The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

morale is contagious, and you, as leader, set the tone. Ask for sacrifices you won’t make yourself (doing everything through assistants) and your troops grow lethargic and resentful; act too nice, show too much concern for their well-being, and you drain the tension from their souls and create spoiled children who whine at the slightest pressure or request for more work. Personal example is the best way to set the proper tone and build morale. When your people see your devotion to the cause, they ingest your spirit of energy and self-sacrifice. A few timely criticisms here and there and they will only try harder to please you, to live up to your high standards. Instead of having to push and pull your army, you will find them chasing after you.

Hannibal reached his soldiers’ emotions indirectly, by relaxing them, calming them, taking them outside their problems and getting them to bond. Only then did he hit them with a speech that brought home their precarious reality and swayed their emotions.

But a few players noticed something different about Lombardi: he oozed confidence—no shouts, no demands. His tone and manner suggested that the Packers were already a winning team; they just had to live up to it.

Then came the practices, and once again the difference was not so much how they were conducted as the spirit behind them—they felt different. They were shorter but more physically demanding, almost to the point of torture. And they were intense, with the same simple plays endlessly repeated. Unlike other coaches, Lombardi explained what he was doing: installing a simpler system, based not on novelty and surprise but on efficient execution. The players had to concentrate intensely—the slightest mistake and they were doing extra laps or making the whole team do extra laps. And Lombardi changed the drills constantly: the players were never bored and could never relax their mental focus.

When Vince Lombardi took over the Packers, he recognized the problem right away: the team was infected with adolescent defeatism. Teenagers will often strike a pose that is simultaneously rebellious and lackadaisical. It’s a way of staying in place: trying harder brings more risk of failure, which they cannot handle, so they lower their expectations, finding nobility in slacking off and mediocrity. Losing hurts less when they embrace it. Groups can get infected with this spirit without realizing it. All they need is a few setbacks, a few adolescent-minded individuals, and slowly expectations lower and defeatism sets in. The leader who tries to change the group’s spirit directly—yelling, demanding, disciplining—actually plays into the teenage dynamic and reinforces the desire to rebel. Lombardi was a motivational genius who saw everything in psychological terms. To him the National Football League teams were virtually equal in talent. The differences lay in attitude and morale: reversing the Packers’ defeatism would translate into wins, which would lift their morale, which in turn would bring more wins. Lombardi knew he had to approach his players indirectly—had to trick them into changing. He began with a show of confidence, talking as if he assumed they were winners who had fallen on bad times. That got under their skins, far more than they realized. Then, in his practices, Lombardi didn’t make demands—a defensive, whiny approach that betrays insecurity. Instead he change...

a group has a collective personality that hardens over time, and sometimes that personality is dysfunctional or adolescent. Changing it is difficult; people prefer what they know, even if it doesn’t work. If you lead this kind of group, do not play into its negative dynamic. Announcing intentions and making demands will leave people defensive and feeling like children. Like Lombardi, play the wily parent. Ask more of them. Expect them to work like adults. Quietly alter the spirit with which things are done. Emphasize efficiency: anybody can be efficient (it isn’t a question of talent), efficiency breeds success, and success raises morale. Once the spirit and personality of the group start to shift, everything else will fall into place.

Between battles Napoleon would sometimes wander among the soldiers’ campfires, mingling with them. He himself had risen through the ranks—he had once been an ordinary gunner—and he could talk to the men as no other general could. He knew their names, their histories, even in what battles they’d been wounded. With some men he would pinch an earlobe between his finger and thumb and give it a friendly tweak.

Napoleon rarely showed anger, but when he did, his men felt worse than just guilty or upset.

Of all Napoleon’s techniques, none was more effective than his use of punishments and rewards, all staged for the greatest dramatic impact. His personal rebukes were rare, but when he was angry, when he punished, the effect was devastating: the target felt disowned, outcast. As if exiled from the warmth of his family, he would struggle to win back the general’s favor and then never to give him a reason to be angry again.

once people know what pleases you and what angers you, they turn into trained poodles, working to charm you with apparent good behavior. Keep them in suspense: make them think of you constantly and want to please you but never know just how to do it. Once they are in the trap, you will have a magnetic pull over them. Motivation will become automatic.

If morale is contagious, so is its opposite: fear and discontent can spread through your troops like wildfire. The only way to deal with them is to cut them off before they turn into panic and rebellion.

