Strategy

by Lawrence Freedman

  The dramatist can use coincidences to move the plot along, to ensure that the main protagonist faces the hard choices at the right time. The strategist knows that there will be events which were never part of the plot and which disrupt its logic but cannot be sure when, where, and how. Boundaries will be hard to maintain, and apparently irrelevant issues will intrude and complicate matters. The plot must therefore build in a certain freedom of action. The earlier definitive choices must be made, the greater the commitment to a particular course and the harder the adjustment when the actions of others or chance events deflect the protagonist from this course. The strategist cannot rely on the device of the deus ex machina, by which classical plays used divine intervention to sort out desperate situations at the last moment. Writers can allow a coincidence to turn an ending, acknowledges McKee, but this is the “writer’s greatest sin” for it negates the value of the plot and allows the central characters to duck responsibility for their own actions. Aristotle also deplored the regular recourse to this device.

  In ancient Greece, the most important distinction in plots was between comedy and tragedy. This was not a distinction between happy/sad or funny/miserable but between alternative ways of resolving conflicts.37 It may be that the conflict is not between opposing characters but between individuals and society. Comedy ends with a satisfactory resolution and the main characters looking forward positively to the future; tragedy ends with a negative prospect—especially for the main character, who is probably largely responsible for his own misfortune—even if society as a whole is restored to some sort of equilibrium. When a new and positive relationship has been forged between society and the main character that is comedy; when the main character’s attempt to change the status quo has been defeated that is tragedy. The dramatist knows from the start whether she is writing comedy or a tragedy: the strategist aims for comedy but risks tragedy.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE CONTRACT FOR this book is dated 1994. The original commission came from Tim Barton, and I appreciate his extraordinary patience as I busied myself with other projects and made a number of false starts on this one. Once it did get underway, he guided me to the capable hands of David McBride, who has been an extraordinarily supportive editor. It is thanks to him, Cammy Richelli, and the rest of the team at Oxford University Press that this book is making an appearance.

  The project, however, would not have even been re-started had it not been for James Gow’s encouragement and seminar opportunities to develop my ideas. James, with Brad Robinson, pushed me into applying to the Research Councils UK under their Global Uncertainties program and helped me put together a successful submission. This joint ESRC/AHRC Fellowship provided me with space to research and write that would otherwise have been impossible. I was particularly fortunate in my coworkers on the grant. I have benefited from Jeff Michaels’s own work on strategic ideas, as well as his sharp critiques of my own. While I was supposedly supervising Ben Wilkinson’s thesis, he was in practice supervising me—especially when it came to the Classics.

  The department of War Studies at King’s College London has been a stimulating home to me for over three decades. Conversations with staff and students inform many parts of this book. I have been grateful for the support of successive department heads: Brian Holden Reid, Christopher Dandeker, and Mervyn Frost. Other colleagues have also given me advice on the manuscript, notably Theo Farrell, Jan Willem Honig, and John Stone, who was a regular source of interesting references. Limor Simhony helped check my references, and Sarah Chukwudebe put in many corrections.

  I have also benefited greatly from the advice of colleagues outside the department. Special mention must be made of two outstanding students of strategy, Beatrice Heuser and Bob Jervis, who provided detailed and meticulous annotations, far beyond the call of duty. Thanks for many useful comments are also due to Rob Ayson, Dick Betts, Stuart Croft, Pete Feaver, Azar Gat, Carl Levy, Albert Weale, and Nick Wheeler. Lastly, my son Sam was a source of good advice on structure and the title, and I was able to discuss the counterculture with my daughter-in-law Linda. I could mention many people with whom I have discussed the issues raised in this book—and a number of them appear in its pages—but two deserve special mention. The first is my teacher and mentor, Sir Michael Howard, who set me on this course and still inspires me to continue. The second is Colin Gray. Our careers have run in parallel, with many shared themes. Though our views have often diverged, the encounters have always been rewarding.

  In all my books I have thanked my wife Judith for her forbearance. Once again she has had to cope with my “book daze,” during which I am oblivious to everything around me other than the manuscript. It struck me, as we approach our ruby wedding, that it is about time I dedicated one of these books to her.

