The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

What you need to pay attention to is not simply the content of your communication but the form—the way you lead people to the conclusions you desire, rather than telling them the message in so many words. If you want people to change a bad habit, for example, much more effective than simply trying to persuade them to stop is to show them—perhaps by mirroring their bad behavior in some way—how annoying that habit feels to other people.

If you want to make people with low self-esteem feel better about themselves, praise has a superficial effect; instead you must prod them into accomplishing something tangible, giving them a real experience. That will translate into a much deeper feeling of confidence. If you want to communicate an important idea, you must not preach; instead make your readers or listeners connect the dots and come to the conclusion on their own. Make them internalize the thought you are trying to communicate; make it seem to emerge from their own minds. Such indirect communication has the power to penetrate deep behind people’s defenses.

ending. But you can use details here and there to say something else. If you are writing a novel, for instance, you might put your dangerous opinions in the mouth of the villain but express them with such energy and color that they become more interesting than the speeches of the hero. Not everyone will understand your innuendos and layers of meaning, but some certainly will, at least those with the proper discernment; and mixed messages will excite your audience: indirect forms of expression—silence, innuendo, loaded details, deliberate blunders—make people feel as if they were participating, uncovering the meaning on their own. The more that people participate in the communication process, the more deeply they internalize its ideas.

Communication that does not advance its cause or produce a desired result is just self-indulgent talk, reflecting no more than people’s love of their own voice and of playing the role of the moral crusader. The effective truth of what they have written or said is that nothing has been changed. The ability to reach people and alter their opinions is a serious affair, as serious and strategic as war. You must be harsher on yourself and on others: failure to communicate is the fault not of the dull-witted audience but of the unstrategic communicator.

A war can only really be fought against an enemy who shows himself. By infiltrating your opponents’ ranks, working from within to bring them down, you give them nothing to see or react against—the ultimate advantage. From within, you also learn their weaknesses and open up possibilities of sowing internal dissension. So hide your hostile intentions. To take something you want, do not fight those who have it, but rather join them—then either slowly make it your own or wait for the moment to stage a coup d’état. No structure can stand for long when it rots from within.

The results of Canaris’s work from the inside are astounding: one man played a major role in saving England, Spain, and Italy from disaster, arguably turning the tide of the war. The resources of the German war machine were essentially at his disposal, to disrupt and derail its efforts.

As the story of Canaris demonstrates, if there is something you want to fight or destroy, it is often best to repress your desire to act out your hostility, revealing your position and letting the other side know your intentions. What you gain in publicity, and perhaps in feeling good about expressing yourself openly, you lose in a curtailment of your power to cause real damage, particularly if the enemy is strong.

It is hard to make your way in the world alone. Alliances can help, but if you are starting out, it is hard to get the right people interested in an alliance with you; there is nothing in it for them. The wisest strategy is often to join the group that can best serve your long-term interests, or the one with which you have the most affinity. Instead of trying to conquer this group from the outside, you burrow your way into it. As an insider you can gather valuable information about how it functions and particularly about its members’ hypocrisies and weaknesses—knowledge you can use to wage insidious intraorganizational warfare. From the inside you can divide and conquer.

The conventional strategy against the fortress was to scale or breach its walls, using siege engines and battering rams. Often that meant first besieging it, creating around it circles known as “lines of circumvallation and contravallation” that would prevent supplies and reinforcements from coming in and the defenders from leaving. The city’s inhabitants would slowly starve and weaken, making it possible eventually to breach the walls and take the castle. These sieges tended to be quite long and bloody.

Over the centuries, however, certain enlightened strategists hit upon a different way to bring down the walls. Their strategy was based on a simple premise: the apparent strength of the fortress is an illusion, for behind its walls are people who are trapped, afraid, even desperate. The city’s leaders have essentially run out of options; they can only put their faith in the fortress’s architecture. To lay siege to these walls is to mistake the appearance of strength for reality. If in fact the walls are hiding great weakness within, then the proper strategy is to bypass them and aim for the interior. This can be done literally, by digging tunnels beneath the walls, undermining their strength—a conventional military strategy. A better, more devious route is to infiltrate people inside them or to work with the city’s disaffected inhabitants. This is known as “opening an inner front”—finding a group on the inside who will work on your behalf to spread discontent and will eventually betray the fortress into your hands, sparing you a long siege.

