Strategy: A History

by Lawrence Freedman

bringing superior strength to bear at crucial moments (“God is on the side of the heaviest battalions”); defeating the enemy by destroying his army; viewing strategy as “the art of making use of time and space”; using time to gain strength when weaker; and compensating for physical inferiority with greater resolve, fortitude, and perseverance (“The moral is to the physical as three to one”).

identified seventeen factors to take into account: people, society, culture, politics, ethics, economics and logistics, organization, administration, information and intelligence, strategic theory and doctrine, technology, operations, command, geography, friction/chance/uncertainty, adversary, and time. Proper strategy required that these be considered holistically—that is, both individually and in context with the others.1

Instead of the polarized class struggle anticipated by Marx, postwar capitalist society was marked by an improved standard of living, apparently developing into a self-satisfied but undifferentiated mass society. The salaried middle classes were on the ascendant, largely to be found in large, impersonal organizations. The daily grind of life was hardly grueling. Yet there appeared to be something missing. The critique was not of growing misery and poverty but of dreariness, not so much physical deprivation but of a psychological void. William Whyte’s The Organization Man suggested a degree of homogenization in the American middle class, reflected in standardized career paths, consumer tastes, and cultural sensibilities, with an accompanying degree of docility. The fault, he argued, was not in organization but its worship, “the soft-minded denial that there is a conflict between the individual and society.”3

“Before you are through with any piece of work, no matter how indirectly on occasion,” he insisted, “orient it to the central and continuing task of understanding the structure and the drift, the shaping and the meanings, of your own period, the terrible and magnificent world of human society in the second half of the twentieth century.”

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...

He therefore understood the need for support from those who might otherwise be spectators. He was prepared to get his funds from rich liberals, and was always looking to his targets’ vulnerabilities on external support as a source of pressure (for example, customers or stockholders or some higher governmental authority). In terms of tactics, his basic need was to find new ways of sustaining campaigns and keeping them in the public eye (and here his own notoriety could be an advantage). He also understood that the degree of organization required, especially when undertaken by outsiders and professionals, was bound to be an issue in itself. The establishment was quick to point to the malign presence of outside “agitators” (a label Alinsky happily embraced) to delegitimize campaigns, just as the young radicals were wary of strong leaders who could easily set themselves up as an alternative establishment and leave the people as powerless as they had been at the start.

History is like a relay race of revolutions; the torch of idealism is carried by one group of revolutionaries until it too becomes an establishment, and then the torch is snatched up and carried on the next leg of the race by a new generation of revolutionaries. The cycle goes on and on, and along the way the values of humanism and social justice the rebels champion take shape and change and are slowly implanted in the minds of all men even as their advocates falter and succumb to the materialistic decadence of the prevailing status quo.

One type of Marxist analysis of the clashes at Chicago would have observed that they were largely between working-class police and middle-class demonstrators. Working-class anger was directed at those who had enjoyed privileged lives and now turned on the system that had pampered them, mocking those who upheld traditional values, turning away from responsibilities and challenging the patriotic symbols (notably the flag) of which they should be proud. Fears of disorder and decadence began to influence working-class political attitudes. Alinsky feared that the rise of the right would be the inevitable response to violence and extremism on the left. He wrote Rules for Radicals to remind the new revolutionaries of the “central concepts of action in human politics that operate regardless of the scene or the time.” He argued the need for a “pragmatic attack on the system.” He warned, correctly, of the dangers of insulting and ignoring ordinary working people.

Their early research noted the limited effects of mass communications compared to friends and family. They tended to reinforce more than convert. In a joint piece published in 1948 they addressed the question of media impact on “social action,” by which they meant progressive causes such as improved race relations or sympathy for the labor unions. They noted the concerns of high-minded critics that after all the efforts reformers had put into releasing people from wage slavery and constant toil, the masses now spent their extra leisure immersed in media products marked by triviality and superficiality. They summed up the media’s political impact in terms of enforcing social norms, by exposing deviations from these norms in private lives; by acting as a narcotic, encouraging public apathy and leaving people with only a secondary exposure to political reality; and lastly by encouraging conformism. Because they provided “little basis for a critical appraisal the commercially sponsored mass media indirectly but effectively restrain the cogent development of a genuinely critical output.” Any minor tokens of progressive attitudes would be dropped from TV or radio shows if they went against the economic interests of the owners. “He who pays the piper generally calls the tune.” Were there circumstances in which the media could shape public attitudes in a more progressive direction? This could happen, but it would require that the media itself was not divided and that preexisting v...

