The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

Clear long-term objectives give direction to all of your actions, large and small. Important decisions become easier to make. If some glittering prospect threatens to seduce you from your goal, you will know to resist it. You can tell when to sacrifice a pawn, even lose a battle, if it serves your eventual purpose. Your eyes are focused on winning the campaign and nothing else.

Your goals must be rooted in reality. If they are simply beyond your means, essentially impossible for you to realize, you will grow discouraged, and discouragement can quickly escalate into a defeatist attitude. On the other hand, if your goals lack a certain dimension and grandeur, it can be hard to stay motivated. Do not be afraid to be bold. In the large sense, you are working out for yourself what Alexander experienced as his destiny and what Friedrich Nietzsche called your “life’s task”—the thing toward which your natural leanings and aptitudes, talents and desires, seem to point you. Assigning yourself a life task will inspire and guide you.

The objectives of grand strategy in the true sense are to build a solid foundation for future expansion, to make you more secure, to increase your power.

achieving a goal will be, but the more seriously and realistically you examine the possibilities downwind, the less likely you are to miscalculate.

Widen your perspective.

Your task as a grand strategist is to force yourself to widen your view, to take in more of the world around you, to see things for what they are and for how they may play out in the future, not for how you wish them to be.

Every event has a reason, a causal chain of relationships that made it happen; you have to dig deep into that reality, instead of seeing only the surfaces of things. The closer you get to objectivity, the better your strategies and the easier the path to your goals.

You can take a step in this direction by always trying to look at the world through the eyes of other people—including, most definitely, your enemy—before engaging in war.

Grand strategists keep sensitive antennae attuned to the politics of any situation. Politics is the art of promoting and protecting your own interests. You might think it was largely a question of parties and factions, but every individual is, among other things, a political creature seeking to secure his or her own position. Your behavior in the world always has political consequences, in that the people around you will analyze it in terms of whether it helps or harms them. To win the battle at the cost of alienating potential allies or

Taking politics into account, you must figure out your grand strategy with a mind to gaining support from other people—to creating and strengthening a base.

Being political means understanding people—seeing through their eyes.

Sever the roots.

To work out a grand strategy against an enemy, you have to know what motivates him or is the source of his power.

Uncover the roots of the trouble and you can strategize to sever them, ending the war or problem with finality.

A part of grand strategy related to severing the roots is seeing dangers as they start to sprout, then cutting them down before they get too big to handle.

Take the indirect route to your goal.

The solution, of course, is to plan ahead but also to plan subtly—to take the indirect route.

The key is to maintain control of your emotions and plot your moves in advance, seeing the entire chessboard.

Always pay attention to the first step of the campaign. It sets the tempo, determines the enemy’s mind-set, and launches you in a direction that had better be the right one.

He meant that every nation has goals—security, well-being, prosperity—that it ordinarily pursues through politics, but when another nation or internal force thwarts their achievement through politics, war is the natural result. War is never merely about victory on the battlefield or the simple conquest of land; it is about the pursuit of a policy that cannot be realized in any other way than through force.

According to von Clausewitz, failure in war is a failure of policy. The goals of the war, and the policies that drove it, were unrealistic, inappropriate, blind to other factors.

Whenever anything goes wrong, it is human nature to blame this person or that. Let other people engage in such stupidity, led around by their noses, seeing only what is immediately visible to the eye. You see things differently.

When an action goes wrong—in business, in politics, in life—trace it back to the policy that inspired it in the fir...

This means that you yourself are largely the agent of anything bad that happens to you. With more prudence, wiser policies, and greater vision, you could have avoided the danger. So when something goes wrong, look deep into yourself—not in an emotional way, to blame yourself or indulge your feelings of guilt, but to...

Authority: It is a common mistake in going to war to begin at the wrong end, to act first and to wait for disaster to discuss the matter. —Thucydides (between 460 and 455 B.C.–circa 400 B.C.)

successes it brings you in your first campaigns may have the same effect on you that easy victory on the battlefield gives a general: drunk on triumph, you may lose the sense of realism and proportion on which your future moves depend.

The greater the victory, the greater the danger. As you get older, as you move to your next campaign, you must retrench, strain doubly hard to rein in your emotions, and maintain a sense of realism.

Second, the detachment necessary to grand strategy can bring you to a point where you find it hard to act.

No matter how far we progress, we remain part animal, and it is the animal in us that fires our strategies, gives them life, animates us to fight. Without the desire to fight, without a capacity for t...

Knowing how to control your emotions means not repressing them completely but using them to their best effect.

The target of your strategies should be less the army you face than the mind of the man or woman who runs it. If you understand how that mind works, you have the key to deceiving and controlling it. Train yourself to read people, picking up the signals they unconsciously send about their innermost thoughts and intentions. A friendly front will let you watch them closely and mine them for information. Beware of projecting your own emotions and mental habits onto them; try to think as they think. By finding your opponents’ psychological weaknesses, you can work to unhinge their minds.

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.

your real enemy is your opponent’s mind.

the ability to read people like a book.

In the end the spy’s information means nothing unless you are adept at interpreting human behavior and psychology.

The first step in the process is to get over the idea that people are impenetrable mysteries and that only some trick will let you peek into their souls.

For even as people consciously struggle to conceal what is going on in their minds, they unconsciously want to reveal themselves.

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.

submerge oneself temporarily in the other person’s mind.

In general, it is easier to observe people in action, particularly in moments of crisis.

You need to know how much fight people have in them.

The quality of the information you gather on your enemies is more important than the quantity.

Try to make friends with people at or near the source of information on your rival; one well-placed friend will yield far more than will a handful of paid spies.

never rely on one spy, one source of information, no matter how good.

Keep your intelligence up to date, and do not rely on the enemy’s responding the same way twice.

The less a thing is foreseen, the more…fright does it cause.

Blitzkrieg warfare, adapted for daily combat, is the perfect strategy for these times.

Initiating the action where there will be less resistance will allow you to develop crucial momentum.

slow in deliberation

swift in execution.