The basic principle here is that it is easiest to topple a structure—a wall, a group, a defensive mind—from the inside out. When something begins to rot or fall apart from within, it collapses of its own weight—a far better way to bring it down than ramming yourself against its walls. In attacking any group, the lotus strategist thinks first of opening an inner front. Confederates on the inside will provide valuable intelligence on the enemy’s vulnerabilities. They will silently and subtly sabotage him. They will spread internal dissension and division. The strategy can weaken the enemy to the point where you can finish him off with a penetrating blow; it can also bring down the enemy in and of itself.

A variation on the lotus strategy is to befriend your enemies, worming your way into their hearts and minds. As your targets’ friend, you will naturally learn their needs and insecurities, the soft interior they try so hard to hide. Their guard will come down with a friend. And even later on, when you play out your treacherous intentions, the lingering resonance of your friendship will still confuse them, letting you keep on manipulating them by toying with their emotions or pushing them into overreactions. For a more immediate effect, you can try a sudden act of kindness and generosity that gets people to lower their defenses—the Trojan Horse strategy. (For ten long years, the Greeks battered the walls of Troy to no effect; the simple gift of a wooden horse let them sneak a few men into Troy and open the gates from within.)

The lotus strategy is widely applicable. When confronted by something difficult or thorny, do not be distracted or discouraged by its formidable outer appearance; think your way into the soft core, the center from which the problem blossoms. Perhaps the source of your problem is a particular person; perhaps it is yourself and your own stale ideas; perhaps it is the dysfunctional organization of a group. Knowing the problem’s core gives you great power to change it from the inside out. Your first thought must a...

There are a few precautions you can take. Keep the number of conspirators as small as possible. Involve them in the details of the plot only as necessary; the less they know, the less they have to blab. Revealing the schedule of your plan as late as possible before you all act will give them no time to back out. Then, once the plan is described, stick to it. Nothing sows more doubts in conspirators’ minds than last-minute changes. Even given all this insurance, keep in mind that most conspiracies fail and, in their failure, create all kinds of unintended consequences.

Even the successful plot to assassinate Julius Caesar led not to the restoration of the Roman Republic, as the conspirators intended, but eventually to the undemocratic regime of the emperor Augustus. Too few conspirators and you lack the strength to control the consequences; too many and the conspiracy will be exposed before it bears fruit.

There are always likely to be disgruntled people in your own group who will be liable to turning against you from the inside. The worst mistake is to be paranoid, suspecting one and all and trying to monitor their every move. Your only real safeguard against conspiracies and saboteurs is to keep your troops satisfied, engaged in their work, and united by their cause. They will tend to police themselves and turn in any grumblers who are trying to foment trouble from within. It is only in unhealthy and decaying bodies that cancerous cells can take root.

Gandhi was a deceptively clever strategist whose frail, even saintly appearance constantly misled his adversaries into underestimating him. The key to any successful strategy is to know both one’s enemy and oneself, and Gandhi, educated in London, understood the English well. He judged them to be essentially liberal people who saw themselves as upholding traditions of political freedom and civilized behavior. This self-image—though riddled with contradictions, as indicated by their sometimes brutal behavior in their colonies—was deeply important to the English. The Indians, on the other hand, had been humiliated by many years of subservience to their English overlords. They were largely unarmed and in no position to engage in an insurrection or guerrilla war. If they rebelled violently, as other colonies had done, the English would crush them and claim to be acting out of self-defense; their civilized self-image would suffer no damage. The use of nonviolence, on the other hand—an ideal and philosophy that Gandhi deeply valued and one that had a rich tradition in India—would exploit to perfection the English reluctance to respond with force unless absolutely necessary. To attack people who were protesting peacefully would not jibe with the Englishman’s sense of his own moral purity. Made to feel confused and guilty, the English would be paralyzed with ambivalence and would relinquish the strategic initiative.

Remember: people are willful and perverse. Opposing them directly or trying to change their ideas will often have the contrary effect. A passive, compliant front, on the other hand, gives them nothing to fight against or resist. Going along with their energy gives you the power to divert it in the direction you want, as if you were channeling a river rather than trying to dam it. Meanwhile the aggressive part of your strategy takes the form of infecting people with subtle changes in their ideas and with an energy that will make them act on your behalf. Their inability to get what you are doing in focus gives you room to work behind the scenes, checking their progress, isolating them from other people, luring them into dangerous moves that make them dependent on your support. They think you are their ally. Behind a pleasant, compliant, even weak front, you are pulling the strings.

The key to using passive aggression as a conscious, positive strategy is the front you present to your enemies. They must never be able to detect the sullen, defiant thoughts that are going on inside of you.

