Strategy: A History

by Lawrence Freedman

The choice between annihilation and exhaustion could not just be a matter of strategic preference but had to reflect the material situation.

Which brings us back to Clausewitz, because these two issues—which go to the heart of his unfulfilled interest in deviations from the strategy of annihilation—were captured but not resolved in one of his enduring but most unsatisfactory concepts: the center of gravity or Schwerpunkt.

The Marine Corps, with a smaller capability, initially also took the view that it was best to attack not the enemy’s strengths but its critical vulnerabilities. The Corps even observed dangers in speaking of a center of gravity, because Clausewitz was about “daring all to win all” in a climactic test of strength.

The centers of gravity could be found in each of the five component parts (or rings)—leadership, organic essentials, infrastructure, population, and fielded forces—that described any strategic entity. The point of this was that air power was uniquely qualified to strike at these points simultaneously through parallel, as opposed to sequential or serial, attacks in order to overwhelm and thereby paralyze an opponent.

There was, therefore, no consensus on what these concepts meant. After two decades of various formulations it was observed that “the lack of doctrinal guidance on developing and employing COGs wastes planners’ time and provides few tangible benefits.” It was reported that planning teams could “take hours—if not days—arguing over what is and is not the enemy’s COG,” with the outcome often decided by the strongest personality rather than the best analysis.

Luttwak noted a further paradox, drawn from Clausewitz: the greater the success of the original strategy the greater the risk of friction as an army moved further away from home base. Supply lines became attenuated as the enemy fell back closer to its own home bases where it could replenish and bring forward fresh reserves as the advancing force moved into unfamiliar territory. Victorious armies were apt to overreach themselves, pushing their luck. If they went beyond the “culminating point,” the most advantageous position vis-à-vis the enemy, the balance of advantage would start to shift.

the mind of the warfighter and the warfighter’s supporting populace. Many battles and wars are won or lost in the cognitive domain. The intangibles of leadership, morale, unit cohesion, level of training and experience, situational awareness, and public opinion are elements of this domain. This is the domain where commander’s intent, doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures reside.14 This form of warfare suited the United States because it played to U.S. strengths: it could be capital rather than labor intensive; it reflected a preference for outsmarting opponents; it avoided excessive casualties both received and inflicted; and it conveyed an aura of almost effortless superiority. Those ideas were deeply comforting, and not entirely wrong.

As this was the “chosen battlespace” of its foes, the United States was now required to learn to conceptualize its victories in terms of shaping perceptions over time rather than in terms of decisive engagements that annihilated the enemy.42 The issue was not so much the flow of data but the way that people thought.

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. By refusing to acknowledge that early terror attacks in Iraq could be the responsibility of anybody other than former members of the regime, for example, they missed the alienation of moderate Sunnis and the growth of Shia radicalism.51

This was the blind spot resulting from the focus on battle, expressed in the belief that the operational art was something best left to military commanders.8 This model of civil-military relationships whereby the actual deployment and employment of armed force was a largely military responsibility was wholly inadequate. The two spheres needed to be in constant dialogue.

Civilians could not ignore the supposedly operational issues associated with military strategy. They needed to consider whether the way a war was being fought was consistent with the purposes for which it was being fought, and to look beyond coming battles to the following peace. They needed to keep the public and allies, potential or actual, on their side.

This was the curse of Marx, from which he personally suffered: a theory of inevitable, progressive change but one that could doom the activist to frustration. If the politics could never be right without the correct material base, what was the revolutionary politician to do?

He described the war fever of the future, as priests “pray on behalf of murder” and newspaper editors “set to work to arouse hatred and murder,” and described how thousands of “simple, kindly folk” will be “torn from peaceful toil” and trudge off to war, until these poor souls “without knowing why, will murder thousands of others whom they had never before seen, and who had done nor could do them any wrong.”19 In this respect, war for Tolstoy was an extreme version of a much more general malaise, of unnatural divisions within humanity, which it both reflected and aggravated. And to explain how men could allow this to happen to them he deployed his own version of false consciousness—men had been “hypnotized” not only by their governments but, most tragically of all, by each other. Only by exposing the myth of patriotism could the spell be broken. At the heart of his antistrategic vision was the belief that divisions within human society were unnatural, and so if they were healed there would be no need for struggle and conflict.

While he still blamed the excesses of his class for social divisions, he now saw urban life as the problem. Cities were venal and corrupt places, beyond reform. The cause went even deeper—the fault lay in the whole path humankind had taken in pursuit of economic development. Money had been allowed to get in the way of proper human relations. They could only be restored on the land where money could be irrelevant and people need not be alienated from each other and the beauty of nature.

Whereas Tolstoy gave up on the city because it forced divisions among humanity, Addams believed that the city could and must be made to work for all its inhabitants. The fundamental point of principle Addams, and other progressives, shared with Tolstoy was a belief that social divisions were unnatural and could and must be transcended.

In his 1885 book Elements of Pure Economics, Walras proved this mathematically, thereby setting a precedent for economic theory that would be picked up enthusiastically in the middle of the next century, particularly in the United States. Pareto gave his name to two contributions. The Pareto principle suggested that 80 percent of effects came from 20 percent of the causes. This rough rule of thumb indicated that a minority of inputs could be responsible for a disproportionate share of outputs, in itself a challenge to notions of equality.

His philosophy of satyagraha, a word of his own devising, involved a combination of truth, love, and firmness.

“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.”

White Americans could afford to “speak softly, tread lightly, employ the soft-sell and put-off” because they “own the society.” It would be ludicrous for black people to “adopt their methods of relieving our oppression.”

“He who pays the piper generally calls the tune.”

In the end, the December 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court case decided against intelligent design on the grounds that it was insufficiently distinctive from creationism to deserve a place on the science curriculum.19

“the three most important things in American politics are money, money and I forget what the other one is.”

SWOT analysis (Strengths and Weaknesses of organization in the light of the Opportunities and Threats in the environment).

Out of this they distilled eight shared keys to excellence: a bias for action, customer focus, entrepreneurship, productivity through people, value-oriented CEOs, sticking to the knitting (that is, do what you know well), keeping things simple and lean, and simultaneously centralized and decentralized (that is, tight centralized control combined with maximum individual autonomy).10