Strategy: A History

by Lawrence Freedman

There is no agreed-upon definition of strategy that describes the field and limits its boundaries. One common contemporary definition describes it as being about maintaining a balance between ends, ways, and means; about identifying objectives; and about the resources and methods available for meeting such objectives.

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

“the strong do what they can while the weak must suffer what they must.”

In the language of later centuries, he sought victory through enemy exhaustion rather than annihilation.

As restraint collapsed so did the possibity of sensible discourse.

Plato bequeathed an enduring and demeaning image of the sophists as the “spin-doctors” of their day, rhetorical strategists, relativist in their morality, disinterested in truth, suggesting that all that really mattered was power. They were hired hands, traveling wordsmiths who sold their skills to the highest bidder without any view of right and wrong.

Plato’s main legacy was not in the character of rulers but in the establishment of philosophy as a specialist profession.

made the comparison with the Chinese term zhi. This had a wide variety of meanings from wisdom, knowledge, and intelligence to skill, craft, cleverness, or cunning.

In Sun Tzu’s formulaic aphorisms, the key to deception was simply a matter of doing the opposite of what was expected—look incapacitated when capable, passive when active, near when far, far when near.

The suggestion, however, of a strong Greek preference for “decisive” battle came from Victor David Hanson’s controversial argument that the terms for a continuing Western way of war were set in classical times.

Vegetus expressed, in terms similar to Sun Tzu, a preference for starving enemies into submission rather than fighting them (“famine is more terrible than the sword”), and spoke of how it “is better to beat the enemy through want, surprises, and care for difficult places (i.e., through maneuver) than by a battle in the open field.”

It was not long before “Machiavellian” came to describe anyone with a talent for manipulation and an inclination to deceit in the pursuit of personal gain, fascinated with power for its own sake rather than with the virtuous and noble things power allows one to do.

Put this way, strategy covered all those aspects of a military campaign that might properly be determined in advance.

Napoleon’s contribution to strategy was not so much in his theory but in his practice. Nobody could think of better ways of using great armies to win great wars.

What Frederick shared with Napoleon—and what later theorists celebrated in both—was the ability to create strength on the battlefield, even without an overall numerical advantage, and direct it against an enemy’s vulnerabilities.

Carnot also showed how a mass army could be used as an offensive instrument by separating it into independent units that could move faster than the enemy, enabling attacks against the flanks and creating opportunities to cut off communications.

Clausewitz came to be celebrated as a greater theorist of war, but Jomini had enduring appeal to military planners. Because he developed his theories while Napoleon was at his peak, Jomini’s writing showed an optimism that is lacking in Clausewitz.

Clausewitz’s most famous dictum, that war is a continuation of policy by other means, is a charter for strategists.

Clausewitz pointed to the other two parts of the trinity to explain why it was unlikely to be realized. Politics was one source of restraint, but friction was another. This was one of Clausewitz’s most significant contributions to military thought. Friction helped explain the difference between war as it might be—that is, absolute and unrestrained—and actual war.

Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war … Countless minor incidents—the kind you can never really foresee—combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal.

A simple plan would require the excellent execution of each engagement; for this reason, tactical success was vital. In this respect, the strategic plan survived so long as successive engagements were being

“A center of gravity,” he explained, “is always found where the mass is concentrated the most densely. It presents the most effective target for a blow; furthermore, the heaviest blow is that struck by the center of gravity.” The Schwerpunkt was “the central feature of the enemy’s power” and therefore “the point against which all our energies should be directed.” This required tracing back the “ultimate substance” of enemy strength to its source and then directing the attack against this source. The target might not be a concentration of physical strength but possibly the point where enemy forces connected and were given direction. Any disruption would maximize effects beyond the immediate point to the larger whole.

Undoubtedly a genius in battle, Napoleon lacked political subtlety. He inclined toward punitive peace terms and was poor at forging coalitions.

Clausewitz represented much of what Tolstoy opposed. He even made a minor appearance in War and Peace. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (assumed to be representing Tolstoy’s views) overheard a conversation between two Germans, Adjutant General Wolzogen and Clausewitz. One said, “The war must be extended widely,” and the other agreed that “the only aim is to weaken the enemy, so of course one cannot take into account the loss of private individuals.”