Remember: it is never wise to seem too eager for power, wealth, or fame. Your ambition may carry you to the top, but you will not be liked and will find your unpopularity a problem. Better to disguise your maneuvers for power: you do not want it but have found it forced upon you. Being passive and making others come to you is a brilliant form of aggression.

Subtle acts of sabotage can work wonders in the passive-aggressive strategy because you can camouflage them under your friendly, compliant front. That was how the film director Alfred Hitchcock would outmaneuver the meddlesome producer David O. Selznick, who used to alter the script to his liking, then show up on set to make sure it was shot the way he wanted

Passive aggression is so common in daily life that you have to know how to play defense as well as offense. By all means use the strategy yourself; it is too effective to drop from your armory. But you must also know how to deal with those semiconscious passive-aggressive types so prevalent in the modern world, recognizing what they are up to before they get under your skin and being able to defend yourself against this strange form of attack.

There are, however, stronger, more harmful versions of passive aggression, acts of sabotage that do real damage. A colleague is warm to your face but says things behind your back that cause you problems. You let someone into your life who proceeds to steal something valuable of yours. An employee takes on an important job for you but does it slowly and badly. These types do harm but are excellent at avoiding any kind of blame. Their modus operandi is to create enough doubt that they were the ones who did the aggressive act; it is never their fault. Somehow they are innocent bystanders, helpless, the real victims in the whole dynamic. Their denials of responsibility are confusing: you suspect they have done something, but you cannot prove it, or, worse, if they are really skillful, you feel guilty for even thinking them at fault. And if in your frustration you lash out at them, you pay a high price: they will focus attention on your angry, aggressive response, your overreaction, distracting your thoughts from the passive-aggressive maneuvers that got you so irritated in the first place. The guilt you feel is a sign of the power they have over you. Indeed, you can virtually recognize the harmful variety of passive aggression by the strength of emotions it churns up in you: not superficial annoyance but confusion, paranoia, insecurity, and anger. To defeat the passive-aggressive warrior, you must first work on yourself. This means being acutely aware of the blame-shifting tac...

The reversal of passive aggression is aggressive passivity, presenting an apparently hostile face while inwardly staying calm and taking no unfriendly action. The purpose here is intimidation: perhaps you know you are the weaker of the two sides and hope to discourage your enemies from attacking you by presenting a blustery front. Taken in by your appearance, they will find it hard to believe that you do not intend to do anything. In general, presenting yourself as the opposite of what you really are and intend can be a useful way of disguising your strategies.

Terror is the ultimate way to paralyze a people’s will to resist and destroy their ability to plan a strategic response. Such power is gained through sporadic acts of violence that create a constant feeling of threat, incubating a fear that spreads throughout the public sphere. The goal in a terror campaign is not battlefield victory but causing maximum chaos and provoking the other side into desperate overreaction. Melting invisibly into the population, tailoring their actions for the mass media, the strategists of terror create the illusion that they are everywhere and therefore that they are far more powerful than they really are. It is a war of nerves. The victims of terror must not succumb to fear or even anger; to plot the most effective counterstrategy, they must stay balanced. In the face of a terror campaign, one’s rationality is the last line of defense.

Understand: we are all extremely susceptible to the emotions of those around us. It is often hard for us to perceive how deeply we are affected by the moods that can pass through a group. This is what makes the use of terror so effective and so dangerous: with a few well-timed acts of violence, a handful of assassins can spark all kinds of corrosive thoughts and uncertainties. The weakest members of the target group will succumb to the greatest fear, spreading rumors and anxieties that slowly overcome the rest. The strong may respond angrily and violently to the terror campaign, but that only shows how influenced they are by the panic; they are reacting rather than strategizing—a sign of weakness, not strength. In normal circumstances individuals who become frightened in some way can often regain their mental balance over time, especially when they are around others who are calm. But this is almost impossible within a panicked group.

a handful of terrorists can hold an entire empire hostage with a few well-calibrated blows against the group psyche. And once the group’s leaders succumb to the emotional pull—whether by surrendering or launching an unstrategic counterattack—the success of the terror campaign is complete.

Victory is gained not by the number killed but by the number frightened. —Arab proverb

In essence, this is terror: an intense, overpowering fear that we cannot manage or get rid of in the normal way. There is too much uncertainty, too many bad things that can happen to us.

