FormalPara Definition

Military strategies are heuristics or guesses about how to shape the outcome of a military conflict or competition in one’s favour. They are fundamentally about identifying or creating asymmetric advantages that can be exploited to achieve one’s ultimate objectives despite resource and other constraints, including the opposing efforts of adversaries and the inherent unpredictability of strategic outcomes.

The English word ‘strategy’ can be traced back to the military experience of the ancient Greek city-states. The word itself derives from the ancient Greek ‘στρατηγός’ (strategos), meaning the ‘leader or commander of an army’. The word ‘στρατηγός’, in turn, is a compound of ‘στρατός’ (stratos), meaning ‘army’, and ‘αγός’ (agos), meaning ‘leader’ or ‘general’. Before the French Revolution the majority of European authors on military affairs wrote neither about strategy nor tactics but focused on the organization, discipline and cohesion of infantry in the tradition of the Roman author Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, whose Epitoma de rei militaris [Epitome of Military Science] is mostly dated to around 387; or ‘else they wrote about “military instructions” (Puységur 1690), or about the “art of war” (Machiavelli 1521)’ (Heuser 2010: 4–5, 567). In the West, the term ‘strategy’ only came into use around 1800 and was not used in the sense generally accepted today until the 20th century (Heuser 2010: 3, 29).

Modern Western conceptions of military strategy are usually traced back to the Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz. In his classic On War, first published in 1832 by his widow, Clausewitz characterized strategy as the use of military forces in the engagement or battle to achieve the objectives of the war: strategy ‘decides the time when, the place where, and the forces with which the engagement is to be fought’ (von Clausewitz et al. 1976: 177, 194). In his 1999 Modern Strategy, Colin Gray consciously expanded Clausewitz’s definition to include the threat of using force for the ends of policy along with its actual use, thereby explicitly broadening the realm of military strategy to include such post-Hiroshima strategies as nuclear deterrence (Gray 1999: 17). In the current lexicon of the US military:

Strategy is about ends, ways, and means. It is a description of the ways (the how) a government employs its available means (elements of power) to achieve the ends (national goals) that support its interests. (Griffard and Eikmeier 2006: CSL. 2)

While these traditional definitions of military strategy are perfectly fine as abstract conceptualizations, they share two fundamental limitations. First, they offer little, if any, guidance as to how one might actually go about crafting and implementing coherent strategies in actual competitive situations. The reason for raising this point can be gleaned from the following observation that John Collins derived from teaching grand strategy at the National War College during the American involvement in Vietnam: while ‘strategy may be a game that anyone can play … it is not a game that just anyone can play well’; only ‘the most gifted participants have much chance to win a prize’ as competent strategists (Collins 1973: 235, emphasis in original).

Second, from Clausewitz to the contemporary end–ways–means formulation, these traditional understandings of strategy are based entirely on Western military experience. As the business strategist Richard Rumelt has argued, it is certainly possible to devalue the concept of strategy by applying it too broadly or too liberally. Yet, in his teaching and writing about strategy, Rumelt has been willing to apply the concept to chess, war and long-term competition between polities in peacetime as readily as he has to the strategies of firms and corporations. Granted, war and business have some important differences. Even Microsoft does not attack its competitors with bombs and missiles. But, especially since the initial appearance in 1980 of Michael Porter’s influential Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, American business schools have devoted more and more attention to analysing and teaching the strategies of firms and corporations, including the development of lucrative consulting services to advise businesses on their strategies (see Ghemawat 2002). So long as the differences between war and business are kept in mind, there is much business strategists can learn from military strategists and vice versa. And, given how wide a range of situations in which we can meaningfully apply the word ‘strategy’, no single definition is likely to circumscribe the underlying concept.