Tolstoy deplored the “great man theory of history,” the idea that events were best explained by references to the wishes and decisions of individuals who through their position and special qualities were able to push events in one direction rather than another.

It was also odd to use Napoleon’s performance at Borodino to debunk the great man theory of history. This was, as Gallie notes, “one of the strangest, least typical, of campaigns known to history,” yet Tolstoy uses it to make points of universal validity to be applied to matters far less strange and atypical.6 Tolstoy showed the emperor pretending to be master of events over which in practice he had no control. He was all bustle and activity, beguiled by an “artificial phantasm of life,” issuing orders of great precision too far from the battlefield to make a real difference: “none of his orders were executed and during the battle he did not know what was going on.” Instead, he played out a role as “representative of authority.” According to Tolstoy, he did this rather well. “He did nothing harmful to the progress of the battle, as he inclined to the most reasonable opinions, made no confusion, did not contradict himself, did not get frightened or run away from the field of battle, but with great tact and military experience carried out his role of appearing to command calmly and with dignity.” The orders he sent out rarely made sense to those receiving them, and what he heard in return was often overtaken by events by the time it reached him.

Nonetheless, more than “all the history books ever written,” War and Peace shaped popular perceptions of Napoleon’s defeat. “By denying any rational direction of events in 1812 by human actors and implying that military professionalism was a German disease Tolstoy feeds rather easily into Western interpretations of 1812 which blame snow or chance for French defeat.”9 It was one thing to acknowledge that military organizations would not always be responsive to the demands of the center. Orders would be misinterpreted; intelligence would be faulty; original campaign plans would need to be modified and at times supplanted. It was entirely different to insist that commands could never be effectual and change the course of a battle or to deny the potential of leadership; the relevance of intelligence, advice, and orders; and the influence of professional experience, training, and competence.

The second factor influencing von Moltke’s approach was that he internalized Clausewitz’s dictum about war being a continuation of politics. He happily served his monarch and less happily shared influence with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. He acquired as a result a sense of the uncertain fit between political ends and military means, but also of the possibilities of limited war and the value of allies. While, à la Clausewitz, he believed the object of war was to “implement the government’s policy by force,” he grumbled that politicians (read Bismarck) might demand more from war than it could realistically deliver. Once objectives were set, it was up to the military to realize them. “Political considerations can be taken into account only as long as they do not make demands that are militarily improper or impossible.”

The victory in the decision by arms is the most important moment in war. Only victory breaks the enemy will and compels him to submit to our own. Neither the occupation of territory nor the capturing of fortified places, but only the destruction of the enemy fighting-power will, as a rule, decide. This is thus the primary objective of operations.

More innovative in von Moltke’s approach to strategy was his refusal to be locked into any system or plan. He was responsible for the famous observation that “no plan survived contact with the enemy.”

Von Moltke’s most radical innovation as a commander, which went against the textbooks of the time, was to divide his army so that both parts could be kept supplied until they would combine for the battle (“march divided; strike united”).

AT THE START of the twentieth century, the military historian Hans Delbrück argued that all military strategy could be divided into two basic forms. The first, conforming to the majority view of the day was Niederwerfungsstrategie, the strategy of annihilation, which demanded a decisive battle to eliminate the enemy’s army. The second drew on Clausewitz’s note of 1827 which recognized the possibility for another type of war when the available military means could not deliver a decisive battle.1 This Delbrück described as Ermattungsstrategie, the strategy of exhaustion, sometimes translated as attrition.

Britain lacked a naval strategist of note. As Winston Churchill observed after the Great War, the Royal Navy had made “no important contribution to naval literature.” Its “thought and study” were devoted to the daily routine. “We had brilliant experts of every description, brave and devoted hearts; but at the outset of the conflict we had more captains of ships than captains of war.”

“Since men live on the land and not upon the sea, great issues between nations at war have always been decided—except in the rarest cases—either by what your army can do against your enemy’s territory and national life, or else by fear of what the fleet makes possible for your army to do.”