  NOTES

  Preface

  1. Matthew Parris, “What if the Turkeys Don’t Vote for Christmas?”, The Times, May 12, 2012.

  2. The concept of strategy as being “concerned with ways to employ means to achieve ends” is comparatively recent but is now well established in military circles, although not in such a way as always to capture the dynamic interaction between these elements. Arthur F. Lykke, Jr., “Toward an Understanding of Military Strategy,” Military Strategy: Theory and Application (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, 1989), 3–8.

  3. Ecclesiastes 9:11.

  4. This can be tracked using Google’s Ngram facility: http://books.google.com/ngrams/.

  5. Raymond Aron, “The Evolution of Modern Strategic Thought,” in Alastair Buchan, ed., Problems of Modern Strategy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), 25.

  6. George Orwell, “Perfide Albion” (review, Liddell Hart’s British Way of Warfare), New Statesman and Nation, November 21, 1942, 342–343.

  1 Origins 1: Evolution

  1. Frans B. M. de Waal, “A Century of Getting to Know the Chimpanzee,” Nature 437, September 1, 2005, 56–59.

  2. De Waal, Chimpanzee Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998). First edition was in 1982.

  3. De Waal, “Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy,” Annual Review Psychology 59 (2008): 279–300. See also Dario Maestripieri, Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

  4. Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp, “Neocortex Size Predicts Deception Rate in Primates,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 271, no. 1549 (August 2004): 1693–1699.

  5. Richard Byrne and A. Whiten, eds., Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes and Humans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The idea is often traced back to Nicholas Humphrey, “The Social Function of Intellect,” in P. P. G. Bateson and R. A. Hinde, eds. Growing Points in Ethology, 303–317 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

  6. Bert Höllbroder and Edward O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 59. Cited in Bradley Thayer, Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 163.

  7. Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

  8. Richard Wrangham, “Evolution of Coalitionary Killing,” Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 42, 1999, 12, 14, 2, 3.

  9. Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe, p. 176, fn 101.

  10. Robert Bigelow, Dawn Warriors (New York: Little Brown, 1969).

  11. Lawerence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 48.

  12. Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 115–117.

  13. Keeping in mind that these societies were relatively simple and social moves within them, including deception, would be less demanding than tho
se in more complex human societies. Kim Sterelny, “Social Intelligence, Human Intelligence and Niche Construction,” Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society 362, no. 1480 (2007): 719–730.

  2 Origins 2: The Bible

  1. Steven Brams, Biblical Games: Game Theory and the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003).

  2. Ibid., 12.

  3. Genesis 2:22, 23. All biblical references use the King James Version.

  4. Genesis 2:16, 17; 3:16, 17.

  5. Diana Lipton, Longing for Egypt and Other Unexpected Biblical Tales, Hebrew Bible Monographs 15 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008).

  6. Exodus 9:13–17.

  7. Exodus 7:3–5.

  8. Exodus 10:1–2.

  9. Chaim Herzog and Mordechai Gichon, Battles of the Bible, revised ed. (London: Greenhill Books, 1997), 45.

  10. Joshua 9:1–26.

  11. Judges 6–8.

  12. 1 Samuel 17.

  13. Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 110–111.

  3 Origins 3: The Greeks

  1. Homer, The Odyssey, translated by M. Hammond (London: Duckworth, 2000), Book 9.19–20, Book 13.297–9.

  2. Virgil, The Aeneid (London: Penguin Classics, 2003).

  3. Homer, The Iliad, translated by Stephen Mitchell (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011), Chapter IX.310–311, Chapter IX.346–352, Chapter XVIII.243–314, Chapter XXII.226–240.

  4. Jenny Strauss Clay, The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1983), 96.

  5. As “ou” is interchangeable with “me,” this was linguistically equivalent to mētis.

  6. The Odyssey, Book 9.405–14.

  7. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Philoctetes.txt.

  8. W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of the Traditional Hero (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), 24.

  9. Jeffrey Barnouw, Odysseus, Hero of Practical Intelligence: Deliberation and Signs in Homer’s Odyssey (New York: University Press of America, 2004), 2–3, 33.

  10. Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, translated from French by Janet Lloyd (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1978), 13–14, 44–45.

  11. Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (London: Michael Joseph, 1984), 46–49.

  12. The word stratēgos was a compound of stratos, for an encamped army spread out over ground, and agein (to lead).

  13. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Rex Warner (London: Penguin Classics, 1972), 5.26.