Contemporary characterizations of strategy based on business experience have tended to be clearer on how to implement strategy than the classic formulations derived from war and competition between nations (or non-state actors, whose potential for inflicting death and destruction has been exponentially multiplied by technology since the 1940s Shubik 1997: 406–408). At a September 2007 workshop on strategy for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, Rumelt characterized strategy as ‘a heuristic solution to a problem’, adding that in competitive situations, strategy is ‘usually an insight that creates or exploits a decisive asymmetry’ (Rumelt 2007: slide 3). His insistence that strategies are heuristics or guesses was based on his firm conviction that the future is fundamentally beyond our feeble powers of prediction – that strategic choices in the real world involve far more possibilities than anyone can evaluate. It was this view of strategy that led Andrew Krepinevich and me to suggest in 2009 that strategy, whether in business or war, is:

fundamentally about identifying or creating asymmetric advantages that can be exploited to help achieve one’s ultimate objectives despite resource and other constraints, most importantly the opposing efforts of adversaries or competitors and the inherent unpredictability of strategic outcomes. (Krepinevich and Watts 2009: 19)

The long-standing preference of ground forces to seize or defend the high ground illustrates an asymmetric advantage stemming from terrain, but the potential domain asymmetries that can be found or created in competitive situations are virtually unbounded. Finally, to add one of the more unusual definitions of strategy based on business experience, in a 2008 interview Sidney Winter characterized strategy in terms of ‘managing the slow-moving variables in a strategic situation in order to change or reshape the situation in one’s favor by influencing the options or possibilities that emerge over time’ (Winter 2008).

The principal merit of these last three formulations is that they provide insight into how one ought to set about doing strategy in the real world. Winter counsels that the first step in designing a viable strategy is to determine what are the slow-moving variables in the situation. He offers reputations and personnel systems as examples of slow-moving variables that good strategy can change in one’s favour, though usually not very quickly. For Winter, therefore, executing a strategy tends to be a long-term endeavour, especially when it involves execution by large organizations such a corporation or a military service.

Rumelt offers even deeper insight into how strategy is done by insisting that good strategies have three essential elements: (1) a diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge, (2) a guiding policy for dealing with the challenge, and (3) a set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy (Rumelt 2011: 77). The US Cold War strategy of containment provides ready confirmation of Rumelt’s analysis. While George Kennan is rightly credited with conceiving this ‘strategy’, it was clearly preceded by an insightful diagnosis of the nature of Soviet power, starting with Kennan’s long telegraph to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes in February 1946 and, subsequently, articulated publicly in his July 1947 Foreign Affairs article, ‘The sources of Soviet conduct’. The essential insight in Kennan’s diagnosis was that the Soviet system contained ‘the seeds of its own destruction’, and that the sprouting of these seeds was ‘well advanced’ (Kennan 1947: 580). Hence, Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world could be ‘contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy’ (Kennan 1947: 576). Containment, then, was not a complete strategy but the guiding policy for American conduct relative to the Soviet Union that emerged from Kennan’s diagnosis of the challenge that the Soviet state posed for the United States and the West after 1945. As for the set of coherent actions that implemented this guiding policy over a period of some four decades, they ranged from the establishment of Strategic Air Command in 1946 and the European Recovery Program (the ‘Marshall Plan’) in 1947 to Dwight Eisenhower’s massive nuclear retaliation, Richard Nixon’s détente and the resulting arms control agreements, and Jimmy Carter’s explicit targeting of Soviet leaders in the event of nuclear war.

Having considered a range of definitions for military strategy, business strategy and strategy in general, perhaps the most important thing to recognize is that the development and, above all, execution of effective strategy almost always turns out to be extraordinarily difficult. While strategy may appear simple in theory, it is profoundly difficult in practice. The reasons are many. But possibly the most fundamental is the unpredictability of the future. As the economist Douglass North has noted, there are at least two reasons why the future is unpredictable. First, we ‘cannot know today what we will learn tomorrow which will shape our tomorrow’s actions’; and, second, the world is non-ergodic, meaning that the statistical time averages of future outcomes can be – and, more often than most people appreciate, are – persistently different from the averages calculated from past observations (North 2005: 19, 69). The future, to paraphrase the options trader Nassim Taleb, is ‘opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history’ (Taleb 2007: 8). Or, stated in the more technical terms of computer science and mathematical logic, ‘There is no algorithmic process to determine the future – whether it’s the future of a computer program, a thought process of the human mind, or the universe as a whole’ (Petzold 2008). In the end, strategies are guesses about how the unpredictable future will unfold after the strategist has chosen and implemented a course of action to address a major problem. Strategic choice itself is one element of the unseen ‘script’ that produces the eventual, but unpredictable, outcome.

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