The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

Authority: The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by a rapid and audacious attack. —Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)

Conditions are such that the hostile forces favored by the time are advancing. In this case retreat is the right course, and it is through retreat that success is achieved. But success consists in being able to carry out the retreat correctly. Retreat is not to be confused with flight. Flight means saving oneself under any circumstances, whereas retreat is a sign of strength. We must be careful not to miss the right moment while we are in full possession of power and position. Then we shall be able to interpret the signs of the time before it is too late and to prepare for provisional retreat instead of being drawn into a desperate life-and-death struggle. Thus we do not simply abandon the field to the opponent; we make it difficult for him to advance by showing perseverance in single acts of resistance. In this way we prepare, while retreating, for the counter-movement. Understanding the laws of a constructive retreat of this sort is not easy. The meaning that lies hidden in such a time is important. THE I CHING, CHINA, CIRCA EIGHTH CENTURY B.C.

CREATE A THREATENING PRESENCE DETERRENCE STRATEGIES

The best way to fight off aggressors is to keep them from attacking you in the first place. To accomplish this you must create the impression of being more powerful than you are. Build up a reputation: You’re a little crazy. Fighting you is not worth it. You take your enemies with you when you lose. Create this reputation and make it credible with a few impressive—impressively violent—acts. Uncertainty is sometimes better than overt threat: if your opponents are never sure what messing with you will cost, they will not want to find out. Play on people’s natural fears and anxieties to make them think twice.

Consider Vlad the Impaler

If your organization is small in numbers, then do what Gideon did: conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does…. Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. RULES FOR RADICALS, SAUL D. ALINSKY, 1972

Surprise with a bold maneuver. 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. Perhaps they had thought you were vulnerable, and now you are acting as someone who is fearless and confident. This will have two positive effects: First, they will tend to think your move is backed up by something real—they will not imagine you could be foolish enough to do something audacious just for effect. Second, they will start to see strengths and threats in you that they had not imagined.

A certain person said the following. There are two kinds of dispositions, inward and outward, and a person who is lacking in one or the other is worthless. It is, for example, like the blade of a sword, which one should sharpen well and then put in its scabbard, periodically taking it out and knitting one’s eyebrows as in an attack, wiping off the blade, and then placing it in its scabbard again. If a person has his sword out all the time, he is habitually swinging a naked blade; people will not approach him and he will have no allies. If a sword is always sheathed, it will become rusty, the blade will dull, and people will think as much of its owner. HAGAKURE: THE BOOK OF THE SAMURAI, YAMAMOTO TSUNETOMO, 1659–1720

Reverse the threat. If your enemies see you as someone to be pushed around, turn the tables with a sudden move, however small, designed to scare them. Threaten something they value. Hit them where you sense they may be vulnerable, and make it hurt. If that infuriates them and makes them attack you, back off a moment and then hit them again when they’re not expecting it. Show them you are not afraid of them and that you are capable of a ruthlessness they had not seen in you. You need...

Seem unpredictable and irrational. In this instance you do something suggesting a slightly suicidal streak, as if you felt you had nothing to lose. You show that you are ready to take your enemies down with you, destroying their reputations in the process. (This is particularly effective with people who have a lot to lose themselves—powerful people with sterling reputations.) To defeat you will be costly and perhaps self-destructive. This will make fighting you very unattractive. You are not acting out emotionally; that is a sign of weakness. You are simply hinting that you are a little irrational a...

Play on people’s natural paranoia. Instead of threatening your opponents openly, you take action that is indirect and designed to make them think. This might mean using a go-between to send them a message—to tell some disturbing story about what you are capable of. Or maybe you “inadvertently” let them spy on you, only to hear something that should give them cause for concern. Making your enemies think they have found out you are plotting a countermove is more effective than telling them so yourself; make a threat and you may have to live up to it, but making them think you are working treacherously against them is another ...

Establish a frightening reputation. This reputation can be for any number of things: being difficult, stubborn, violent, ruthlessly efficient. Build up that image over the years and people will back off from you, treating you with respect and a little fear. Why obstruct or pick an argument with someone who has shown he will fight to the bitter end? Someone strategic yet ruthless? To create this image, you may every now and then have to play a bit rough, but eventually it will become enough of a deterrent to make those occasions rare. It will be an offensive weapon, scaring people into submission before the...

Brinkmanship is…the deliberate creation of a recognizable risk, a risk that one does not completely control. It is the tactic of deliberately letting the situation get somewhat out of hand, just because its being out of hand may be intolerable to the other party and force his accommodation. It means harassing and intimidating an adversary by exposing him to a shared risk, or deterring him by showing that if he makes a contrary move he may disturb us so that we slip over the...