The cumulative impact of these anomalies would eventually become overwhelming. This Kuhn described as a “scientific revolution,” when everything scientists thought they knew would be reassessed, all the prior assumptions and information reappraised, often against fierce resistance from the old guard. Eventually the new paradigm would usurp the old.

Until the late 1960s, narrative was still largely to be found in literary theory, referring to works distinguished by a character telling of an event (rather than a stream of consciousness or some interaction between personalities).30 It moved into wider theory under the influence of the French post-structuralists. They rejected the idea of meaning as a reflection of the intention of an author but instead insisted that texts could support a range of meanings, depending on the circumstances in which they were read. With every reading there could be a new meaning. A key figure in this group, with whom Foucault was linked, was the literary theorist Roland Barthes. He pushed the idea of the narrative to the fore, moving it away from purely literary texts into all forms of communication. There were, he wrote in 1968, “countless forms of narrative,” including “articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, drama … comedy, pantomime, paintings … stained-glass windows, movies, local news, conversation.” It was to be found “at all times, in all places, in all societies.” There had “never been anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups, have their stories, and very often those stories are enjoyed by men of different and even opposite cultural backgrounds: narrative remains largely ...

The impact of these ideas, whether framing paradigms or discourses—or propaganda, consciousness, hegemony, belief-systems, images, constructs, and mind-sets for that matter—was to encourage the view that a struggle for power was at root a struggle to shape widely accepted views of the world. In the past, a similar understanding had led socialists to prepare for long campaigns of political education, conducted by means of pamphlets and lectures. This was now a media age and the opportunities to shape and disseminate opinions and presentations of the truth were now many and various. The techniques pioneered by Bernays, with his intuitive grasp of the importance of framing, now promised an even greater impact. The struggle over images and ideas did not become one between radicals and resisters but between mainstream political activists, with the beneficiaries in the first instance turning out to be the Right rather than the Left.

It was the case that Republicans had been paying attention for some time to the use of language to sharpen their political message. In this the key event had been the collaboration between Representative Newt Gingrich and consultant Frank Lutz to take Congress for the Republicans in the 1994 midterm elections. The centerpiece of the campaign was the “Contract with America.” According to Lutz, the word contract was chosen because plan sounded insufficiently binding, promises were made to be broken, pledges went unfulfilled, platforms were too political, oaths too legal, and covenants too religious. The adjective “Republican” was left off to encourage independents to keep an open mind.2 In the actual document, a lot of effort went into talking about personal responsibility, family reinforcement, and tax cuts (“American Dream Reinforcement”). In 1995, the two men combined on a memo for the new Republican Congressmen entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” which urged that they talk of themselves using such words as “opportunity, truth, moral, courage, reform, prosperity” and portray their opponents in term of such words as “crisis, destructive, sick, pathetic, lie, liberal, betray.”3

Once the conflict was being fought in the enemy’s language, too much had been conceded. To Lakoff the great challenge was to turn these frames around so that Americans came to see the issues with new ideas. “Reframing is social change.”4

