Strategy FundamentalsHistorical DevelopmentLand Warfare StrategyNaval Warfare StrategyAir Warfare StrategyNuclear Warfare Strategy and War Plans
Strategy: Fundamentals To ancient Greeks, strategos, from which we derive strategy, meant simply the general's art; a modern definition, however, would generalize the meaning to a reasoned relationship among military means and the ways they might be used to reach the ends of national policy. For the senior commander of a theater of war, the battle tactics of lower echelons blend into operational strategy in which he uses their combat in the conduct of campaigns designed to achieve war's politically defined purposes. The national military headquarters also uses the means‐ways‐ends calculation while devising a national military strategy, establishing campaign objectives, and building armed forces as one of several instruments contributing to grand strategy, often called national security policy.

Dimensions.

In On War, Carl von Clausewitz helped push the domain of strategy beyond the battlefield when he acknowledged that the tactical and operational successes sought by military commanders are but means to political ends. At the highest level, therefore, military strategy and national policy overlap, with the latter shaping and directing military operations and force development. As Clausewitz warned, however, political leaders should not ask their generals to pursue goals unattainable through organized violence, beyond their forces' capacity to attain, and either imposing disproportionate costs or requiring methods so destructive as to preclude a satisfactory peace—summarized as the tests of suitability, feasibility, and acceptability. From the French Revolution, Clausewitz concluded that the strategic calculations of the government and armed forces depend not simply on the State and the army, but also on a sound estimate of popular attitudes—the existence of a national will to carry war to a successful conclusion.

The twentieth century's expanded governmental bureaucracies and financial systems—and revolutions in production and transportation—have added new dimensions to strategy. A government able to mobilize overwhelming human and material resources and convey them to the theater of war can, for example, enable its generals to defeat even opponents more skilled in the operational aspects of strategy. As World War I demonstrated, the capacity to mobilize massive military resources includes the danger that modern industrial powers with sound logistical strategies might fall into a mutually destructive war of attrition that continues until even the victors have paid too great a price for victory.

Though technological superiority may enable a belligerent to escape attrition's blind alley, the Cold War demonstrated that two technologically superior powers possessing the means and the will to destroy one another may create a long‐term strategic impasse that precludes fighting—except through proxies—until one of the powers suffers internal collapse. Because the development and production of increasingly sophisticated modern weapons (and training armed forces in their use) takes years, major powers must also devise peacetime force development strategies that economically build forces for wars they can only anticipate.

Strategy also has a psychological dimension, which may enable a power skilled in propaganda or with a reputation for great resolve and military skill to undermine its opponent's will to resist and gain its political ends with a minimum of combat. As Sun Tzu observed more than two millennia ago, the “acme of skill” is overcoming your enemy's resistance “without fighting,” or, failing that, accepting battle only when strategic success makes victory certain. Although that psychological dimension of warfare may lead to great strategic efficiency, a strategist who overrates his nation's military reputation or underrates his opponent's resolve may so miscalculate the means‐ways‐ends relation as to increase the risk of defeat if threats and reputation do not suffice.

Strategic Concepts.

Because strategic concepts represent ways that military and other means might be employed in pursuit of political ends, their principal forms deserve brief description.

In the broadest terms, strategies may be either direct or indirect and sequential or cumulative. Military force supplies the paramount element of a direct strategy whose focus is violent, perhaps sequential assaults on the enemy's main strength with the aim of overcoming his forces in decisive battle and thus rendering him vulnerable to coercion. In the extreme, the destruction becomes so complete as to lead to his political overthrow and might be characterized as a strategy of annihilation. Should a decisive victory prove impossible, the direct approach may end in exhausting the enemy's forces or will through attrition.

Indirect strategies, championed by Basil Liddell Hart, often involve less violence and typically include a series of military, economic, diplomatic, or psychological actions completed in no fixed order but aimed at enemy weaknesses, often locations on his periphery. If successful, the cumulative effect of the attacks will so unbalance the enemy as to cause him to yield or, at least, render him vulnerable to direct assault. Though more passive in nature, the containment strategy of the Cold War era represents another form of indirect approach, one leading to an opponent's internal collapse as prelude to victory.

Maritime and airpower strategies also have an indirect character in that they aim to undermine the enemy's will to resist or deny his armed forces the means to make war. Seapower strategy, whose best known advocate is Alfred T. Mahan, seeks those ends by gaining control of the seas—perhaps in a decisive fleet engagement—and imposing an economy‐strangling blockade. To the same end, weaker naval powers raid an enemy's commerce. To avoid costly ground campaigns, airpower strategists, beginning with Giulio Douhet and Billy Mitchell, advocated bombardment of an enemy's military and industrial base, or, by attacking cities, terrorizing citizens into surrender.

Although deterrence, seeking to prevent war by making even victory unacceptably costly, has long been a factor in strategy, nuclear‐tipped intercontinental missiles made it the distinguishing strategic concept of the Cold War. The nuclear powers typically sought deterrence by threatening an enemy's cities (countervalue strategy), but a desire to limit war's costs should deterrence fail led to consideration of counterforce strategies (attacks on military facilities).

Revolutionary strategy, developed in its modern form by Mao Zedong, aims to overthrow an existing government through a long struggle during which the revolutionaries develop a covert political base amongst the population and strengthen it with propaganda, terrorism, and guerrilla attacks (hence the use of guerrilla warfare for this strategy) designed to discredit and demoralize the government before launching assaults by the rebels' conventional troops on its weakened armed forces. In response, the leading Western powers developed equally multifaceted counterinsurgency strategies.

With the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the United States entered a new strategic environment in which it needed to assess the contribution of armed forces to maintaining regional balances and Third World peacekeeping at a time of public reluctance to pay for forces sufficient to either purpose.
[See also Tactics.]

Bibliography

Basil H. Liddell Hart , Strategy. 1954; 2nd rev. ed. 1967.
Andre Beaufre , An Introduction to Strategy, 1965.
Michael Howard , War in European History, 1976.
Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, 1986.
Edward N. Luttwak , Strategy, 1987.
Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein, eds., The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War, 1994.

James L. Abrahamson

Bibliography

M. Marcovich, ed., Heraclitus: Greek text with a short commentary, 1967.
Carl von Clausewitz , On War, ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, 1976.
George T. Dennis (Transl.) Maurice's Strategikon: Handbook of Byzantine military strategy (Philadelphia Pa.: Pennsylvania University Press, 1984).
Edward N. Luttwak , Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, 1987; 2nd ed. 1992.
Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein, eds., The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War, 1994.
N. P. Milner , Vegetius: Epitome of military science 2nd rev. ed. 1996.

Edward N. Luttwak

Strategies of Annihilation.

Beginning with the seventeenth‐century Indian Wars, American strategists have usually preferred to act directly against an enemy's armed forces, somehow bringing them to battle and seeking in a single decisive action or campaign to destroy them so thoroughly as to force terms on a disarmed opponent.

Despite the possibility of an armed European descent on their ports, the first colonists principally feared the normally hospitable Indians. Aware of the defensive inadequacies of militia and blockhouses in an age when both messages and men moved slowly, colonials favored short offensives that quickly returned them to farms and families. Indians, however, refused to fight in the European manner, and militiamen generally lacked the skill and patience for tribal warfare. The colonists therefore overcame their foes by attacking, usually in winter, their food supplies and villages in order to force a decisive battle that would annihilate the hostile tribe as an independent polity, as in the Tidewater Wars, the Pequot War, and King Philip's War—a strategy also used in the Plains Indians Wars.

