The new makers of modern.., p.6
The New Makers of Modern Strategy, page 6
Liddell Hart’s approach elevated the importance of policy. To military practitioners this risked relegating the importance of tactics. Field Marshall Lord Wavell held that “tactics, the art of handling troops on the battlefield, is and always will be a more difficult and more important part of the general’s task than strategy, the art of bringing forces to the battlefield in a favorable position.” Strategy, the Field Marshall averred, was “simpler and easier to grasp.”37 Here Wavell was harking back to the distinction favored in the British army from when he was learning his trade. Liddell Hart’s seemed more appropriate for the post-1945 age of deterrence and limited war. In a volume published in 1970 entitled Problems of Modern Strategy, Michael Howard opened his essay by observing that Liddell Hart’s definition was “as good as any, and better than most.”38 Liddell Hart is still regularly cited whenever strategy is being defined. The 1989 article by US Army Colonel Arthur Lykke, which introduced the definition of strategy currently popular in military circles, opened with a quotation from Liddell Hart about how military means must serve political ends. Lykke’s innovation was to introduce “ways” as the course of action that brings means and ends together: “Strategy equals ends (objectives toward which one strives) plus ways (courses of action) plus means (instruments by which some end can be achieved).”39 The advantage of this was that it is theoretically neutral and so could be used by those working with a variety of perspectives.
There were other competing definitions. The former French General André Beaufre referred to strategy as “the art of the dialectic of two opposing wills using force to resolve their dispute.”40 The former American Admiral Joseph Wylie wrote that strategy was “a plan of action designed in order to achieve some end; a purpose together with a system of measures for its accomplishment.”41 The first definition captured the centrality of conflict but not much else; the second assumed fixed objectives and that a strategy could be synonymous with a plan, playing down the problems of implementation caused by conflicts. Other definitions tended towards superfluous specificity or else were aspirationally normative. A 2018 Pentagon document, for example, defined a strategy only as something positive—“a prudent idea or set of ideas for employing the instruments of national power in a synchronized and integrated fashion to achieve theater or multinational objectives.”42 Other definitions are more theoretically loaded. The idea of strategy they all encompass, however, is that it is about the interaction of military means with political ends.
VI
One of the consequences of this shift in the understanding of strategy was that it moved attention away from the relationship between tactics and strategy, in which strategy was in some way superior, to the relationship between strategy and policy, in which strategy was subordinate.
As Corbett, Fuller, and Liddell Hart had discerned, the link between strategy and policy raised a further question. If military means had to be linked to political objectives, where did non-military means fit? The original idea of grand strategy was that, to win a war, it was necessary to draw on all the instruments of national power, not just the military instrument. That kept a link to the conduct of war. But by the late nineteenth century peacetime issues of policy had been identified as having to do with managing budgets and armaments, negotiating bases, forming alliances, or calming areas of tension, issues that determined preparedness for war or possibly made war avoidable. But at times governments might see only a comparatively minor role for the military instrument in their overall policy. Other instruments, for example those to do with commerce and finance, might be more important. Grand strategy, therefore, came to include not only how governments sought to win wars using all available means, but also the most effective combination of means—non-military as well as military—to achieve the objectives of national security and prosperity at times of peace.
The start of this shift can be seen in the first landmark edition of Makers of Modern Strategy, published in 1943. In his introduction, Edward Mead Earle remarked that, narrowly defined, strategy was “the art of military command, of projecting and directing a campaign,” where tactics was “the art of handling forces in battle.” But, he observed, strategy had “of necessity required increasing consideration of nonmilitary factors, economic, psychological, moral, political, and technological.” Strategy, therefore, was “an inherent element of statecraft at all times.” Earle defined strategy as:
the art of controlling and utilizing the resources of a nation—or a coalition of nations—including its armed forces, to the end that its vital interests shall be effectively promoted and secured against enemies, actual, potential, or merely presumed.
