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Step 6: Mix harshness and kindness.
Step 7: Build the group myth.
Step 8: Be ruthless with grumblers.
The Greeks met the Trojans without a tremor. Agamemnon ranged among them, commanding: “Be men, my friends. Fight with valor And with a sense of shame before your comrades. You’re less likely to be killed with a sense of shame. Running away never won glory or a fight.” THE ILIAD, HOMER, CIRCA NINTH CENTURY B.C.
Authority: The Way means inducing the people to have the same aim as the leadership, so that they will share death and share life, without fear of danger. —Sun-tzu (fourth century B.C.)
But Elizabeth’s spies had fully informed her of Spain’s plans, and she was able to send a fleet of smaller, more mobile English ships to harass the Armada on its way up the French coast, sinking its supply ships and generally creating chaos. As the commander of the English fleet, Lord Howard of Effingham, reported, “Their force is wonderful great and strong; and yet we pluck their feathers little by little.”
Interpretation 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
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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’
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Pride and anger had overtaken their powers of reason. Do not fall into such a trap; know when to stop. Do not soldier on out of frustration or pride. Too much is at stake.
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MING DYNASTY TEXT, QUOTED IN THE TAO OF SPYCRAFT,
THE WILES OF WAR: 36 MILITARY STRATEGIES FROM ANCIENT CHINA, TRANSLATED BY SUN HAICHEN, 1991
In charging ahead we limit our options and get ourselves into trouble. Patience, on the other hand, particularly in war, pays unlimited dividends: it allows us to sniff out opportunities, to time a counterblow that will catch the enemy by surprise. A person who can lie back and wait for the right moment to take action will almost always have an advantage over those who give in to their natural impatience.
THE BOOK OF FIVE RINGS, MIYAMOTO MUSASHI, 1584–1645
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.
In sixteenth-century Japan, there emerged a novel way of fighting called Shinkage:
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.
A key principle of counterattack is never to see a situation as hopeless. No matter how strong your enemies seem, they have vulnerabilities you can prey upon and use to develop a counterattack. Your own weakness can become a strength if you play it right; with a little clever manipulation, you can always turn things around. That is how you must look at every apparent problem and difficulty.
Retreat is not to be confused with flight. Flight means saving oneself under any circumstances, whereas retreat is a sign of strength. We must be careful not to miss the right moment while we are in full possession of power and position.
THE I CHING, CHINA, CIRCA EIGHTH CENTURY B.C.
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.
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.
Injuring all of a man’s ten fingers is not as effective as chopping off one. —Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976)
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.
Six in the fourth place means: The army retreats. No blame. In face of a superior enemy, with whom it would be hopeless to engage in battle, an orderly retreat is the only correct procedure, because it will save the army from defeat and disintegration. It is by no means a sign of courage or strength to insist upon engaging in a hopeless struggle regardless of circumstances. THE I CHING, CHINA, CIRCA EIGHTH CENTURY B.C.
Advancing is not always good; retreating is not always weak. In fact, in moments of danger or trouble, refusing to fight is often the best strategy: by disengaging from the enemy, you lose nothing that is valuable in the long run and gain time to turn inward, rethink your ideas, separate the true believers from the hangers-on. Time becomes your ally. By doing nothing outwardly, you gain inner strength, which will translate into tremendous power later, when it is time to act. Space I can recover. Time, never. —Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)
What I particularly admire in Alexander is, not so much his campaigns…but his political sense. He possessed the art of winning the affection of the people. —Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)
What sets grand strategists apart is the ability to look more deeply into both themselves and others, to understand and learn from the past and to have a clear sense of the future, to the extent that it can be predicted. Simply, they see more, and their extended vision lets them carry out plans over sometimes-long periods of time—so long that those around them may not even realize that they have a plan in mind. They strike at the roots of a problem, not at its symptoms, and hit their mark cleanly.
In ancient times, strategists and historians from Sun-tzu to Thucydides became conscious of this recurring self-destructive pattern in warfare and began to work out more rational ways to fight. The first step was to think beyond the immediate battle. Supposing you won victory, where would it leave you—better off or worse? To answer that question, the logical step was to think ahead, to the third and fourth battles on, which connected like links in a chain.
Military history shows that the key to grand strategy—the thing that separates it from simple, garden-variety strategy—is its particular quality of forethought. Grand strategists think and plan further into the future before taking action. Nor is their planning simply a matter of accumulating knowledge and information; it involves looking at the world with a dispassionate eye, thinking in terms of the campaign, planning indirect, subtle steps along the way whose purpose may only gradually become visible to others. Not only does this kind of planning fool and disorient the enemy; for the
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Blinded by their obsession with stopping the spread of communism, they failed to note the far deeper influences of culture and religion on the North Vietnamese way of fighting. Theirs was a grand-strategic blunder of the highest order.
