‘Strategy’ is defined as a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty. With regards to the “art of the general,” which included several subsets of skills such as military tactics, siege-craft, logistics, Eastern Romans used the term in the 6th century C.E., from where it was translated into Western vernacular languages in the 18th century. From that point, the word came to denote “a comprehensive way to try to pursue political ends, including the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills in a military conflict, in which both adversaries interact.”
In Strategy: A History, author Lawrence Freedman stresses there is no one definition of the word that describes the field and limits its boundaries. “One common contemporary definition describes it as being about maintaining a balance between ends, ways, and means; about identifying objectives; and about the resources and methods available for meeting such objectives,” he writes, adding having a strategy implies an ability to look past the short-term to the long-term, address causes rather than symptoms.
“Without strategy, facing up to any problem or striving for any objective would be considered negligent. Certainly no military campaign, company investment or government initiative is likely to receive backing unless there is a strategy to evaluate,” he continues, noting it is often presented as a duel. “This reflects the term’s military origins and regular comparisons to a wrestling match. It can also be the result of the simple modeling of conflicts encouraged by game theory with the standard two-by-two matrix,” he adds.
Greek concepts
Historically, writes Freedman, Homer gave the contrasting qualities—represented respectively by Achilles and Odysseus—of “bie” (strength) and “metis” (cunning), which eventually came to be represented as “force” and “guile” by individuals such as Machiavelli. Metis described a particular notion of a strategic intelligence for which there is no obvious English equivalent; in Greek it relates to metiao: “to consider, meditate, plan,” together with metioomai, “to contrive,” and conveys a sense of a capacity to think ahead, attend to detail, grasp how others think and behave, and possess a general resourcefulness.
But it could also convey deception and trickery, capturing the moral ambivalence around a quality so essential to the strategist’s art. According to mythology, the goddess Metis was chosen by Zeus as his first wife. Fearful that a son with his strength and his wife’s intelligence would become too powerful, he employed her methods of deceit and surprise to prevent it by eating her, thereby controlling the source of all metis forever. What he did not know was that Metis was already pregnant with a daughter—Athena—who was born from Zeus’s head. Thereafter Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, came to be associated with metis more than all other divinities. She was closely associated with the mortal who most embodied metis, Odysseus. Homer’s The Odyssey has Athena describing Odysseus as “by far the best of mortals in thought and word, and I’m renowned among all the gods for my wisdom and my cunning ways.”
Achilles and Odysseus
Homer’s epics contrasted “metis” with “bie,” or brute force. Bie was personified by Achilles, famed for his exceptional physical strength, bravery, agility, and mastery of the spear, but also his great rages. While The Odyssey was about metis, The Iliad was largely an exploration of bie. Achilles demonstrated not only the limits to what force could achieve but also how it could become associated with a certain wildness, a bloodlust that led to terrible deaths and slaughter. Yet it was hard to do without force. When Achilles gave up on the war against the Trojans after being slighted by King Agamemnon, it was Odysseus who led the delegation sent to plead with him. Achilles’s response was to denounce Odysseus and his methods: “I hate, like the gates of Hades, the man who says one thing and hides another inside.” Just as pointedly, Achilles drew attention to the failure of metis to stop Greeks being pushed back to the sea by the rampaging “man-killing” Hector, the equivalent Trojan superhero.
For those who start as powerful, strategy should not be too difficult. The sensible application of superior resources tends to be successful. A famous Biblical passage observes “that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.” American writer Damon Runyon added, “But that’s the way to bet.” Fighting against superior force may score high on nobility and heroism but normally low on discretion and effectiveness. This is why underdog strategies, in situations where the starting balance of power would predict defeat, provide the real tests of creativity. Such strategies often look to the possibility of success through the application of a superior intelligence, which takes advantage of the boring, ponderous, muscle-bound approach adopted by those who take their superior resources for granted.
