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

by Robert Greene

According to Machiavelli, human beings naturally tend to think in terms of patterns. They like to see events conforming to their expectations by fitting into a pattern or scheme, for schemes, whatever their actual content, comfort us by suggesting that the chaos of life is predictable. This mental habit offers excellent ground for deception, using a strategy that Machiavelli calls “acclimatization”—deliberately creating some pattern to make your enemies believe that your next action will follow true to form. Having lulled them into complacency, you now have room to work against their expectations, break the pattern, and take them by surprise.

In the Six-Day War of 1967, the Israelis submitted their Arab enemies to a devastating and lightning-fast defeat. In doing so they confirmed all their preexisting military beliefs: the Arabs were undisciplined, their weaponry was outdated, and their strategies were stale. Six years later the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat exploited these prejudices in signaling that his army was in disarray and still humbled by its defeat in 1967, and that he was squabbling with his Soviet patrons. When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973, the Israelis were caught almost totally by surprise. Sadat had tricked them into letting down their guard.

When the Germans invaded France in 1940, the French had secondhand knowledge of their blitzkrieg style of warfare from their invasion of Poland the year before but had never experienced it personally and were overwhelmed. Once a strategy is used and is no longer outside your enemy’s experience, though, it will not have the same effect if repeated.

In ancient times the insane were seen as divinely possessed; a residue of that attitude survives. The greatest generals have all had a touch of divine, strategic madness.

You must fight the psychological aging process even more than the physical one, for a mind full of stratagems, tricks, and fluid maneuvers will keep you young. Make a point of breaking the habits you have developed, of acting in a way that is contrary to how you have operated in the past; practice a kind of unconventional warfare on your own mind. Keep the wheels turning and churning the soil so that nothing settles and clumps into the conventional.

No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected. —Julius Caesar (100–44 B.C.)

The war with Hannibal would drag on for years. Carthage never sent him the reinforcements that might have turned the tide, and the much larger and more powerful Roman army was able to recover from its many defeats at his hands. But Hannibal had earned a terrifying reputation. Despite their superior numbers, the Romans became so frightened of Hannibal that they avoided battle with him like the plague.

To sow this kind of chaos with the tiny army he had been able to bring over the Alps, Hannibal had to make his every action unexpected. A psychologist before his time, he understood that an enemy that is caught by surprise loses its discipline and sense of security. (When chaos strikes those who are particularly rigid and orderly to begin with, such as the people and armies of Rome, it has double the destructive power.) And surprise can never be mechanical, repetitive, or routine; that would be a contradiction in terms. Surprise takes constant adaptation, creativity, and a mischievous pleasure in playing the trickster.

Ali’s unconventional tactics in the first Liston fight began well before the bout. His irritating antics and public taunts—a form of dirty warfare— were designed to infuriate the champion, cloud his mind, fill him with a murderous hatred that would make him come close enough for Ali to knock him out.

The way to be truly unorthodox is to imitate no one, to fight and operate according to your own rhythms, adapting strategies to your idiosyncrasies, not the other way around. Refusing to follow common patterns will make it hard for people to guess what you’ll do next. You are truly an individual. Your unorthodox approach may infuriate and upset, but emotional people are vulnerable people over whom you can easily exert power.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste. MARCEL DUCHAMP, 1887–1968

It took great courage for Grant to disobey these conventions and cut himself loose from any base, living instead off the rich lands of the Mississippi Basin. It took great courage for him to move his army without forming a front. (Even his own generals, including William Tecumseh Sherman, thought he had lost his mind.) This strategy was hidden from Pemberton’s view because Grant kept up ordinary appearances by establishing a base at Grand Gulf and forming front and rear to march toward the rail line.

An ordinary appearance spiced by a touch of divine madness is more shocking and alarming than an out-and-out crazy person. Remember: your madness, like Hamlet’s, must be strategic. Real madness is all too predictable.

