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“Maneuver” displaced “attrition” remarkably quickly. This all took place within a cold-war context, in which the enemy was both well known and substantial, and the problem to be solved was deterring and if necessary resisting aggression across the inner German border.
The linear planning model, which Robert McNamara had taken to the Pentagon, was flawed precisely because it could not anticipate everything and so was likely to produce perverse outcomes. This led Luttwak into arguing, in effect, for confusion or at least against attempted coherence, for “only policies that are seemingly contradictory can circumvent the self-defeating effect of the paradoxical logic.”
The evidence that this would be working would be “surface fear, anxiety, and alienation in order to generate many non-cooperative centers of gravity.”
discussing the move from platform-centered to network-centered warfare, the Pentagon largely followed this formulation (Garstka was one of the authors) and recognized that, following the physical and information domains, there was a cognitive domain.
The new generation began in the moral and cognitive spheres, where even physically strong entities could be victims of shock, disorientation, and loss of confidence and coherence.
In practice, the more visible manifestations took the form of “hacktivism,” a way of making political or cultural points rather than threatening the economy or social cohesion.
Hong Kong
Jeff Michaels developed the idea of a “discourse trap” whereby the politically comfortable and approved language used to describe campaigns led policymakers to miss significant developments.
So much was expected of the true strategist: a student of the present who must be aware of the past, sensitive to the possibilities of the future, conscious of the danger of bias, alert to ambiguity, alive to chaos, ready to think through consequences of alternative courses of action, and then able to articulate all this with sufficient precision for those who must execute its prescriptions.2 This was a counsel of perfection. There was only so much knowledge that an individual could accumulate, assimilate, and manipulate; only so many potential sequences of events that could be worked through
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That was not an argument to attempt to anticipate everything in advance but to recognize the unreality of insisting on setting out with confidence, certainty, and clarity a series of steps that was sure to reach long-term goals.
Stepping Stones
On the other hand, it failed to take account of what were often the real and immediate demands of strategy-making. This was to bring together a variety of disparate actors to agree on how to address the most pressing problems arising out of the current state of affairs and plot a means of advance to a much better state.
“Men make their own history,” he observed in a famous passage from the Eighteenth Brumaire, “but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
First, class had to be more than a social or economic category but an identity willingly accepted by its members.
Second, consciousness-raising as a class required undermining the competing claims of nation and religion, yet for many workers there was no inconsistency with being a socialist, a patriot, and a Christian.
But if revolutionary strategy was a matter of temperament, reflecting a deep commitment to transformational change as a matter of urgency, restraint could feel unbearable. Either way, as we shall see in the next chapter, radical politics could be intensely frustrating, either living with injustice while waiting for a moment when change might become possible, or else striking out against injustice even when the cause was hopeless.
“A curse on your capital letters! We’re asking people to spill their blood—at least spare them the conceit that they are acting out the biography of an abstract noun.”
True, they must be exceptional, constituting a “sort of revolutionary general staff composed of individuals who are devoted, energetic, intelligent, and most important, sincere and lacking ambition and vanity, capable of serving as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and popular instinct.”25 The metaphor of the general staff was revealing in itself: this was after all the strategy-making body of a conventional army.
Indeed, a refusal to address directly the possibilities of power precluded the possibility of a serious strategy leaving them only the role of angry critics.
Marx and Engels had always put a far greater stress on a correct socialist program rather than a particular strategy.
Lenin won in 1917 because he survived. A couple of times he could have been lynched or incarcerated, or he could have thrown in his lot with the Provisional Government and then been as culpable as everybody else. The isolation that had left him apparently irrelevant before now turned out to be his greatest advantage. He did not need a coalition from the top down when his numbers were growing from the bottom up.
Science had encouraged disenchantment in the loss of an unquestioning religious belief but could not offer a new enchantment.
Tolstoy might be of the Enlightenment when it came to his search for truth and an intense, gnawing belief that with a determined enough search it could be found, but he was also of the counter-Enlightenment in so many key respects, horrified by modernization and an exaggerated confidence in science, by efforts at political reform that lost sight of what he saw to be the fundamentals of the good life.
This describes exactly the sort of belief required for strategy, one acknowledged to be no more than a best guess in the face of uncertainty, but sufficient to permit action.
Frankly to manufacture thought Is like a masterpiece by a weaver wrought. —Goethe, Faust
which meant that key political struggles must also take place within the elite.
