The 33 Strategies Of War (The Modern Machiavellian Robert Greene Book 1)

by Robert Greene

Every individual is like an alien culture. You must get inside his or her way of thinking, not as an exercise in sensitivity but out of strategic necessity. Only by knowing your enemies can you ever hope to vanquish them.

Napoleon could not believe what he was hearing. He traveled to Dresden for a meeting with Metternich, which took place on June 26. The moment he saw the prince, he felt a shock: the friendly, nonchalant air was gone. In a rather cold tone, Metternich informed him that France must accept a settlement that would reduce it to its natural boundaries. Austria was obligated to defend its interests and the stability of Europe. Suddenly it occurred to the emperor: Metternich had been playing him all along, the family ties merely a ploy to blind him to Austrian rearmament and independence.

“So I have perpetrated a very stupid piece of folly in marrying an archduchess of Austria?” Napoleon blurted out. “Since Your Majesty desires to know my opinion,” Metternich replied, “I will candidly say that Napoleon, the conqueror, has made a mistake.”

In his very first meeting with Napoleon, he saw a man straining to impress: he noticed that the bantam Napoleon walked on his toes, to look taller, and struggled to suppress his Corsican accent. Later meetings only confirmed Metternich’s impression of a man who craved acceptance as the social equal of Europe’s aristocracy. The emperor was insecure.

This insight won, Metternich used it to craft the perfect counter-strategy: the offer of marriage into the Austrian dynasty. To a Corsican, that would mean everything, and it would blind Napoleon to a simple reality: for aristocrats like Metternich and the Austrian emperor, family ties meant nothing compared to the survival of the dynasty itself.

War is not an act of the will aimed at inanimate matter, as it is in the mechanical arts…. Rather, [it] is an act of the will aimed at a living entity that reacts. —Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831)

Understand: day in and day out, people emit signals that reveal their intentions and deepest desires. If we do not pick them up, it is because we are not paying attention. The reason for this is simple: we are usually locked up in our own worlds, listening to our internal monologues, obsessed with ourselves and with satisfying our own egos. Like William Macnaghten, we tend to see other people merely as reflections of ourselves. To the extent that you can drop your self-interest and see people for who they are, divorced from your desires, you will become more sensitive to their signals.

You can actively probe them by doing things that seem harmless but get a response—maybe say something bold or provocative, then see how they react. Making people emotional, pushing their buttons, will touch some deep part of their nature. Either they will let slip some truth about themselves or they will put on a mask that you, in the laboratory situation you have created, will be able to peer behind.

The quality of the information you gather on your enemies is more important than the quantity. A single but crucial nugget can be the key to their destruction. When the Carthaginian general Hannibal saw that the Roman general he was facing was arrogant and hot-tempered, he would deliberately play weak, luring the man into a rash attack.

War is such that the supreme consideration is speed. This is to take advantage of what is beyond the reach of the enemy, to go by way of routes where he least expects you, and to attack where he has made no preparations. SUN-TZU, FOURTH CENTURY

Reports from the front lines began to give the shah a picture of these strange warriors from the east. Their army was all cavalry. Each Mongol not only rode a horse but was trailed by several more riderless horses, all mares, and when his own horse tired, he would mount a fresh one. These horses were light and fast. The Mongols were unencumbered by supply wagons; they carried their food with them, drank the mares’ milk and blood, and killed and ate the horses that had become weak. They could travel twice as fast as their enemy. Their marksmanship was extraordinary—facing forward or in retreat, they could fire arrows with remarkable dexterity, making their attacks far deadlier than anything the shah’s army had ever seen. Their divisions communicated over great distances with flags and torches; their maneuvers were precisely coordinated and nearly impossible to anticipate.

The less a thing is foreseen, the more … fright does it cause. This is nowhere seen better than in war, where every surprise strikes terror even to those who are much the stronger. —Xenophon (430?–355? B.C.)

