The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

In general, it is important to cultivate these directed telescopes and plant them throughout the group. They give you flexibility in the chain, room to maneuver in a generally rigid environment. The single greatest risk

Once you identify the moles in the group, you must act fast to stop them from building a power base from which to destroy your authority.

Finally, pay attention to the orders themselves—their form as well as their substance. Vague orders are worthless. As they pass from person to person, they are hopelessly altered, and your staff comes to see them as symbolizing uncertainty and indecision.

orders. On the other hand, if your commands are too specific and too narrow, you will encourage people to behave like automatons and stop thinking for themselves—which they must do when the situati...

No good can ever come of divided leadership. If you are ever offered a position in which you will have to share command, turn it down, for the enterprise will fail and you will be held responsible.

Learn from Napoleon, warfare’s greatest master: speed and adaptability come from flexible organization. Break your forces into independent groups that can operate and make decisions on their own. Make your forces elusive and unstoppable by infusing them with the spirit of the campaign, giving them a mission to accomplish, and then letting them run.

Napoleon chose the opposite way, reorganizing and decentralizing his army in such a way as to enable its parts to operate independently for a limited period of time and consequently tolerate a higher degree of uncertainty.

MILITARY MISFORTUNES: THE ANATOMY OF FAILURE IN WAR, ELIOT A. COHEN AND JOHN GOOCH, 1990

COMMAND IN WAR, MARTIN VAN CREVELD, 1985

Napoleon would give the marshals their mission, then let them accomplish it on their own. Little time was wasted with the passing of orders back and forth, and smaller armies, needing less baggage, could march with greater speed.

It takes strength of character to allow for a margin of chaos and uncertainty—to let go a little—but by decentralizing your army and segmenting it into teams, you will gain in mobility what you lose in complete control.

Smaller teams are faster, more creative, more adaptable; their officers and soldiers are more engaged, more motivated. In the end, fluidity will bring you far more power and control than petty domination.

To separate yourself from such a crowd, you need to get rid of a common misconception: the essence of strategy is not to carry out a brilliant plan that proceeds in steps; it is to put yourself in situations where you have more options than the enemy does. Instead of grasping at Option A as the single right answer, true strategy is positioning yourself to be able to do A, B, or C depending on the circumstances. That is strategic depth of thinking, as opposed to formulaic thinking.

The lesson is simple: a rigid, centralized organization locks you into linear strategies; a fluid, segmented army gives you options, endless possibilities for reaching shih. Structure is strategy—perhaps the most important strategic choice you will make.

depth. First, the staff’s structure was fluid, allowing its leaders to adapt it to their own needs. Second, it examined itself constantly and modified itself according to what it had learned. Third, it replicated its structure through the rest of the army: its officers trained the officers below them, and so on down the line. The smallest team was inculcated with the overall philosophy of the group. Finally, rather than issuing rigid orders, the staff embraced the mission command, the Auftragstaktik. By making officers and soldiers feel more creatively engaged, this tactic improved their performance and sped up the decision-making process. Mobility was written into the system.

In unifying your own hordes, find exercises to increase your troops’ knowledge of and trust in each other. This will develop implicit communication skills between them and their intuitive sense of what to do next.

The lesson is simple: do not confuse a chummy, clublike atmosphere with team spirit and cohesion. Coddling your soldiers and acting as if everyone were equal will ruin discipline and promote the creation of factions. Victory will forge stronger bonds than superficial friendliness, and victory comes from discipline, training, and ruthlessly high standards.

General William Tecumseh Sherman had a different solution: he changed his organization to suit the personalities of his men.

Like frontiersmen generally, his soldiers were restless and nomadic, so he exploited their mobility and kept his army in perpetual motion, always marching faster than his enemies could. Of all the Union armies, Sherman’s were the most feared and performed the best.

Like Sherman, do not struggle with your soldiers’ idiosyncrasies, but rather turn them into a virtue, a way to increase your potential force. Be creative with the group’s structure, keeping your mind as fluid and adaptable as the army you lead.

Even if you run a looser organization, there may be times when you will have to tighten it and give your officers less freedom. Wise generals set nothing in stone, always retaining the ability to reorganize their army to fit the times and their changing needs.

Make both rewards and punishments rare but meaningful. Remember: a motivated army can work wonders, making up for any lack of material resources.

Morale is contagious: put people in a cohesive, animated group and they naturally catch that spirit. If they rebel or revert to selfish behavior, they are easily isolated. You must establish this dynamic the minute you become the group’s leader; it can only come from the top—that is, from you.