Facing European opponents, colonists applied strategies of annihilation in a regional context. During the imperial conflicts culminating in the French and Indian War, Americans displayed little strategic variation as they held to a single goal: permanent security by driving France off the continent. With the aid of the British army and navy, they finally achieved this in 1763.

Early in the Revolutionary War, George Washington made similar efforts to drive Great Britain from the continent. He threatened its forces with destruction if they did not evacuate Boston, and later dispatched forces under Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold in an unsuccessful attempt to seize Québec. Washington even attempted to turn back the British invasion of New York, until a series of lost battles around Manhattan convinced him to abandon so direct a strategy in favor of exhausting the British and exploiting the revolutionary role of the militia.

In the War of 1812, similarly unable, except through commerce raiding, to strike at the sources of British power, the United States chose to invade Canada, which if successful might add new territory and eradicate British power in North America. Due to antiwar sentiment in New England, the army unwisely failed to concentrate in northern New York for an overwhelming descent on Montréal and Québec. Until forced on the defensive by Napoleon's 1814 defeat, the army instead launched a series of indecisive offensives in the West.

During the Civil War, Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, and Union commanders George B. McClellan and George Gordon Meade pursued decisive battlefield victories in the Napoleonic manner—victories so complete as to break an opponent's will to continue. With the introduction of rifled weapons to armies that still moved on foot and by horse, battles became more bloody even as decisive victory became less likely.

Considering the Confederacy's vast land and maritime frontier, lack of a navy, small population, and industrial inferiority, Lee wisely rejected the strategy of perimeter defense initially employed in the western theater. But the Confederacy proved unable to replace the losses resulting from an aggressive strategy in which his army sought to break the Union's will through the defeat of its armies or victories on its soil, which eluded Lee at Antietam and Gettysburg.

In the end, Lee could not withstand Ulysses S. Grant's use (in 1864–65) of unremitting pressure, campaigns of constant battles rather than a few decisive engagements. Driven back on Petersburg, Virginia, Lee accepted a siege he knew to be fatal before being overwhelmed by Union forces as he attempted escape. In the western theater, Grant sent William Tecumseh Sherman in similar grim pursuit of the Army of the Tennessee, which Sherman destroyed. Those Union victories, historian Russell Weigley has asserted, established annihilation as the army's preferred strategy.

In World War II, though initially forced by the British and lack of resources to follow a peripheral strategy, American forces in Europe finally launched their preferred cross‐Channel attack in June 1944, and in conjunction with British forces and (on the eastern front) the Red Army, commenced a concentrated mass assault on German forces, aimed at their annihilation and imposition of unconditional surrender.

In the Korean War, annihilation of the enemy's forces, following an envelopment, also influenced Douglas MacArthur's Inchon landing—though attrition became the strategy following Chinese intervention and increasing American fear of a Soviet attack in Europe.

During the Persian Gulf War, the army planned a campaign of annihilation calling on airpower to isolate the battlefield and weaken Iraqi forces in Kuwait, which only an early armistice saved from being enveloped and destroyed by ground and air attack. That campaign also benefited from recent American preparations for the defense of Western Europe without relying on the early use of nuclear weapons. Aiming to win, though fighting outnumbered, the U.S. Army intended to annihilate the Red Army not through the unremitting direct pressure of superior force (in the manner of Grant) but by increasing the pace of combat beyond what the Soviets could match, using violent maneuver that would send American forces into rear areas, disrupting Soviet command and control, service support, and reserves.

Strategies of Attrition and Exhaustion.

When unwilling or unable to win through annihilation, U.S. strategists have sometimes resorted to gradual and often indirect efforts to wear down their opponent's military forces or exhaust his will to resist.

The superiority of British regulars led Washington to alter his initial strategy in 1777, keeping his Continental army largely concentrated and employing it principally to shadow and harass the British. His forces sought battle only when they could safely retreat from failure or overwhelm detachments from their opponent's main body—as at Trenton and Princeton, Saratoga, Monmouth, and, during 1781, in the Carolinas and at Yorktown. That strategy wore down British forces, and when combined with French forces, also Britain's will to continue the war. With American militia units retaining control of most of the countryside and the population—as in a revolutionary strategy—Britain had little to show for its expensive military efforts.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis favored a similar defensive strategy in the Civil War, concentrating Confederate forces in a few large armies that would avoid decisive battles, maintain Southern independence, and exhaust Union will. That meant, however, leaving more areas of the Confederacy vulnerable to occupation than Davis could tolerate politically—opening the door for Lee's offensives in the East. Only Joseph E. Johnston—too late in the war and with too little room for maneuver—skillfully employed that strategy against Sherman's advance on Atlanta.

Early on, Abraham Lincoln, preferring the more rapid results seemingly promised by direct methods, rejected Winfield Scott's “Anaconda” Plan for undermining Confederate will through naval blockades and army‐navy riverine assaults to isolate major sections of its territory. In the last twelve months of the war, however, Grant encouraged Sherman to exhaust Confederate will by marching his army across Georgia and through the Carolinas, destroying the supplies and lines of communication upon which Lee depended and making Confederates feel war's “hard hand.” Drained by combat losses, suffering naval blockade, and terrorized by Sherman's capacity to ravage rear areas, Confederate will collapsed, and both Lee and Johnston refused Davis's order to commence guerrilla operations.

Strategies of Maneuver and Indirect Approaches.

If American ground forces have most often employed strategies of annihilation and various types of attrition, they have also used traditional maneuver strategies aimed either at forcing an enemy's withdrawal with a minimum of fighting or gaining control of points whose possession might lead to peace. Acting even less directly, they have fought limited battles at weak points along an enemy's periphery and employed economic, political, and psychological methods designed to undermine his strength or will to resist.

In the Mexican War, for example, President James K. Polk directed his generals to seize Mexican territory—the northern tier of provinces bordering Texas, and ultimately the capital itself—in order to pressure Mexico to cede New Mexico and Upper California to the United States. Winfield Scott's seizure of Veracruz and movement on Mexico City, with a minimum of costly combat, represent classic American use of maneuver warfare.

In 1846, Henry W. Halleck and his mentor, Dennis Hart Mahan, published the first American works on strategy. Both rejected Napoleonic offensives in favor of fortification, tactical defense, and maneuver‐oriented strategies characteristic of the eighteenth century and Scott's campaign. Although most (strategically unschooled) Civil War commanders knew only that the great Napoleon had won military fame in decisive but bloody battles, the Union produced one advocate of maneuver who was sympathetic to the need for both speedy victory and minimal casualties: George B. McClellan, unsuccessful commander of the Army of the Potomac.

The Spanish‐American War better illustrates that American land war strategy has taken limited forms. The army initially planned to assist Cuban independence only by providing military assistance to the insurrection, perhaps through some remote port seized by a few regulars. Meanwhile, it would defend coastal cities and carefully raise, arm, and train volunteer units, if necessary, to occupy the island. With the president impatient for victory and the navy leading the way, the army captured Guam en route to occupation of Manila, seized Puerto Rico, and stormed El Caney and the San Juan Heights in order to take Santiago and drive the Spanish fleet into the navy's guns. This tactic forced Spain to recognize the futility of further resistance and eliminated any need directly to overcome its main army in Cuba.

In World War I, initially convinced that neither maneuver nor a single battle could decisively overcome a major power, John J. Pershing expected his American Expeditionary Forces in 1918 to employ frontal assaults, modified by open field tactics, only to penetrate German positions before descending on its objective, the rail center at Metz. That strategic maneuver, Pershing hoped, would force a general German withdrawal from France. Fighting on a front without flanks and as part of a multinational force, however, Pershing had to accept his Allies' reliance on bloody frontal assaults to push German forces back all along the line, a strategy more in keeping with the Grantian tradition.

