The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

wei wu—the idea of action through inaction, of controlling a situation by not trying to control it, of ruling by abdicating rule. Wei wu involves the belief that by reacting and fighting against circumstances, by constantly struggling in life, you actually move backward, creating more turbulence in your path and difficulties for yourself. Sometimes it is best to lie low, to do nothing but let the winter pass. In such moments you can collect yourself and strengthen your identity.

By doing nothing outwardly, you gain inner strength, which will translate into tremendous power later, when it is time to act.

Space I can recover. Time, never. —Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)

Your task as a strategist is simple: to see the differences between yourself and other people, to understand yourself, your side, and the enemy as well as you can, to get more perspective on events, to know things for what they are.

If you are always advancing, always attacking, always responding to people emotionally, you have no time to gain perspective.

Retreating is something you must do every now and then, to find yourself and detach yourself from infecting influences. And the best time to do this is in moments of difficulty and danger.

Around the world every mythology has a hero who retreats, even to Hades itself in the case of Odysseus, to find himself.

by refusing to fight aggressive enemies, you can effectively infuriate and unbalance them.

Most people respond to aggression by in some way getting involved with it.

By disengaging completely and retreating, you show great power and restraint. Your enemies are desperate for you to react; retreat infuriates and provokes them into further attack. So keep retreating, exchanging space for time. Stay calm and balanced. Let them take the land they want; like the Germans, lure them into a void of nonaction. They will start to overextend themselves and make mistakes. Time is on your side, for you are not wasting any of it in useless battles.

War is a constant illustration of Murphy’s Law: if anything can go wrong, it will. But when you retreat, when you exchange space for time, you are making Murphy’s Law work for you.

But time is just as important as space in strategic thought, and knowing how to use time will make you a superior strategist, giving an added dimension to your attacks and defense. To do this you must stop thinking of time as an abstraction: in reality, beginning the minute you are born, time is all you have. It is your only true commodity.

Authority: To remain disciplined and calm while waiting for disorder to appear amongst the enemy is the art of self-possession. —Sun-tzu (fourth century B.C.)

martyrdom makes you a symbol, a rallying point for the future. The strategy will succeed if you are important enough—if your defeat has symbolic meaning—but the circumstances must work to highlight the rightness of your cause and the ugliness of the enemy’s.

Retreat must never be an end in itself; at some point you have to turn around and fight. If you don’t, retreat is more accurately called surrender: the enemy wins. Combat is in the long run unavoidable. Retreat can only be temporary.

The greatest dangers in war, and in life, come from the unexpected:

In strategy this discrepancy between what you want to happen and what does happen is called “friction.” The idea behind conventional offensive warfare is simple: by attacking the other side first, hitting its points of vulnerability, and seizing the initiative and never letting it go, you create your own circumstances.

“grand strategy.”

Everyone around you is a strategist angling for power, all trying to promote their own interests, often at your expense. Your daily battles with them make you lose sight of the only thing that really matters: victory in the end, the achievement of greater goals, lasting power. Grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the battle and calculating ahead. It requires that you focus on your ultimate goal and plot to reach it. In grand strategy you consider the political ramifications and long-term consequences of what you do. Instead of reacting emotionally to people, you take control, and make your actions more dimensional, subtle, and effective. Let others get caught up in the twists and turns of the battle, relishing their little victories. Grand strategy will bring you the ultimate reward: the last laugh.

the art of grand strategy.

In grand strategy you look beyond the moment, beyond your immediate battles and concerns. You concentrate instead on what you want to achieve down the line. Controlling the temptation to react to events as they happen, you determine each of your actions according to your ultimate goals. You think in terms not of individual battles but of a campaign.

First, clarify your life—decipher your own personal riddle—by determining what it is you are destined to achieve, the direction in which your skills and talents seem to push you. Visualize yourself fulfilling this destiny in glorious detail. As Aristotle advised, work to master your emotions and train yourself to think ahead: “This action will advance me toward my goal, this one will lead me nowhere.” Guided by these standards, you will be able to stay on course.

Ignore the conventional wisdom about what you should or should not be doing. It may make sense for some, but that does not mean it bears any relation to your own goals and destiny. You need to be patient enough to plot several steps ahead—to wage a campaign instead of fighting battles.

the less they understand you, the easier they are to deceive, manipulate, and seduce.