In a world that frowns on displays of overt aggression, the ability to fight defensively—to let others make the first move and then wait for their own mistakes to destroy them—will bring you untold power. Because you waste neither energy nor time, you are always ready for the next inevitable battle. Your career will be long and fruitful.

the more you want the prize, the more you must compensate by examining what getting it will take. Look beyond the obvious costs and think about the intangible ones: the goodwill you may squander by waging war, the fury of the loser if you win, the time that winning may take, your debt to your allies. You can always wait for a better time; you can always try something more in line with your resources. Remember: history is littered with the corpses of people who ignored the costs. Save yourself unnecessary battles and live to fight another day.

The defeat of the Spanish Armada has to be considered one of the most cost-effective in military history: a second-rate power that barely maintained a standing army was able to face down the greatest empire of its time. What made the victory possible was the application of a basic military axiom: attack their weaknesses with your strengths. England’s strengths were its small, mobile navy and its elaborate intelligence network; its weaknesses were its limited resources in men, weaponry, and money. Spain’s strengths were its vast wealth and its huge army and fleet; its weaknesses were the precarious structure of its finances, despite their magnitude, and the lumbering size and slowness of its ships. Elizabeth refused to fight on Spain’s terms, keeping her army out of the fray. Instead she attacked Spain’s weaknesses with her strengths: plaguing the Spanish galleons with her smaller ships, wreaking havoc on the country’s finances, using special ops to grind its war machine to a halt. She was able to control the situation by keeping England’s costs down while making the war effort more and more expensive for Spain. Eventually a time came when Philip could only fail: if the Armada sank, he would be ruined for years to come, and even if the Armada triumphed, victory would come so dear that he would ruin himself trying to exploit it on English soil.

no person or group is completely either weak or strong. Every army, no matter how invincible it seems, has a weak point, a place left unprotected or undeveloped. Size itself can be a weakness in the end. Meanwhile even the weakest group has something it can build on, some hidden strength. Your goal in war is not simply to amass a stockpile of weapons, to increase your firepower so you can blast your enemy away. That is wasteful, expensive to build up, and leaves you vulnerable to guerrilla-style attacks. Going at your enemies blow by blow, strength against strength, is equally unstrategic. Instead you must first assess their weak points: internal political problems, low morale, shaky finances, overly centralized control, their leader’s megalomania. While carefully keeping your own weaknesses out of the fray and preserving your strength for the long haul, hit their Achilles’ heel again and again. Having their weaknesses exposed and preyed upon will demoralize them, and, as they tire, new weaknesses will open up. By carefully calibrating strengths and weaknesses, you can bring down your Goliath with a slingshot.

Armies that seem to have the edge in money, resources, and firepower tend to be predictable. Relying on their equipment instead of on knowledge and strategy, they grow mentally lazy. When problems arise, their solution is to amass more of what they already have. But it’s not what you have that brings you victory, it’s how you use it.

If you have less than your enemy, do not despair. You can always turn the situation around by practicing perfect economy. If you and your enemy are equals, getting hold of more weaponry matters less than making better use of what you have. If you have more than your enemy, fighting economically is as important as ever.

As Pablo Picasso said, Even if you are wealthy, act poor. The poor are more inventive, and often have more fun, because they value what they have and know their limits. Sometimes in strategy you have to ignore your greater strength and force yourself to get the maximum out of the minimum. Even if you have the technology, fight the peasant’s war.

Perfect economy, then, does not mean hoarding your resources. That is not economy but stinginess—deadly in war. Perfect economy means finding a golden mean, a level at which your blows count but do not wear you out. Overeconomizing will wear you out more, for the war will drag on, its costs growing, without your ever being able to deliver a knockout punch.

Deception can be a great equalizer for the weaker side. Its arts include the gathering of intelligence, the spreading of misinformation, and the use of propaganda to make the war more unpopular within the enemy camp.

Second, look for opponents you can beat. Avoid enemies who have nothing to lose—they will work to bring you down whatever it costs.

There will be times when your calculations misfire; what had seemed to be an easy campaign turns out hard. Not everything can be foreseen. Not only is it important to pick your battles carefully, then, but you must also know when to accept your losses and quit.

Authority: The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it but in what one pays for it—what it costs us.