THE AGING LION AND THE FOX A lion who was getting old and could no longer obtain his food by force decided that he must resort to trickery instead. So he retired to a cave and lay down pretending to be ill. Thus, whenever any animals came to his cave to visit him, he ate them all as they appeared. When many animals had disappeared, a fox figured out what was happening. He went to see the lion but stood at a safe distance outside the cave and asked him how he was. “Oh, not very well,” said the lion. “But why don’t you come in?” But the fox said: “I would come inside if I hadn’t seen that a lot
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Macnaghten had the information but refused to see it. Instead he projected onto the Afghans the values of an Englishman, which he mistakenly assumed were universal. Blinded by narcissism, he misread every signal along the way. As a result his strategic moves—leaving the British army occupying Kabul, halving the Ghilzyes’ stipend, trying not to overplay his hand in putting down the rebellions—were exactly the opposite of what was needed. And on that fateful day when he literally lost his head, he made the ultimate miscalculation, imagining that money and an appeal to self-interest would buy
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Granting that people generally acquire fixed habits early in life, a man’s end may therefore be foreseen by midlife: “Someone who is still disliked at forty years of age will end by being so.” RALPH D. SAWYER, THE TAO OF SPYCRAFT, 1998
Metternich’s genius was to recognize the appropriate target for his strategy: not Napoleon’s armies, which Austria could not hope to defeat—Napoleon was a general for the ages—but Napoleon’s mind. The prince understood that even the most powerful of men remains human and has human weaknesses. By entering Napoleon’s private life, being deferential and subordinate, Metternich could find his weaknesses and hurt him as no army could. By getting closer to him emotionally—through the emperor’s sister Caroline, through the Archduchess Marie Louise, through their convivial meetings—he could choke him
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War is not an act of the will aimed at inanimate matter, as it is in the mechanical arts…. Rather, [it] is an act of the will aimed at a living entity that reacts. —Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831)
To the extent that you can drop your self-interest and see people for who they are, divorced from your desires, you will become more sensitive to their signals.
War is above all else a struggle over who can control the actions of the other side to a greater extent. Military geniuses such as Hannibal, Napoleon, and Erwin Rommel discovered that the best way to attain control is to determine the overall pace, direction, and shape of the war itself. This means getting enemies to fight according to your tempo, luring them onto terrain that is unfamiliar to them and suited to you, playing to your strengths.
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. You do not wait for opportunities to open up; you make them yourself. If you are the weaker side, this will often more than level the playing field. Keeping your enemies on the defensive and in react mode will have a demoralizing effect on them.
One who excels at warfare compels men and is not compelled by others. —Sun-tzu (fourth century B.C.)
THE WILES OF WAR: 36 MILITARY STRATEGIES FROM ANCIENT CHINA, TRANSLATED BY SUN HAICHEN, 1991
And beneath the display is the support on which power rests—its “center of gravity.” The phrase is von Clausewitz’s, who elaborated it as “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends.” This is the part that governs the whole, a kind of nerve center. 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.
In crafting a strategy to defeat the United States in the Vietnam War, General Vo Nguyen Giap determined that the real center of gravity in the American democracy was the political support of its citizens. Given that support—the kind of support the military had had during World War II—the country could prosecute a war with the utmost effectiveness. Without that support, though, the effort was doomed.
As your army faces the enemy and the enemy appears powerful, try to attack the enemy in one particular spot. If you are successful in crumbling that one particular spot, leave that spot and attack the next, and so on and so forth, as if you were going down a winding road. —Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645)
You must ask yourself this question: 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. In war itself—blood war, not the interpersonal wars of everyday life—frontal battles have become rare. Military officers have come to realize that direct attack increases resistance, while indirection lowers it.
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.
The ultimate evolution of strategy is toward more and more indirection. An opponent who cannot see where you are heading is at a severe disadvantage. The more angles you use—like a cue ball in billiards caroming off several sides of the table—the harder it will be for your opponents to defend themselves. Whenever possible, calculate your moves to produce this caroming effect. It is the perfect disguise for your aggression.
THE ANATOMY OF THE ZULU ARMY, IAN KNIGHT, 1995
Give your enemy dilemmas, not problems. Most of your opponents are likely to be clever and resourceful; if your maneuvers simply present them with a problem, they will inevitably solve it. But a dilemma is different: whatever they do, however they respond—retreat, advance, stay still—they are still in trouble.
So to win a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the highest excellence; the highest excellence is to subdue the enemy’s army without fighting at all. —Sun-tzu (fourth century B.C.)
