Strategy

EVERETT CARL DOLMAN

The idea is timeless; the act is historical.

The manner in which states link political intent with the use or threat of violence is the subject of this essay. Although strategy as a concept can be applied to any human endeavor that requires critical decision making, the focus here is on its application in a military context.

The word strategy, drawn from classical Greek, has changed meaning considerably over time. Originally limited to describing the art and skills of generals (strategós), strategy (strategía) was differentiated from and placed hierarchically above the science (epistéme) of tactics (taktiké), or battlefield techniques and maxims—distinctions that are still widely held.¹ Accordingly, until the mid-nineteenth century, when writing about strategy authors tended to title their works along the lines of The Art of War, or a suitable variation, focusing on the characteristics and instincts of notable commanders and, more recently, on the difficulty of connecting the policies of civilian leadership with the use of military force. In discussions of tactics the tendency is to shift to more systematic analyses under the rubric of military science. And yet, despite all the ink spilled and effort spent on the subject, there is no clear or prevailing authority on what strategy is or how to do it.

With the demise of classical learning in the Middle Ages, the ancient texts were for the most part lost, then forgotten, in the Western world, and the art of strategy was subordinated to acts of piety. From Constantine’s conversion following a dream in which he led Rome to victory by placing the symbol of a cross at the head of his overmatched armies, until at least the disastrous battle of Tannenberg (1410), when Grand Master Ulrich von Jungian led a force of Teutonic Knights and assorted volunteer noblemen to ruinous defeat at the hands of a much larger Polish and Lithuanian army, planning for victory was decidedly less valued than praying for it.

By way of Islamic libraries and scholarship (and a scattering of Irish monasteries), many of the surviving Greek and Roman texts returned to the West in the fifteenth century, and the intellectual appetites of Europe ignited a renaissance in all matters of systematic inquiry.² No one had more of an influence on secular politics than an ambitious civil servant from Florence. Ever since Machiavelli cleanly severed the connection between politics and religion, in what has been aptly dubbed the “Machiavellian Moment,” and took the further step of separating completely the notions of strategy and religious or godly favor, successful military thinkers have looked to the latest paradigms of science to inform their ideas about the art and conduct of war.³ Accordingly, this chapter includes a description of several adaptations into military affairs of concepts from emerging sciences, including the mind-bending facets of quantum physics and complexity theory but also insights that linger from the more intuitive constructs of the physical and social sciences, to include evolutionary change, problems of cause and effect, and the curious realm of paradox.

DEFINING STRATEGY

It is curious that an authoritative or universally accepted definition of strategy has been so elusive, given its extended lineage and lengthy etymology.⁴ The pithiest description of the process, that of simply matching means to ends, is a reasonable start, but its universality makes it broadly unsatisfying.⁵ For state-centered military strategy, it neglects the widely accepted view that although war has an essential nature amenable to broad and enduring principles, such as unity of command, the character of war is in continual flux. Theorists today thus predominantly assert that strategy is a concept that must be continually prodded, poked, investigated, adapted, and then elevated to fit the circumstances of the times—because the times always change. From such a perspective it is reasonable to assert that seeking strategy is vastly more important than finding it.

Seekers of strategy, like seekers of philosophic or scientific truth, are notoriously critical. For them, finding the truth is anathema, as it ends their quest and with it their purpose. Once truth is declared there is no more need for investigation, no lack of surety in its rightness, no room for doubters. For the seeker, a solution is merely an excuse to cease thinking, for thought is no longer needed; it has no more value to the problem now solved. The solution becomes dogma or doctrine, to be followed precisely and without dissent. Continued questioning interferes with dogma’s efficiency. And yet seekers continue to prod and poke, investigate and adapt, ultimately settling on a practical solution that works for the time being but retains too many shortcomings to be declared unassailable. These seekers tend to be considered, for the efforts, cantankerous pains and can easily become ostracized—or worse, denounced as heretical. Regardless of the popularity or profit of the accepted truth, the seeker retains doubt, continuing to ask questions, forever assessing and evaluating the edifice that undergirds the accepted canon, never quite accepting its certitude and thereby constantly suspicious of its authority.

Strategy may be especially prone to predisposing outcomes through definition. Defining a thing bounds it, and strategy may “no more be bound by a definition than the wind can be shut in a box without ceasing to be wind. Thus any attempt to write on [strategy] may seem an absurdity from the beginning, but that is only so if either reader or writer imagines that [strategy] can be contained in a set of ideas. A book about London is in no sense London itself, and no sane person would dream of thinking it is.”⁶ A book—or in this case a chapter—about strategy should not be taken as a substitute for strategy.⁷

Definitions are not required in order to think deeply about a subject, though they are extremely useful for productive debate. When two sides are arguing past each other, it is generally because they have not agreed on basic terms. To break such an impasse, working definitions can be agreed on, allowing the finer points of an argument to go forward. In attempts to discover new information or gain fresh knowledge, however, definitions can prove harmful. By defining a thing or idea, the description channels investigation into predetermined directions or outcomes. And so definitions can either help or harm; the point here is simply that they may not be necessary. For instance, in response to the statement “You haven’t even bothered to define the word ‘consciousness’ before embarking on this [study],” Dr. Francis Crick said, “I’d remind you that there was never a time in the history of biology when a bunch of us sat around the table and said, ‘Let’s first define what we mean by life.’ We just went out there and discovered what it was—a double helix. We leave matters of semantic hygiene to you philosophers.”⁸ The latter point is rather dismissive of the high regard most of us have for the importance of semantics—we insist words have meaning and thus value—but it does help clarify my insistence that it is not necessary to define strategy before we study it or even before we discover profound implications of it. Indeed, it may be part of the human condition that we cannot help but meddle with things we don’t fully understand; otherwise, how would anything get done? I once heard of a fellow who refused to go into the water until he learned how to swim. Such an attitude is hardly dynamic and unlikely to allow the fellow to swim well when he finally does attempt it. In favor of the old sink-or-swim rubric, Pablo Picasso used to insist that he was constantly trying to do that which he could not do, in order that he might learn to do it.

While there is no consensus definition of strategy—the opening line of this essay is about as useful as any—each of us undoubtedly has a personal working definition of strategy, one that appeals to us and gives meaning to our efforts, but ideally not so pedantic as to declare this or that definition the final solution, the end of inquiry. The bulk of definitions that have gained traction in academic and military practice, nevertheless, do share several essential assumptions about war and strategy. For example, most hold that certain aspects of war have persisted through time, can be identified, and subsequently can be stated as enduring principles (if not laws) of war and strategy. These generally cleave to the Clausewitzian notion that the character or conduct of war evolves but the essence or nature of war is unchanging. In this way the immutable principles of war, the adaptive agents of strategy, find success in context.

Beyond this limited consensus, however, there is little agreement among theorists and plenty of doubt—a very desirable condition for any study of strategy. This brief interlude of shared notions also allows a mea culpa for the rest of this essay, which comprises an attempt to present some of my own thoughts on the essential principles of strategy and some more recent beguiling aspects of its study that all of my colleagues have assisted in developing over the last decade at SAASS (but for which none of whom can be blamed).