Injuring all of a man’s ten fingers is not as effective as chopping off one. —Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976)

Jackson altered Union perceptions first by his bold attack on Kernstown, which made Lincoln and McClellan think he had more troops than he did—they could not imagine that anyone would be so stupid as to send only 3,600 men against a Union stronghold. If Jackson was stronger than they had imagined, that meant they needed more men in the Shenandoah Valley, which cut into the troops available for the march on Richmond. Next Jackson began behaving unpredictably, creating the impression of having not only a large army but also some strange and worrying plan. Lincoln’s and McClellan’s inability to figure out this plan stopped them in their tracks, making them divide their forces to take care of the possible dangers. Finally Jackson attacked boldly one more time. He did not have nearly enough men to threaten Washington, but Lincoln could not be sure of that. Like a conjuror, Jackson created a bogeyman out of an army that in essence was laughably small. You must take control over people’s perceptions of you by playing with appearances, mystifying and misleading them. Like Jackson, it is best to mix audacity with unpredictability and unorthodoxy and act boldly in moments of weakness or danger. That will distract people from any holes in your armor, and they’ll be afraid there may be more to you than meets the eye.

Once, when a group of five or six pages were traveling to the capital together in the same boat, it happened that their boat struck a regular ship late at night. Five or six seamen from the ship leapt aboard and loudly demanded that the pages give up their boat’s anchor, in accord with the seaman’s code. Hearing this, the pages ran forward yelling, “The seaman’s code is something for people like you! Do you think that we samurai are going to let you take equipment from a boat carrying warriors? We will cut you down and throw you into the sea to the last man!” With that, all the seamen fled back to their own ship. At such a time, one must act like a samurai. For trifling occasions it is better to accomplish things simply by yelling. By making something more significant than it really is and missing one’s chance, an affair will not be brought to a close and there will be no accomplishment at all. HAGAKURE: THE BOOK OF THE SAMURAI, YAMAMOTO TSUNETOMO, 1659–1720

The Spider King was a man who always plotted several moves in advance. In this case he knew that if he spoke politely and diplomatically to the ambassador of his worries about the duke, his words would carry no weight—they would seem like whining. If he vented his anger directly to the ambassador, on the other hand, he would look out of control. A direct thrust is also easily parried: the duke would just mouth reassurances, and the treachery would go on. 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: it meant he was planning something and wanted to keep the duke from suspecting it and knowing his true feelings. He delivered his threat insidiously to make the duke ponder his intentions and to instill an uneasy fear.

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. Sending them a message through a third party or revealing it indirectly through action is much more effective. That way you signal that you are already maneuvering against them. Keep the threat veiled: if they can only glimpse what you are up to, they will have to imagine the rest. Making them see you as calculating and strategic will have a chilling effect on their desires to harm or attack you. It is not worth the risk to find out what you may be up to.

Don't speak, do; don't tell, show!

As a fighter pilot, Boyd had trained himself to think several moves ahead of his opponents, always aiming to surprise them with some terrifying maneuver.

Authority: 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.)

Retreat in the face of a strong enemy is a sign not of weakness but of strength. By resisting the temptation to respond to an aggressor, you buy yourself valuable time—time to recover, to think, to gain perspective. Let your enemies advance; time is more important than space. By refusing to fight, you infuriate them and feed their arrogance. They will soon overextend themselves and start making mistakes. Time will reveal them as rash and you as wise. Sometimes you can accomplish most by doing nothing.

Then a power struggle broke out among the Communists: a group of Soviet-educated intellectuals known as the 28 Bolsheviks tried to gain control of the party. They despised Mao, seeing his taste for guerrilla warfare as a sign of timidity and weakness and his advocacy of a peasant revolution backward. Instead they advocated frontal warfare, fighting the Nationalists directly for control of key cities and regions, as the Communists had done in Russia. Slowly the 28B isolated Mao and stripped him of both political and military power. In 1934 they put him under virtual house arrest on a farm in Hunan. Mao’s friends and comrades felt he had suffered a dizzying fall from grace. But more troubling than the fall itself was his apparent acceptance of it: he did not rally supporters to fight back, he stopped publishing, he effectively disappeared. Perhaps the 28B had been right: Mao was a coward.