A few days before the exhibition was to open, the society received the strangest work so far: a urinal mounted on its back, with the words R. MUTT 1917 painted in large black letters on its rim. The work was called Fountain, and it was apparently submitted by a Mr. Mutt, along with the requisite membership fee. In viewing the piece for the first time, the painter George Bellows, a member of the society’s board, claimed it was indecent and that the society could not exhibit it. Arensberg disagreed: he said he could discern an interesting work of art in its shape and presentation. “This is what the whole exhibit is about,” he told Bellows. “An opportunity to allow the artist to send in anything he chooses, for the artist to decide what is art, not someone else.”

Me, Ninan and AjS built a sand model of a latrine at VIT in 2007.

All was going well, until, in October 1517, news reached the pope that a priest named Martin Luther (1483–1546)—some tiresome German theologian—had tacked to the doors of the castle church of Wittenberg a tract called The Ninety-five Theses. Like many important documents of the time, the tract was originally in Latin, but it had been translated into German, printed up, and passed out among the public—and within a few weeks all Germany seemed to have read it.

The Ninety-five Theses was essentially an attack on the practice of selling indulgences. It was up to God, not the church, to forgive sinners, Luther reasoned, and such forgiveness could not be bought. The tract went on to say that the ultimate authority was Scripture: if the pope could cite Scripture to refute Luther’s arguments, the priest would gladly recant them.

Prieras proclaimed that the pope was the highest authority in the church, even higher than Scripture—in fact, that the pope was infallible. He quoted various theological texts written over the centuries in support of this claim. He also attacked Luther personally, calling him a bastard and questioning his motives: perhaps the German priest was angling for a bishopric? Prieras concluded with the words, “Whoever says that the Church of Rome may not do what it is actually doing in the manner of indulgences is a heretic.” The warning was clear enough.

Leo wrote a papal bull threatening Luther with excommunication. He also sent church officials to Germany to negotiate the priest’s arrest and imprisonment. These officials, however, came back with shocking news that altered everything: in the few short years since the publication of The Ninety-five Theses, Martin Luther, an unknown German priest, had somehow become a sensation, a celebrity, a beloved figure throughout the country. Everywhere the pope’s officials went, they were heckled, even threatened with stoning. Shop windows in almost every German town contained paintings of Luther with a halo over his head.

By 1526 a Protestant party was officially recognized in different parts of Europe. This was the birth of the Reformation, and with it the vast worldly power of the Catholic Church, at least as Leo had inherited it, was irrevocably broken. That obscure, pedantic Wittenberg priest had somehow won the war.

Understand: you cannot win wars without public and political support, but people will balk at joining your side or cause unless it seems righteous and just. And as Luther realized, presenting your cause as just takes strategy and showmanship. First, it is wise to pick a fight with an enemy that you can portray as authoritarian, hypocritical, and power-hungry. Using all available media, you strike first with a moral offensive against the opponent’s points of vulnerability.

Conscious moral warriors are those who use the strategy knowingly. They are most dangerous on a public level, where they can take the high ground by manipulating the media. Luther was a conscious moral warrior, but, being also a genuine believer in the morality he preached, he used the strategy only to help him in his struggle with the pope; slipperier moral warriors tend to use it indiscriminately, adapting it to whatever cause they decide to take on.

Both the Algerians and the North Vietnamese worked hard to frame each of their respective conflicts as a war of liberation fought by a nation struggling for its freedom against an imperialist power. Once this view was diffused in the media and accepted by many in the French and American publics, the insurgents were able to court international support, which in turn served to isolate France and the United States in the world community.

Can India do this to Pakistan?

Beaufre calls the strategic use of morality an “exterior maneuver,” for it lies outside the territory being fought over and outside battlefield strategy. It takes place in its own space—its own moral terrain. For Beaufre both France and the United States made the mistake of ceding the high ground to the enemy.

