The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

Tactic

The success of this strategy depends on three things: a group that is mobile (often, the smaller the better), superior coordination between the parts, and the ability to send orders quickly up and down the chain of command. Do not depend on technology to accomplish this.

Frederick the Great noted that an army that moves quickly has higher morale. Velocity creates a sense of vitality. Moving with speed means there is less time for you and your army to make mistakes. It also creates a bandwagon effect: more and more people admiring your boldness, will decide to join forces with you.

Key to first 100 days and strategy

Like Roosevelt, make such decisive action as dramatic as possible: a moment of quiet and suspense on the stage before you make your startling entrance.

Your task as a strategist is twofold: First, recognize the struggle for control in all aspects of life, and never be taken in by those who claim they are not interested in control. Such types are often the most manipulative of all.

There is too much in war and in life that is unpredictable. But if the strategist can control the mood and mind-set of his enemies, it does not matter exactly how they respond to his maneuvers. If he can make them frightened, panicky, overly aggressive, and angry, he controls the wider scope of their actions and can trap them mentally before cornering them physically.

Tactic

Keep them on their heels. Before the enemy makes a move, before the element of chance or the unexpected actions of your opponents can ruin your plans, you make an aggressive move to seize the initiative. You then keep up a relentless pressure, exploiting this momentary advantage to the fullest.

Tactic

Shift the battlefield. An enemy naturally wants to fight you on familiar terrain. Terrain in this sense means all of the details of the battle—the time and place, exactly what is being fought over, who is involved in the struggle, and so on.

Compel mistakes. Your enemies depend on executing a strategy that plays to their advantages, that has worked in the past. Your task is twofold: to fight the battle in such a way that they cannot bring their strength or strategy into play and to create such a level of frustration that they make mistakes in the process.

Assume passive control. The ultimate form of domination is to make those on the other side think they are the ones in control. Believing they are in command, they are less likely to resist you or become defensive. You create this impression by moving with the energy of the other side, giving ground but slowly and subtly diverting them in the direction you desire.

Your goal is to subtly shift the conflict to terrain of your choice. You accept the battle but alter its nature. If it is about money, shift it to something moral. If your opponents want to fight over a particular issue, reframe the battle to encompass something larger and more difficult for them to handle. If they like a slow pace, find a way to quicken it. You are not allowing your enemies to get comfortable or fight in their usual way. And an enemy who is lured onto unfamiliar terrain is one who has lost control of the dynamic. Once such control slips from his hands, he will compromise, retreat, make mistakes, and effect his own destruction.

Before anything else you must lose your fear—of death, of the consequences of a bold maneuver, of other people’s opinion of you. That single moment will suddenly open up vistas of possibilities. And in the end whichever side has more possibilities for positive action has greater control.

they would get revenge by deliberately withholding information about their lives. Erickson would begin by telling these patients that it was natural, even healthy, not to want to reveal everything to the therapist. He would insist they withhold any sensitive information. The patients would then feel trapped: by keeping secrets they were obeying the therapist, which was just the opposite of what they wanted to do. Usually by the second session, they would open up, rebelling to such an extent that they revealed everything about themselves.

Be sympathetic to their plight, but make it seem that whatever they do, they are actually cooperating with your own desires. That will put them off balance; if they rebel now, they are playing into your hands. The dynamic will subtly shift, and you will have room to insinuate change. Similarly, if the other person wields a fundamental weakness as a weapon (the heart-attack tactic), make that threat impossible to use against you by taking it further, to the point of parody or painfulness. The only way to beat passive opponents is to outdo them in subtle control.

Tactic for passive aggressive?

when the banners of the enemy come into sight and the beating of its battle drums can be heard, we must first ascertain the positions of its back and throat. Then we can attack it from the back and strangle its throat. This is an excellent strategy to crush the enemy.

Often what separates a mediocre general from a superior one is not their strategies or maneuvers but their vision—they simply look at the same problem from a different angle. Freed from the stranglehold of convention, the superior general naturally hits on the right strategy.

He understood that military power was located not in the army itself but in its foundations, the things that supported it and made it possible: money, supplies, public goodwill, allies. He found those pillars and bit by bit knocked them down.

Power depends on balance and support; so look at what is holding your enemy up, and remember that what holds him up can also make him fall. A person, like an army, usually gets his or her power from three or four simultaneous sources: money, popularity, skillful maneuvering, some particular advantage he has fostered.

It is the nature of power to present a forceful front, to seem menacing and intimidating, strong and decisive. But this outward display is often exaggerated or even downright deceptive, since power does not dare show its weaknesses. And beneath the display is the support on which power rests—its “center of gravity.” The phrase is von Clausewitz’s,

To attack this center of gravity, to neutralize or destroy it, is the ultimate strategy in war, for without it the whole structure will collapse.

The key is analyzing the enemy force to determine its centers of gravity. In looking for those centers, it is crucial not to be misled by the intimidating or dazzling exterior, mistaking the outward appearance for what sets it in motion. You will probably have to take several steps, one by one, to uncover this ultimate power source, peeling away layer after layer.

The more centralized the enemy, the more devastating becomes a blow at its leader or governing body. Hernán Cortés was able to conquer Mexico with a handful of soldiers by capturing Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor. Moctezuma was the center around which everything revolved;

A more decentralized enemy will have several separate centers of gravity. The key here is to disorganize them by cutting off communication between them.

