More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
THE MIND OF WAR, GRANT T. HAMMOND, 2001
People respond most directly to what they see, to what is most visible to their eyes. If you seem clever—if you seem deceptive—their guard will be up and it will be impossible to mislead them. Instead you need to present a front that does the opposite—disarms suspicions.
In general, as strategists advocated in the days of ancient China, you should present a face to the world that promises the opposite of what you are actually planning. If you are getting ready to attack, seem unprepared for a fight or too comfortable and relaxed to be plotting war.
They like to see events conforming to their expectations by fitting into a pattern or scheme, for schemes, whatever their actual content, comfort us by suggesting that the chaos of life is predictable. This mental habit offers excellent ground for deception, using a strategy that Machiavelli calls “acclimatization”—deliberately creating some pattern to make your enemies believe that your next action will follow true to form. Having lulled them into complacency, you now have room to work against their expectations, break the pattern, and take them by surprise.
The more you can make them dig for their information, the more deeply they will delude themselves.
Finally Meinhertzhagen sent his opponent a letter. He thanked the Arab for his services as a double agent and for the valuable information he had supplied to the British. He enclosed a large sum of money and entrusted the letter’s delivery to his most incompetent agent. Sure enough, the Germans captured this agent en route and found the letter. The agent, under torture, assured them that his mission was genuine—because he believed it was; Meinhertzhagen had kept him out of the loop. The agent was not acting, so he was more than believable. The Germans quietly had the Arab shot.
Your tendency is to try so hard to seem natural and sincere that it stands out and can be read. That is why it is so effective to spread your deceptions through people whom you keep ignorant of the truth—people who believe the lie themselves. When working with double agents of this kind, it is always wise to initially feed them some true information—this will establish the credibility of the intelligence they pass along. After that they will be the perfect conduits for your lies.
If you are trying to mislead your enemies, it is often better to concoct something ambiguous and hard to read, as opposed to an outright deception—that deception can be uncovered and enemies can turn their discovery to their advantage, especially if you think they are still fooled and act under that belief. You are the one doubly deceived. By creating something that is simply ambiguous, though, by making everything blurry, there is no deception to uncover. They are simply lost in a mist of uncertainty, where truth and falsehood, good and bad, all merge into one, and it is impossible to get
...more
If you become known as a deceiver, try being straightforward and honest for a change. That will confuse people—because they won’t know how to read you, your honesty will become a higher form of deception.
Unfold the extraordinary out of the ordinary. To Sun-tzu and the ancient Chinese, doing something extraordinary had little effect without a setup of something ordinary. You had to mix the two—to fix your opponents’ expectations with some banal, ordinary maneuver, a comfortable pattern that they would then expect you to follow.
THE WILES OF WAR: 36 MILITARY STRATEGIES FROM ANCIENT CHINA, TRANSLATED BY SUN HAICHEN, 1991
This is how Napoleon declined as a strategist: he came to rely more on the size of his army and on its superiority in weapons than on novel strategies and fluid maneuvers. He lost his taste for the spirit of strategy and succumbed to the growing weight of his accumulating years.
Adapting Hannibal’s method to your own daily battles will bring you untold power. Using your knowledge of your enemies’ psychology and way of thinking, you must calculate your opening moves to be what they least expect. The line of least expectation is the line of least resistance; people cannot defend themselves against what they cannot foresee.
Going without a security blanket is dangerous and uncomfortable, but the power to startle people with the unexpected is more than worth the risk.
Our natural tendency at such times is to be conservative, which only makes it easier for our enemies to anticipate our moves and crush us with their superior strength; we play into their hands. It is when the tide is against us that we must forget the books, the precedents, the conventional wisdom, and risk everything on the untried and unexpected.
First, it is wise to pick a fight with an enemy that you can portray as authoritarian, hypocritical, and power-hungry. Using all available media, you strike first with a moral offensive against the opponent’s points of vulnerability. You make your language strong and appealing to the masses, and craft it, if you can, to give people the opportunity to express a hostility they already feel. You quote your enemies’ own words back at them to make your attacks seem fair, almost disinterested. You create a moral taint that sticks to them like glue. Baiting them into a heavy-handed counterattack will
...more
THE MIND OF WAR: JOHN BOYD AND AMERICAN SECURITY, GRANT T. HAMMOND, 2001
If you have to do something nasty and not in harmony with your stated position or public image, use a cat’s-paw—some agent to act for you and hide your role in the action. If that is not possible, think ahead and plan a moral self-defense. At all costs avoid actions that carry the taint of hypocrisy.