During World War II, when the Germans bombed London, psychologists noted that when the bombing was frequent and somewhat regular, the people of the city became numb to it; they grew accustomed to the noise, discomfort, and carnage. But when the bombing was irregular and sporadic, fear became terror. It was much harder to deal with the uncertainty of when the next one would land. It is a law of war and strategy that in the search for an advantage, anything will be tried and tested. And so it is that groups and individuals, seeing the immense power that terror can have over humans, have found a way to use terror as a strategy. People are crafty, resourceful, and adaptable creatures. The way to paralyze their will and destroy their capacity to think straight is to consciously create uncertainty, confusion, and an unmanageable fear.

Such strategic terror can take the form of exemplary acts of destruction. The masters of this art were the Mongols. They would level a few cities here and there, in as horrible a manner as possible. The terrifying legend of the Mongol Horde spread quickly. At its very approach to a city, panic would ensue as the inhabitants could only imagine the worst. More often than not, the city would surrender without a fight—the Mongol...

No one knew who would be next. Although the radicals were relatively small in number, by creating such uncertainty and fear they were able to paralyze their opponents’ will. Paradoxically, the Reign of Terror—which gives us the first recorded instance of the use of the words “terrorism” and “terrorist”—produced a degree of stability.

Although terror as a strategy can be employed by large armies and indeed whole states, it is most effectively practiced by those small in number. The reason is simple: the use of terror usually requires a willingness to kill innocent civilians in the name of a greater good and for a strategic purpose. For centuries, with a few notable exceptions such as the Mongols, military leaders were unwilling to go so far. Meanwhile a state that inflicted mass terror on its own populace would unleash demons and create a chaos it might find hard to control. But small groups have no such problems. Being so few in number, they cannot hope to wage a conventional war or even a guerrilla campaign. Terror is their strategy of last resort. Taking on a much larger enemy, they are often desperate, and they have a cause to which they are utterly committed. Ethical considerations pale in comparison. And creating chaos is part of their strategy.

Yet for all its strengths, terrorism also has limitations that have proved the death of many a violent campaign, and those opposing it must know and exploit this. The strategy’s main weakness is the terrorists’ lack of ties to the public or to a real political base.

Terrorism is usually born out of feelings of weakness and despair, combined with a conviction that the cause one stands for, whether public or personal, is worth both the inflicting and the suffering of any kind of damage. A world in which the faces of power are often large and apparently invulnerable only makes the strategy more appealing. In this sense terrorism can become a kind of style, a mode of behavior that filters down into society itself.

To consider the 9/11 attack a failure because it did not achieve Al Qaeda’s ultimate goal of pushing the United States out of the Middle East or spurring a pan-Islamic revolution is to misread their strategy and to judge them by the standards of conventional warfare. Terrorists quite often have a large goal, but they know that the chances of reaching it in one blow are fairly negligible. They just do what they can to start off their chain reaction. Their enemy is the status quo, and their success can be measured by the impact of their actions as it plays out over the years.

As a frustrated Napoleon Bonaparte said when he was struggling to deal with German nationalist groups resorting to acts of terror against the French, “A sect cannot be destroyed by cannonballs.”

The threat was real, Churchill and de Gaulle acknowledged; security measures were being taken; but the important thing was to channel public emotions away from fear and into something positive. The leaders turned the attacks into rallying points, using them to unite a fractured public—a crucial issue, for polarization is always a goal of terrorism. Instead of trying to mount a dramatic counterstrike, Churchill and de Gaulle included the public in their strategic thinking and made the citizenry active participants in the battle against these destructive forces.

While working to halt the psychological damage from an attack, the leader must do everything possible to thwart a further strike. Terrorists often work sporadically and with no pattern, partly because unpredictability is frightening, partly because they are often in fact too weak to mount a sustained effort. Time must be taken to patiently uproot the terrorist threat. More valuable than military force here is solid intelligence, infiltration of the enemy ranks (working to find dissidents from within), and slowly and steadily drying up the money and resources on which the terrorist depends. At the same time, it is important to occupy the moral high ground. As the victim of the attack, you have the advantage here, but you may lose it if you counterattack aggressively. The high ground is not a minor luxury but a critical strategic ploy: world opinion and alliances with other nations will prove crucial in isolating the terrorists and preventing them from sowing division. All this requires the willingness to wage the war over the course of many years, and mostly behind the scenes. Patient resolve and the refusal to overreact will serve as their own deterrents. Show you mean business and make your enemies feel it, not through the blustery front used for political purposes—this is not a sign of strength—but through the cool and calculating strategies you employ to corner them.