Like any form of warfare, moral conflict has both offensive and defensive possibilities. When you are on the offense, you are actively working to destroy the enemy’s reputation. Before and during the American Revolution, the great propagandist Samuel Adams took aim at England’s reputation for being fair-minded, liberal, and civilized. He poked holes in this moral image by publicizing England’s exploitation of the colonies’ resources and simultaneous exclusion of their people from democratic processes. The colonists had had a high opinion of the English, but not after Adams’s relentless campaign.

Revealing your opponent’s hypocrisies is perhaps the most lethal offensive weapon in the moral arsenal: people naturally hate hypocrites. This will work, however, only if the hypocrisy runs deep; it has to show up in their values.

If a fight with your enemies is inevitable, always work to make them start it. In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln maneuvered carefully to make the South shoot first at Fort Sumter, initiating the Civil War. That put Lincoln on the moral high ground and won over many ambivalent Northerners to his side.

When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and initiated the Civil War against Pompey, he was highly vulnerable to the charge of trying to usurp the authority of the Roman Senate in order to become a dictator. He inoculated himself against these charges by acting mercifully toward his enemies in Rome, making important reforms, and going to the extreme in showing his respect for the Republic.

Luther’s moral campaign against Rome generated such hatred that in the subsequent invasion of the Holy City by the troops of Charles V, in 1527, German soldiers went on a six-month rampage against the church and its officials, committing many atrocities in what came to be known as “the sack of Rome.”

Thousands of French soldiers had succumbed to disease and hunger without a single battle’s being fought. The army was strung out along a 500-mile line, parts of which were constantly harassed by small troops of Cossacks on horseback, sowing terror with their bloodthirsty raids. Napoleon could not allow the chase to go on any longer—he would march his men to Smolensk and fight the decisive battle there. Smolensk was a holy city, with great emotional significance to the Russian people. Surely the Russians would fight to defend it rather than let it be destroyed. He knew that if he could only meet the Russians in battle, he would win.

Napoleon could not understand the Russian people, who seemed to him suicidal—they would destroy their country rather than surrender it.

In earlier years, when he had marched into Vienna and Berlin, he had been met as a conquering hero, with dignitaries turning over to him the keys to their cities. But Moscow was empty: no citizens, no food. A terrible fire broke out almost immediately and lasted five days; all of the city’s water pumps had been removed—an elaborate sabotage to make Moscow still more inhospitable.

By the time Napoleon invaded Russia, Czar Alexander I had met him a number of times in previous years and had come to know him quite well. The emperor, Alexander saw, was an aggressive man who loved any kind of fight, even if the odds were stacked against him. He needed battles as a chance to put his genius in play. By refusing to meet him in battle, Alexander could frustrate him and lure him into a void: vast but empty lands without food or forage, empty cities with nothing to plunder, empty negotiations, empty time in which nothing happened, and finally the dead of winter. Russia’s harsh climate would make a shambles of Napoleon’s organizational genius.

A soldier can endure almost anything except the expectation of a battle that never comes and a tension that is never relieved. Instead of battle, the French got endless raids and pinprick attacks that came out of nowhere, a continuous threat that gradually built into panic. While thousands of soldiers fell to disease, many more simply lost the will to fight.

Most wars are wars of contact, both forces striving to keep in touch…. The Arab war should be a war of detachment: to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing themselves till the moment of attack…. From this theory came to be developed ultimately an unconscious habit of never engaging the enemy at all. This chimed with the numerical plea of never giving the enemy’s soldier a target. —T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)

The word “guerrilla”—“small war” in Spanish—was coined in reference to the Peninsular War of 1808–14, which began when Napoleon invaded Spain. Melting into their country’s mountains and inhospitable terrain, the Spaniards tortured the French, making it impossible for them to profit from their superior numbers and weaponry.

Napoleon was bedeviled by an enemy that attacked without forming a front or rear. The Cossack fighters who undid him in Russia in 1812 had learned a lot from the Spanish and perfected the use of guerrilla warfare; their harassment caused far more damage than anything the rather incompetent Russian army could inflict.

