of organization and tactics and a readiness to learn. He was aware of Gandhi and Thoreau, but he had not thought through nonviolence as a strategy.21 As a theological student he had wrestled with the issues of morality and politics, was aware of Niebuhr’s Christian realism, and remained unconvinced by those who spoke of the power of love to change hearts.

Dahl’s definition stressed the ability to influence: “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.”

He set down eleven. A number were basic to any underdog strategy. The first was pure Sun Tzu: persuade the opponent that you were stronger than was really the case (“If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do”). The second and third were about staying close to the comfort zone of your own people and going outside that of the opponent in order to “cause confusion, fear, and retreat.” Rule 4 was to use the opponent’s own rulebook against them, and Rule 5 was to use ridicule (“man’s most potent weapon”) because it was hard to counterattack and infuriated the opposition. This led to Rule 6, which was that a good tactic was one your people enjoyed, while a bad tactic was not only not fun but also (Rule 7) dragged on and became hard to sustain. This was because (Rule 8) the essence of a good strategy was to keep the pressure on the opponent. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.” Rule 9 was an observation about how threats could be more terrifying than the reality, and Rule 10 was about the need for a constructive alternative, an answer to the question, “Okay, what would you do?” Lastly, Rule 11 commanded: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Ide...

The term “third world” had been coined in France in the early 1950s to describe countries that were economically underdeveloped and politically unaligned, keeping their distance from the liberal capitalist first world and the state socialist second world.

Che’s romantic model was based on a misreading of the Cuban revolution. Castro had presented himself as a liberal and leader of a wide anti-Batista coalition, not as a Marxist-Leninist—an affiliation that was only announced after the seizure of power.

It was out of this faction that the Weather Underground was formed with the aim of moving out of the universities to organize young people for a coming armed struggle. The name came from one of Bob Dylan’s lyrics (“You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows”).

Kuhn’s message was that beliefs, even in an area committed to reason and experimentation, could be influenced by factors that were at their root non-rational.