Julius Caesar—master of speed and surprise—was a great example of this. From out of the blue, he might form an alliance with a senator’s bitterest enemy, forcing the senator either to change his opposition to Caesar or to risk a dangerous confrontation. Equally, he might unexpectedly pardon a man who had fought against him. Caught off guard, the man would become a loyal ally. Caesar’s reputation for doing the unpredictable made people all the more cautious in his presence, further enhancing his ability to catch those around him unawares.

For their initial thrust into France during World War II, the Germans chose to attack through the Ardennes Forest in southern Belgium. The forest, considered impenetrable by tank, was lightly guarded. Pushing through this weak point, the Germans were able to build up speed and momentum.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military might in fact have been hindered by its superior communications—too much information to be processed made for slower response times. The North Vietnamese, who depended on a well-coordinated network of spies and informers, not gadgetry, made decisions more quickly and as a result were more nimble on the ground.

Frederick the Great noted that an army that moves quickly has higher morale. Velocity creates a sense of vitality. Moving with speed means there is less time for you and your army to make mistakes. It also creates a bandwagon effect: more and more people admiring your boldness, will decide to join forces with you.

Military geniuses such as Hannibal, Napoleon, and Erwin Rommel discovered that the best way to attain control is to determine the overall pace, direction, and shape of the war itself. This means getting enemies to fight according to your tempo, luring them onto terrain that is unfamiliar to them and suited to you, playing to your strengths.

One who excels at warfare compels men and is not compelled by others. —Sun-tzu (fourth century B.C.)

without warning, at the end of March 1941, Rommel’s tanks swept eastward. Rommel had broken up his small force into columns, and he hurled them in so many directions against the British defensive line that it was hard to fathom his intentions. These mechanized columns moved with incredible speed; advancing at night with lights dimmed, time and again they caught their enemy by surprise, suddenly appearing to their flank or rear.

What was most devastating about this offensive was the novel way in which Rommel fought. He used the desert as if it were an ocean. Despite supply problems and the difficult terrain, he kept his tanks in perpetual motion. The British could not let up their guard for a moment, and this mentally exhausted them. But his movements, though seemingly random, were always for a purpose. If he wanted to take a particular city, he would head in the opposite direction, then circle and attack from an unexpected side. He brought along an armada of trucks to kick up enough dust so that the British could not see where he was headed and to give the impression of a much larger force than was actually on the attack.

Kept constantly on their heels, forced to come to rapid decisions in response to Rommel’s moves, the British made endless mistakes. Not knowing where he might show up next, or from what direction, they spread their forces over dangerously vast areas. Before long, at the mere mention that a German column was approaching, Rommel at its head, the British would abandon their positions, even though they greatly outnumbered him.

get his strategy to work, Rommel had to create maximum disorder in the enemy. In the ensuing confusion, the Germans would seem more formidable than they were. Speed, mobility, and surprise—as agents of such chaos—became ends in themselves.

As Sherman saw it, his goal was not to capture a city or to defeat the Confederates in battle. In his view the only way to win the war was to regain control of the dynamic. Instead of brutal, frontal attacks against Dalton or Atlanta, which would play into the South’s hands, he operated indirectly.

The worst dynamic in war, and in life, is the stalemate. It seems that whatever you do only feeds the stagnation. Once this happens, a kind of mental paralysis overcomes you. You lose the ability to think or respond in different ways. At such a point, all is lost. If you find yourself falling into such a dynamic—dealing with a defensive, entrenched opponent or trapped in a reactive relationship—you must become as creative as General Sherman.

For the rest of Douglass’s stay with Covey, the white man did not lay a hand on him. Douglass had noticed that slaveholders often “prefer to whip those who are most easily whipped.” Now he had learned the lesson for himself: never again would he be submissive. Such weakness only encouraged the tyrants to go further. He would rather risk death, returning blow for blow with his fists or his wits.

in his book My Bondage and My Freedom, after he had escaped to the North and become a leading advocate of the abolitionist movement, Douglass wrote, “This battle with Mr. Covey … was the turning point in my ‘life as a slave.’ … I was a changed being after that fight…. I had reached the point at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, while I remained a slave in form.”

