Strategy: A History

by Lawrence Freedman

Moses was told by God to go to Pharaoh and say on his behalf: Let my people go that they may serve me. For I will at this time send all my plagues upon thine heart, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people;

Moses’s demands were now getting complex. The modest initial demand, an opportunity for the Hebrew men to leave for a while to pray, was being transformed into something much more complete.

A regular victim of God’s power, he only seemed to believe in it while the pressure was actually upon him and his people.

The actual methods employed in this case were quite unique, but the strategic logic reflected a turning of the screw.

Another problem might have been that Moses increased his demands with the pressure.

There is, however, a more intriguing explanation: Pharaoh was set up. Before the plagues started, God told Moses: I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt.

God needed an obstinate Pharaoh because the only way he could demonstrate the full range of his power, and its superiority over all other powers on earth, was to put on the most awesome display.

This was problematic for Talmudic scholars and later for Christian theologians, for it raises fundamental questions of free will.

Just before entering this land, Moses died and Joshua became the leader of the Israelites.

Joshua had only himself to blame if he had been deceived. Convinced by the Gibeonites’ appearance, he “did not inquire of the Lord.” What is the point of having access to omniscience if it is not used to check out a potentially dubious story?

The book of Judges relates a regular pattern of Israelites turning away from God, who then used a hostile tribe, the Midianites, to punish them.

The Israelites were suffering for their idolatry and begged for deliverance. God chose Gideon for the mission.

One of the most iconic of all the Bible’s stories is that of David and Goliath. It is invariably invoked by an underdog, yet the underdog status was illusory because David had God on his side.

David’s success depended on surprise and accuracy. He knew he could not defeat Goliath on the giant’s terms, which is why he rejected Saul’s armor and with it the conventions of this form of combat.

This was one of a complex set of encounters between the Israelites and the Philistines. The Philistines controlled the territory west of the Jordan River.

Saul was the first king of the Israelites, anointed by Samuel. This constitutional innovation was intended to meet the Israelites’ desire to be led in the same way as other nations.

God’s objectives were clear enough, but his methods were invariably deceptive, leading his victims into traps under the erroneous impression that they were masters of their destinies. As a result, deception became a strong biblical theme.

Do not trust the Horse, Trojans/ Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts. —Laocoön in Virgil’s Aeneid

OUR THIRD SOURCE for the origins of strategy is ancient Greece.

by the fifth century BCE a Greek enlightenment, a combination of intellectual open-mindedness and rigorous political debate, had taken place.

The man of action could either be admired for his courage or dismissed as a fool for his sole reliance on strength, while the man of words could be celebrated for his intelligence or treated warily because words could deceive.

One of the curiosities of this literature is that some of its most interesting reflections on what it might mean to think as well as act strategically—not only in a military sense—were later played down and lost their impact. We can attribute this to the intervention of Plato.

From Homer came the contrasting qualities, represented respectively by Achilles and Odysseus, of biē and mētis (strength and cunning), which over time—for example, in Machiavelli—came to be represented as force and guile.

The master of casting a strategy in its most compelling form, at least according to Thucydides, was the Athenian statesman Pericles. The ability to persuade not only one’s people but also allies and enemies was a vital attribute of the successful strategist. In this way, strategy required a combination of words and deeds, and the ability to manipulate them both.

Mētis described a particular notion of a strategic intelligence for which there is no obvious English equivalent. In Greek it was related to mētiaō: “to consider, meditate, plan,” together with metióomai, “to contrive,” conveyed a sense of a capacity to think ahead, attend to detail, grasp how others think and behave, and possess a general resourcefulness.

She developed a close association with the mortal who most embodied mētis, Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey.

More concerned with success than glory, he was indirect and psychological in his methods, seeking to confuse, disorient, and outwit opponents. But Odysseus also suffered from the challenge of the known deceiver. After a time, he became a victim of the liar’s paradox: it became hard to get anyone to believe him, even when he was telling the truth.

Virgil, the Roman who took a less generous view of Odysseus than did Homer, described how the Greeks made a show of giving up on their struggle to seize Troy.

Unlike Sinon, who could lie and be believed, Cassandra would make accurate predictions and never be believed.

Homer mentioned the wooden horse only in passing in The Odyssey, as a special example of the sort of craftiness that distinguished Odysseus from his more pedestrian peers.

Homer’s indulgent view of Odysseus’s escapades was not shared by Virgil. He thought such behavior deplorable and unfortunately typical of untrustworthy Greeks. In later centuries, Sinon was placed with Odysseus in Dante’s Eighth Circle of Hell, a place for those guilty of fraudulent rhetoric and falsification.

Achilles demonstrated not only the limits to what force could achieve but also how it could become associated with a certain wildness, a bloodlust that led to terrible deaths and slaughter. Yet it was hard to do without force.

When Achilles gave up on the war against the Trojans after being slighted by King Agamemnon, it was Odysseus who led the delegation sent to plead with him. Achilles’s response was to denounce Odysseus and his methods: “I hate like the gates of Hades, the man who says one thing and hides another inside him.”

According to one account—though not Homer’s—the arrow had to hit him in his heel.

“In the final analysis,” notes Jenny Strauss Clay, “the

humane heroism of Odysseus, based as it is on intelligence and endurance, is set above the quicksilver glory of Achilles.”4

For Odysseus, the ends justified the means. The trickster was always prepared to be judged by results. The moral unease that this approach generated was evident in Sophocles’s play, Philoctetes.

Odysseus has been described as exemplifying “a particular idea of practical intelligence.” According to Barnouw, he was able to consider “intended actions in the light of anticipated consequences.” He kept his main purpose in mind and thought “back from that final goal through a complex network of means (and obstacles) to achieve it.”

Odysseus’s understanding of how others viewed the world allowed him to manipulate their thought processes by giving out signs that he knew they would read in a particular way.

Barnouw described this intelligence as being as much “visceral as intellectual,” less an “impassive weighing of alternatives,” and more a prioritizing of aims or impulses that are most

Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant similarly argued that mētis as exemplified by Odysseus was a distinctive form of practical intelligence.

Whereas strength could be defeated by superior strength, mētis could defeat all strength.

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.”

Atē, the daughter of Eris, the goddess of strife, spent her time encouraging stupidity in both mortals and immortals.

Such gods, lamented Tuchman, provided humans with an excuse for their folly.

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. In addition, warfare became too complicated to be left to the heroic deeds of individual warriors; more coordination and planning was needed. The Athenian War Council consisted of ten strategoi

Thucydides, who lived from around 460 to 395 BCE, was a strategos.

Peloponnesian War. This was fought from 431 to 404 BCE between the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta, and the Athenian empire, known as the Delian League. Sparta was the clear victor. Before the war Athens had been the strongest of the Greek city states. By the war’s conclusion, Athens was much diminished.

As a historian, Thucydides exemplified the enlightenment spirit, describing conflict in unsentimental and calculating terms, posing hard questions of power and purpose, and observing how choices had consequences.

the role of language as a strategic instrument.