I begin with the highest level of strategy, commonly referred to as grand strategy. At this level, the state is bound by its purpose, by the reason for which it exists—to enhance the welfare and security of its people.⁹ This applies to all states, regardless of leadership’s effectiveness or intent in pursuing this aim, and it helps the strategist differentiate good from bad strategy. Tyrannies or dictatorships can act as they please only so long as they maintain the power to keep the population politically inert; power is the metric of their legitimacy, just as popular support is the metric of legitimacy in representative and democratic government. Note there is no so-called end state, no static objective to be reached in politics. There is no point when the state can announce that the security and welfare of the population has been achieved and it is time to move on to something else. Strategy, like politics, never ends.¹⁰

Military strategy—the focus here—is subordinate to grand strategy. It conforms to the dictates of higher-level strategy but must be differentiated from other forms of state power, including diplomatic, economic, and information power the grand strategist employs to pursue continuing advantage. As with grand strategy, military (like other forms of) strategy is best defined by its purpose. Accordingly, I have declared elsewhere that the purpose of military power is to be prepared, and when called upon by the legitimate governing authority, to maximize violence within the constraints and limitations placed upon it.¹¹ The military strategist must ensure that the force available to the legitimate governing authority is the best that can be procured in the circumstances, with the resources and within the direction provided, and is maintained at the highest level of proficiency. The functions of military power and strategy thus serve the compatible interests of the grand strategic level above it, but are limited to martial means and methods.

Without question, military violence is but one means of power the state may have at its disposal, and it is quite often inappropriate for the task at hand. A worthy grand strategist will consider all pertinent means individually and in concert to achieve the continuing health and advantage of the state. The military strategist should be aware of and coordinate with the strategists dealing with other forms of state power, but unless the military is limited by law or policy to martial functions requiring external violence (a legitimate monopoly on internal, or domestic, violence is properly the police power of the state, and such force or violence by military organizations should be applied sparingly—if at all—by liberal democratic states) it quickly can be tapped to take over the duties and responsibilities of the other forms of power.¹²

Note too that the purpose of military force is not to go to war—that would be absurd, for whenever it was not at war the military would not be fulfilling its purpose and would be worse than useless. Rather, its purpose is preparing for war, which requires organizing, training, and equipping in peacetime. It requires maximizing the capacity for violence in the (perhaps paradoxical) belief that this is the best manner in which to ensure that violence does not have to be unleashed. In the classic Roman adage, si vis pacem, para bellum.

As one moves down the scale of organization, a strategy becomes necessary for any subordinate functions or capabilities that are different enough to require unique expertise or functional capabilities. Thus within military power there is room for land, sea, air, and now space (and possibly cyber) power. The purpose of each should be nested (again) within the overarching purpose of military power, which, as asserted above, should be focused on external violence. Unfortunately, this hierarchical nesting is rarely the case.

Typically, the military is organized into branches or services to deal separately with each warfighting domain: an army for land and a navy for the sea, and today an air and/or space force for the others. As new domains are discovered, or perhaps created, they may require additional service entities.

Paralleling this organizational separation is a tendency to define the services by platform/function (ships for navies, aircraft for air forces) or by the physical characteristics of the medium in which they operate (fluid dynamics for the water, orbital mechanics for outer space), even though doing so stresses the relationships between these organizations in predictable ways. Which branch should command joint operations, for example, is routinely contested; in the U.S. military today the services for the most part simply take turns or, worst of all, insist that all are represented equally in every operation, campaign, or war. Who is in charge ought to be based on which service is providing or tasked with the predominance of effort, but since budget allotments are argued on the basis of participation in whatever current activity is deemed most vital, American military operations appear to follow the rules of Little League baseball—everybody suits up, everybody plays.

When medium as a characteristic is the determinant of service priority, intra-service budget battles and rivalries are multiplied. It may seem obvious that platforms operating in the air should be assigned to an air force, for example, but does this mean that the navy and army should have no aircraft? The organizational mess that would ensue if aircraft on aircraft carriers were owned, maintained, and operated by some organization other than the one that owns, maintains, and operates the carrier is equally obvious. So too should be the conundrum of a platform that routinely operates in or on more than one medium. Should control of an intercontinental ballistic missile launched from a submarine—passing through the water, then the air, and then outer space before arching over and falling back through the air to a target on the land—be passed from the navy to the air force then to the army in the course of its flight?

If the logic of purpose for determining the role of military power helps us to understand the proper roles and functions of the military in the context of state power, the same logic should apply to the roles and functions of subordinate military services in the context of military power. The medium of operations becomes dominant not because of its physical characteristics (as described above) but because of the capacity to use or contest the medium.

Thus the purpose of military land power is to take and hold territory. Any operational command issues or functional differentiations disappear when this mission is assigned to the army. Likewise, the purpose of military sea power is to command the seas; that of military airpower is to command the air; and that of military spacepower is to command space. It is of the utmost importance that if command of the land, sea, air, or space cannot be achieved (or is undesirable), then it is vital that an enemy does not command it. This is called contestation of the domain.

Accordingly, the service assigned to control or command a domain in times of conflict or to deny that control to an opponent if one’s own command cannot or should not be achieved must have the capacity to contest the littoral (or adjacent) domains to prevent (or at a minimum add a cost to) an opponent from operating freely there. This allows, for example, an army to maintain air-defense weapons so that the skies above it are not open for opposing air forces to strike. The navy must maintain ports on the land, and the air forces need air bases there, and so both properly have ground troops to help secure them. When purpose determines organization, the functions of subordinate military services are clarified.¹³

Such purposeful deliberation helps further to assign proper use and roles for military operations at the level of state power. Specifically, is actual or latent (implied) violent command and contestation an intended effect of the use of military forces in any particular state-contemplated action? If so, military power should be considered and, where determined necessary or useful, employed. If not but military power is the most expedient or available form of power that can be effectively put to use, then it is to be used sparingly and temporarily. For example, military forces can and should be used to provide humanitarian aid in areas where civilian resources are limited or unavailable, but this should be thought of as an expedient only, not a new or desirable function of military power.

Sea transport is a vital function of navies, for example, as is air transport for air forces, but not all sea and air transport is military power. Although commercial transport can be and sometimes is appropriated and placed directly in the martial service of the state when dedicated military transport is insufficient for the task at hand, and a robust maritime or air commerce is extremely helpful in crises (just as military aircraft can assist in humanitarian missions, as described previously), their primary purposes are economic, and their organizations and functions should be maximized for and controlled by civilian entities. Likewise, a bomber can be used to transport passengers or deliver informational pamphlets, but this does not make it a commercial or propaganda platform; to believe that its role is not necessarily violent confuses the purpose for which it was designed and built. Along these lines, to insist that when the military bombs a factory it is conducting economic warfare is as ludicrous as arguing that if it bombs a school or church the state is conducting educational or religious warfare. It is this ironic and euphemistic cause-and-effect reversal that makes missions palpable; the U.S. Air Force services targets when it destroys them, a nice way of putting it but divorced from the meaning by which, say, a Maytag repair technician would service an appliance.

Attempts to place function or platform or even effects and targets as the characteristics of strategy denies the importance of the value of thinking as a strategist and supplants it with the utility of thinking as a tactician. When purpose is at the forefront, the effects of military power, the uses to which it can be employed, are limited only by the creative genius of the strategist. This does not mean, however, that strategy is superior to tactics or to the way of thinking that maximizes the use of means within prescribed boundaries to achieve assigned goals. Strategy and tactics work synergistically to maximize both utility and value.

SEPARATING STRATEGY FROM TACTICS

Perhaps the most difficult thing for a strategist to accept is that there are no meaningful ends, goals, or targets in strategy—at least, there ought not to be, for including these forces the strategist to set aside purpose and focus on objectives. It is simply not effective (and may not be possible) to think as a tactician and a strategist at the same time. The strategist determines the means, establishes the boundaries, and provides the goals for the tactician. Within these, the tactician maximizes—most efficiently and/or effectively—results. The most that can be hoped for is the capacity to switch nimbly back and forth, but in practice such movement is difficult at best.