To become preeminent, hard work and ambition made a difference, more so than a sense of justice and altruism. Most important were “perspicacity, a ready intuition of individual and mass psychology, strength of will and, especially confidence in oneself.”
But Lenin was able to mount an opportunistic campaign to seize power by taking advantage of an organized party, a disorganized state, and a feeble civil society. These, Gramsci believed, were exceptional and peculiarly “eastern” conditions, quite different from the complex civil societies and structures of Western states, where the only course was first to fight the battle of ideas. “The war of position in politics,” he insisted, “is the concept of hegemony.” This was, according to one authority, “a capsule description of his entire strategic argument.”20
Eventually practically all abandoned their Marxism, and many became conservatives, driven by their anti-Stalinism.
Interesante!
“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
“The real sequence,” according to Lippmann, “should be one where the disinterested expert first finds and formulates the facts for the man of action, and later makes what wisdom he can out of comparison between the decision, which he understands, and the facts, which he organized.”
Having urged careful preparation in terms of available budget, clarity of objectives, and a survey of current thinking, attention must be given to the major themes, which he described as “ever present but intangible,” comparable to the “story line” in fiction, appealing to both the conscious and subconscious of the public.
First, the economic effects were as important as the political.
Cue: hong kong
“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”
From Camus came the argument that rebellion made a life worth living, even when this meant acting in the face of overwhelming odds. So long as one was acting with integrity there was no need to worry about being an underdog, for integrity mattered more than consequences.
it was about how A sustained a position in a power structure, of power over others, by keeping issues off the agenda and creating a background consensus that denied B the opportunity to begin to challenge A, never mind defeat A in a direct confrontation.
If discontent was present but inchoate, then it was possible that it could be turned by some spark into mass anger, but the professional revolutionaries tended not to be the source of the spark.
Now he accepted: “Consequences: there’s no getting away from them. How disconcerting that ideals and passions are compatible with gross miscalculations!” For activists considering a campaign of civil disobedience to address contemporary ills, he urged that it be “farsighted, strategic.” Such a campaign should “not hope to reinvent the world at will” or “simply express itself.” It must argue and “take place within history, not beat on its doors from outside,” seizing opportunities and calling on “popular (even if latent) convictions and sentiments.”61
The challenge posed by the New Left was to argue that the apparent plurality and diversity of Western liberal democracies was an illusion.
His model, at least in a simplified version, appeared as a gift to relativists, suggesting that what mattered with any coherent set of views, including social philosophies, was not their relationship to any discernible reality but the political power behind them.
In addition, his paradigms were quite conscious and deliberate frameworks for scientific research. Foucault’s epistemes could be and often were unconscious, setting the terms for thought and action in ways that could be invisible to those affected.
Strategy was “the totality of the means put into operation to implement power effectively or to maintain it.”
struggle for power was at root a struggle to shape widely accepted views of the world.
He argued that Richard Nixon’s majority in 1968 was so thin precisely because Republicans did not follow his ideas and tried to pretend that the candidate was something milder than was actually the case.
Trump did not make the same mistake
The few who were successful (Lenin, Hitler, Mao, and Castro) came to be idolized as heroic strategists. They were celebrated for their foresight, grasp of theory, resolve, and dedication as they saw and took opportunities for power missed by lesser mortals, playing down the extent to which they might have been helped by circumstances or the errors of their opponents. Western liberal democracies rejected this model.
The normal political experience was of more modest advances and regular frustration.
As so with change
Yet, in another sense, this was the logic of eschewing an ethic of ultimate ends. This messy, infuriating, unceasing political activity reflected the limiting logic of an ethic of responsibility.
It suggested something more than administration but less than total control,
“The follies of socialism and the terrors of anarchy will fade away in an industrial system that guarantees to every man, rich or poor, a fair field and a square deal.”
Though a great innovator, Ford was a terrible strategist. He was absolutely sure in his own views and put himself beyond challenge in the running of his company. So long as others agreed then all was fine, but he expected business to be undertaken on his terms and showed no flexibility when he faced resistance, whether from his own executives, workers, the government, or even consumers. He saw no need for advice from anybody else.
One was about the ability to get on with the business without constant interference from the center; the second was about doing so within clear financial and policy guidelines.
He was not so much relating to the external environment; he was completely reshaping it.