The art of war
While the etymology of “strategy” dates back to classical Greek, the relevant reference to it through the Middle Ages and into the modern era tended to be the “art of war,” including but not limited to the value of alliances, the role of battle, the respective merits of force and guile. The word didn’t come into vogue in Britain, France, and Germany until the late 18th century, reflecting an Enlightenment optimism that war—like all other spheres of human affairs—could benefit from the application of reason. It also reflected the demands of contemporary warfare, with mass armies and long logistics chains. The employment of force now required careful preparation and theoretical guidance. A warrior leader combined ends and means, responsible for both the formulation and execution of a strategy. Subsequently, these functions were separated, with governments laying down objectives for generals, who acquired specialist staffs to devise campaign plans that others would implement.
In the business world, ‘strategy’ requires corporations to acquire planning staff, which sets targets for others to follow. Politicians similarly hire consultants who advise on how to win elections. Experienced ‘strategists’ write and lecture on its principles, offering prescriptions that might bring success in potentially diverse settings. The rise of strategy has therefore gone hand in hand with bureaucratization of organizations, professionalization of functions, and growth of social sciences. It reflected the hope that the specialist study of economics, sociology, politics, and psychology would make possible a more comprehensible and therefore more predictable world, so that all moves could be better informed and judged, tailored more effectively to the circumstances of the moment.
And guerrilla war
Unlike conventional conflict, guerrilla warfare was defensive, fought on home territory with the advantages of popular support and local knowledge. It comprised a strategy of exhaustion, gaining time in the hope that the enemy would tire out. Such warfare rarely succeeded on its own. Irregular forces worked most effectively when providing distraction to an enemy also facing regular forces in a more conventional campaign. Napoleon suffered in Spain because he also faced the British army. Militarily, Russian peasants made life additionally miserable for French forces in 1812. Clausewitz, who experienced the French occupation of Prussia and was in a position to observe the Spanish insurrection and the French debacle in Russia, made guerrilla warfare the subject of his early lectures and writing. In war, it was considered a form of defense. By the 1820s, when Clausewitz wrote most of his On War, it had become an uncommon strategy.
Popular energies appeared to have been played out and conservative states were in command. Particularly influential theory was one that stressed the benefits of defeat—choices as if they were rational. Adherents were confident that they, most uniquely, could offer a theory deserving of the accolade of the “social sciences” in which all propositions could be deduced from a strong theory validated empirically. Though rational choice theory consistently delivered far less than promised, and its underlying assumptions became vulnerable to a fundamental challenge from cognitive psychology, it was promoted effectively and in a highly strategic manner. In a remarkably short space of time, supporters of the theory became embedded in political science departments. They were not deterred by the widespread apprehension that the theory depended on an untenable view of human rationality. The claim, they insisted, was no more than that the premise of rationality helped good theory.
Uncontrolled environment
Strategies were neither designed, nor implemented in controlled environments. The longer the sequence of planned moves, the greater the number of human agents who must act in particular ways, the more extensive the ambition of the project, the more likely that something would go wrong. If the first moves in a planned sequence of events fail to produce the intended effects matters could soon go awry. Situations would become more complex and the actors more numerous and contrary. Warning against the belief that history was full of lessons, Gordon Wood argued that there was but one big one: “Nothing ever works out quite the way its managers intended.” History taught skepticism about people’s ability to manipulate and control their own destinies. Strategies were not so much means of asserting control over situations but ways of coping with situations that nobody totally controlled.
In ancient Greece plays, the most important distinction in plots was between comedy and tragedy. This was not a distinction between happy/sad or funny/miserable but between alternative ways of resolving conflicts. It may be that the conflict is not between opposing characters but between individuals and society. Comedy ends with a satisfactory resolution and the main characters looking forward positively to the future; tragedy ends with a negative prospect—especially for the main character, who is probably largely responsible for his own misfortune—even if society as a whole is restored to some sort of equilibrium. When a new and positive relationship has been forged between society and the main character that is comedy; when the main character’s attempt to change the status quo has been defeated that is tragedy. A dramatist knows from the start whether he is writing comedy or a tragedy: the strategist aims for comedy but risks tragedy.
Author Freedman has a profound understanding of the fundamental issues. Strategy is defined as the art of creating power, a difficult art to master. “While it is undoubtedly a good thing to have,” he sensibly remarks, “it is also a hard thing to get right.” We catch the echo of Clausewitz, still the preeminent authority, nearly two centuries after his death: “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is very difficult.” Freedman counsels caution. “The world of strategy is full of disappointment and frustration, of means not working and ends not reached.”