This exposition of strategy began at the top and worked down, but this is not necessary. At the bottom of any organizational human endeavor is the individual, and here there is ample room for strategy, because the realm of activity is unique—every person is different. And despite the enormity of individual differences, a good strategy for any individual is the same, just as it is identical for every state—to grow, to get better, to improve. It is an overarching purpose in life. It is also not necessary to start a discussion on tactical thinking from the bottom and work up, but it is at the bottom that tactical thinking can be shown as different from strategic thinking but equally valuable and necessary. Tactical thinking is focused on utility, on ends or goals. It is eminently measurable, and determining a proper metric is vital in assessing success. Thus the typical misunderstanding of strategy, as a matching of means to ends, is properly tactical—regardless of the size of the organization, the breadth of control, the length of time desired or required, or the variety of twists and turns in the plan to reach some end state.

At an individual level, my desire is to become more. I may want to be healthier, stronger, kinder, wealthier, and the like. This is the purpose for my strategy. But I cannot realize a continuing advantage if I do not achieve results along the way. Thus I set goals and I measure my performance. For example, I wish to be educated, and so I determine that I will go to university. I set as a tangible goal a degree, and I dedicate a portion of my resources to achieving a diploma. I measure my success by grades, the time in which it takes, and the employment I get upon graduation. There are, of course, numerous effective ways to become educated; I have selected this as a means by which I attempt to accomplish my goals. If, however, I accept the goal as the end of my strategy, then upon graduation I will have completed my education and learning will no longer be needed. This is absurd, of course. Education—learning—is a lifelong process that is never finished. As soon as I believe that some achievement, a piece of paper, completes my education and that now I can move on to the next goal or task, I am no longer a strategist. I am a fool.

On the other hand, if I think I can become educated without setting interim goals and objectives, or if I demand a college degree simply as evidence of my education—or worse, to validate myself as educated—then I am no better than the scarecrow who receives a diploma from the wizard and believes he now has a brain.

Two more examples should suffice. The first concerns the American fascination with weight and dieting. On the one hand, any reasonable weight-loss program will get a dieter to a predetermined weight if he or she sticks with it. On the other, if lifestyle changes are not part of the diet, once the weight is achieved and the diet cast off, it is very unlikely that the target weight will be maintained. Typically, crash-dieters who achieve their goals eventually balloon up to weights greater than those from which they started. Much of this failure can be ascribed to the poor strategy that determined the tactical diet. If my goal is to fit into a swimsuit for the summer, the best diet is the one that gets me there quickest and cheapest. I shall declare victory and proudly march out onto the beach. If my goal is to become healthier and weight loss is a valid part of my strategy, how I diet—the tactical element—is critical. It must be sustainable and must be done in such a way that health problems associated with rapid weight loss and bounce-back gain are avoided.

This is better illustrated in the social problem of drug and alcohol addiction. Too often an addict is sent to a rehabilitation facility to dry out, to force a period of abstinence that allows the physical addiction to drugs or alcohol to dissipate, and after a suitable four- or six-week program is released as “cured.” This tactical success is overcome by the strategic failure of recidivism, a return to drug or alcohol use and the requirement to be cured again. What is needed is a strategy that combines the tactical necessity of first getting addicts clean and then keeping them that way. Logistician Derrick Niederman describes the confluence of sound tactics and strategy in his description of Alcoholics Anonymous, which “has long recommended that its followers view alcoholism as a never-ending struggle, [that] this prescription, far from an admission of defeat, was recognition that alcoholics do better by developing strategies against a constant adversary than through the premature declaration of victory.”¹⁴

STRATEGY AND TACTICS AS PARADOX

Human beings live in perpetual paradox; every fundamental principle of life can be expressed in two opposing ways.¹⁵ Life is thus dialectical, and so are people. So is their output. A consistent and remarkable observation is that every strategy and every stratagem has a counter that is directly in opposition and is just as valid and persuasive in the same context. For example, a common rule of thumb (a stratagem) offered by Sun Tzu is that the pinnacle of strategic success is to put oneself in such a superior position that war or combat is unnecessary: the outcome is foregone, and the opponent acquiesces. Thus, to “win a thousand battles without dulling the sword” is the mark of a great strategist.¹⁶ But what kind of military force will be left after a thousand potential battles in which fighting is superseded by excellent command? (In any case, why is the state potentially engaged in a thousand battles? Is it doing something wrong?) An army that has not fought, regardless of the keen edge of its weapons, has not been battle tested and is unlikely to counter successfully a less-well-equipped or smaller force of hardened veterans. Sometimes the strategist must find a battle to keep the state’s military forces sharp.¹⁷

A true paradox exists where individual components, each of which is rational and logical on its own, cannot coexist. To the strategist, this is generally evident where opposing solutions are equally logical and no compromise is possible. For better or worse, most of the great questions and important aspects of human existence are paradoxes. Does the good of the one outweigh the good of the many? Is it better to allow a possible criminal to go free than potentially to imprison an innocent person? Can a war now stop a greater war later? These questions are simply insoluble—the only thing worse than doing either is doing neither. This is not some curious aside; it seems that at some level rational life must be so, for paradox expresses the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system.¹⁸ Therefore paradox, which cannot be solved, has one of two outcomes: either the conflict continues in perpetuity, which is pathological, or it must be outgrown. To get past paradox, paradox must be accepted and moved beyond.

This growth beyond the pathological is the essence of understanding strategy as a dialectical or paradoxical counter to tactics, an opposing way of thinking. It is not that they compete (necessarily); they interact to form a conceptual whole. Strategy and tactics are the yin and yang of military operations. The whole is incomprehensible without both and irreducible to one or the other. Xeno’s classic paradox is a fine example. He argued that the essence of reality is continuous but that the essence of thought is discrete. Xeno asked whether an arrow fired from a bow can ever hit a tree if it first must travel half the distance to its destination before reaching it. If it must, as reality dictates, it must also travel half the remaining distance before hitting the tree, and then half that, ad infinitum (or possibly nauseam). Since it must always travel half the distance before hitting the tree, it can never hit the tree. The logic is impeccable, and the only thing an observer can do is point out that the arrow does, in fact, hit the tree. But this is not a solution to Xeno’s paradox; it is simply an observation. What is needed is not an answer but a better question.

In this case, Xeno highlighted a recurring paradox of nature, between a digital (discrete) and an analog (continuous) framework of reference. Until Newton (and Leibnitz) solved the equation using fractions—by inventing a new form of mathematics called calculus—Xeno’s paradox could only be dismissed.

STRATEGY AND CHOICE

Strategists have practical needs that must be met. Choices are made that affect the future health of the state, and the first area of study or practice is decision making. For this reason, as already stated, strategy is commonly defined as effectively or efficiently matching means to ends. Such thinking is child’s play at worst, tactical genius at best. It stems from the notion that as political and military leaders rise through the ranks they make decisions for increasing spans of control. In this view, strategy is simply tactics at a grander scale; experience in making choices is completely transferable from one level to the next.

It is also widely accepted that the more information or options a decision maker has, the better the choice ultimately made. But this is rarely the case. It is simply easier to choose profitably between a limited set of choices than an infinite number, but this does not mean having fewer choices has merit in itself. There are many situations in which I make myself better off by limiting my own choices—for example, when I cut off my own retreat so my army will fight with greater desperation (not something you want to induce in the opponent) or by strictly adhering to treaties and conventions regarding humane treatment of prisoners so that the opponent is less likely to continue fighting for fear of torture. While strategy is about making more choices for myself and quite often for my opponent (though it is a bad idea to interrupt an enemy who is making poor choices), tactics is about constraining the opponent’s choices to one—surrender or die.