Moving first—initiating the attack—will often put you at a disadvantage: you are exposing your strategy and limiting your options. Instead discover the power of holding back and letting the other side move first, giving you the flexibility to counterattack from any angle. If your opponents are aggressive, bait them into a rash attack that will leave them in a weak position. Learn to use their impatience, their eagerness to get at you, as a way to throw them off balance and bring them down. In difficult moments do not despair or retreat: any situation can be turned around. If you learn how to hold back, waiting for the right moment to launch an unexpected counterattack, weakness can become strength.

In the weeks following the election, Roosevelt essentially hid from public view. Slowly his enemies on the right began to use his absence to attack him, circulating speculation that he was unprepared for the challenge of the job. The criticisms became pointed and aggressive. At his inauguration, however, Roosevelt gave a rousing speech, and in his first months in office, now known as the “Hundred Days,” he switched from the appearance of inactivity to a powerful offensive, hurrying through legislation that made the country feel as if something were finally being done. The sniping died.

Over the next few years, this pattern repeatedly recurred. Roosevelt would face resistance: The Supreme Court, say, would overturn his programs, and enemies on all sides (Senator Huey Long and labor leader John L. Lewis on the left, Father Charles Coughlin and wealthy businessmen on the right) would launch hostile campaigns in the press. Roosevelt would retreat, ceding the spotlight. In his absence the attacks would seem to pick up steam, and his advisers would panic—but Roosevelt was just biding his time. Eventually, he knew, people would tire of these endless attacks and accusations, particularly because, by refusing to reply to them, he made them inevitably one-sided.

Then—usually a month or two before election time—he would go on the offensive, defending his record and attacking his opponents suddenly and vigorously enough to catch them all off guard. The timing wo...

In the periods when Roosevelt was silent, his opponents’ attacks would grow, and grow more shrill—but that only gave him material he could use later, taking advanta...

To undertake the military operations, the army must prefer stillness to movement. It reveals no shape when still but exposes its shape in movement. When a rash movement leads to exposure of the shape of the army, it will fall victim to the enemy. But for movement, the tiger and leopard will not fall into trap, the deer will not run into snare, the birds will not be stuck by net, and the fish and turtles will not be caught by hooks. All these animals become prey to man because of their movement. Therefore the wise man treasures stillness. By keeping still, he can dispel temerity and cope with the temerarious enemy. When the enemy exposes a vulnerable shape, seize the chance to subdue it. The Book of Master Weiliao observes, “The army achieves victory by stillness.” Indeed, the army should not move without careful thought, much less take reckless action.

Devastatingly funny, the speech was also ruthlessly effective. And how could his opponents reply to it when it quoted their own words right back at them? Year after year Roosevelt’s opponents exhausted themselves attacking him, scoring points at moments when it didn’t matter and losing one landslide election after another to him.

Thousands of years ago, at the dawn of military history, various strategists in different cultures noticed a peculiar phenomenon: in battle, the side that was on the defensive often won in the end. There seemed to be several reasons for this. First, once the aggressor went on the attack, he had no more surprises in store—the defender could clearly see his strategy and take protective action. Second, if the defender could somehow turn back this initial attack, the aggressor would be left in a weak position; his army was disorganized and exhausted. (It requires more energy to take land than to hold it.) If the defenders could take advantage of this weakness to deliver a counterblow, they could often force the aggressor to retreat. Based on these observations, the art of the counterattack was developed. Its basic tenets were to let the enemy make the first move, actively baiting him into an aggressive attack that would expend his energy and unbalance his lines, then taking advantage of his weakness and disorganization. This art was refined by theorists such as Sun-tzu and practiced to perfection by leaders like Philip of Macedon.

The counterattack is, in fact, the origin of modern strategy. The first real example of an indirect approach to war, it represents a major breakthrough in thinking: instead of being brutal and direct, the counterattack is subtle and deceptive, using the enemy’s energy and aggression to bring about his downfall. Although it is one of the oldest and most basic strategies in warfare, it remains in many ways the most effective and has proven highly adaptable to modern conditions. It was the strategy of choice of Napoleon Bonaparte, T. E. Lawrence, Erwin Rommel, and Mao Tse-tung.

Once you learn patience, your options suddenly expand. Instead of wearing yourself out in little wars, you can save your energy for the right moment, take advantage of other people’s mistakes, and think clearly in difficult situations. You will see opportunities for counterattack where others see only surrender or retreat.