Red Army officers began to listen to Mao: his guerrilla tactics had been successful before, and the 28B strategy was clearly failing. They slowly adopted his ideas. They traveled more lightly; they moved only at night; they feinted this way and that to throw the Nationalists off their scent; wherever they went, they conducted rallies to recruit peasants to their cause. Somehow Mao had become the army’s de facto leader. Although outnumbered a hundred to one, under his leadership the Red Army managed to escape the Nationalists and, in October 1935, to arrive at the remote reaches of Shan-hsi Province, where it would finally be safe.

Six in the fourth place means: The army retreats. No blame. In face of a superior enemy, with whom it would be hopeless to engage in battle, an orderly retreat is the only correct procedure, because it will save the army from defeat and disintegration. It is by no means a sign of courage or strength to insist upon engaging in a hopeless struggle regardless of circumstances. THE I CHING, CHINA, CIRCA EIGHTH CENTURY B.C.

Mao was born and raised on a farm, and Chinese farm life could be harsh. A farmer had to be patient, bending with the seasons and the capricious climate. Thousands of years earlier, the Taoist religion had emerged from this hard life. A key concept in Taoism is that of 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.

During the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), Frederick the Great of Prussia was faced with Austrian, French, and Russian armies on every side, all determined to carve him up. A strategist who usually favored aggressive attack, Frederick this time went on the defensive, crafting his maneuvers to buy himself time and slip the net his enemies were trying to catch him in. Year after year he managed to avoid disaster, though barely. Then, suddenly, Czarina Elizabeth of Russia died. She had hated Frederick bitterly, but her nephew and successor to the throne, Czar Peter III, was a perverse young boy who had not liked his aunt and who greatly admired Frederick the Great. He not only pulled Russia out of the war, he allied himself with the Prussians. The Seven Years’ War was over; the miracle Frederick needed had come to pass. Had he surrendered at his worst point or tried to fight his way out, he would have lost everything. Instead he maneuvered to create time for Murphy’s Law to do its work on his enemies.

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.)

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: people do not respond the way you had thought they would, events mess up your plans and produce confusion, circumstances are overwhelming. 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. Before any friction can creep in and undermine your plans, you move to the offensive, and your relentless maneuvers force so much friction on the enemy that he collapses.

LOSE BATTLES BUT WIN THE WAR

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. Readiness is everything. Resolution is indissolubly bound up with caution. If an individual is careful and keeps his wits about him, he need not become excited or alarmed. If he is watchful at all times, even before danger is present, he is armed when danger approaches and need not be afraid. 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…. If reason triumphs, the passions withdraw of themselves. THE I CHING, CHINA, CIRCA EIGHTH CENTURY B.C.

Epistemologically speaking, the source of all erroneous views on war lies in idealist and mechanistic tendencies…. People with such tendencies are subjective and one-sided in their approach to problems. They indulge in groundless and purely subjective talk, basing themselves upon a single aspect or temporary manifestation [and] magnify it with similar subjectivity into the whole of the problem…. 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. SELECTED MILITARY WRITINGS, MAO TSE-TUNG, 1893–1976

There is, however, much difference between the East and the West in cultural heritages, in values, and in ways of thinking. In the Eastern way of thinking, one starts with the whole, takes everything as a whole and proceeds with a comprehensive and intuitive synthesization [combinaton] . In the Western way of thinking, however, one starts with the parts, takes [divides] a complex matter into component parts and then deals with them one by one, with an emphasis on logical analysis. Accordingly, Western traditional military thought advocates a direct military approach with a stress on the use of armed forces. THE STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE: SUN ZI & WESTERN APPROACHES TO WAR, CAO SHAN, ED., 1997

What I particularly admire in Alexander is, not so much his campaigns…but his political sense. He possessed the art of winning the affection of the people. —Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)

When dark inertia increases, obscurity and inactivity, negligence and delusion, arise. When lucidity prevails, the self whose body dies enters the untainted worlds of those who know reality. When he dies in passion, he is born among lovers of action; so when he dies in dark inertia, he is born into wombs of folly. The fruit of good conduct is pure and untainted, they say, but suffering is the fruit of passion, ignorance the fruit of dark inertia. From lucidity knowledge is born; from passion comes greed; from dark inertia come negligence, delusion, and ignorance. Men who are lucid go upward; men of passion stay in between; men of dark inertia, caught in vile ways, sink low. THE BHAGAVAD GITA: KRISHNA’S COUNSEL IN TIME OF WAR, CIRCA FIRST CENTURY A.D.