Proper strategy is more than simplified choice selection; strategy is different and requires an alternative, effectively opposite, way of thinking. To illustrate, great generals are primarily known for winning battles—that is, in situations in which forces (or means) are fixed and the end is unchanging, victory in the battle space.¹⁹ In this view, the general is a master tactician, using the forces available to achieve the ends provided most effectively and efficiently. This in no way diminishes the role of the tactical commander. Quite the opposite, it is the hallmark of great generalship, as without competent tacticians few strategies will be successful. But it highlights the opposing thought processes that dominate strategic and tactical thinking. An appropriate analogy is with chess. In this game, forces—the strength of pieces and their movements—are perfectly understood by all sides, the battlefield is rigid and contained, and the objective of both is clear: take the opponent’s king. Within this tightly regulated contest, genius can emerge, as epitomized by the grand master. Within the game, the grammar of chess is perfect, its logic supreme. But it is outside the game that strategy as I perceive it truly takes place. Why chess as a form of competition? Should I win every game? When should I play knowing I will lose? These are all questions of strategy. They are external to the game.

The tactician seeks to bring events to culmination, whether in victory or in exit strategies or end games. This is appropriate. But only that which is capable of change is capable of continuing indefinitely. Thus the strategist’s realm, which has no end or culminating point, is the realm of change. It is the strategist’s purpose to manipulate the boundaries and rules of competition, to make them fluid, to change them as readily as needs dictate. In such a realm of the possible, the strategist enters into a relationship with the goal of continuing it, on favorable terms, and accepts that every choice made and acted on redefines the rules and boundaries of the interaction. This is anathema to the tactician, for if the rules and boundaries of the conflict change in midconflict, carefully made plans are disrupted. Imagine a game of chess in which halfway through pawns were allowed to move as queens. The master chess player would be frustrated to no end—and more important, if the conditions of conflict are not fixed, it will be impossible to agree on a victor! The conditions for victory could change at the moment of triumph, in which case the winner is determined not by skillful play but fortuitous interruption.

Hence it is vital to the tactician that the rules not change during the course of battle, and many of the tactician’s actions are directed toward that end—establishing a consistent combat environment that is congruent with the strengths and knowledge of the tactician. Expecting and adapting to change is the essence of the strategic thinker’s planning, however. A strategist without at least the possibility of change has no function within the conflict. In the chess analogy above, once the terms and decisions that get the players in position to begin the game are agreed upon, strategy is subordinated to tactics (but never over). Prowess within the rules will determine a winner of that match. Play may conform to an overall strategy—to win decisively, for example, or to perform credibly even in losing—but neither outcome is predicated on a future change in the structure of the game. If the future will be like the past, boundaries are set and immutable. The master tactician can hone his or her craft through experience and in a study of history alone. Everything important is already known.

In fact, savvy chess players do not seek to take the king. They force situations in which the king must move, and that move must be to a vulnerable square. Great players gain control or dominate a space next to the king, not the king’s space, and then force the king to move into it. The chess master is thus a tactical thinker. When the opposing player understands that within the rules and boundaries of chess the outcome is certain, resignation occurs before the final moves are made. When there is no action allowed in the rules that would reverse the coming defeat, surrender will be offered. Tactics are triumphant when choices are eliminated.

To the extent that the game of chess has master strategists, they would not be concerned about the outcome of a particular game or tournament. For them, the outcome of each game establishes new conditions and boundaries for subsequent play. The desire is not to win but to continue playing chess on favorable terms. Permit me to continue the chess analogy from the perspective of a strategist. Perhaps I have decided to teach my daughter to play chess. I do this because I enjoy chess and would like a partner, but also because I believe learning and mastering chess is good for my daughter, that it will assist in developing analytic skills and stronger capacity for logical reasoning. Thus I have no end state; my goal is to enhance my own and my daughter’s futures, regardless of the circumstances that may present themselves in the future.

If I were to go over the rules of chess carefully and then win every game quickly and decisively, she would soon grow bored and refuse to play. I would have demolished my opponent, satisfying the conditions of victory, but I would have lost my strategic purposes of enhancing her mental development and eventually playing a substantial game with my daughter—in other words, sharing some quality time. If I were thoughtful, however, I would carefully develop my daughter’s skills so that she would become an able opponent—so that she developed a taste for the game and someday became a master herself—in order that someday she could teach me new options, ultimately enhancing my play. No matter how much better we mutually get at chess, there is no conceivable point at which we would be good enough and the games would end. In fact, as I get older and my skills erode, my daughter may continue playing for enjoyment and as an excuse to spend time with me in my dotage. At that point, she may even let me win now and again. Even upon my death, the game will not end. My daughter will teach her children, and they will play on.

This metaphor for conflict and war is not a clean fit. It seems a bit strained to try to equate the desire of the chess player to play in the future and the state strategist’s desire to continue positive future interactions with other states, but the mental leap is not overwrought. The tactician plays chess to win, the strategist to play in the future. The tactician wages war to win; the strategist anticipates waging war in the future.

Hence the ideal tactical decision-making situation is one in which all courses of actions are known (surprise is impossible) and the rules and boundaries are clearly established. Battle is a foregone conclusion, and so entering into it (or not) is the initial strategic decision. The game of tic-tac-toe provides an analogy here. Between skilled opponents, the side that goes first will win. While there is no best strategy for playing the game, there are infallible tactics within it. It would even be possible to create a short guide that would list all possible moves and the optimum counters to each. All the tactician must do is recognize the situation on the board and counter appropriately. In a few iterations, it becomes apparent that the superior player will attempt to put the opponent in a position that requires a choice: block one of two winning moves. Since either block allows the other to win, it is not even a meaningful choice. It is merely interesting. Therefore neither how the game was played nor its outcome is relevant to the strategist. What is important is how the decision was made as to who goes first. This critical competition outside the boundaries of the field of play is what connects the tactician to the strategist.

Hence the tactician strives to eliminate choice, to ensure that no surprise can occur. All possibilities are included in the ideal battle plan. The best of these anticipate outcomes that are foregone, that are sureties. The perfect plan is therefore perfected prediction. Accordingly, if the outcome is not in doubt, choice has been eliminated. If no action the other takes will forestall victory, those actions are meaningless. The strategist strives instead to expand options, even for the opponent (by leaving an honorable exit, perhaps, or making available an alternative game), to maximize the available choice set. The tactician seeks closure, the culmination of the plan. The strategist rejects closure, seeking instead to continue. It is the interaction of war, its dual nature, that forces this view: no matter how careful my planning, no matter how comprehensive my plan, the opponent could do something unanticipated. The boundaries could change. The rules could evolve.

Choice again becomes the operational descriptive of power and meaning. As human beings, we reference our lives not by the boundaries that begin and end them, notions of birth then death, but by the major events that shape them: graduations, marriage, births of children, new jobs, and the like. These are events and accomplishments that define us, and they are always subject to change and reinterpretation. They are representative of the free choices made and rejected that continuously shape our existence. So long as life goes on, there is choice, and where there is choice, hope. A single act can redeem a life of evil or condemn the good person to ignominy. More than this, a life ends in death only in the physical sense. The choices and accomplishments of a profound life can shape the future long after the body is dust. Birth too is not seen as a sudden creation of life. Each person is the result and extension of generations before, the manifestation of a physical, cultural, and political evolution that gives shape and meaning to the newest life.

The state is a manifestation of this logic. Its decisions are based on a past history and accomplishments. It is understood not as a simple descriptive of its existing characteristics (size, population, resources, etc.) but as a culmination of these and its culture, ideology, mythology, and more. Since the state is what makes war, its power has meaning only in the context of its accomplishments and the events that shaped it. But history is not deterministic for the state any more than it is for the individual. It shapes and guides behavior, but the likelihood that a certain action will or will not be taken is a probability only. It is in fact this mutability of time that makes strategic thinking incompatible with the notions of victory or defeat. For the tactically defeated, this means that the possibility of rising to challenge again exists. For the tactical victor, it means there will be new challenges and new challengers. Nothing is ever truly finished.