For the rest of his life, he adopted this fighting stance: by being unafraid of the consequences, Douglass gained a degree of control of his situation both physically and psychologically. Once he had rooted fear out of himself, he opened up possibilities for action—sometimes fighting back overtly, sometimes being clever and deceitful. From a slave with no control, he became a ma...

Be sympathetic to their plight, but make it seem that whatever they do, they are actually cooperating with your own desires. That will put them off balance; if they rebel now, they are playing into your hands. The dynamic will subtly shift, and you will have room to insinuate change.

Often what separates a mediocre general from a superior one is not their strategies or maneuvers but their vision—they simply look at the same problem from a different angle. Freed from the stranglehold of convention, the superior general naturally hits on the right strategy.

The Romans were dazzled by Hannibal’s strategic genius. They came to so fear him that the only strategies they could use against him were delay and avoidance. Scipio Africanus simply saw differently. At every turn he looked not at the enemy army, nor even at its leader, but at the pillar of support on which it stood—its critical vulnerability. He understood that military power was located not in the army itself but in its foundations, the things that supported it and made it possible: money, supplies, public goodwill, allies. He found those pillars and bit by bit knocked them down.

He looked at Carthage

To find a group’s center of gravity, you must understand its structure and the culture within which it operates. If your enemies are individuals, you must fathom their psychology, what makes them tick, the structure of their thinking and priorities.

The more centralized the enemy, the more devastating becomes a blow at its leader or governing body. Hernán Cortés was able to conquer Mexico with a handful of soldiers by capturing Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor. Moctezuma was the center around which everything revolved; without him Aztec culture quickly collapsed. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, he assumed that by taking Moscow, the capital, he could force the Russians to surrender. But the true center of gravity in this authoritarian nation was the czar, who was determined to continue the war. The loss of Moscow only steeled his resolve.

Muhammad Ali, in crafting a strategy to defeat his archnemesis Joe Frazier, took aim at Frazier’s mind, the ultimate center of gravity for any individual. Before every fight, Ali would get under Frazier’s skin, riling him up by calling him an Uncle Tom, a tool of the white man’s media. He would keep going during the fight itself, taunting Frazier mercilessly in the ring. Frazier became obsessed with Ali, could not think about him without bursting with anger. Controlling Frazier’s mind was the key to controlling his body.

The victory at Marathon and race to Athens were perhaps the most decisive moments in Athenian history. Had the soldiers not come in time, the Persians would have taken the city, then certainly all of Greece, and eventually they would have expanded throughout the Mediterranean, for no other power in existence at the time could have stopped them.

When a powerful foe attacks you in strength, threatening your ability to advance and take the initiative, you must work to make the enemy divide its forces and then defeat these smaller forces one by one—“in detail,” as the military say.

According to Locke, a government should reflect the will of its citizens; a government that did not do so had lost its right to exist. Adams had inherited a brewery from his father, but he did not care about business, and while the brewery veered toward bankruptcy, he spent his time writing articles on Locke and the need for independence.

one night in mid-December, after Adams had addressed a town meeting about the Tea Act, a group of members of the Sons of Liberty— disguised as Mohawk Indians, body paint and all—erupted in war whoops, charged to the wharves, boarded the tea ships, and destroyed their cargo, cutting open the cases of tea and pouring them into the harbor, all of this done with great revelry.

This provocative act, which later became known as the Boston Tea Party, was the turning point. The British could not tolerate it and quickly closed down Boston harbor and imposed military law on Massachusetts. Now all doubt vanished: pushed into a corner by Adams, the British were acting just as tyrannically as he had prophesied they would. The heavy military presence in Massachusetts was predictably unpopular, and it was only a matter of months before violence erupted: in April 1775, English soldiers fired on Massachusetts militiamen in Lexington. This “shot heard ’round the world” became the spark for the war that Adams had so diligently worked to kindle out of nothing.