An emotional appeal needs a setup: lower their defenses, and make them bond as a group, by putting on a show, entertaining them, telling a story. Now they have less control over their emotions and you can approach them more directly, moving them easily from laughter to anger or hatred.

Anger and punishment should be equally rare; instead your harshness should take the form of setting very high standards that few can reach. Make your soldiers compete to please you. Make them struggle to see less harshness and more kindness.

To generate this myth, you must lead your troops into as many campaigns as you can. It is wise to start out with easy battles that they can win, building up their confidence. Success alone will help bring the group together. Create symbols and slogans that fit the myth. Your soldiers will want to belong.

Allow grumblers and the chronically disaffected any leeway at all and they will spread disquiet and even panic throughout the group. As fast as you can, you must isolate them and get rid of them.

Although he was ahead of his times with his visions of mobile warfare, Cromwell was not a brilliant strategist or field tactician; his success lay in the morale and discipline of his cavalry, and the secret to those was the quality of the men he recruited—true believers in his cause.

True believers are what you want; expertise and impressive résumés matter less than character and the capacity for sacrifice. Recruits of character will give you a staff already open to your influence, making morale and discipline infinitely easier to attain.

His later career, first as a senator, then as U.S. president, obscured the foundation of his first great success: the army of devoted and tireless followers that he had carefully built up over the previous five years.

Oratory and eloquent pleas only irritate and insult us; we see right through them. Motivation is subtler than that. By advancing indirectly, setting up your emotional appeal, you will get inside instead of just scratching the surface.

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.

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.

Napoleon was famous for his well-timed promotions and for promoting soldiers on merit, making even the lowliest private feel that if he proved himself, he could someday be a marshal. But a drum major becoming a baron overnight? That was entirely beyond their experience.

Learn from the master: the way to manage people is to keep them in suspense. First create a bond between your soldiers and yourself. They respect you, admire you, even fear you a little. To make the bond stronger, hold yourself back, create a little space around yourself; you are warm yet with a touch of distance. Once the bond is forged, appear less often.

Consider the hidden costs of a war: time lost, political goodwill squandered, an embittered enemy bent on revenge. Sometimes it is better to wait, to undermine your enemies covertly rather than hitting them straight on.

Understand: 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.

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.

Understand: 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.

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.

In all this—in selection of nutriment, of place and climate, of recreation—there commands an instinct of self-preservation which manifests itself most unambiguously as an instinct for self-defense. Not to see many things, not to hear them, not to let them approach one—first piece of ingenuity, first proof that one is no accident but a necessity. The customary word for this self-defensive instinct is taste. Its imperative commands, not only to say No when Yes would be a piece of “selflessness,” but also to say No as little as possible. To separate oneself, to depart from that to which No would be required again and again. The rationale is that defensive expenditures, be they never so small, become a rule, a habit, lead to an extraordinary and perfectly superfluous impoverishment. Our largest expenditures are our most frequent small ones. Warding off, not letting come close, is an expenditure—one should not deceive oneself over this—a strength squandered on negative objectives. One can merely through the constant need to ward off become too weak any longer to defend oneself…. Another form of sagacity and self-defense consists in reacting as seldom as possible and withdrawing from situations and relationships in which one would be condemned as it were to suspend one’s freedom, one’s initiative, and become a mere reagent.

FRIEDRICH

There are things they can never do, talents they will never have, lofty goals they will never reach; that hardly bothers them. Warriors focus on what they do have, the strengths that they do possess and that they must use creatively. Knowing when to slow down, to renew, to retrench, they outlast their opponents. They play for the long term.

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.

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.

Instead of being locked in to a way of fighting, like so many generals, he constantly adjusted his ends to his means. That was the strategic advantage he used again and again.

Instead think deeply about what you have—the tools and materials you will be working with. Ground yourself not in dreams and plans but in reality: think of your own skills, any political advantage you might have, the morale of your troops, how creatively you can use the means at your disposal. Then, out of that process, let your plans and goals blossom. Not only will your strategies be more realistic, they will be more inventive and forceful. Dreaming first of what you want and then trying to find the means to reach it is a recipe for exhaustion, waste, and defeat.

Avoid enemies who have nothing to lose—they will work to bring you down whatever it costs. In the nineteenth century, Otto von Bismarck built up Prussia’s military power on the backs of weaker opponents such as the Danes.

Oddly enough, knowing your limits will expand your limits; getting the most out of what you have will let you have more.