Strategy is thus always about the game or competition. Within are tactics only. The absurdity of a strategy within a game is highlighted by the example of a game of solitaire. The only unknown, the order in which the cards are revealed, is tactically all-important and strategically meaningless. The conclusion of the game is immaterial to the play or outcome of subsequent ones, with the exception that patterns might emerge that could reveal or prompt a preference (or habits) for certain moves. Since no other people are required to engage in solitaire and the decision to play is entirely internally motivated, strategy is absent. The game is a time-filler.

On the other hand, in interactive games with players of differing skills, strategy is always present, even if only implicitly so. Poker is the exemplar here. When and where to play, what limit to place on bets, which variation of the game to use, what opponents to engage, these are all serious strategic questions. Once in the game, knowledge of odds, skills of card counting, and awareness of other player’s tells (and one’s own) are critical to increasing the chances of winning. Even a decision to throw some games (that is, once it is recognized that the other players are outmatched, so as to increase the take at the end of the night) is a tactical move toward ultimate victory. To throw some games because the other players are friends or family and the most important thing is to keep them playing week after week is a strategic choice, however. Examples abound. A poor player who engages in poker to win, playing to the best of his or her ability, may lose repeatedly yet still desire to play on. In this case, the external strategy may be to gain experience. Future advantage is the goal, to become a better player, and so near-term reversals are expected as part of the process toward that end.

At this juncture it may be useful to change the analogy from games to occupations. It is useful to think of the strategist’s role as akin to that of a gardener: “To garden is to design a culture capable of adjusting to the widest possible range of surprise in nature. Gardeners are acutely attentive to the deep patterns of natural order, but are also aware that there will always be much lying beyond their vision.”²⁰ The garden itself is a perpetual thing, and a “successful harvest is not the end of a garden’s existence, but only a phase of it[;] . . . gardens do not ‘die’ in the winter but quietly prepare for another season.”²¹ Like a gardener, who creatively monitors and cares for a parcel of ground, the strategist perceives a continuity of interactions that must be tended to from one generation to the next. Just as master gardeners creatively and experimentally draw all the sources of nourishment and variety to enhance the continual output of the garden, master strategists must take an active part in the maintenance and health of the many political systems that encompass military actions. It is necessary to prune the tree to keep it healthy, but too vigorous cutting will kill it. “Inasmuch as gardens do not conclude with a harvest and are not [planted] for a certain outcome, one never arrives anywhere in a garden. . . . [One] does not bring change to a garden, but comes to a garden prepared for change, and therefore prepared to change.”²²

STRATEGY AND STRATEGISTS

For the most part, the study of strategy is the study of plans and actions of noted military and political leaders. Strategy is, in this view, an intrinsic thing that can be assessed and critiqued. But it is unrealistic to separate strategy from those who practice and promulgate various forms of it. Strategists as agents are products of their times, their cultures, societies, and governments—in short, interactive products of their structures. The study of strategy is therefore incomplete without a study of strategists in their time, a relationship that is a coequal if not dominant influence on the evolution of strategy through history. This helps to explain why the dominant view of successful strategy changes so much over time—not because strategy is mutable (in theory it need not be) but because strategists live and think in a contextually constrained space and time.

Strategists and tacticians are by necessity observers of the world around them. They cull from reality and the database of history justification for their choices. But strategists are human, and humans are flawed. People see what they expect to see and tend to ignore what does not fit into their worldviews. This is neither good nor bad; it simply is. One cannot observe with perfect objectivity, not in the social sciences or in history. A bias exists in all observations—a bias generated by the desire or reason for the observation. Whenever strategists seek data, prejudice and bias limits their ways of observing. I observe the outcome of battles, for example, to study the efficacy of strategy. But why start (or end) there? I presume the outcome of battles is necessary to understanding the strategy under examination, but what of the influence of cockroach populations in Alabama? I don’t even take a look on the off chance it might be important. As an investigator, I choose avenues of inquiry that I believe will lead to insight. I have to.

Not only personal or psychological biases eliminate observational objectivity. Nature seems bent on eliminating it as well. One of the most confounding aspects of theory or strategy is the paradoxical logic of duality when assessing cause and effect. The conventional view is that every effect has a prior cause. The explanation is naturalistic and grounded in empiricism; it asserts that no cause can be preceded by its effect. This seems sensible enough, at first, but the world seems to be filled with causes that do not precede effects. Whenever purpose or emotion is factored in, cause and effect are routinely misinterpreted.

As Werner Heisenberg observed: “Causality law has it that if we know the present, then we can predict the future. Be aware: In this formulation, it is not the consequence but the premise that is false. As a matter of principle, we cannot know all determining elements of the present.”²³ This brilliant observation comes from Heisenberg’s mathematical proof that the more accurately one determines one aspect of nature, another aspect becomes necessarily obscured. In the case of quantum physics, the location of a subatomic particle cannot be determined accurately if one also knows precisely the velocity of that particle. Observation of one aspect makes simultaneous knowledge or observation of another aspect impossible. Indeed, quantum physics shows a world that is not deterministic, not empirically established until the observer intrudes on reality. Erwin Schrödinger’s cat-in-a-box metaphor describes the fundamental problem—quantum events occur all at once and are not resolved until the observer fixes an event by the act of observation.

Quantum theory describes the physicist’s attempt to understand and explain the basic nature of reality at the submicroscopic level, at the level of quantum mechanics. As such, it is appealing to strategists, who have always adapted freely from the sciences, even when they have been convinced that a perfected science of war could never truly be achieved. Clausewitz, more a product of the German Romanticist tradition than of the Enlightenment, may have done so intuitively. He could have accepted the tenets of probability and uncertainty that quantum physics would identify more readily than his Newtonian counterparts in the West.²⁴ This is not surprising. Some of the outcomes of quantum analysis are so foreign to the Western intuitive sense of reality that they have only been reluctantly applied. Those strategists educated into Enlightenment values and holding a faith in scientific positivism (holding that a thing exists only if it can be observed and measured) could not so easily accept that nature, at its core, could be unknowable.

If the world were truly governed by natural laws that could not be violated, then the essence of science should be entirely based upon observation and prediction. The more carefully we define our experiments and the more keenly we measure and chart changes over time, the closer we get to a perfect comprehension of reality. The most perilous strategic connotation may be the always-present implication that reality is rational, explainable, and perfectible. Implicitly or stated plainly, this view must lead to the belief that the universe can be comprehensively understood. One has only to know the fundamental laws acting upon the fundamental material particles (atomic structures) and one could, in theory, predict future events with certitude.²⁵ This belief imbues tactical notions in which combatants attempt to make the outcome of battle, and ultimately war, assured. If the individual soldier is trained to clockwork precision and will perform all tasks flawlessly, a perfect calculation of battle is conceivable. The dilemma for the Newtonian physicists and Maurician grand tacticians is plain. If the outcome is certain, the future is predestined. There is no choice, and so there is no power.

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics claimed, among many other dazzling notions, that perfect prediction is impossible not only in practice but even in theory. Because the future cannot be known, the new physics predicted probabilities only. This is partly because we can never know precisely the reality in which we exist. We comprehend the universe by interpreting (with our brains) the senses of our bodies and the measurements of our instruments. Thus, it is possible to know only the shadow of reality, much as Plato insisted in his famous allegory of the cave. Some philosophers go so far as to state that all notions of reality are equally valid, as each is merely the individual interpretation of sensory and data input, and so all realities are created. Any reality is possible. The response of the realist, like that of the Zen master, is to smack the philosopher on the head with a stick. (“Interpret that reality!”)

Nonetheless, the quantum model is a powerful one that spawns an incredible array of insights. It stems, innocuously enough, from Einstein’s resolution of the centuries-old dispute as to whether light is composed of particles, and thus mass, or of energy, like a frequency wave. The result of so-called double-slit experiments, repeated and verified innumerable times, showed that light acts as both a particle and a wave until it is acted upon by observation—at which point it displays the characteristics of either a particle or a wave—not both. Einstein’s solution was radically simple. He envisioned a new physical construct called a photon that at times exhibits the characteristics of a particle and at other times those of a wave. The problem was that the characteristics they exhibit depended on the means one uses to measure them.

