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And finally, by practicing the art as needed, you will build for yourself a reputation as someone tough, someone worthy of respect and a little fear.
The best way to hide your weakness and to bluff your enemies into giving up their attack is to take some unexpected, bold, risky action.
The story of Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley illustrates a simple truth: what matters in war, as in life generally, is not necessarily how many men you have or how well supplied you are but how your enemies see you.
You must take control over people’s perceptions of you by playing with appearances, mystifying and misleading them.
Having been enlightened as to the true meaning of the art of sword fighting, which should be based on the promotion of well-being of people rather than the destruction or killing of others,
By transmitting his threat indirectly, however, Louis made it stick. That the duke was not meant to know he was angry made his anger truly ominous:
When we are under attack, the temptation is to get emotional, to tell the aggressors to stop, to make threats as to what we’ll do if they keep going. That puts us in a weak position: we’ve revealed both our fears and our plans, and words rarely deter aggressors.
Keep the threat veiled: if they can only glimpse what you are up to, they will have to imagine the rest.
and a strategist never hits strength against strength; instead he probes the enemy’s weaknesses.
Understand: there is great value in letting people know that when necessary you can let go of your niceness and be downright difficult and nasty.
Once people see you as a fighter, they will approach you with a little fear in their hearts. And as Machiavelli said, it is more useful to be feared than to be loved.
When opponents are unwilling to fight with you, it is because they think it is contrary to their interests, or because you have misled them into thinking so. —Sun-tzu (fourth century B.C.)
Be careful not to become intoxicated by the power fear brings: use it as a defense in times of danger, not as your offense of choice.
Retreat in the face of a strong enemy is a sign not of weakness but of strength.
By refusing to fight, you infuriate them and feed their arrogance. They will soon overextend themselves and start making mistakes.
an orderly retreat is the only correct procedure, because it will save the army from defeat and disintegration.
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.
The best you can do is to rid yourself of lazy, conventional patterns of thinking. Advancing is not always good; retreating is not always weak.
But most often we are barely aware of what makes us different—in other words, of who we really are. Our ideas come from books, teachers, all kinds of unseen influences. We respond to events routinely and mechanically instead of trying to understand their differences.
We fail to see events for what they are; we do not know ourselves.
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.
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.
Symbolically the retreat is religious, or mythological. It was only by escaping into the desert that Moses and the Jews were able to solidify their identity and reemerge as a social and political force. Jesus spent his forty days in the wilderness, and Mohammed, too, fled Mecca at a time of great peril for a period of retreat.
Therefore, sages do not value huge jewels as much as they value a little time. Time is hard to find and easy to lose.
When you fight someone more powerful than you are, you lose more than your possessions and position; you lose your ability to think straight, to keep yourself separate and distinct.
Most people respond to aggression by in some way getting involved with it. It is almost impossible to hold back. 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.
But when you retreat, when you exchange space for time, you are making Murphy’s Law work for you. So it was with von Lettow-Vorbeck: he set up Smuts as the victim of Murphy’s Law, giving him enough time to make the worst come to pass.
beginning the minute you are born, time is all you have. It is your only true commodity. People can take away your possessions, but—short of murder—not even the most powerful aggressors can take time away from you unless you let them.
To remain disciplined and calm while waiting for disorder to appear amongst the enemy is the art of self-possession. —Sun-tzu
Retreat must never be an end in itself; at some point you have to turn around and fight.
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.
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.
The superior man is on his guard against what is not yet in sight and on the alert for what is not yet within hearing; therefore he dwells in the midst of difficulties as though they did not exist….
Only by opposing idealistic and mechanistic tendencies and taking an objective all-sided view in making a study of war can we draw correct conclusions on the question of war.
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.
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.
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. We think in small, microlevel terms and react to present events—but this is petty strategy. Nothing in life happens in isolation; everything is related to everything else and has a broader context.
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.
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 Greeks imagined an ideal human prudence. Its symbol was Odysseus, who always thought before he acted. Having visited Hades, the land of the dead, he was in touch with ancestral history and the past; and he was also always curious, eager for knowledge, and able to view human actions, his own and other people’s, with a dispassionate eye, considering their long-term consequences. In other words, like the gods, if to a lesser extent, he had the skill of looking into the future.
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.
In a world where people are increasingly incapable of thinking consequentially, more animal than ever, the practice of grand strategy will instantly elevate you above others.
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
His subordination of his emotions to strategic thought would give him more control during the course of the campaign. He would keep his perspective in the heat of battle. He would not get caught up in the reactive and self-destructive pattern that had destroyed so many armies and states.
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.
Not only does this kind of planning fool and disorient the enemy; 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.
begin with a clear, detailed, purposeful goal in mind, one rooted in reality.
Our emotions infect us with hazy desire: we want fame, success, security—something large and abstract. This haziness unbalances our plans from the beginning and sets them on a chaotic course.
By a psychological law peculiar to humans, clearly visualizing them this way will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
He would also visualize the campaign’s aftermath: the signing of the treaty, its conditions, how the defeated Russian czar or Austrian emperor would look, and exactly how the achievement of this particular goal would position Napoleon for his next campaign.