During the first years of World War II, the United States, possessing few mobilized, trained military forces, had no alternative but to adopt Winston S. Churchill's peripheral strategy, a classically indirect approach. The British opposed a prompt cross‐Channel invasion and favored weakening Germany with indirect attacks: strategic bombardment, supplying the Soviets, assistance to resistance movements, and seizure of territory on the periphery of the German conquests. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt was eager to involve American forces in the fighting. His planners reluctantly agreed, first, to the invasion of French North Africa, then Sicily, and finally Italy, before insisting, with Soviet support, that Churchill abandon his Balkan schemes and agree to invade northern France in mid‐1944.

The Pacific War was an American war of strategic maneuver, even if for unlimited ends and involving many bloody tactical assaults. In the face of Japan's rapid advance in the winter of 1941–42, the United States and Great Britain sought to secure their lines of communication to Australia and India. Although unconditional surrender seemingly required the annihilation of Japan's armed forces, the United States thereafter bypassed and isolated many Japanese strongholds en route to gaining control of a vast oceanic territory. Using land, sea, and air forces, the U.S. Army pushed north from Australia, while the navy led the drive through the central Pacific, a two‐front advance culminating in the conquest of the Philippines, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima. With its navy sunk, its economy prostrate, and half its army isolated overseas, after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered before American plans for combined assaults on its home islands could be implemented.

Cold War Strategies.

The Cold War and nuclear weapons changed the strategic position of the United States and the emphasis of its land warfare tradition. The country lost the protection offered by European rivalries, and technology undermined the security of vast oceans. Facing an enemy threatening America's very survival, U.S. planners dared not rely on weakened allies to buy time for mobilization.

Although containment emerged in 1947 as America's grand strategy, the next four decades demonstrated great variation in its means (economic, political, and military) and intermediate ends (protecting vital areas or securing all the nations along the Sino‐Soviet perimeter). To overcome the Red Army's numerical superiority in Europe, the United States relied on nuclear deterrence while also employing military assistance, German rearmament, tactical nuclear weapons, and new maneuver strategies later tested, as noted above, in the Persian Gulf.

During periods when containment emphasized perimeter defense, the army engaged in limited conflict in Korea and in revolutionary war in Vietnam. Although not unaware of the nature of the Vietnam War and the elements of successful counterinsurgencies, the army—aided by the marines and the other services' air forces—too often fought in traditional ways. Commanders hoped to bring the enemy's main forces to decisive combat, used firepower lavishly to limit U.S. casualties, and relied on airpower to isolate the battlefield, destroy the enemy's economy, and break his will. Fearful of prompting Chinese intervention, the United States applied its power incrementally—discounting the psychological impact of sustained powerful blows and rejecting direct assault on North Vietnam—and made a negotiated settlement its war aim. All of this meant that its opponent could set the pace and intensity of the war at levels it found endurable. “Vietnamization”—turning the war over to the South Vietnamese—showed initial promise, but without lavish American aid, the strategy could not resist North Vietnam's 1975 cross‐border invasion.
[See also Enemy, Views of the; Land Warfare; Napoleonic Warfare; Native American Wars: Wars Between Native Americans and Europeans and Euro‐Americans; Philippines, U.S. Military Involvement in the; Tactics: Land Warfare Tactics.]

Bibliography

Russell F. Weigley , American Military Thought: From Washington to Marshall, 1962.
Walter Millis, ed., American Military Thought, 1966.
Russell F. Weigley , The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy, 1973.
John Lewis Gaddis , Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, 1982.
Allan R. Millett and and Peter Maslowski , For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America, 1984.
Archer Jones , Elements of Military Strategy: An Historical Approach, 1996.

James L. Abrahamson

Bibliography

Edward L. Beach , The United States Navy: 200 Years, 1986.
Wayne P. Hughes , Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice, 1986.
J. C. Wylie , Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control, 1990.
Edward S. Miller , War Plan Orange: The U.S. strategy to defeat Japan, 1897–1945, 1991.
David Alan Rosenberg , Process: The Realities of Formulating Modern Naval Strategy, James Goldrick and John B. Hattendorf, eds., Mahan is not Enough, 1993.
George W. Baer , One Hundred Years of Sea Power: the U.S. Navy, 1890–1990, 1994.
Colin S. Gray and and Roger W. Barnett , Seapower and Strategy, 1996.
N. A. M. Rodger, ed., Naval Power in the Twentieth Century, 1996.
Jon Tetsuro Sumida , Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command: The Classic Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan Reconsidered, 1997.

Larry Seaquist

John F. Guilmartin, Jr.

Bibliography

Lawrence Freedman , The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 1981; rev. ed. 1989.
Fred Kaplan , The Wizards of Armageddon, 1983.
David Alan Rosenberg , The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960, International Security, 7 (Spring 1983), pp. 1–71.
David MacIsaac , The Nuclear Weapons Debate and American Society, Air University Review, 35 (May–June 1984), pp. 81–96.
Thomas B. Cochran,, William M. Arkin,, and and Milton M. Hoenig , Nuclear Weapons Data Book. Vol. I: U.S. Nuclear Forces and Capabilities, 1984.
Robert Jervis , The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy, 1984.
Charles W. Kegley, Jr., and Eugene R. Wittkopf, eds., The Nuclear Reader: Strategy, Weapons, War, 1985.
Gregg Herken , Counsels of War, 1985; enl. ed. 1987.
Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson, eds., Strategic Nuclear Targeting, 1986.
A. B. Carter et al., eds., Managing Nuclear Operations, 1987.
Steven Ross , American War Plans, 1945–1950, 1988.
Janne E. Nolan , Guardians of the Arsenal: The Politics of Nuclear Strategy, 1989.
Scott Sagan , Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security, 1989.
Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., and and Steven L. Reardon , The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, 1945–1953, 1993.
Robert S. Norris and and Thomas B. Cochran , US‐USSR/Russian Strategic Offensive Nuclear Forces, 1945–1996, 1997.
Stephen I. Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, 1998.

David MacIsaac

Strategy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The word “strategy,” derived from Greek, originally meant the “art of the general,” or “generalship.” It has long since been broadened to include also the art of the admiral and of the air commander. So dynamic and pregnant a word is bound to be applied also to numerous other kinds of competitive situations, including commerce and games, and today one speaks of testing various “strategies of play” over a broad range of game situations. Such usage is, however, comparatively recent, occurring mostly since World War II. In this article we shall be concerned only with the classic application of the term strategy to war, including relevant aspects of the planning processes prior to, and in preparation for, war.

Strategy is distinguished from the related term “tactics” in ways which are well understood, though variously stated. Thus, the Oxford English Dictionary asserts that tactics refers “only to the mechanical movement of bodies set in motion by” strategy. Mahan proposed as a distinction between tactics and strategy the fact of contact. Tactics thus refers to the localized hostilities that occur where adversaries are in contact; strategy, to the basic dispositions of strength that constitute the entire conduct of a campaign or of a war. Or one can say that tactics is fighting and strategy is planning where and how to fight, with the “how” construed so as to exclude the details.

Another meaningful and even necessary distinction stresses the different levels at which the pertinent operations or decisions take place. Although one might speak appropriately of the “strategy” of a battle, referring thereby to the commander‘s purpose and essential dispositions of force, one would generally apply the term only to a large and critical battle and to the decisions of the commander in chief. Lesser commanders would be concerned with tactics. The normal connotations of the word “strategy” suggest, however, even higher levels of direction. Some have attempted, though abortively, to introduce terms like “grand strategy” to refer to the very highest levels of decision making affecting the most basic and essential dispositions for the conduct of a war, such as the major decisions made jointly by Churchill and Roosevelt during World War II, the most basic and dominant of these being the decision to defeat Germany first and Japan second.