He needed battles as a chance to put his genius in play. By refusing to meet him in battle, Alexander could frustrate him and lure him into a void: vast but empty lands without food or forage, empty cities with nothing to plunder, empty negotiations, empty time in which nothing happened, and finally the dead of winter. Russia’s harsh climate would make a shambles of Napoleon’s organizational genius.
We find people who are deliberately elusive, who evade contact, extremely disconcerting. Whether because we want to grab them and pin them down or because we are so annoyed with them that we want to hit them, they pull us toward them, so that either way the elusive one controls the dynamic. Some people take this further, attacking us in ways that are evasive and unpredictable.
The primary consideration should always be whether a guerrilla-style campaign is appropriate for the circumstances you are facing. It is especially effective, for instance, against an opponent who is aggressive yet clever—a man like Napoleon. These types cannot stand lack of contact with an enemy. They live to maneuver, outwit, and outhit. Having nothing to strike at neutralizes their cleverness, and their aggression becomes their downfall. It is interesting to note that this strategy works in love as well as in war and that here, too, Napoleon was its victim: it was by a guerrilla-style
...more
Large bureaucracies are often perfect targets for a guerrilla strategy for the same reason: they are capable of responding only in the most orthodox manner. In any event, guerrilla warriors generally need an opponent that is large, slow-footed, and with bullying tendencies. Once you have determined that a guerrilla war
Use the media to goad your enemies, getting them to disperse their energies in defending themselves while you watch, or find a new target to raid and ambush. Lacking a real battle to deal with, their frustration will mount and lead them to costly mistakes. In conventional warfare the way
Let them take key positions that give them the illusion of success. They will hold on to them tenaciously as your raids and pinprick attacks grow in number. Then, as they weaken, increase the pace of these attacks. Let them hope, let them think it is all still worth it, until the trap is set. Then break their illusion.
You must refuse them the freedom of time and space they need for their mayhem. You must work to isolate them—physically, politically, and morally. Above all, you must never respond in a graduated manner, by stepping up your forces bit by bit, as the United States did in the Vietnam War. You need a quick, decisive victory over such an opponent. If this seems impossible, it is better to pull out while you can than to sink into the protracted war the guerrilla fighter is trying to lure you into.
King Louis XI would eventually become known as the Spider King, infamous for the elaborate webs he would weave to ensnare his opponents. His genius was to think far ahead and plot an indirect path to his goals—and his greatest goal was to transform France from a feudal state into a unified great power. Burgundy was his largest obstacle, and one he could not meet head-on: his army was weaker than Charles’s, and he did not want to provoke a civil war. Before he became king, though, Louis had fought a short campaign against the Swiss and had seen the brutal efficiency with which their phalanxes
...more
A common mistake is to think that the more allies we have, the better; but quality is more important than quantity.
No one can get far in life without allies. The trick, however, is to recognize the difference between false allies and real ones. A false alliance is created out of an immediate emotional need. It requires that you give up something essential about yourself and makes it impossible for you to make your own decisions. A true alliance is formed out of mutual self-interest, each side supplying what the other cannot get alone. It does not require you to fuse your own identity with that of a group or pay attention to everyone else’s emotional needs. It allows you autonomy.
Nor should we take it personally when we realize that someone else is using us; using people is a human and social necessity. Next, with this understanding in mind, you must learn to make these necessary alliances strategic ones, aligning yourself with people who can give you something you cannot get on your own. This requires that you resist the temptation to let your decisions about alliances be governed by your emotions; your emotional needs are what your personal life is for, and you must leave them behind when you enter the arena of social battle. The alliances that will help you most are
...more
If Chin faced an enemy that had a key ally, it would work first to disrupt the alliance—sowing dissension, spreading rumors, courting one of the two sides with money—until the alliance fell apart.
The key to playing the game is to recognize who can best advance your interests at that moment. This need not be the most obviously powerful person on the scene, the person who seems to be able to do most for you; alliances that meet specific needs or answer particular deficiencies are often more useful. (Grand alliances between two great powers are generally the least effective.)
Recognizing this years in advance, he cultivated an alliance that bewildered his enemies. As an ambitious young congressional assistant in Washington, Lyndon Johnson realized he lacked all kinds of powers and talents to get him to the top. He became a clever user of other people’s talents. Realizing the importance of information in Congress, he made a point of befriending and allying himself with those at key positions—whether high or low—in the information chain.