The activity of the photon is indeterminate until one decides to measure the activity. This must lead to the notion that a fundamental basis of nature is its inherent unpredictability (and its reliance on the perspective of the observer!). Not that we have too little understanding to be able to predict the future with certainty but that even if all the relevant information were available, it would not be possible to do so. This is the essence of Werner Heisenberg’s extraordinary Uncertainty Principle. This indispensable principle of quantum physics states that it is impossible to know simultaneously both the precise location and the velocity of any object. Quantities of position and momentum, when measured in relationships, generate uncertainties. We can know one or the other exactly, but the more precisely we determine one, the vaguer our knowledge of the other.

Much of the uncertainty of nature comes from our own intrusive attempts to measure it, and conjectures drawn from Heisenberg’s principle for information gathering are startling. If the subatomic (micro) realm proves to be a better model for information flow than the macro one, the limit of what is even possible to know is severely constrained. First, the easy part: since one cannot know all things precisely, only approximately, strategists must become comfortable with knowledge of the world stated in probabilities, not absolutes. We cannot say with certainty that a war will occur, much less precisely when, where, or with whom such an event will transpire. But, with increasing reliability, we should be able to predict the exact likelihood that a certain type of war, perhaps in a certain region and with specified foes, will occur within a given time and prepare accordingly. We simply cannot know the specifics. The phenomenon is highlighted in the process of radioactive decay.²⁶ In this case, precisely predictable overall behavior (rate of decay) is based on the patterns observed in completely unpredictable individual events. Wars of attrition are fought this way. Predictions of success are based on the numbers of one’s own troops that will be killed in a given situation (versus the opponent’s). Without knowing who will be killed, the total casualty rate can be quite accurately projected. It is a grisly calculus but at times a useful one.

Now the more difficult notion: our very attempts to determine the likelihood of an event happening alters the probability of that event happening. Not only do we alter the probabilities of reality by observing it, in the act of observing we choose the future in which we will act. This is clearly counter to the Newtonian view based on universal laws that govern mass and movement. Prequantum physics adheres to the belief that nature is fixed, that our measurements of it have no effect on what is or what will be. This real world is external to us, at least to our inquiring minds. It is what it is. Moreover, it is indifferent to us. In this image, the course of human history is akin to a rudderless boat floating down a river. Its course is buffeted and complex, it goes from right to left and back again, but its progress is inevitable, and the desires or observations of the people on the boat have no effect on the outcome of its journey.

Quantum mechanics tells us it is impossible to know precisely the future of any phenomenon, only the probabilities that lie ahead. The quantum vision sees humanity as a part of nature, an element in its journey that continuously interacts with and influences it, with or without intent. Any choice the strategist makes changes nature. Staying with the river analogy, imagine the boat has oars and a rudder, as well as a crew to operate them. The people on board look downstream for the best passage through rapids and shoals. The boat is moved in anticipation of the perceived danger, and the course is different than it would have been without the observation. And the river has changed too. Eddies and currents are altered minutely. There will always be the image of what might have happened if we did not steer from right to left, and even though we will never float through that section of the river in precisely the same way again, that image will affect future decisions as much as does the physical lay of the stream. Strategists are no different from the quantum physicist in this regard. They cannot be objective, for they are elements within the world of war. What they choose to examine will change the future, because every choice is real and reality cannot be observed without changing it.

This notion of choosing one’s reality is undoubtedly more tenable to the strategist than to the tactician. It is difficult to persuade a naval battle planner that the enemy is both over the horizon and not over it, for example, and that both realities will remain in being until we choose (or are forced) to look for one or the other. This is because the enemy ships are things, or objects, and our experience tells us the thing is there or it is not, regardless of my attention. Whether or not I choose to look does not change the reality of its coming. I cannot avoid being struck by a bullet by closing my eyes.

But strategists do not deal in their planning with things or objects (aspects should be left to the tactician); they seek instead a condition or situation of advantage. This world of ideas and possibilities is more compatible with the microphysical world of the quantum physicists than the macrophysical one of Newton, because quantum particles should not be thought of as things. They are more correctly understood as “tendencies to exist” or “tendencies to happen.”²⁷ They are events, phases, and fields. The smallest of reality’s building blocks may not even have mass; they may simply be rules of interaction.²⁸ The strengths of these tendencies are expressed as probabilities. The result is that careful study and examination of aggregate characteristics over time, the province of statistical analysis, cannot provide with assurance a prediction of the actions of any one individual; it can, however, give an uncannily accurate projection of the future behavior of a group. Political pollsters have long known this phenomenon and have established methods that work extremely well. They collect data to determine the characteristics of voters likely to be swayed by particular arguments, or they use the data to make projections of future elections. They recognize that not all the members of the target group will be equally swayed and that the decision of any one voter is not known with any greater accuracy than intuition. But a particular group decision of a large number of likely decision makers, and by what size plurality, can be known with astonishing accuracy.

The notion that a group acts in predictable ways but that an individual does not has far-reaching consequences for the military planner. It points to the patterns inherent in actions as the sources of true understanding, and not the actions themselves. Perhaps most disconcerting, the tactician’s correct and proper search for perfect knowledge in the conduct of campaigns and battles could prove to be suboptimal as one moves toward the level of strategy. If we follow the logic to conclusion, however, it may prove that the more we attempt to know about one characteristic of the enemy, the less we can know about another. The more we try to get perfect knowledge about the enemy’s intent, for example, the less we may be able to know about the enemy’s actions. The more a planner looks to the micro level of battle to influence or simply observe a single engagement, the less that can be known about the macro level of the war.

It is desirable, for example, to know which of two individual combatants will win. But it is not yet possible to predict accurately every action or event in the course of the fight. These can be stated as probabilities only. The outcome of any single engagement is thus unknowable in advance. But the aggregate outcome of thousands of similar actions or events can be known with a high degree of reliability. In other words, planners cannot know which aircraft will make it to an assigned objective, which ordnance will hit its target, which of the enemy will be killed, but over time they can determine how many aircraft of a certain kind carrying what type of load are needed to achieve the desired effect with near certainty. One of the functions of doctrine is to assist the tactical and operational planner in calculations like this for specific engagements, and they are commonly performed. It is quite rare to see them done for entire battles—as components of campaigns or wars—and rarer still for wars as components of grand strategy.

The ability of the battle planner to predict the aggregate outcome of numerous indeterminable tactical engagements efficiently is extremely useful in the effort to maximize the probability of achieving broad tactical goals. For the operational planner, an ability to determine the aggregate outcome of numerous battles is equally valuable in campaign planning. For the operational planner, however, reaching down to the level of engagements to increase the probability that specific battles would be judged successful would skew the probability set for aggregate outcomes of all battles and so must be scrupulously avoided. The temptation to reach down multiple levels to increase control over variables should be even more shunned. Strategists should thus abandon any attempt to exercise control at the micro level (the individual soldier, sailor, or airman), entrusting that function to the commander on the scene. Operational strategy or grand tactics raises the aggregate level of success through better training and equipping, and the strategist must support these efforts, but the strategist should guide military matters so that the tactical outcome of any war, much less any individual battle, is not critical to success (or continuing advantage). To be sure, a strategist whose plan rests on a specific action working out in a precise way is not thinking strategically. Such a mind-set locks the strategist into predetermined choices, and the capacity to control events is lost.