Although it is pointless to resist established usage, one might note in passing that the use of the term “strategic” to describe a certain kind of aerial bombing has been misleading and therefore unfortunate. “Strategic bombing” applies to a type of operation characterized by deep penetration into the heartland of the enemy country, against targets selected for military or economic (i.e., supportive of the military) reasons or simply for purposes of terrorizing civilians. It is distinguished from “tactical bombing,” which includes short-range operations, often in close support of friendly ground forces, and intermediate-range, or “interdiction,” bombing, usually against the logistics or supply system of the enemy ground forces. The distinction is essentially one of zones of penetration and attack, with the concurrent implication, at least on the part of its advocates, that the targets for strategic bombing are radically different in kind from those sought in tactical bombing and somehow more fundamental in importance.

Professional neglect of strategic thought. The student in quest of the written strategic thought of the past will be startled to discover how lean it is, especially in a world that has known so much war. Actually, the frequency and persistence of war from remote antiquity to the present—for long periods one might almost speak of its continuity—provide one clue to the scarcity of written works. Men who spent much of their adult lives fighting were apparently content to learn their art in the field and by communication of relevant wisdom through word of mouth.

Moreover, until the early part of the nineteenth century, weapons and methods of fighting changed slowly, as did the conventions which guided those methods. The challenge of sharply changed conditions was generally absent. Even the introduction of gunpowder offered no such change. At the time it was so unimportant that chroniclers neglected to note the precise date of its first use on a European battlefield, sometime in the early fourteenth century. It took two centuries for the crossbow to be displaced by the musket, which developed when the touchhole gave way to the matchlock (late in the fifteenth century), thus permitting use of a trigger.

Another part of the explanation concerns the character and number of the potential users of strategic lore, who would also normally be the contributors to its literature. For most of the span of our civilization the leaders of armies have been aristocrats, often princes and kings, and those surrounding them have been of the same caste, which has never been known as a society of scholars. It is significant that the great Marshal de Saxe, first soldier of France during part of the reign of Louis xv, wrote his brief “Reveries Upon the Art of War” (1757) relatively early in his career, during a period of illness when he could do nothing else, and wrote nothing subsequently. The more modern practitioners of the military arts too have been committed to the idea, no doubt correctly on balance, that the first function of the commander is not strategic decision making but the leadership of military forces, whether large or small. Among the great military powers of modern times, it has always been axiomatic that the avenue to promotion in peacetime and, especially, in war is success in command, not good staff work.

A related conviction long cherished by professional military officers is, in the words of Field Marshal Lord Wavell, “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.” Of strategy, Wavell added, “the main principles . . . are simple and easy to grasp” (1953, p. 97). It is remarkable that the reflective Wavell should have considered tactics more important as well as more difficult than strategy. The fatal error in his own military career was one of strategic judgment—his approving early in 1941 the commitment of a major portion of his North African forces to the British expedition to Greece without having first disposed of Rommel in the desert. What has been certainly true, however, is that tactics has been much more than strategy the province of the professional soldier, since the former is in many ways more esoteric and makes far heavier demands on military virtues like resolution and courage.

Finally, one should remember that the market for strategic insight has always been a limited one. Actual and potential commanders in chief were never numerous. Until very recently, the great majority of professional military officers could live out their careers without ever being called upon to make or to offer advice upon a strategic decision. Their training took full cognizance of this fact.

Background of strategy. The “roots of strategy” have been traced as far back as the writings, or collected maxims, of Sun Tzu (c. 500 B.C.). His “Art of War,” however, is today merely quaint. The Greeks, especially Xenophon and Thucydides, are more important, although they did not write discourses on strategy. But included in their chronicles or histories are long statements, supposedly quoting Greek generals, which often reveal fascinating strategic insight. Another early author, Vegetius (“The Military Institutions of the Romans,” c. a.d. 390), deals more with tactics than strategy, though his book is said to have been used by commanders in the Middle Ages and later. Niccolò Machiavelli should also be mentioned, although interestingly enough, his Art of War (1521), engrossed with problems of tactics and organizational reform, probably contains less about strategy than some of his other works. Again, the writings of Marshal Maurice de Saxe (1757) and Friedrich n (1747) are absorbed largely in detailed tactical concerns and are interesting today mostly for what they reveal of war in their own times. Only the collection of what are purported to be Napoleon‘s “maxims” begin to show some live connection with our own times. In short, the roots of modern strategy really begin at the end of the eighteenth century.

However, rather than catalogue the contributions of past writers whose works have dissolved into the stream of modern military thinking, it is preferable to look back to see which thinkers stand out as major contributors to the ideas and doctrines that in one form or another represent our living strategic inheritance.

Mahan . Before World War II, theoretical strategy was divided into three parts: naval, air, and land strategy. In the field of naval strategy the figure of the American naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan was still supreme. His strategic ideas represented mostly the rediscovery of principles that had held sway in sailing days. More clearly than any predecessor, Mahan illuminated the concept of “command of the sea.” He distinguished sharply between attaining command, which is the function of the battle fleet, and exercising it, which is done by cruisers and convoy-escort vessels. He felt that mere commerce raiding had always failed to be “decisive of great issues,” and being innately conservative, he missed seeing the special strategic potential of the submarine in that role. He died too early (December 1914) to witness its astonishing success against Allied commerce in World War I. Mahan‘s views and great prestige contributed to the general prewar underestimation of the submarine, even within the German navy. [See the biography of Mahan.]

Corbett and Castex . Another distinguished though less well-known figure in naval strategy was Mahan‘s civilian British contemporary Julian Corbett, also a naval historian. In France an outstanding figure was Admiral Raoul Castex, who between the wars wrote with insight of the submarine experience of World War I. The very few books on naval strategy published after these writers (e.g., Brodie 1941) were usually attempts to bring the work of these thinkers, especially of Mahan, up to date.

Douhet . In the new field of air strategy there was only one noteworthy writer, the Italian General Giulio Douhet, whose slender body of writings appeared in the decade following World War I. U.S. Brigadier General “Billy” Mitchell was an air propagandist, but except for some commonplace ideas, like applying the notion of concentration of force to the air, he was not truly a thinker on air strategy. The British attach much importance to the views of Lord Trenchard, World War I commander of the Royal Flying Corps and founder of the Royal Air Force, and some of his assistants (e.g., General P. R. C. Groves), whose convictions were more or less parallel to those of Douhet. The leaders of the German Luftwaffe of World War II, as well as of the American air forces, subsequently acknowledged their indebtedness to Douhet.

Douhet (1921) attempted to apply Mahan‘s concept of command of the sea to air fighting. Actually Douhet exaggerated the similarity of air and naval strategies, and he is more easily and accurately remembered as the prophet of the concept that attributes dominance to strategic bombing. In Douhet‘s opinion nothing could withstand the power of a large bomber force, which could and should ignore the static battle lines on the ground and proceed to destroy first the enemy‘s offensive air force, then the factories from which his air power issued, and finally the will to resist of the people at large. Douhet assumed, too readily that ground fighting would always be stalled as it was in 1914-1918, and he grossly underestimated the tonnage of bombs required to accomplish the above-described goals against any significant power. In World War II the RAF and the USAAF attempted to carry out his design, with results that were limited but certainly positive, especially against Japan. [For an evaluation, see Brodie 1959, chapters 3 and 4; see also the biography of Douhet.]