The problem, Westen suggested, was that Democrats wanted to believe that campaigns were about issues and that it would be possible to appeal to the rationality and better nature of voters. Unfortunately, human beings are barely rational creatures. Instead, they respond to messages which tug on their emotions and are prone to feel as much as see the world. “Most of the time, this battle for control of our minds occurs outside of awareness, leaving us as blind spectators to our own psychodrama, prisoners of the images cast on the wall of our skulls.” Republicans understood this and developed a narrative of themselves as on the side of patriotism and God. Democrats were soft and fuzzy, inattentive on crime and limp in facing the nation’s enemies, stuck with rhetoric about fighting for the working people of America as if the country was still facing the challenges of the 1930s. When persuading voters to back them, Republicans had no compunction about resorting to negativity, while Democrats continued to act as if they could rise above such aggression, dismissing the negativity as irrelevant and a turn-off for voters. To remedy the situation, Democrats had to learn to frame issues to their advantage and go on the attack, finding ways of convincing voters that their candidate was in tune with voters’ interests and values, defining the party and its principles in ways that were emotionally compelling. This involved developing a grand narrative that was coherent, using policy posi...

Lutz’s own guide to the use of language acknowledged the importance of framing issues, but his stress was on more basic rules of communication. He aimed for simplicity and brevity; short words and short sentences; attention to consistency, imagery, sound, and texture; and language that was aspirational and offered novelty. Only toward the end of his list did he point to the need to “provide context and explain relevance.” Credibility, he noted, was as important as philosophy. Explicitly addressing Lakoff, he observed that “language alone cannot achieve miracles. Actual policy counts at least as much as how something is framed.”8

They therefore opposed government intervention in their personal lives as well as in economic affairs. In all this, Atwater was exploring prevailing attitudes, which he saw as more deeply ingrained than opinions, emotional as much as intellectual. All this resulted in a more fluid political context than in the past and challenged campaigns to engage with voters’ attitudes. The logic was “to find the specific example, the outrageous abuse, the easy-to-digest take that made listeners feel—usually repulsion—rather than think.

To the dismay, even bewilderment, of the progressives, the unions bitterly resisted Taylorism. They had no interest in blurring the line between capital and labor and understood that at root scientific management was not about partnership but centralized control based on strict hierarchy. Providing management with insights into core tasks undermined workers’ control over the shop floor and treated them in a patronizing and dehumanizing manner. They saw Taylor’s methods as means by which more could be extracted from workers without commensurate reward.

For Porter, strategy was all about positioning. The menu of strategies was small and the choice would depend on the nature of the competitive environment, with the aim of finding a position that could be defended against existing competitors and those trying to enter the market. Porter offered three generic strategies: staying market leader by keeping costs down, having a product that was sufficiently different that it could not be challenged by other competitors (differentiation), and identifying a particular part of the market where there were few challengers (market specialization). He argued that it was important to pick one of these strategies, stick to it, and never get “stuck in the middle,” because that would almost “guarantee low profitability.” Since the best position would be extremely profitable, there would then be sufficient resources to improve the position. The key thing was to find and exploit the imperfections in the market. In terms of the SWOT framework, this was about addressing opportunities and threats rather than strengths and weaknesses. There was very little interest in internal organization and the actual implementation of a strategy.

It became clear that the key factor was not faulty calculation but the nature of the social interaction. In the ultimatum game, the responders accepted far less if they were told that the amount had been determined by a computer or the spin of a roulette wheel. If the human interaction was less direct, with complete anonymity, then proposers made smaller grants.19 A further finding was that there were variations according to ethnicity. The amounts distributed reflected culturally accepted notions of fairness. In some cultures, the proposers would make a point of offering more than half; in others, the responders were reluctant to accept anything.

Playing these games with children also demonstrated that altruism was something to be learned during childhood.20

One response from those committed to the rational actor model was that it was interesting but irrelevant. The experiments involved small groups, often graduate students. It was entirely possible that as these types of situations became better understood, behavior would tend to become more rational as understood by the theory. Indeed, there was evidence that when these games were played with subjects who were either professors or students in economics and business, players acted in a far more selfish way, were more likely to free ride, were half as likely to contribute to a public good, kept more resources for themselves in an ultimatum game, and were more likely to defect in a prisoner’s dilemma game. This fit in with studies that showed economists to be more corruptible and less likely to donate to charity.25 One researcher suggested that the “experience of taking a course in microeconomics actually altered students’ conceptions of the appropriateness of acting in a self-interested manner, not merely their definition of self-interest.”26