  14. The extent to which contemporary realist theories claim Thucydides as one of their own is discussed critically in Jonathan Monten, “Thucydides and Modern Realism,” International Studies Quarterly (2006) 50, 3–25, and David Welch, “Why International Relations Theorists Should Stop Reading Thucydides,” Review of International Studies 29 (2003), 301–319.

  15. Thucydides, 1.75–76.

  16. Ibid., 5.89.

  17. Ibid., 1.23.5–6.

  18. Arthur M. Eckstein, “Thucydides, the Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, and the Foundation of International Systems Theory,” The International History Review 25 (December 4, 2003), 757–774.

  19. Thucydides, I.139–45: 80–6.

  20. Donald Kagan, Thucydides: The Reinvention of History (New York: Viking, 2009), 56–57.

  21. Thucydides, 1.71.

  22. Ibid., 1.39.

  23. Ibid., 1.40.

  24. Richard Ned Lebow, “Play It Again Pericles: Agents, Structures and the Peloponnesian War,” European Journal of International Relations 2 (1996), 242.

  25. Thucydides, 1.33.

  26. Donald Kagan, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1991).

  27. Sam Leith, You Talkin’ To Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama (London: Profile Books, 2011), 18.

  28. Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff, “The Sophists,” in Patricia Curd and Daniel W. Graham, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 365–382; W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971); G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Thomas J. Johnson, “The Idea of Power Politics: The Sophistic Foundations of Realism,” Security Studies 5: 2, 1995, 194–247.

  29. Adam Milman Parry, Logos and Ergon in Thucydides (Salem: New Hampshire: The Ayer Company, 1981), 121–122, 182–183.

  30. Thucydides, 3.43.

  31. Gerald Mara, “Thucydides and Political Thought,” The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Political Thought, edited by Stephen Salkever (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 116–118. Thucydides, 3.35–50.

  32. Thucydides, 3.82.

  33. Michael Gagarin, “Did the Sophists Aim to Persuade?” Rhetorica 19 (2001), 289.

  34. Andrea Wilson Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 14. See also Håkan Tell, Plato’s Counterfeit Sophists (Harvard University: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2011); Nathan Crick, “The Sophistical Attitude and the Invention of Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96: 1 (2010), 25–45; Robert Wallace, “Plato’s Sophists, Intellectual History after 450, and Sokrates,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Pericles, edited by Loren J. Samons II (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 215–237.

  35. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato, vol. 1 (London, 1945).

  36. Book 3 of The Republic, 141b–c. Malcolm Schofield, “The Noble Lie,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, edited by G. R. Ferrari (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 138–164.

  4 Sun Tzu and Machiavelli

  1. Cited in Everett L. Wheeler, Stratagem and the Vocabulary of Military Trickery. Mnemoseyne supplement 108 (New York: Brill, 1988), 24.

  2. Ibid., 14–15.

  3. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Frontinus/Strategemata/home.html.

  4. Lisa Raphals, Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Tradition of China and Greece (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 20.

  5. The first translation of Sun Tzu into English by Lionel Giles in 1910 remains a standard work. The translation by Samuel Griffiths in 1963 helped to popularize the book, as it drew the link with contemporary Asian approaches to warfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963). During the 1970s, new materials made possible a more complete version. Giles’s text can be found at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/132. For a more up-to-date translation and discussion of Sun Tzu, see http://www.sonshi.com.

  6. Jan Willem Honig, Introduction to Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translation and commentary by Frank Giles (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2012), xxi.

  7. François Jullien, Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece, translated by Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 35, 49–50.

  8. Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1989).

  9. Pulling these criticisms together, Jeremy Black quotes John Lynn with approval: “Claims that a Western Way of Warfare extended with integrity for 2500 years speak more of fantasy than fact. No overarching theory can encompass the totality of Western combat and culture.” J. A. Lynn, Battle (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), 25, cited in Jeremy Black, “Determinisms and Other Issues,” The Journal of Military History 68, no. 1 (October 2004): 217–232.

  10. Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 89–90.

  11. Michael D. Reeve, ed., Epitoma rei militaris, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). An earlier translation is found in Roots of Strategy: The Five Greatest Military Classics of All Time (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1985).