Clausewitz . In land strategy, certainly the oldest area in which any kind of strategic thinking can be discovered, the towering stature of Karl von Clausewitz, who died in 1831, has not been surpassed or even equaled. Clausewitz is almost alone in the philosophic breadth and grasp he had of this subject. Among the publicists in all strategic fields since his time, only Mahan comes close to his sense of the political constraints on strategy. Clausewitz‘ book On War (1832-1834) is ponderous and difficult to read, and it has suffered from bad translations of corrupted texts. It has had few readers, and the frequent references to, or “quotations” from, his work often distort his essential message.

Far from being the advocate of total or absolute war, as is often charged, Clausewitz might in fact be considered the originator of the modern doctrine of limited war. His often-quoted phrase “War is a mere continuation of politics by other means” was intended simply to stress the necessary dominance of the political aim and thus the necessary subjection of the general to the political leader. This has been generally overlooked or forgotten, but another basic Clausewitz thesis which did not suffer this fate was the importance of destroying the enemy‘s armed forces, a process distinct from capturing portions of his territory or cities or fortresses. [See the biography of Clausewitz.]

Jomini . An important contemporary of Clausewitz‘ was the Swiss mercenary Antoine Henri Jomini, a senior officer on Napoleon‘s staff and later on the staff of Napoleon‘s enemy, the tsar of Russia. Jomini‘s continual publications during a very long life, his lucidity, and the fact that he wrote in relatively accessible French rather than forbidding German, resulted in his having, outside of Germany, a far greater influence than Clausewitz. The generals on both sides of the American Civil War are supposed to have been much influenced by him.

He is best summarized as the chief interpreter of Napoleon‘s strategy and of the elements which brought about its success. We may perceive his continuing influence especially in his exaltation of the doctrine of the offensive. Clausewitz had also appreciated the importance of the offensive, but his views were characteristically more moderate and qualified. Jomini is also famous for coining the phrase (though not originating the thought) “methods change but principles are unchanging.” However, he did not deign to present an accompanying list of principles. Such a list was to be the corruption of a later age.

Du Picq and Foch . In France an original mind appeared in the slender but scholarly work of Colonel Ardant du Picq, killed in one of the first battles of the Franco-Prussian War. Du Picq was entirely absorbed with the psychology of the soldier in combat. His realistic insights, because they were not carefully studied, had an unfortunate influence in the pre-World War I school of French military romantics under the intellectual leadership of Ferdinand Foch. Foch and his followers made slogans of quotations from du Picq and Clausewitz without troubling to understand the subleties of their thought. For example, du Picq‘s remark “He will win who has the resolution to advance” referred to the omnipresent element of fear in battle. Foch quoted it as a clarion call to the attack. However outstanding his later abilities as a commander, Foch in his pre-1914 role as professor at the École Supérieure de la Guerre and as a writer on strategy was mostly a propagandist and a vulgarizer of his greater predecessors.

The method of all these men consisted in the scrutiny of military history to see what abiding lessons could be derived from the experience of the past. Some, like Clausewitz, du Picq, and Mahan, had been careful and fairly objective historians; others, like Foch, were not averse to distorting history, with which they had little enough familiarity, to serve their pre-existing convictions. We should also notice that none of these figures, including the most recent, were at all interested in applying quantitative measures to their data or conceptions. Douhet‘s failure to apply even elementary arithmetical calculations to his concepts resulted in the gross exaggerations that oblige us to account him, however insightful, more wrong than right in his prediction of the character of World War II. Perhaps the contemporary strategists contrast most sharply with the old precisely in their different attitude toward quantification.

”Principles of war.” Beginning shortly before World War I and continuing into the present, there have been various presentations of the so-called principles of war (the first listing of principles in United States Army training manuals was in Training Regulations 10-5 of 1921, which simply named the “principles” without explaining them). These “principles,” usually presented in lists of six to a dozen numbered maxims, are supposed to be unchanging despite the fantastic changes that have occurred and continue to occur in almost all the factors with which they deal. The propositions usually stress the importance of such common-sense precepts as: avoid undue dispersion of strength in order to maximize the chances for superiority at the decisive point (principle of mass, or concentration); choose firmly your course of action and adhere to it despite distracting pressures (principle of the objective); press vigorously any advantage gained, especially after victory in battle (principle of pursuit); etc. There are occasional additions to, or subtractions from, this list, depending on the whim or bias of the individual compiler.

The utility of these generalizations or “principles” is in encapsulating what otherwise has to be derived from much study, as well as in placing foremost in the commander‘s mind important ideas that might otherwise be forgotten in the heat of battle. Nevertheless, undue emphasis upon them argues a negation of strategic thinking. When Admiral Halsey declined on the basis of the “principle of concentration” to divide his tremendous force at Leyte Gulf, electing instead to throw the whole of the great Third Fleet against the puny decoy force under Admiral Ozawa, he threw away his chance for destroying the main Japanese fleet. As Winston Churchill put it, “The truths of war are absolute, but the principles governing their application have to be deduced on each occasion from the circumstances, which are always different; and in consequence no rules are any guide to action” (1923-1929, p. 576 in the 1931 edition).

Contemporary strategic thought. Changes wrought by World War II. World War II had an altogether different character from World War I, but among the more conspicuous changes two deserve special mention. The first was the heavy reliance upon scientists to assist not only top military commanders but even heads of government to reach critical tactical and strategic decisions. The role of scientists was particularly prominent in the new field of strategic bombing, where previous war experience was completely lacking and where a flow of new inventions was radically affecting the capabilities of the bombing forces. The outstanding application of analytical skills was in target selection, where economists proved especially invaluable.

The second was the introduction at the very end of the conflict of the atomic bomb, which was in itself a basic strategic change of totally unprecedented importance. It also signaled the beginning of an era of extremely rapid and also extremely costly technological development, which would in turn account for the unparalleled ascendancy of the “superpowers,” the Soviet Union and especially the United States. The atomic bomb differed from all previous military inventions in that it was immediately clear that its effects went far beyond the tactical. The bomber airplane had already taken war beyond the battlefield, but nuclear weapons guaranteed that those operations which in World War II we called strategic bombing would be all-important in any war in which they should again occur. However, shortly one began to hear expressions of the fear that even in their initial form those weapons were far too effective for the user‘s good, as long as reciprocal use also had to be considered.

Furthermore, the rapidity of change that resulted from the development of a wide range of nuclear weapons, combined with the development of fabulous new rockets or “self-propelled missiles” for carrying them, diminished greatly the utility of traditional “military judgment” in selecting the appropriate systems. The professional military man had enough to do to keep abreast of current technological developments pertinent to his work. But decisions about weapons systems had to be made even though these systems might not be ready for six years or more, when the whole technological environment could be significantly different. (A “weapons system” refers to the entire system of utilization, including manning, bases, etc., of any major weapon.)

It was not a wholly new requirement of the military that they think ahead technologically, but certainly the dimensions and complexity of the problem were totally new. Also, apart from technological issues, the fears justly inspired by nuclear weapons, as well as the menacing unknowns posed by the political realignment of world power—accented by the ascendancy of the Soviet Union in Europe, the victory of communism in China, and the decolonization of large parts of Africa, Asia, and the western Pacific—required continuing intensive scrutiny by suitably trained scholars of the changing political constraints on national strategy.

