The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

Understand: in life as in war, nothing ever happens just as you expect it to. People’s responses are odd or surprising, your staff commits outrageous acts of stupidity, on and on. If you meet the dynamic situations of life with plans that are rigid, if you think of only holding static positions, if you rely on technology to control any friction that comes your way, you are doomed: events will change faster than you can adjust to them, and chaos will enter your system.

The greatest power you can have in any conflict is the ability to confuse your opponent about your intentions. Confused opponents do not know how or where to defend themselves; hit them with a surprise attack and they are pushed off balance and fall. To accomplish this you must maneuver with just one purpose: to keep them guessing.

Named for Col. John Boyd, the term refers to the understanding that war consists of the repeated cycle of observation, orientation, decision, and action. Colonel Boyd constructed his model as a result of his observations of fighter combat in the Korean War.

THE ART OF MANEUVER, ROBERT R. LEONHARD, 1991

The great British diplomat and writer Harold Nicholson believed there were two kinds of negotiators: warriors and shopkeepers. Warriors use negotiations as a way to gain time and a stronger position. Shopkeepers operate on the principle that it is more important to establish trust, to moderate each side’s demands and come to a mutually satisfying settlement. Whether in diplomacy or in business, the problem arises when shopkeepers assume they are dealing with another shopkeeper only to find they are facing a warrior.

Aut non tentaris, aut perfice (Either don’t attempt it, or carry it through to the end). OVID, 43 B.C.–A.D. 17 To go too far is as bad as to fall short. —Confucius (551?–479 B.C.)

STRATEGY, B. H. LIDDELL HART, 1954

Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (1659–1720)

Learn the lesson well: brilliant plans and piled-up conquests are not enough. You can become the victim of your own success, letting victory seduce you into going too far, creating hard-bitten enemies, winning the battle but losing the political game after it. What you need is a strategic third eye: the ability to stay focused on the future while operating in the present and ending your actions in a way that will serve your interests for the next round of war. This third eye will help you counteract the emotions that can insidiously infect your clever strategies, particularly anger and the desire for revenge.

In war-time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1874–1965

In essence, military deception is about subtly manipulating and distorting signs of our identity and purpose to control the enemy’s vision of reality and get them to act on their misperceptions. It is the art of managing appearances, and it can create a decisive advantage for whichever side uses it better.

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.

Unconventional warfare has four main principles, as gleaned from the great practitioners of the art.

Work outside the enemy’s experience.

Unfold the extraordinary out of the ordinary.

Act crazy like a fox.

Keep the wheels in constant motion.

To cross the sea without heaven’s knowledge, one had to move openly over the sea but act as if one did not intend to cross it. Each military maneuver has two aspects: the superficial move and the underlying purpose. By concealing both, one can take the enemy completely by surprise…. [If] it is highly unlikely that the enemy can be kept ignorant of one’s actions, one can sometimes play tricks right under its nose. THE WILES OF WAR: 36 MILITARY STRATEGIES FROM ANCIENT CHINA, TRANSLATED BY SUN HAICHEN, 1991

Chaos—where brilliant dreams are born. THE I CHING, CHINA, CIRCA EIGHTH CENTURY B.C.

In the process, one should influence the uncommitted, potential adversaries and current adversaries so that they are drawn toward one’s philosophy and are empathetic toward one’s success. THE MIND OF WAR: JOHN BOYD AND AMERICAN SECURITY, GRANT T. HAMMOND, 2001

Cede the moral terrain to the other side and you limit your freedom of action: now anything you might have to do that is manipulative yet necessary will feed the unjust image the enemy has publicized, and you will hesitate to take such action.

The best defense against moral warriors is to give them no target. Live up to your good name; practice what you preach, at least in public; ally yourself with the most just causes of the day. Make your opponents work so hard to undermine your reputation that they seem desperate, and their attacks blow up in their faces. 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.

The word “guerrilla”—“small war” in Spanish—was coined in reference to the Peninsular War of 1808–14, which began when Napoleon invaded Spain. Melting into their country’s mountains and inhospitable terrain, the Spaniards tortured the French, making it impossible for them to profit from their superior numbers and weaponry.

A guerrilla strategy is extremely hard to counter, which is what makes it so effective. If you find yourself in a fight with guerrillas and you use conventional methods to fight them, you play into their hands; winning battles and taking territory means nothing in this kind of war. The only effective counterstrategy is to reverse the guerrillas’ reversal, neutralizing their advantages. 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.