When Adams realized this, he reformulated his goals: instead of preaching independence and the ideas of John Locke, he set to work to sever the colonists’ ties with England. He made the children distrust the parent, whom they came to see not as a protector but as a domineering overlord exploiting them for its profit. The bond with England loosened, Adams’s arguments for independence began to resonate. Now the colonists began to look for their sense of identity not to Mother England but to themselves.

In the war to win people’s attention and influence them, you must first separate them from whatever ties them to the past and makes them resist change. You must realize that these ties are generally not rational but emotional. By appealing to people’s emotions, you can make your targets see the past in a new light, as something tyrannical, boring, ugly, immoral. Now you have room to infiltrate new ideas, shift people’s vision, make them respond to a new sense of their self-interest, and sow the seeds for a new cause, a new bond. To make people join you, separate them from their past. When you size up your targets, look for what connects them to the past, the source of their resistance to the new.

The phenomenon is timeless: the soldier who feels he is losing the support of those around him is borne back into an intolerable primitive terror. He fears he will face death alone. Many great military leaders have turned this terror into strategy. Genghis Khan was a master at it: using the mobility of his Mongol cavalry to cut off his enemies’ communications, he would isolate parts of their armies to make them feel alone and unprotected. He worked consciously to instill terror. The divide-and-isolate strategy was also used to great effect by Napoleon and the guerrilla forces of Mao Tse-tung, among many others.

Counterinsurgency requires a deft hand, more political than military, and for Lansdale the key to success was to stamp out government corruption and bring the people close to the government through various popular programs. That would deny the insurgents their cause, and they would die of isolation. Lansdale thought it folly to imagine that leftist rebels could be defeated by force; in fact, force just played into their hands, giving them a cause they could use to rally support. For insurgents, isolation from the people is death.

Whether you are beset by many small problems or by one giant problem, make Musashi the model for your mental process. If you let the complexity of the situation confuse you and either hesitate or lash out without thought, you will lose mental control, which will only add momentum to the negative force coming at you. Always divide up the issue at hand, first placing yourself in a central position, then proceeding down the line, killing off your problems one by one.

At Arcola, sensing that the enemy was tiring, Napoleon sent a small contingent to cross the river to the south and march on the Austrian flank, with instructions to make as much noise as possible—trumpets, shouts, gunfire. The presence of this attacking force, small though it was, would induce panic and collapse. The ruse worked.

Once you move on their flanks, your targets will turn to face you and lose their equilibrium. All enemies are vulnerable from their sides. There is no defense against a well-designed flanking maneuver.

Opposition to the truth is inevitable, especially if it takes the form of a new idea, but the degree of resistance can be diminished—by giving thought not only to the aim but to the method of approach. Avoid a frontal attack on a long-established position; instead, seek to turn it by flank movement, so that a more penetrable side is exposed to the thrust of truth. —B. H. Liddell Hart (1895–1970)

Let us see if by moderation we can win all hearts and secure a lasting victory, since by cruelty others have been unable to escape from hatred and maintain their victory for any length of time…. This is a new way of conquering, to strengthen one’s position by kindness and generosity. —Julius Caesar

Maneuvers like this one should be the model for your attempts at persuasion. Never reveal your intentions or goals; instead use charm, pleasant conversation, humor, flattery—whatever works—to hold people’s attention to the front. Their focus elsewhere, their flank is exposed, and now when you drop hints or suggest subtle changes in direction, the gates are open and the walls are down. They are disarmed and maneuverable.

Authority: It is by turning the enemy, by attacking his flank, that battles are won. —Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)

The Zulus facing Durnford and his men seemed to grow out of the earth, emerging from behind boulders or from out of the grass in ever-greater numbers. A knot of five or six of them would suddenly charge, throwing spears or firing rifles, then disappear back into the grass. Whenever the British stopped to reload, the Zulus would advance ever closer, occasionally one reaching Durnford’s lines and disemboweling a British soldier with the powerful Zulu spear, which made an unbearable sucking sound as it went in and out.