Institutional and intellectual developments . Deriving partly from these realizations on the part of the military, a development took place in the United States that was to have far-reaching consequences for the study of strategy. This was the founding of a number of nonprofit research institutions closely associated with, but autonomous from, the military services, where people with various kinds of scientific training, including the social sciences, and with access to “classified” (i.e., secret) information could devote themselves on a full-time basis to the consideration of national security problems. The prototype of these organizations, and still the best known among them, is The RAND Corporation, originally set up by a contract between the United States Air Force and the Douglas Aircraft Corporation but shortly thereafter made independent from Douglas.

Although it was perhaps not intended by their military sponsors that these research institutions should concern themselves with strategy, it was inevitable that at least some of their personnel would ultimately do so. Able, highly trained men are unlikely to let go unchallenged assumptions which they consider invalid or faulty but which have been fed to them as “givens” or “inputs” for what are supposed to be limited technical inquiries. Furthermore, while in the nuclear age the old division between land, sea, and air strategy makes, from the national point of view, less sense than ever, professional military officers are likely to be affected by loyalty to service interests. At any rate, the new nonprofit research institutions, together with some universities, began to produce from their civilian staffs the new leaders of strategic thought.

Although the larger research efforts conducted by these institutions were likely to be carried on by teams of technical experts, the novel and important ideas that floated into public consciousness were, as always in the past, the product mostly of individuals who seemed to have special gifts for strategic insight. The latter, though certainly more numerous than ever before, are still not a numerous group, yet they have produced most of the ideas on which debate has focused since the end of World War II, some of which have already won overwhelming national and even international acceptance. The more important of these ideas can be divided into two groups, comprising (a) a drastic modification of the previously prevailing notions concerning the conduct of total, or “general,” nuclear war, and (b) development of a new body of views concerning “limited war.”

With respect to the former, the theory of strategic bombing derived from Douhet and the experience of World War II, and initially carried over almost unchanged into the nuclear era, called for the most rapid possible destruction of the enemy‘s retaliatory air power, his war-production industries, and the morale of his people, mostly through the slaughter of a large proportion of them. Security of the offensive force was to be gained not through defensive means but by attacking in good time, and nuclear weapons only made it more urgent to strike first. However, civilian theorists began to point out that because general nuclear wars would have to be fought with “forces-in-being,” which is to say, forces existing at the outset, the so-called war-production industries counted for little or nothing as targets. Furthermore, the slaughter of populations was contraindicated for strategic as well as humanitarian reasons. There was, therefore, a strong trend toward “city-avoidance” strategies, which is to say that in any sensible target system cities were to be hostages rather than ruins, the main emphasis being on “counterforce” or “damage-limiting” targets, that is, the destruction of enemy retaliatory forces in order to limit damage to oneself.

Security of one‘s own offensive or retaliatory forces was to be sought not through rapidity of reaction—obviously dangerous to the maintenance of peace—but, especially with missiles, through underground protection (”hardening”), concealment, or mobility. As both major nuclear powers proceeded to make their retaliatory forces markedly less vulnerable, a real targeting dilemma set in, inasmuch as the resulting deterioration of the utility of counterforce strategies did not in itself warrant a return to the concept of city targeting. At any rate, the changes which produced this dilemma were considered highly stabilizing, because far from being anxious to strike while striking was possible, neither side now had much inducement to initiate the mutually destructive exchange.

The prevailing realization was indeed that there could be no conceivable political objectives worth the fighting of a general nuclear war. As a result ideas of limited war were developed, characterized in the main by the concept of having localized aggressions resisted locally rather than by general war or “massive retaliation” (to use a phrase derived from a much-publicized speech on January 12, 1954, by U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who was thereby attempting to reject the recently concluded Korean War as a pattern for the future). The modern concept of limited war, it should be noted, is totally different from that of the eighteenth century, inasmuch as it means not a limited mobilization of the total potential force of the state but rather the withholding of a tremendously powerful, already mobilized and in fact highly alerted force.

The earlier theorists of limited war saw no essential reason for avoiding tactical use of nuclear weapons, but later a school of thought developed which placed heavy emphasis on the avoidance of nuclear weapons at almost all costs, primarily because of the allegedly “escalatory” effects of any resort to nuclear weapons. “Escalation” (i.e., a heightening of intensity of hostilities) was something which might be deliberately sought as a warning to the enemy of one‘s resolve, but its obvious dangers made it imperative to keep it tightly controlled. The idea of a deliberate and always measured progression, where necessary, from very limited to very large applications of force fell under the general concept of “controlled response.” This concept, with special emphasis on “conventional,” or nonnuclear, fighting capabilities, characterized the administration of President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. [See Limited war; and Nuclear war.]

The intellectual and institutional movement just described has thus far been almost exclusively American, with some imitation, on an extremely modest scale, in the United Kingdom and in France. There seems to be no comparable emphasis on analytical techniques in the communist countries, where the study of strategy still seems to be the exclusive preserve of the military leaders, except insofar as they are guided on particular issues by the intuitively derived dicta of their political leaders.

Recent research directions . The body of the new strategic inquiry may be divided, somewhat arbitrarily, into three major categories: (1) the formulation and intellectual testing of new strategic concepts by a variety of analytical devices (including war gaming); (2) the formulation of national-defense-policy recommendations concerning particular regions; and (3) recommendations on the selection of “weapons systems,” determined largely by what has come to be called “cost-effectiveness” analysis, that is, a rigorous method for finding how to get the most military value for any given sum of money or, conversely, for getting a certain high level of defense potential at minimum cost (see Quade 1964).

These varying efforts, most of them concerned with vast expenditures, have stimulated an appreciation of quantification, which as we have seen, was previously absent from strategic discourse except in mobilization planning. On the other hand, where strategic study used to be based primarily on historical research, most of its new devotees have largely neglected or- abandoned military history. Although this neglect or separation has sometimes been defended by appeals to the novelty of the post-World War II strategic universe, there is no doubt that it represents one of the weaknesses or limitations in the new approach. Perhaps the new emphasis on limited war will stimulate a return to relevant historical research, which after all provides our only secure information on how men behave in political crisis and in battle. Besides, the era since World War II has by now developed an important history of its own, which includes a succession of crises and of various kinds of military conflict, including a considerable conventional war in Korea and a new kind of conflict in Vietnam.

The pace of technological development in military armaments is hardly likely to slacken appreciably in the future. For that reason, the special kinds of cost-effectiveness analysis of military systems developed since World War II will no doubt continue to play a prominent part in strategic decision-making processes. On the other hand, there are at least two reasons for expecting that strategic thought will be much less concerned with technological developments than in the score of years following World War II. First, though new weapons systems will appear, and various existing kinds will become more “sophisticated,” there do seem to be ceilings on meaningful effectiveness. Already nuclear weapons can be made that are much more powerful than seems to be warranted by most conceivable uses; and the possibility, for example, of using orbiting space vehicles for potentially aggressive military purposes (they are already available for reconnaissance) is not likely to make a major change in the military aspect that the great nuclear powers already present to each other. Second, while the primary problem for strategists in the past was to assemble and effectively utilize superior strength, in the contemporary period the more frequent problem is how to make the available power relevant to objectives likely to be in dispute. Certainly it is no longer necessary at this writing to emphasize, to any government that may have the power to conduct it, the fantastic destructiveness of total nuclear war and the unsuitability of that degree of military conflict for any conceivable political objectives.

We may therefore expect, in any strategic analysis, a heightening of the importance of the political environment with respect to the total governance of any military operations. And for that reason we may expect not only the continued dominance of civilian influence in both the analysis and determination of strategic issues but possibly also some lessening of the relative importance of the special nonprofit defense-oriented research organizations described above, for they will not necessarily have a comparative advantage over other intellectual institutions in appraising the political realities of the times.