Guerrilla strategy may be the reverse side of war, but it has its own logic, backward yet rigorous. You cannot just improvise it anarchically; you must think and plan in a new way—mobile, dimensional, and abstract.

The primary consideration should always be whether a guerrilla-style campaign is appropriate for the circumstances you are facing. It is especially effective, for instance, against an opponent who is aggressive yet clever—a man like Napoleon.

When U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd joined the Pentagon in the late 1960s to help develop jet fighters, he faced a reactionary bureaucracy dominated by commercial interests rather than military ones. The Pentagon was in dire need of reform, but a traditional bureaucratic war— an attempt to convince key staff directly and frontally of the importance of his cause—would have been a hopeless venture: Boyd would simply have been isolated and funneled out of the system. He decided to wage a guerrilla war instead. His first and most important step was to organize cells within the Pentagon. These cells were small and hard to detect, giving the reactionaries nothing to hit at when they realized they were in a war. Boyd recruited his guerrillas from among those dissatisfied with the status quo, especially the young—young people are always more receptive to change, and they love this style of fighting.

Once you have organized your cells, you must find a way to lure the enemy into attacking you. In war this is generally accomplished by retreating, then turning to strike at the enemy with constant small raids and ambushes that cannot be ignored. This was the classic strategy pursued by T. E. Lawrence in Arabia during World War I.

You will win your guerrilla war in one of two ways. The first route is to increase the level of your attacks as your enemies deteriorate, then finish them off, as the Russians finished off Napoleon. The other method is by turning sheer exhaustion to your advantage: you just let the enemy give up, for the fight is no longer worth the aggravation.

King Louis XI would eventually become known as the Spider King, infamous for the elaborate webs he would weave to ensnare his opponents. His genius was to think far ahead and plot an indirect path to his goals— and his greatest goal was to transform France from a feudal state into a unified great power. Burgundy was his largest obstacle, and one he could not meet head-on: his army was weaker than Charles’s, and he did not want to provoke a civil war.

Understand: the perfect allies are those who give you something you cannot get on your own. They have the resources you lack. They will do your dirty work for you or fight your battles. Like the Swiss, they are not always the most obvious or the most powerful. Be creative and look for allies to whom you in turn have something to offer as well, creating a link of self-interest.

The forces of a powerful ally can be useful and good to those who have recourse to them … but are perilous to those who become dependent on them. — Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)

As a family therapist, Bowen had studied a phenomenon he called an “anxiety wave,” in which a peripheral event could spark enough emotional turmoil to lead to the death of the family’s oldest or most vulnerable member. Somehow Bowen had to find a way to defuse this anxiety wave in his own family.

One of his most influential theories held that members of a family were healthy to the extent that they could differentiate themselves from their siblings and parents, establishing their own identity, being able to make decisions on their own, while also being integrated and actively involved with the rest of the family.

A family has a kind of group ego and an interlocking emotional network; it requires a great deal of effort and practice to establish autonomy outside this system.

No one can get far in life without allies. The trick, however, is to recognize the difference between false allies and real ones. A false alliance is created out of an immediate emotional need. It requires that you give up something essential about yourself and makes it impossible for you to make your own decisions. A true alliance is formed out of mutual self-interest, each side supplying what the other cannot get alone. It does not require you to fuse your own identity with that of a group or pay attention to everyone else’s emotional needs. It allows you autonomy.

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Once you are in a position where you are able to stay rational within the group, you can seem to join an alliance without worrying about your emotions running away with you. And you will find that as the person who is simultaneously autonomous and part of the group, you will become a center of gravity and attention.

Enter into action under the cover of helping another’s interests, only to further your own in the end…. This is the perfect stratagem and disguise for realizing your ambitions, for the advantages you seem to offer only serve as lures to influence the other person’s will. They think their interests are being advanced when in truth they are opening the way for yours. —Baltasar Gracian (1601–1658)