Earle saw grand strategy as the highest form; it was here that the policies and armaments of the nation could be integrated. Earle went beyond Liddell Hart. Through grand strategy, “the resort to war is either rendered unnecessary or is undertaken with the maximum chance of victory.”43
After the Second World War and through the Cold War, the big questions of grand strategy appeared settled because of the bipolar conflict between one bloc led by the United States and another by the Soviet Union. The term was used as much as a historical construct—as in Edward Luttwak’s Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire—as in discussions of contemporary security policies. In the late-1980s there was a revival of interest, presaging the end of the Cold War. Available definitions of strategy were still close to Liddell Hart’s. At Yale, Professor Paul Kennedy, who had known Liddell Hart while a graduate student, introduced an edited book on the topic with quotations from Liddell Hart and Earle, noting how the term “strategy” was concerned with peace as much as war and the “balancing of ends and means.” Kennedy concluded that:
The crux of grand strategy lies therefore in policy, that is, in the capacity of the nation’s leaders to bring together all of the elements, both military and nonmilitary [sic], for the preservation and enhancement of the nation’s long-term (that is, wartime and peacetime) best interests.44
Over the next three decades, the amount of attention given to grand strategy expanded, and so did the concept. The risk was when a country was not at war, or was not preparing for one, and did not have some sort of grand project to improve its security and enhance its status for an extended period of time, grand strategy merged into general discussions of foreign policy. This was especially so once the Cold War threat had evaporated and there was uncertainty about whether there were strategic objectives that had to be pursued. Much of the (largely American) literature on grand strategy was concerned with advocacy, explaining why a grand strategy was needed and describing its appropriate content. Compared with military strategy, which tended to be about solving a particular and often urgent problem, grand strategy inclined towards the aspirational, setting out how to act in a constantly changing international environment, and providing an overarching framework to accommodate a range of foreign policy concerns. The historian Williamson Murray warned that, as resources and interests would always be out of balance, attempts to provide clarity would struggle in an “environment of constant change, where chance and the unexpected are inherent.” Murray likened grand strategy to French peasant soup, with whatever happened to be available thrown into a pot. “In thinking about the soup of grand strategy, recipes and theoretical principles are equally useless.”45
Many definitions of grand strategy were essentially broader definitions of strategy. Thus, the political scientist Barry Posen described grand strategy as a “a chain of political ends and military means,” while the historian John Gaddis described it as “the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.” Similarly, Peter Feaver, after discussing grand strategy as “the collection of plans and policies that comprise the state’s deliberate effort to harness political, military, diplomatic, and economic tools together to advance that state’s national interest,” added that this was “the art of reconciling ends and means.”46 Thus, just as strategy lost its specificity when it became unhinged from battle, so too did grand strategy lose its specificity as it became detached from war. Instead of discussions on strategy staying close to those on tactics, they moved to a much higher plane.
VII
An even broader definition of strategy emerged during the first decades of the nuclear age. The demands of nuclear deterrence prompted big innovations in strategic thinking from the 1940s to the 1960s. These demands challenged the conservative bias in strategic thinking, which had long depended on studies of the great battles of history to help elucidate the principles of war. Amongst practitioners, the conservative bias did not go away. The officers in charge of nuclear arsenals showed little interest in new ways of thinking to accommodate the new weapons and did not let such issues or ideas influence their plans. Away from the military staffs, civilians—at universities and think-tanks such as RAND—took the view that they could and should address the special dilemmas posed by the new weaponry, including intercontinental missiles and nuclear weapons. A number of these civilians came from the humanities and understood the history of strategic thought. Bernard Brodie’s Strategy in the Missile Age was exemplary in this regard, pointing to the military inclination to focus on tactics and their over-regard for offensives. Brodie also noted the “intellectual no-man’s land where military and political problems meet,” which was the realm of strategy. His complaint was about insufficient attention being paid to strategy and not about any need for a fundamental reappraisal.47
Others with backgrounds in economics, and often an interest in game theory, adopted new analytical methodologies to suggest how deterrence could be made to work and what to do should it fail. The origins of game theory were in mathematician John von Neumann’s exploration in the 1920s of how probability theory could be applied to poker. He later teamed up with Oskar Morgenstern to produce the classic text, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, published in 1944.48 By presenting potential outcomes using a two-by-two matrix, the work showed how one set of strategic moves depended on expectations about the moves of others. This insight could be used to design better moves. It pointed to the importance of imperfect information about opponents, and of thinking in terms of minimizing losses as well as maximizing gains.
By framing confrontations in abstract terms, game theory provided a way to grapple with the complexities of nuclear deterrence in a bipolar world without constant reference to the daunting humanitarian implications of these weapons being employed on any scale. The thing about a game of strategy, compared with games of chance or skill, Schelling observed, is that “each player’s best choice depends on the action he expects the other to take, which he knows depends, in turn, on the other’s expectation of his own.” Strategy was defined in terms of this interdependence: “the conditioning of one’s own behavior on the behavior of others.”49 This could apply to partnerships as well as conflicts, and so encouraged explorations of arms control. A distinct advantage of this approach was that it pointed to ways in which antagonists might cooperate and partners compete. Nuclear strategy remained an area in which civilians felt that they had as much competence as military officers. They assessed possible strategic moves in speculative, and even fantastical, scenarios, though their theories tended to work better when considering reinforcing deterrence than working out optimum moves should deterrence break down. These endeavors introduced many sub-concepts into strategic discourse, such as escalation, damage limitation, and crisis stability.