It was classical logic that placed on us the rules of either/or, not the world of experience. Greek philosophers demonstrated the fallacy long ago, with two confounding paradoxes.²⁹ The first was Epimenides’ famous Cretan paradox, in which a traveler from Crete states that all Cretans are liars. The paradox can be boiled down to the statement by a Cretan, “I am lying,” or simply, “This statement is false.” In a world of either/or logic, where A and B are clearly defined and existence of one cancels the other, the statement is logically insoluble. To a significant extent, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which states that “all consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecipherable propositions,” is a mathematical investigation of the Cretan paradox.³⁰ Gödel demonstrated that for any logical system, statements could be formulated that cannot be proven true or false (they are “undecidable”) from within the system, starting with the statement, “This statement is unprovable.” This is actually the First Incompleteness Theorem. The Second Incompleteness Theorem proves that the statement “The axioms of arithmetic are consistent” cannot be proved by using those same axioms.³¹

Gödel’s theorem concerned self-referencing systems and holds sway in the logic developed here to separate tactics and strategy. One of the significant steps in scientific analysis is to differentiate when one is making hypotheses and taking measurements from within the system being studied from when one is doing the same from an observational vantage outside the system. Such a distinction cannot always be made. At the strategic level, it is possible to step outside the arena of combat and make decisions about war. At the tactical level we are by definition within the system of war and must make rational decisions that impact individual lives directly. Tactics is in effect a self-referencing milieu and can usefully be portrayed in that manner. But it will cause paradoxes to develop—of necessity—because decisions are made within the system. A tactician might see the current battle as the most crucial event on the road to victory, for instance, and be perfectly convinced of the truth of that. Even if the statement were true, there is no way to prove it from within the system of reference—the tactical level of war. More to the point, it is a meaningless assessment at the level of strategy. This is because the strategist instead recognizes the war for what it is: an event or series of events that has become part of the context of what is now the structure of decision making—a structure that will change with the next event.

Likewise, victory is a self-referencing notion in tactics, as is evident in the statement, “This war is winnable if politicians do not interfere.” Since the decision maker at the tactical level cannot step outside the circumstances of his or her condition, anything that appears to confound the established criteria for victory is absurd. If one could withdraw from the immediacy of one’s experience for a moment, an order to withdraw from a well-fortified position (for example) might make perfect sense. From the tactical perspective, doing so will put the unit at risk of heavier casualties—in addition to giving up territory that may have come at a stiff price—than staying put would. In an overall battle plan, the movement could be part of a ruse to draw the enemy into a losing position elsewhere. But what of the decision by a government to withdraw or remove its forces from combat despite having won (by the standards of victory) every battle of the war?³² This can make no sense at all to the tactician, for the standards of victory in war do not apply to the strategic-level requirement that war is to support policy.

The physical sciences are generally perceived as focusing on objects of inquiry, the social sciences on observers or inquirers. Both emphasize the relationship between observers and observed, but their foci are opposite. Hard-science physicists tend to study empirical phenomena, the things observed, and to reject motives or justifications. Historians, on the other hand, tend to study strategists, using biography to understand the roles of individuals in time. Social historians focus on the output of societies rather than individuals but still tend to elevate the individual (in the aggregate) to prominence. As the softer sciences explore human activity that is hidden from direct view, they tend to look more equally at both the practice and the practitioners of strategy. Medical doctors and psychiatrists study the patient as well as the disease. Social scientists study both politics and politicians, culture and celebrity, and wars and warriors, and yet even within these groups there are notable divisions. Behavioralists study actions, or outputs, while Traditionalists study motives, justifications, and reasons. The real difference, again, is one of emphasis. The more the field relates to human behavior, the more its scions tend to study the observer.

The bottom line is that is impossible to observe or investigate without some point of view. Objective research does not mean that the investigator has no idea what he or she shall find, for that would make research all but futile. When one does not know where one is going, any road will take you there. Without an idea of what will be found or of what is related to the phenomena under investigation, observers nevertheless have implicit theories or explicit working hypotheses to guide their observations. Karl Popper would famously emphasize this to his students by starting class with a simple command, “Observe!” “Well,” students queried, “observe what? Why? To what end?” Popper would stand mute, and eventually students would make observations such as the room is cold, the table is hard, there are fifteen males in the room. So what? Popper knew that all useful observation is guided by some theoretical perspective or belief and that this is as it must be. He would point out to the students that they were not making observations outside of the room, as they probably thought there would be some sort of exercise to follow, and that limited their observations. Some students tried to make observations that were connected to the subject matter of the course, believing that was the intent of the assignment. In the end, Popper would relent and highlight to his students that the highest integrity of objective observation is not perceiving the world with a blank mind—even if such a thing were possible, it would be more important to chart the manner in which the mind was filled with data to isolate bias or presumptive theory than to accept the random and uncoordinated observations likely to emerge. The highest integrity comes when the observer thinks she or he knows what data and information are needed to understand the situation and seeks it out but does not hide or ignore observations to the contrary or reject alternative explanations. Only when there is a theory to guide the observation can observed data and facts provide meaningful support. Only in the light of a theory, a problem, the quest for solution, can they speak to us in revealing ways. Facts can never speak for themselves, some wag wrote—they are always spoken for.

STRATEGY AND CHANGE

Change is the constant of our time, and so theories of change play heavily in the formulation of strategy. Because change is constant, no end state can profitably be contemplated by the practicing strategist. Static conditions exist only in theory. There are, of course, goals and ends in tactics, but wherever they appear in strategy the grammar of war will subsume the logic of war, to paraphrase Clausewitz, and perversions will result.³³

For example, what is so excellent about stability that it is so popular in current U.S. strategy? The current U.S. peacekeeping and nation-building operations are based on a notion called “stability operations,” or “crisis stability,” the latter an oxymoron of the first rank.³⁴ What is it about a crisis that would lead anyone to want to stabilize it? Crises should be defused, solved, or overcome, but for what purpose should they be preserved?

Stability in international relations is the desire of the dominant persons or states to maintain their positions at the top of the extant world order. This is quite understandable, but why would those at the bottom of the order prefer stability? Shouldn’t they desire upward movement?

The actions of nations were in this view not determined, or capable of being judged, by right or wrong: the haves preached peace and the sacredness of international law, since the law sanctioned their holdings, but this code was unacceptable to virile have-not nations. The latter would rise and overthrow the degenerate capitalistic democracies, which had become the dupes of their own pacific ideology, originally intended to bemuse the underdogs.³⁵

Stabilizing any system that is defined by change is a poor strategy. The best one can hope for is to postpone the crisis to a later time, when it will undoubtedly come to a head. The longer the crisis is stabilized, the greater the passion—and likely violence—for change or reform. Change is in fact the only thing that matters. Stability is a chimera, and static goals are hopeless causes.

Huge efficiencies in perception and assessment are possible because of change. Indeed, humans have become so adept at perceiving and reacting to change that they may not even be able to comprehend an end state or static condition should it present itself. People react to movement, which is change over time. It is also easily demonstrable. What we really perceive is motion, or to be more precise, changes in velocity (or Δv). Not only is change the thing that catches our attention, but it may be impossible to perceive a thing that has no change in velocity. Indeed, once change is perceived humans have a tendency to impart intrinsic meaning to it. There must be some reason for the change, some prior cause that demands change.³⁶

Movement is simply change over time. Where no time passes, no movement can occur. This is obvious enough, but we can also reverse the statement and declare with utmost certainty that where there is no movement, no time passes. And this is true. All movement is a function of space and time, and humans are constructs of the real world. But even constant movement imparts no meaning if there is no Δv. Movement, or velocity, is something that makes sense only by comparison. We say something is moving with respect (or relative to) some other thing, and it is the change in distance between them we really notice. But even such constant change as this becomes static over time and less and less noticeable. A thing in constant movement is predictable; it becomes part of the scenery and deserves no further notice. But an unexpected change in direction or velocity catches our attention; it is an effect, and we look for what caused the change. We want to give the change meaning.