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. 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 world around you, more than your enemy does. Your strategies will become insidious and impossible to thwart. You will be able to harness the relationships between events, one battle setting up the next, a cultural coup setting up a political coup. You will bring the war to arenas your enemies have ignored, catching them by surprise. Only grand strategy can yield grand results. War is the continuation of politics by other means. —Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831)

We are all of us to some extent strategists: we naturally want control over our lives, and we plot for power, consciously or unconsciously angling to get what we want. We use strategies, in other words, but they tend to be linear and reactive and are often fractured and struck off course by emotional responses. Clever strategists can go far, but all but a few make mistakes. If they are successful, they get carried away and overreach; if they face setbacks—and setbacks are inevitable over a lifetime—they are easily overwhelmed. 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.

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 have—your mind, your rationality, your vision. Having evolved as a solution to the problems of warfare, grand strategy is a military concept. And an examination of its historical development will reveal the key to making it work for you in daily life.

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 neighboring states—any missteps with them and the entire plan could unravel. He had to imagine the peace after the war. He had to know what his army was capable of over time and ask no more of it than that. He had to be realistic. His mind had to expand to meet the complexities of the task—and all this before a single blow was exchanged.

Focus on your greater goal, your destiny. The first step toward becoming a grand strategist—the step that will make everything else fall into place—is to begin with a clear, detailed, purposeful goal in mind, one rooted in reality.

Widen your perspective. Grand strategy is a function of vision, of seeing further in time and space than the enemy does. The process of foresight is unnatural: we can only ever live in the present, which is the ground for our consciousness, and our subjective experiences and desires narrow the scope of our vision—they are like a prison we inhabit. 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.

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 creating intractable enemies is never wise. 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.

Sever the roots. In a society dominated by appearances, the real source of a problem is sometimes hard to grasp. To work out a grand strategy against an enemy, you have to know what motivates him or is the source of his power. Too many wars and battles drag on because neither side knows how to strike at the other’s roots. As a grand strategist, you must expand your vision not only far and wide but under. Think hard, dig deep, do not take appearances for reality. Uncover the roots of the trouble and you can strategize to sever them, ending the war or problem with finality.

This is as it should be. No major proposal required for war can be worked out in ignorance of political factors; and when people talk, as they often do, about harmful political influence on the management of war, they are not really saying what they mean. Their quarrel should be with the policy itself, not with its influence. If the policy is right—that is, successful—any intentional effect it has on the conduct of war can only be to the good. If it has the opposite effect the policy itself is wrong. Only if statesmen look to certain military moves and actions to produce effects that are foreign to their nature do political decisions influence operations for the worse. In the same way as a man who has not fully mastered a foreign language sometimes fails to express himself correctly, so statesmen often issue orders that defeat the purpose they are meant to serve. Time and again that has happened, which demonstrates that a certain grasp of military affairs is vital for those in charge of general policy. Before continuing, we must guard against a likely misinterpretation. We are far from believing that a minister of war immersed in his files, an erudite engineer or even an experienced soldier would, simply on the basis of their particular experience, make the best director of policy—always assuming that the prince himself is not in control. Far from it. What is needed in the post is distinguished intellect and strength of character. He can always get the necessary military i...

Take the indirect route to your goal. The greatest danger you face in strategy is losing the initiative and finding yourself constantly reacting to what the other side does. The solution, of course, is to plan ahead but also to plan subtly—to take the indirect route. Preventing your opponent from seeing the purpose of your actions gives you an enormous advantage.

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.)

KNOW YOUR ENEMY

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.

He who knows the enemy and himself Will never in a hundred battles be at risk. SUN-TZU, FOURTH CENTURY B.C.

Be submissive so that he will trust you and you will thereby learn about his true situation. Accept his ideas and respond to his affairs as if you were twins. Once you have learned everything, subtly gather in his power. Thus when the ultimate day arrives, it will seem as if Heaven itself destroyed him. —Tai Kung, Six Secret Teachings (circa fourth century B.C.)

In all the martial arts, in all the performing arts and still more in all the forms of human behavior, a man’s postures or moves are based on the movements of his [invisible] mind…. In the Kage Style of swordsmanship a swordsman reads his opponent’s mind through his postures or moves…. What mind can penetrate his opponent’s mind? It is a mind that has been trained and cultivated to the point of detachment with perfect freedom. It is as clear as a mirror that can reflect the motions within his opponent’s mind…. When one stands face to face with his opponents, his mind must not be revealed in the form of moves. Instead his mind should reflect his opponent’s mind like water reflecting the moon. LIVES OF MASTER SWORDSMEN, MAKOTO SUGAWARA, 1988