Mirroring people—giving back to them just what they give you—is a powerful method of counterattack. In daily life, mirroring and passivity can charm people, flattering them into lowering their defenses and opening themselves to attack. It can also irritate and discomfit them. Their thoughts become yours; you are feeding off them like a vampire, your passive front disguising the control you are exercising over their minds. Meanwhile you are giving them nothing of yourself; they cannot see through you. Your counterattack will come as a complete surprise to them.

The counterattack is a particularly effective strategy against what might be called “the barbarian”—the man or woman who is especially aggressive by nature. Do not be intimidated by these types; they are in fact weak and are easily swayed and deceived. The trick is to goad them by playing weak or stupid while dangling in front of them the prospect of easy gains.

In our own time, the family therapist Jay Haley has observed that for many difficult people acting out is a strategy—a method of control. They give themselves the license to be impossible and neurotic. If you react by getting angry and trying to make them stop, you are doing just what they want: they are engaging your emotions and dominating your attention. If, on the other hand, you simply let them run amok, you put them still more in control. But Haley discovered that if you encourage their difficult behavior, agree with their paranoid ideas, and push them to go further, you turn the dynamic around. This is not what they want or expect; now they’re doing what you want, which takes the fun out of it. It is the jujitsu strategy: you are using their energy against them. In general, encouraging people to follow their natural direction, to give in to their greed or neuroses, will give you more control over them than active resistance will. Either they get themselves into terrible trouble or they become hopelessly confused, all of which plays into your hands.

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.

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

This art of deterrence rests on three basic facts about war and human nature: First, people are more likely to attack you if they see you as weak or vulnerable. Second, they cannot know for sure that you’re weak; they depend on the signs you give out, through your behavior both present and past. Third, they are after easy victories, quick and bloodless. That is why they prey on the vulnerable and weak.

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 needn’t go too far; just inflict a little pain. Send a short, threatening message to indicate that you are capable of a lot worse.

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 and that your next move could be almost anything. Crazy opponents are terrifying—no one likes fighting people who are unpredictable and have nothing to lose.

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 they even meet you. In any event, you must build your reputation carefully, allowing no inconsistencies. Any holes in this kind of image will make it worthless.

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. If they think you are weak and vulnerable, they act aggressively, which in and of itself can put you in trouble. If they suddenly think you are strong, or unpredictable, or have hidden resources, they back off and reassess. Getting them to change their plans and treat you more carefully can by itself alter the war. In any struggle, some things will be outside your control; you may not be able to put together a large army or defend all your weak points, but you can always affect people’s perceptions of you.

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. Then, if you make your behavior hard to read, you’ll only seem more powerful, since actions that elude interpretation attract attention, worry, and a bit of awe. In this way you will throw people off balance and onto their heels. Kept at a distance, they will be unable to tell how far you are bluffing them. Aggressors will back off. Appearance and perception—you are not someone to mess with—will become reality.

Another anecdote explaining iwao-no-mi concerns an accomplished warrior who had reached the highest stage of the art of sword fighting. 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, this great master was not interested in fighting any longer. His ability in the art of sword fighting was absolutely unquestionable; he was respected and feared by everyone. He walked the streets with a cane like a bored old man and yet wherever he went people looked at him with intense fear and respect. People were careful not to anger him and the old man was nonchalant. This is akin to having a huge rock hanging above a mountain path. People are afraid of the rock, which they believe may come down at any moment, and so they walk quietly and carefully under the rock. But the rock is actually very stable, being planted in the ground so deeply that it will never fall down. But people do not know it, and they continue to fear that it will fall down if they make any kind of loud noise as they walk under it. The rock just sits there completely indifferent to its surroundings and people’s fear and awe.

Trying to stop what seemed inevitable, Robert the Bruce evolved a novel strategy. When the English attacked, he did not take them on directly; he would have lost. Instead he hit them indirectly but where it hurt, doing exactly to the English what they were doing to him: ruining his country.

The essence of this deterrence strategy is the following: when someone attacks you or threatens you, you make it clear that he will suffer in return. He—or she—may be stronger, he may be able to win battles, but you will make him pay for each victory. Instead of taking him on directly, you hurt something he values, something close to home. You make him understand that every time he bothers you he can expect damage, even if on a smaller scale. The only way to make you stop attacking him in your irritating fashion is for him to stop attacking you. You are like a wasp on his skin: most people leave wasps alone.

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.

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.

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.