We always tend to look at what is most immediate to us, taking the most direct route toward our goals and trying to win the war by winning as many battles as we can.

Nothing in life happens in isolation; everything is related to everything else and has a broader context. That context includes people outside your immediate circle whom your actions affect, the public at large, the whole world; it includes politics, for every choice in modern life has political ramifications; it includes culture, the media, the way the public sees you.

Your task as a grand strategist is to extend your vision in all directions—not only looking further into the future but also seeing more of the wor...

War is the continuation of politics by other means. —Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831)

Despite our progress there is always a part of us that remains animal, and that animal part can respond only to what is most immediate in our environment—it is incapable of thinking beyond the moment.

the two sides of our character, rational and animal, are constantly at war, making almost all of our actions awkward. We reason and plan to achieve a goal, but in the heat of action we become emotional and lose perspective. We use cleverness and strategy to grab for what we want, but we do not stop to think about whether what we want is necessary, or what the consequences of getting it will be.

The extended vision that rationality brings us is often eclipsed by the reactive, emotional animal within—t...

The prudent man might seem cold, his rationality sucking pleasure out of life. Not so. Like the pleasure-loving gods on Mount Olympus, he has the perspective, the calm detachment, the ability to laugh, that come with true vision, which gives everything he does a quality of lightness—these traits comprising what Nietzsche calls the “Apollonian ideal.”

This calm, detached, rational, far-seeing creature, called “prudent” by the Greeks, is what we shall call the “grand strategist.”

What sets grand strategists apart is the ability to look more deeply into both themselves and others, to understand and learn from the past and to have a clear sense of the future, to the extent that it can be predicted. Simply, they see more, and their extended vision lets them carry out plans over sometimes-long periods of time—so long that those around them may not even realize that they have a plan in mind.

In moving toward becoming a grand strategist, you follow in the path of Odysseus and rise toward the condition of the gods. It is not so much that your strategies are more clever or manipulative as that they exist on a higher plane. You have made a qualitative leap.

a world where people are increasingly incapable of thinking consequentially, more animal than ever, the practice of grand strategy wi...

To become a grand strategist does not involve years of study or a total transformation of your personality. It simply means more effective use of what you ha...

In plotting war a king would depend on things like his knowledge of the terrain and his understanding of both the enemy’s forces and his own; his success would depend on his ability to see these things clearly.

Other rulers actually won their battles only to grow drunk on victory and not know when to stop, stirring up implacable hatred, distrust, and the desire for revenge all around them, culminating in war on several fronts and total defeat—as in the destruction of the warlike Assyrian Empire, its capital of Nineveh eternally buried in the sand.

in which the strategist sets a realistic goal and plots several steps ahead to get there.

The victory that matters is that of the overall campaign, and everything is subordinated to that goal.

Think of chess, where the grand master, instead of focusing only on the move at hand and making it solely in reaction to what the other player has just done, must visualize the entire chessboard deep into the future, crafting an overall strategy, using the moves of the pawns now to set up those of the more powerful pieces later on.

Thinking in terms of the campaign gave strategy a new depth. The strategist used more and more of the map.

War on this level required that the strategist think deeply in all directions before launching the campaign. He had to know the world. The enemy was just one part of the picture; the strategist also had to anticipate the reactions of allies and neighbor...

A victory on the battlefield would not seduce the leader into an unconsidered move that might ultimately set the campaign back, nor would a defeat unnerve him.

Military history shows that the key to grand strategy—the thing that separates it from simple, garden-variety strategy—is its particular quality of forethought. Grand strategists think and plan further into the future before taking action. Nor is their planning simply a matter of accumulating knowledge and information; it involves looking at the world with a dispassionate eye, thinking in terms of the campaign, planning indirect, subtle steps along the way whose purpose may only gradually become visible to others.

for the strategist it has the psychological effects of calm, a sense of perspective, flexibility to change in the moment while keeping the ultimate goal in mind. Emotions are easier to control; vision is far-seeing and clear. Grand strategy is the apex of rationality.

Focus on your greater goal, your destiny.

Our emotions infect us with hazy desire: we want fame, success, security—something large and abstract.

What have distinguished all history’s grand strategists and can distinguish you, too, are specific, detailed, focused goals. Contemplate them day in and day out, and imagine how it will feel to reach them and what reaching them will look like. By a psychological law peculiar to humans, clearly visualizing them this way will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.