Bernard Brodie

[See alsoDeterrence; Limited war; Military policy; Military power potential; National security; Nuclear war. Other relevant material may be found underInternational relations; andWar.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ardant Du Picq, Charles (1880)1947 Battle Studies: Ancient and Modern Battles. Edited by John N. Greely and Robert C. Cotton. Harrisburg, Pa.: Military Service Publishing. → First published in French.

Aron, Raymond (1963) 1965 The Great Debate: Theories of Nuclear Strategy. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. → First published as Le grand débat: Initiation à la stratégie atomique.

Brodie, Bernard (1941) 1965 A Guide to Naval Strategy. 5th ed. Princeton Univ. Press., Bernard (1941) 1965 A Guide to Naval Strategy. 5th ed. Princeton Univ. Press.

Brodie, Bernard (1959) 1965 Strategy in the Missile Age. 2d ed. Princeton Univ. Press. → An introduction to modern strategic concepts.

Brodie, Bernard 1966 Escalation and the Nuclear Option. Princeton Univ. Press. → On the debate concerning nuclear versus conventional strategies.

Bull, Hedley (1961) 1965 The Control of the Arms Race: Disarmament and Arms Control in the Missile Age. 2d ed. New York: Praeger.

Churchill, Winston (1923-1929) 1963-1964 The World Crisis. 6 vols. New York: Scribners. → The 1931 edition is a condensation of the 1923-1929 edition.

Clausewitz, Karl Von (1832-1834) 1943 On War. New York: Modern Library. → First published in German as Vom Kriege, in three volumes. To date this is the best translation of this great classic, but a new and superior version is at this writing under preparation by an international team of scholars.

Corbett, Julian S. (1911) 1918 Some Principles of Maritime Strategy. London: Longmans.

Douhet, Giulio (1921)1942 The Command of the Air. New York: Coward-McCann. → First published as 11 domino dell ‘aria.

Earle, Edward M. (editor) 1943 Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought From Machiavelli to Hitler. Princeton Univ. Press.

Foch, Ferdinand (1903) 1920 Principles of War. New York: Holt. → First published as Des principes de la guerre.

Friedrich II, der Grosse, King of prussia (1747) 1950 The Instruction of Frederick the Great for His Generals, 1747. Pages 301-400 in Thomas R. Phillips (editor), The Roots of Strategy. Harrisburg, Pa.: Military Service Publishing. → For other writings of Frederick the Great, see Earle (1943).

Hitch, Charles J.; and McKean, R. N. 1960 The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard Univ. Press.

Jomini, Henri (1836) 1952 Summary of the Art of War. Edited by J. D. Hittle. Harrisburg, Pa.: Military Service Publishing. → First published as Precis de I‘art de la guerre. The 1952 edition is a condensed version.

Kahn, Herman (1960) 1961 On Thermonuclear War. 2d ed. Princeton Univ. Press.

Kaufmann, William W. 1964 The McNamara Strategy. New York: Harper. → An interpretation of the strategic philosophy absorbed by U.S. Secretary of Defense McNamara from certain of his contemporaries.

Kissinger, Henry A. (editor) 1965a Problems of National Strategy: A Book of Readings. New York: Praeger.

Kissinger, Henry A. 1965b The Troubled Partnership: A Re-appraisal of the Atlantic Alliance. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Knorr, Klaus E.; and Read, Thornton (editors) 1962 Limited Strategic War. New York: Praeger.

Luvaas, Jay 1964 The Education of an Army: British Military Thought, 1815-1940. Univ. of Chicago Press.

Machiavelli, NiccolÒ (1521) 1965 The Art of War. Edited with an introduction by Neal Wood. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. → First published as Arte della guerra.

Mahan, Alfred Thayer (1890) 1963 The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660-1783. New York: Hill & Wang.

Mahan, Alfred Thayer 1911 Naval Strategy Compared and Contrasted With the Principles and Practice of Military Operations on Land: Lectures. . . . Boston: Little.

NapolÉon I, Emperor of the French (1827) 1950 Military Maxims of Napoleon. Pages 401-441 in Thomas R. Phillips (editor), The Roots of Strategy. Harrisburg, Pa.: Military Service Publishing. → First published posthumously in French.

Osgood, Robert E. (1957) 1960 Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy. Univ. of Chicago Press.

Phillips, Thomas R. (editor) (1940) 1950 The Roots of Strategy. Harrisburg, Pa.: Military Service Publishing.

Quade, Edward S. (editor) 1964 Analysis for Military Decisions. Chicago: Rand McNally.

Saxe, Maurice De (1757) 1950 My Reveries Upon the Art of War. Pages 177-300 in Thomas R. Phillips (editor), The Roots of Strategy. Harrisburg, Pa.: Military Service Publishing. → First published posthumously as Les reveries; Ou mémoires sur I‘art de la guerre.

Schelling, Thomas C. 1960 The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. → A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Oxford University Press.

Schelling, Thomas C. 1966 Arms and Influence. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.

Snyder, Glenn II. 1961 Deterrence and Defense: Toward a Theory of National Security. Princeton Univ. Press.

Sokolovskii, Vasilii D. (editor) (1962) 1963 Soviet Military Strategy. Translated, analyzed, and annotated by H. S. Dinerstein, L. Gouré, and T. W. Wolfe. Engle-wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. → First published in Russian as Voennaiia strategiia.

Sun Tzu On the Art of War. Pages 13-63 in Thomas R. Phillips (editor), The Roots of Strategy. Harrisburg, Pa.: Military Service Publishing, 1950. → First written as Ping Fa c. 500 B.C.

Vegetius The Military Institutions of the Romans. Pages 65-175 in Thomas R. Phillips (editor), The Roots of Strategy. Harrisburg, Pa.: Military Service Publishing, 1950. → First written as De re militari c. A.D. 390. First printed in 1473.

Wavell, Archibald 1953 Soldiers and Soldiering: Or Epithets of War. London: Cape.

Wolfe, Thomas W. 1964 Soviet Strategy at the Crossroads. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Strategy

"Strategy" is a somewhat over-used word to indicate a general plan or an approach to doing just about anything—so that one reads about strategies for winning in poker, finding the right woman or man, shaping a business, or preparing prize animals for an exhibition. The word came to be adopted from military usage after World War II. Etymologically the word comes from the Greek stratos, meaning army, and more narrowly from strategos, meaning a general. Thus it derives from "generalship" or, more precisely, a general's battle plan. It is normally coupled with the word "tactics," which comes from the Greek for "arranging things." The general formulated his plan and lesser officers then "arranged things" so that the plan would work out in detail. "Strategy" thus sounds both more martial and exalted than the ho-hum word "planning"—which, in addition, carries a faint reminder of socialist economics. Strategy has therefore, as it were, invaded business discourse and spread from broad concepts of corporate planning to such matters as marketing, advertising, human resources, accounts receivable collections and on to every specialty of business, suggesting that everyone is now a strategic thinker, not just the person at the top.

DEFINITIONS AND EXAMPLES

When the word is appropriately used, a strategy is a broad and general approach to an enterprise in which certain structural elements are determined in advance and courses of action have been selected from among others by preference in order to differentiate this enterprise from others in light of the environment as it is perceived to be and the anticipated action of opponents in particular.

A strategy is thus characterized by choices and decisions concerning future action at a level of generality which permits flexible implementation within the broad outline that the strategy presents. A strategy is more specific than a policy but more general than a plan yet has aspects of both.