It was not necessary to adopt the full methodological apparatus to appreciate the importance of the interdependence of decision-making and the possibility of cooperation at times of conflict. Nor was the methodology only appropriate to a specific and extreme type of strategic problem. Its employment soon gravitated away from nuclear issues and towards economics and business strategy. This both encouraged and reflected the tendency for an increasing proportion of the literature on strategy to become geared to business and other non-military audiences, with its own definitions and formulations. While this literature would occasionally pick up on Sun Zi, Clausewitz, and Liddell Hart, there was little evidence of influence in the other direction.
By the 1970s the concept of strategy had moved far from the original, narrow military concept and was trending towards a general concept relevant to a range of situations, not all of which involved armed force. Debates were underway about the boundary lines between strategy and grand strategy, and between grand strategy and policy. Yet the boundary line between tactics and strategy, left over from earlier times, was still unresolved. Should the line be between preparations for fighting and actual fighting? Or between the higher and lower levels of command? These questions were most relevant to regular warfare. In the more irregular warfare of colonial times, the boundary line had already proved harder to draw because of the large importance of small engagements. This issue returned with counterinsurgency warfare in Vietnam.
In the aftermath of the frustrations of Vietnam, which provided more opportunities for civilians to get involved in operational decisions, and against the backdrop of the nuclear bias of the Cold War, there was a resurgence of interest in conventional warfare. In part, this became a debate about strategy, in particular about the comparative merits of attritional versus maneuver warfare, animated by a conviction that the American military needed to relearn the operational art. Just as the domain of tactics had shrunk, the generals had forgotten how to command; they had become inclined to assess the political implications of every move. An operational level of war was defined between strategy and tactics. This was defined in the 1982 Field Manual 100 as a level which involved “planning and conducting campaigns.”50 Here senior commanders could think once again about how best to defeat enemies with forces similar in composition to their own (“peer competitors”) and in an arena that left little room for the intrusion of politicians. The higher level of strategy was left for the highest level of command, those who would be charged with managing the interface with the political leadership. Edward Luttwak’s book Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace was the most substantial attempt to consider strategy in terms of distinct levels (technical, tactical, and operational).51 The alternative, set out in an influential article by Sir Michael Howard in Foreign Affairs, was to think not in terms of levels but rather in terms of dimensions—the operational, the logistical, the social, and the technological—which had to be accounted for in any successful strategy although the respective weighting might vary.52
The basic problem was that warfare had burst out of its boundaries, pushing out into societies with the possibility of destroying not only whole cities but also civilizations, or else requiring constant engagement with local populations to gain their support or to monitor their hostility. Once warfare could not be contained within manageable limits, it was unlikely that classical operations—geared as they were towards decisive battles—would suffice or that nations would dare to commit the totality of their resources to an epic struggle. The incentives shifted to limiting wars or avoiding them altogether, and strategy had to adjust accordingly.
VIII
This account has largely followed debates in the West. The content of a Russian, Chinese, or Indian strategy will be different from one adopted by the United States or France. Differences in culture and situations will make a significant difference in both their concepts of what strategy is and how it relates to tactics. Their concepts have different roots—whether Sun Zi in China or Kautilya in India. Yet the differences can be overdone. Sun Zi, for example, was a major influence on Liddell Hart, while those seeking support for the existence of an “operational level” found it in Soviet publications. The focus of this chapter has not been so much on content but rather on what can be discussed under the heading of strategy. Over the past 250 years “strategy” has become an umbrella term of potential relevance to all human affairs. Because it lacks specificity, it can include many national strategies, so long as they are about relating means to ends. It has become one of those words, along with politics and power, that are generally understood, even though they can be interpreted with great variation.
The use of “strategy” was never fully settled, even when employed as a more specific military term. Even then, there was a distinct set of practical activities associated with being strategic, largely connected with preparing forces for battle, working out where and how a battle would be fought, and then getting the forces into position. At that point tactics would take over. Strategy was also a matter for senior commanders. All this began to change once battle was recognized to be a means to an end and not an end in itself. Strategy could be approached from either a political or a military perspective because it was focused on the relationship between these two distinct spheres. But holding together these two distinct types of activities was always challenging, and so strategy was always apt to drift off in one direction at the expense of the other. Within the political sphere, strategy soon became detached from questions of war and peace, and came to be invoked whenever means must be aligned with ends. Eventually even the elements of conflict and competition diminished, so that strategy merely became a synonym for plan. There was still an association with a higher form of thinking, focused on the important, long-term, and essential, but the word could also be used to endow more mundane decisions with those properties. Strategy has come to represent a way of thinking, a habit of mind, an ability to assess vulnerabilities and possibilities in situations, an appreciation of causes and effects, and a capacity to link disparate activities in pursuit of a shared purpose.