A key component of the Alliance Game is the ability to manipulate other people’s alliances and even destroy them, sowing dissension among your opponents so that they fight among themselves. Breaking your enemy’s alliances is as good as making alliances yourself.
Your focus here is on stirring up mistrust. Make one partner suspicious of the other, spread rumors, cast doubts on people’s motives, be friendly to one ally to make the other jealous. Divide and conquer. In this way you will create a tide of emotions, hitting first this side, then that, until the alliance totters. Now former members of the alliance will feel vulnerable. Through manipulation or outright invitation, make them turn to you for protection.
When fighting large groups of allies, as he often did, Napoleon always attacked first the weak link, the junior partner. Collapse here could make the whole fabric of the alliance fall apart. He would also seek quick victory in battle, even a small one, for no force is more easily discouraged by a defeat than an allied one.
You can often recognize them by their overeagerness to pursue you: they will make the first move, trying to blind you with alluring offers and glittering promises. To protect yourself from being used in a negative way, always look at the tangible benefits you will gain from this alliance. If the benefits seem vague or hard to realize, think twice about joining forces.
Be wary of people who speak well, have apparently charming personalities, and talk about friendship, loyalty, and selflessness: they are most often con artists trying to prey on your emotions. Keep your eye on the interests involved on both sides, and never let yourself be distracted from them.
Understand: what will yield the greatest effects in the game of one-upmanship is a subtle disturbance in your opponents’ mood and mind-set. Be too direct—make an insulting comment, an obvious threat—and you wake them to the danger you represent, stir their competitive juices, bring out the best in them. Instead you want to bring out the worst.
THE COMPLETE UPMANSHIP, STEPHEN POTTER 1950
The first bite—always the most important—was to gain himself public exposure with first one BBC broadcast, then, through clever maneuvering, an ongoing series. Here, exploiting his keen dramatic instincts and hypnotic voice, he quickly established a larger-than-life presence. This allowed him to create and build up his military group Fighting France.
A piecemeal approach to conquest of anything is perfect for these political times, the ultimate mask of aggression. The key to making it work is to have a clear sense of your objective, the empire you want to forge, and then to identify the small, outlying areas of the empire that you will first gobble up. Each bite must have a logic in an overall strategy but must be small enough that no one senses your larger intentions.
The truth is that most people are conservative by nature. Desperate to keep what they have, they dread the unforeseen consequences and situations that conflict inevitably brings. They hate confrontation and try to avoid it. (That is why so many people resort to passive aggression to get what they want.)
There are likely to be many more reasons for leaving you alone than for fighting over something small. You have played to your enemy’s conservative instincts, which are generally stronger than their acquisitive ones. And soon your ownership of this property becomes a fait accompli, part of the status quo, which is always best left alone.
If you reveal your intentions before taking action, you will open yourself to a slew of criticisms, analyses, and questions: “How dare you think of taking that bite! Be happy with what you have!” It is part of people’s conservatism to prefer endless discussion to action.
slowly. The piecemeal strategy is the perfect antidote to our natural impatience: it focuses us on something small and immediate, a first bite, then how and where a second bite can get us closer to our ultimate objective.
It forces us to think in terms of a process, a sequence of connected steps and actions, no matter how small, which has immeasurable psychological benefits as well. Too often the magnitude of our desires overwhelms us; taking that small first step makes them seem realizable. There is nothing more therapeutic than action.
In plotting this strategy, be attentive to sudden opportunities and to your enemies’ momentary crises and weaknesses. Do not be tempted, however, to try to take anything large; bite off more than you can chew and you will be consumed with problems...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
To gain control of any project, you must be willing to make time your ally. If you start out with complete control, you sap people’s spirit and stir up envy and resentment. So begin by generating the illusion that you’re all working together on a team effort; then slowly nibble away. If in the process you make people angry, do not worry. That’s just a sign that their emotions are engaged, which means they can be manipulated.
Give the impression your objectives are limited by taking a substantial pause between bites—exploiting people’s short attention spans—while proclaiming to one and all that you are a person of peace. In fact, it would be the height of wisdom to make your bite a little larger upon occasion and then giving back some of what you have taken.
If they are tougher and more ambitious, like Frederick the Great, that forceful response becomes more crucial still. Letting them get away with their bites, however small, is too dangerous—nip them in the bud.