A classical example of corporate strategy was that developed by Alfred P. Sloan for General Motors after he became its president in 1923. Sloan introduced annual styling changes, thus launching planned obsolescence as a motivator for replacing the car, and organized the different car lines based on pricing, with Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac each positioned in a unique price range and not competing with each other. The strategy worked very well for its time and consequently has led to widespread imitation. But it was a high-cost strategy in that it imposed significant, expensive redesign and reengineering annually—and is now followed only with token symbolic gestures. Another strategy, the basic platform on which multiple models can be built, has gradually taken over—and the competition now is between categories: sedans, SUVs, and pickups.

It is worth noting that strategies in business (as also in war) frequently evolve from circumstances; the significance of the circumstances is then consciously noted and formalized. Thus, for instance, 7-Eleven, credited with pioneering the convenience store, began in 1927 as an ice cream company that started selling bread, milk, and eggs at its ice docks to customers. It was called The Southland Corporation then and did not adopt its current name until 1946, choosing the name then because its stores were open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. These days, of course, 7-Eleven is open 24 hours a day and seven days a week—but has not chosen to rename itself to fits its new strategy of delivering convenience 24-Seven.

It is conventional management wisdom to say that businesses must have a strategy in order to succeed. It is closer to the truth to say that all businesses by definition have a strategy; it may be consciously realized or not, formally rendered or not. The manner in which a company is organized and run is the expression of its strategy. The difference between two companies is that in one the strategy may be well known by all and operating as a set of conscious guiding principles; in the other it may be unconscious or simply perceived as "the way we do things around here." Consciously formulated strategies are superior to "traditional" approaches only if the planning is insightful, well done, and adapted to the circumstances. The business owner with a good smell for the market, a good sense of his or her customers, and a history of good "seat of the pants" judgment will outperform another business no matter how formal the strategizing of its owners—if they do not have the touch. For these reasons "strategy" is not a cure-all for a business in trouble, large or small, but a technique of discovering solutions and setting a course.

STRATEGIZING: BIG AND SMALL

Strategy formulation as a discipline—meaning as a special kind of business activity—is much more common in large corporations than in small business. In small business the same activity takes place but tends to be less formal, more adaptive, and more the product of one or two individuals in the company's leadership. In the big corporations strategy development flows in two directions. From the top will come a general sense of direction and emphasis: "We are a marketing company." "We are a technology company." "We are bottom-line oriented." Operating elements within the company then respond to this general message in annual plans in which each division or element responds with a plan of which the top few paragraphs are a strategic statement further elaborated into specific action initiatives in the body. This general approach arises from the very complexity of large organizations serving many diverse markets with dozens or hundreds of products or services—each of which requires different adaptations. In a company principally interested in short-term returns, for instance, individual strategies reliant on capital investments over longer periods will fare more poorly than highly leveraged approaches. In a technology company dominated by an engineering mindset, very exciting ("sexy") marketing concepts may be sidelined because they lack technical sophistication. In well-run large corporations, top management will make the effort to formulate different broad strategies for lower elements based on realities in the market and not permit vague, broad, but restrictive concepts to preempt appropriate responses. Such a stance, of course, requires high-level executives who actually understand a business rather than shining in some specialty like finance or marketing.

In a small business the formulation of strategy is typically closer to the market simply because the principals are engaged in the business itself at the point where, proverbially put, the rubber meets the road: where the business interfaces with the customer. Most small businesses owe their origin to the perception of what is, in actually, a strategic opportunity. The very idea of the business expresses the strategy: "I swear I've driven fifty miles this afternoon and I still can't find a decent art supply store anywhere." "What this town needs is a [fill in the blank]" has launched many a business. So have two unrelated objects that, for a brilliant moment, combine in the mind of an entrepreneur—and a new product is born.

In his book, My Years at General Motors, Sloan spoke about "the concept of the organization." Behind every small business there is a concept of the organization—a complex perception of needs and of responses to that need. That concept, in effect, is the strategy of the business. It is equivalent to the theme of a novel or of a non-fiction work: it is the organizing idea behind it which often escapes analysis—the entrepreneurial insight. It might be argued that, in its absence, strategies will tend to be pretty much the same and quite conventional. Robert Kennedy, writing in the Journal of Industrial Economics on "strategy fads" made this point by analyzing prime-time television programs—showing that, despite a great deal of strategizing, networks produce lackluster imitations. These findings are echoed in a broader context by Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago in a paper tided Conformity and Dissent.

Analysis applied to strategy decomposes the concept into its visible inputs. These are the needs of the market, products that can meet the need, their differentiation from competing products, alternative means of production and of reaching the market, different messages to reach the consumer, the positioning of products to reach the best segments, pricing and incentives, and much more. There is little doubt that intense examination of the market is desirable—as is the consideration of alternative approaches. But what makes a winning strategy is that secret ingredient the entrepreneurial mind adds after everyone has left for home.

see also Business Planning

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Colley, John L, Jacqueline L. Doyle, and Robert D. Hardie. Corporate Strategy. McGraw-Hill, 2002.

Grant, Robert M. Contemporary Strategy Analysis. Blackwell Publishing, 2002.

Kennedy, Robert E. "Strategy Fads and Competitive Convergence: An Empirical Test for Herd Behavior in Prime-Time Television Programming." Journal of Industrial Economics. March 2002.

Lake, Neville. The Strategic Planning Workbook. Second Edition. Kogan Page, 2006.

Mourdoukoutas, Panos. Business Strategy in a Semiglobal Economy. M.E. Sharpe, 2006.

Navarro, Peter. "Sustainable Strategies for a World of Economic Shocks." Financial Executive. April 2006.

Pettigrew Andrew M., Howard Thomas, and Richard Whittington eds. Handbook of Strategy and Management. Sage, 2002.

Schmetterer, Bob. Leap: A Revolution in Creative Business Strategy. John Wiley & Sons, 2003.

Sloan, Alfred P. My Years with General Motors. Currency, 1990.

Sunstein, Cass R. Conformity and Dissent. University of Chicago. 30 October 2002. Available from http://www.law.uchicago.edu/academics/publiclaw/resources/34.crs.conformity.pdf. Retrieved on 31 May 2006.

                                            Darnay, ECDI

Strategy

Once a beginning fly fisherman has experienced these various lies on a small stream, he (she) is ready to fish the larger streams. Fish the larger stream as a group of small streams adjacent to each other. Locate the many feeding, resting, and prime lies and fish them just like you did on the small stream.

For example, Montana’s Madison River can be intimidating to a novice. Ignore its heavy flows and focus on the first twenty feet of the bank side waters. Fish this just like your small stream. Look for current seams because these are prime lies that seem to always collect good fish. Take into account the light intensity, temperature, insect activity, and you will discover the best water to fish.

A large spring creek such as Idaho’s Henry’s Fork can be perplexing. Again, divide it up into small stream segments and look for the resting, feeding, and prime lies.

Huge coastal rivers such as Oregon’s Rogue River can be puzzling with many heavy flows and deep currents that are nearly impossible to penetrate. Remember that anadromous fish must migrate upstream through this river’s maze of rapids. Its salmon and steelhead have hundreds of miles to migrate and must choose the easiest flows to navigate through. This means the fish are swimming upstream through the river’s depths from knee to chest deep, and its current velocity is about as fast as you can walk. Eliminate all of the other water and concentrate your efforts on these fish migration paths. Again take into account the other factors which can influence fish activities. Look for resting lies and migratory highways. Spend your time fishing these areas.

strat·e·gy / ˈstratəjē/ • n. (pl. -gies) a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim: time to develop a coherent economic strategy | shifts in marketing strategy. ∎  the art of planning and directing overall military operations and movements in a war or battle.Often contrasted with tactics (see tactic). ∎  a plan for such military operations and movements: nonprovocative defense strategies.