Alliances infected with emotions, or with ties of loyalty and friendship, are nothing but trouble.

The key to playing the game is to recognize who can best advance your interests at that moment.

Never interfere with an enemy that is in the process of committing suicide. —Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)

To Machiavelli the ultimate good was a world of dynamic change in which cities or republics were reordering and revitalizing themselves in perpetual motion. The greatest evil was stagnation and complacency.

Authority: The worst [military policy is] to assault walled cities…. If your commander, unable to control his temper, sends your troops swarming at the walls, your casualties will be one in three and still you will not have taken the city…. Therefore the expert in using the military subdues the enemy’s forces without going to battle, takes the enemy’s walled cities without launching an attack. —Sun-tzu (fourth century B.C.)

The Salt March is perhaps the quintessential example of Gandhi’s strategic brilliance. First, he deliberately chose an issue that the British would consider harmless, even laughable. To respond with force to a march about salt would have given an Englishman trouble. Then, by identifying his apparently trivial issue in his letter to Irwin, Gandhi made space for himself in which to develop the march without fear of repression. He used that space to frame the march in an Indian context that would give it wide appeal. The religious symbolism he found for it had another function as well: it heightened the paralysis of the British, who were quite religious themselves in their own way and could not countenance repressing a spiritual event. Finally, like any good showman, Gandhi made the march dramatically visual and used the press to give it maximum exposure.

We humans have a particular limitation to our reasoning powers that causes us endless problems: when we are thinking about someone or about something that has happened to us, we generally opt for the simplest, most easily digestible interpretation. An acquaintance is good or bad, nice or mean, his or her intentions noble or nefarious; an event is positive or negative, beneficial or harmful; we are happy or sad. The truth is that nothing in life is ever so simple. People are invariably a mix of good and bad qualities, strengths and weaknesses. Their intentions in doing something can be helpful and harmful to us at the same time, a result of their ambivalent feelings toward us. Even the most positive event has a downside. And we often feel happy and sad at the same time. Reducing things to simpler terms makes them easier for us to handle, but because it is not related to reality, it also means we are constantly misunderstanding and misreading. It would be of infinite benefit for us to allow more nuances and ambiguity into our judgments of people and events.

The idiom represents an archetype in world literature: a person with a smiling face and a cruel heart, dubbed a “smiling tiger” in Chinese folklore. THE WILES OF WAR, TRANSLATED BY SUN HAICHEN, 1991

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.

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

Narodnaya Volia saw that it could use one relatively small event—a bomb blast—to set off a chain reaction: fear in the administration would produce harsh repression, which would win the group publicity and sympathy and heighten the government’s unpopularity, which would lead to more radicalism, which would lead to more repression, and so on until the whole cycle collapsed in turmoil. Narodnaya Volia was weak and small, yet simple but dramatic acts of violence could give it a disproportionate power to sow chaos and uncertainty, creating the appearance of strength among police and public.

In essence, terrorists kick a rock in order to start an avalanche. If no landslide follows, little is lost, except perhaps their own lives, which they are willing to sacrifice in their devotion to their cause. If mayhem and chaos ensue, though, they have great power to influence events. Terrorists are often reacting against an extremely static situation in which change by any route is blocked. In their desperation they can often break up the status quo.

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. Often isolated, living in hiding, they are prone to lose contact with reality, overestimating their own power and overplaying their hand. Although their use of violence must be strategic to succeed, their alienation from the public makes it hard for them to maintain a sense of balance.

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.

Because of the extreme asymmetry of forces at play in the terrorist strategy, the military solution is often the least effective. Terrorists are vaporous, spread out, linked not physically but by some radical and fanatic idea. 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.”

In general, the most effective response to unconventional provocation is the least response: do as little as possible and that cunningly adjusted to the arena. Do no harm. Deny one’s self, do less rather than more. These are uncongenial to Americans who instead desire to deploy great force, quickly, to achieve a swift and final result. What is needed is a shift in the perception of those responsible in Washington: less can be more, others are not like us, and a neat and tidy world is not worth the cost. DRAGONWARS, J. BOWYER BELL, 1999

It has reached a point where the idea of liberty, one that is relatively recent, is in the process of disappearing from our customs and consciences, and the globalization of liberal values is about to realize itself in its exact opposite form: a globalization of police forces, of total control, of a terror of security measures. This reversal moves towards a maximum of restrictions, resembling those of a fundamentalist society. THE SPIRIT OF TERRORISM, JEAN BAUDRILLARD, 2002