Three maxims flowed from his analysis: “Who rules East Europe controls the heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”32

The reason for the ascent of strategic man, he suggested, was nuclear weapons. Strategy could no longer be solely concerned with how to fight war as an instrument of policy but also had to understand how to threaten war. Studies of actual violence had to be supplemented by discussions of deterrence and the manipulation of risk. It was because of this that strategic thinking was no longer a military preserve.

John McDonald’s Strategy in Poker, Business and War is curiously neglected in the histories of game theory.

Deterrence answered the stark exam question posed by the arrival of nuclear weapons: What role can there be for a capability that has no tactical role in stopping armies or navies but can destroy whole cities? Answers in terms of war-fighting, though explored by the Eisenhower administration, appeared distasteful; answers in terms of deterrence promised the prevention of future war.

The point about coercion was that it involved influencing through threats rather than controlling the opponent’s behavior. 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. Deterrence was easier because all that was required was that an action be withheld. The target could deny that one was ever contemplated. Compliance was more conspicuous with compellence, more evidently “submission under duress,” less “capable of being rationalized as something that one was going to do anyhow.” The two could merge.

If neither side had the capability, however, trigger-happiness would be suicidal, and restraint only prudent.37 Depending on how the technology developed, there would either be powerful pressures to preempt at times of high political tension, which could lead to a dangerous dynamic, or there would be considerable stability, as no premium would be attached to unleashing nuclear hostilities. Thus, confidence in stability depended on expectations with regard to the opponent’s attitude and behavior.

For the foreseeable future, each side could eliminate the other as a modern industrial state. Robert McNamara, as secretary of defense, argued that so long as the two superpowers had confidence in their capacity for mutual assured destruction—an ability to impose “unacceptable damage” defined as 25 percent of population and 50 percent of industry—the relationship between the two would be stable. These levels, it should be noted, reflected less a judgment about the tolerances of modern societies and more the point at which extra explosions would result in diminishing marginal returns measured by new damage and casualties, the point at which—to use Winston Churchill’s vivid phrase—“all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.”

The president’s speechwriter, Ted Sorenson, noted that he had no trouble writing the speech announcing the blockade but great difficulty writing one to report an air strike.

Nuclear deterrence worked for the United States because it warned of the severe dangers of disrupting the status quo. The sense of danger depended not on the rationality of a nuclear response but on the residual doubt that once the passions of war had been unleashed no reliance could be placed on the irrationality of nuclear response.

It was Thomas Edward Lawrence, an archaeologist who made his name during the Great War seeking to foment an Arab rebellion against Ottoman rule, who did the most to develop principles about how guerrilla warfare should be fought rather than how it could be contained. Lawrence had not only a startling story to tell but also impressive literary gifts. His vivid metaphors and aphorisms help explain his influence. His memoir of the campaign, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,

The basic principle was that “a pound of threat is worth an ounce of action—as long as we are not bluffing.”39

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

James Wylie’s Military Strategy retains a following, but its impact has been marginal.4 Wylie first began to set down his ideas in the early 1950s, partly as reflections on his Second World War experience. He worked in concert with another admiral, Henry Eccles, whose thoughts followed a similar path. Both of them put questions of power at the heart of their analyses. Both wondered what that meant in terms of an ability to assert “control.” As naval officers in the Mahan tradition, they believed that control was the objective of strategy.

The distinctive sources of power that had to be addressed internally included not only politicians and the public but also logistics and the industrial bases. The external sources, not only adversaries but also allies and neutrals, were even harder to control.5 In these circumstances, control could clearly not be absolute and had to be considered as a matter of degree.

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

The resentment of McNamara’s managerialism at the Pentagon still ran deep, and was reflected in much of the critical literature of the time. He was taken to embody the stifling introduction of conformist practices and the risk-averse culture of large corporations into a business that should really honor warrior virtues and cultivate mavericks. This became another version of the romantic lament against bureaucratization and scientific rationality, although the trends in scientific thinking around complexity encouraged the view that it was the rationalists who were now being overtaken.