It is almost always strategically wise to disrupt your enemy’s lines of communication; if the parts cannot communicate with the whole, chaos ensues.

Your enemy’s center of gravity can be something abstract, like a quality, concept, or aptitude on which he depends: his reputation, his capacity to deceive, his unpredictability. But such strengths become critical vulnerabilities if you can make them unattractive or unusable.

Tactic

We often hide our sources of power from view; what most people consider a center of gravity is often a front. But sometimes an enemy will reveal his center of gravity by what he protects the most fervently.

Tactic - win over real power

When you look at your enemies, do not be intimidated by their appearance. Instead look at the parts that make up the whole. By separating the parts, sowing dissension and division from within, you can weaken and bring down even the most formidable foe.

In setting up your attack, work on their minds to create internal conflict. Look for the joints and links, the things that connect the people in a group or connect one group to another. Division is weakness, and the joints are the weakest part of any structure.

is a law of war that by allowing the larger force to come to you, at full strength and unified, you increase the odds against you; a large and powerful army on the move will gain an irresistible momentum if left unchecked. You will find yourself quickly overwhelmed. The wisest course is to take a risk, meet the enemy before it comes to you, and try to blunt its momentum by forcing or enticing it to divide. And the best way to make an enemy divide is to occupy the center.

Before you launch an outright attack on your enemies, it is always wise first to weaken them by creating as much division in their ranks as possible. One good place to drive a wedge is between the leadership and the people, whether soldiers or citizenry; leaders function poorly when they lose their support among the people.

Divide and rule is a powerful strategy for governing any group. It is based on a key principle: within any organization people naturally form smaller groups based on mutual self-interest—the primitive desire to find strength in numbers.

It is often wise to begin with the smallest problem while keeping the most dangerous one at bay. Solving that one will help you create momentum, both physical and psychological, that will help you overwhelm all the rest.

In general, any division of your forces must be temporary, strategic, and controlled.

Learn from the great master himself: attacking from the front is rarely wise. The soldiers facing you will be tightly packed in, a concentration of force that will amplify their power to resist you. Go for their flank, their vulnerable side. This principle is applicable to conflicts or encounters of any scale.

Individuals often show their flank, signal their vulnerability, by its opposite, the front they show most visibly to the world. This front can be an aggressive personality, a way of dealing with people by pushing them around. Or it can be some obvious defense mechanism, a focus on keeping out intruders to maintain stability in their lives.

Avoid a frontal attack on a long-established position; instead, seek to turn it by flank movement, so that a more penetrable side is exposed to the thrust of truth. —B. H. Liddell Hart (1895–1970)

Find their flank—the support people crave, the kindness they will respond to, the favor that will disarm them. In the political world we live in, the flank is the path to power.

what is the point of being direct and frontal if it only increases people’s resistance, and makes them more certain of their own ideas? Directness and honesty may give you a feeling of relief, but they also stir up antagonism. As tactics they are ineffective.

The key to any flanking maneuver is to proceed in steps. Your initial move cannot reveal your intentions or true line of attack. Make Napoleon’s manoeuvre sur les derrières your model: First hit them directly, as Napoleon did the Austrians at Caldiero, to hold their attention to the front. Let them come at you mano a mano. An attack from the side now will be unexpected and hard to combat.

attempts at persuasion. Never reveal your intentions or goals; instead use charm, pleasant conversation, humor, flattery—whatever works—to hold people’s attention to the front. Their focus elsewhere, their flank is exposed, and now when you drop hints or suggest subtle changes in direction, the gates are open and the walls are down. They are disarmed and maneuverable.

Think of people’s ego and vanity as a kind of front. When they are attacking you and you don’t know why, it is often because you have inadvertently threatened their ego, their sense of importance in the world. Whenever possible, you must work to make people feel secure about themselves.

In a political world, people are dependent on their social position. They need support from as many sources as possible. That support, the base of most people’s power, presents a rich flank to expose and attack.

The secret is to envelop your opponents—create relentless pressure on them from all sides, dominate their attention, and close off their access to the outside world. Make your attacks unpredictable to create a vaporous feeling of vulnerability. Finally, as you sense their weakening resolve, crush their willpower by tightening the noose. The best encirclements are psychological—you

Remember: the power of envelopment is ultimately psychological. Making the other side feel vulnerable to attack on many sides is as good as enveloping them physically.

The impetuous, violent, and arrogant are particularly easy to lure into the traps of envelopment strategies: play weak or dumb and they will charge ahead without stopping to think where they’re going.

Good quote

Some armies that have failed in their envelopments have found themselves later encircled by their enemies. Use this strategy only when you have a reasonable chance of bringing it to the conclusion you desire.

A general fighting a war of attrition will calculate ways to overwhelm the other side with larger numbers, or with the battle formation that will do the most damage, or with superior military technology. In any event, victory depends on wearing down the other side in battle.

Over many centuries, and most notably in ancient China, a second method of waging war developed. The emphasis here was not destroying the other side in battle but weakening and unbalancing it before the battle began. The leader would maneuver to confuse and infuriate and to put the enemy in a bad position—having to fight uphill, or with the sun or wind in its face, or in a cramped space. In this kind of war, an army with mobility could be more effective than one with muscle.