THE EVOLUTION OF STRATEGY

The evolution of strategy shows the dynamic interaction between context and strategists over time. Evolution theory applies to biological entities and environments, of which humanity is a part, but the metaphor is so powerful that it works its way into social constructs and physical systems as well. The primary insight is that success is fleeting. Organisms that dominate their niche will be successful only so long as the environment remains stable, and the longer an environment is perceived as stable—that is, the longer a single species dominates a niche—the more catastrophic the collapse of the perfectly adapted when change inevitably occurs.

The process is relatively simple. Organisms adapt to their environments and develop strengths and capabilities that are rewarded in their special contexts in two ways, within generations and across generations. Characteristics that are rewarded in the extant environment (specific strengths, cunning, camouflage, etc.) are heightened within the organism, and its success attracts mates. These characteristics are passed on and enhanced. But there is another key. When copying the dominating individuals and species, nature introduces slight-to-significant variations in each successive generation and lets these mutations loose. When the environment is static, most of these variations do not repeat (they die off), for they represent departures from the ideal of the perfectly adapted niche. But nature also provides an ever-changing world (in which the rules of competition keep shifting). In such a context, the mass of modifications to each generation allows optimal solutions to new problems to arise. Thus diversity is the most valued attribute of a species in a changing environment—not ideal adaptation to a specific environment. Darwin never claimed that the species best adapted to its niche will survive (which would be an extension of Herbert Spencer’s notion of survival of the fittest). Darwin said the species most able to adapt to changes in the environment will survive.

This is how evolutionary adaptation works. Organisms interact and collect information about the world. Adaptations increase the yield of resources from the environment specific to the organism’s survival, which in turn modifies the environment. Through its ability to gather and process information about the environment, the organism embarks on creating an environment that is conducive to providing more of those resources. Different adaptive problems give rise to alternative environments, and so environments and organisms are mutually adaptive. Much in the same way, successful strategy changes the context for which it was devised, making context at least partially strategy dependent. So now we are all constructivists, of course.

CONCLUSION

How does one explain the relationship between strategy, a plan for continuing advantage, and tactics, maximizing means toward given ends? If the outcomes of battles are the means of the strategist, as Clausewitz tells us, how do the myriad of interactions that take place between individuals in combat relate to the strategy of the state? The new science of complexity may hold the key. Metabehavior, which cannot be predicted from the interactions of components, gives meaning to those interactions. No matter how carefully we observe and describe neurons and synapses that constitute interaction in the brain, we cannot project consciousness from them, much less emotions, such as hate or love. No matter how intensely we examine the cells of an organism, we cannot project what it means to be human—or just what it means to be alive, for that matter. No matter how carefully we describe individual letters—symbols for sounds—we cannot understand the meaning of speech or predict the Gettysburg Address.

An emergent property—and strategy fits that definition—does not exist in the components of the system from which it derives. It forms as a result of the arrangement of those parts and the myriad of interactions between them. Craig Reynolds has pointed out that the flocking behavior of birds, an emergent property, cannot be understood by observing the characteristics that make up a bird—wings, feathers, bone structure, etc.³⁷ But it can be perfectly understood by the simplicity of the rules that guide their interaction. First, leave a minimum separation between yourself and the next bird (don’t crowd your neighbor); second, align yourself with the average heading of everyone else; and third, steer toward the average position of the birds adjacent to you. When automata are modeled on these three rules, they exhibit the extraordinarily complex movement of flocks of birds with perfect precision.

In this way strategists can promote positive emergent properties from the myriad of individual interactions at the tactical level by providing sound rules of engagement that both properly constrain and enable the broader conduct of war along lines amenable to the state. This is not an easy task. Whenever the strategist meddles with rule sets, unintended consequences also emerge. A city or county that decides, in order to save money, to pay members of a fire department according to the number of fires it puts out rather than fixed salaries is likely to find a number of arsonists in its employ. Unfortunately, as my old history professor James B. Oviatt used to opine, “Hind-sight is better than foresight by a damned sight.”

The problem of unintended consequences is inherent to situations in which strategists attempt to influence real-world systems with a lot of moving parts. Any change to these environments will have unforeseen outcomes, because the calculations necessary to determine all of them accurately are beyond current computing capacity. Thus thinking about second- or third-order effects is useful but fraught in practice with dangerous assumptions and impossible calculations: the more interactions with a complex system, the more unforeseen and unforeseeable effects.

How do strategists make unpredictability beneficial? First, they recognize there are fundamental limits to what can be known. Second, they seek out conundrums—especially paradoxes—that challenge what is accepted as true. Third, they plug away. And there are good examples of this strategy. The discovery of quantum indeterminacy in physics and mathematics—at first a frustrating conundrum—in turn fostered an unprecedented increase in our knowledge and understanding of nature.

If complex systems science could help to determine fundamental limits to the predictability of war, commanders and decision makers could refocus efforts from trying to anticipate fundamentally unknowable events—the search for the so-called silver bullet that efficiently and permanently solve problems—to increasing the resilience and adaptive capacities of their forces. The ability to adapt will provide greater responsiveness to stimuli and limit the risk of systemic or catastrophic collapse. Understanding how predictability decays over time and space is needed if we are to shape operational tempo and information dissemination policies. By challenging the simplifying assumptions of traditional approaches to preparing for future conflicts, complex theory could stimulate a much richer and valuable understanding of the phenomena of war.

NOTES

1. See Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3–4.

2. An excellent popular account is Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012).

3. John Pockock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 1.

4. Lawrence Freedman states the case flatly in his magnificent Strategy: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), xi: “There is no agreed-upon definition of strategy” [original emphasis].

5. See Edward Luttwak’s Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1987), 239–41, which includes more than a dozen accepted military definitions. Colin Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17–23, adds considerably to the list.

6. From the argument of Francoise Jullien, A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking, trans. Janice Lloyd (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 57.

7. Nor should anyone proclaim him- or herself a strategist simply for penning a book or chapter on the subject. I have most certainly not reached that status. Strategy is still too difficult for me, evident in retrospect but awkwardly laborious in prospect. Nonetheless, I continue to study, practice, discuss, write, and learn in the hope that one day it might be so.

8. V. S. Ramachandran, “Genes, Claustrum, and Consciousness,” in This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works, ed. John Brockman (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 88–89.

9. This is clearly not the raison d’état of Cardinal Richelieu (who extended Machiavelli’s insistence that the only end that justifies any means is the continued health and benefit of the state and) who insisted that any end the state pursues is by definition in the national interest and that therefore the means to achieve it are morally and ethically unassailable.

10. Politics, which never ends, has its analogy to tactics in the political process culminating in selection of a leader or representative. In a democracy, the political campaign ends with an election. Candidates must achieve victory in order to govern, as tacticians must achieve objectives in the battlespace during war. But good military strategy is about war in support of sustainable peace; good politics goes beyond winning elections and is about governing in support of sustainable security and economic well-being.

11. For a fuller exposition, see Everett Dolman, Pure Strategy: Power and Principle in the Space and Information Age (New York: Frank Cass, 2005).

12. A point made much better by Clausewitz, who asserted that those who shy away from the violence necessary to proper military activities may feel better about themselves but do their states and their politics no favors: see Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 1.

13. Though not eliminated. For example, the U.S. Air Force’s A-10 aircraft is designed and intended for close air support (CAS)—that is, direct ground combat support in the U.S. Army’s mandate to take and hold territory.

14. Gary Bateson, “The Cybernetics of Self,” cited in Derrick Niederman, The Puzzler’s Dilemma: From the Lighthouse of Alexandria to Monty Hall, a Fresh Look at Classic Conundrums of Logic, Mathematics, and Life (New York: Penguin, 2012), 47 [emphasis added].

15. Jullien, Treatise on Efficacy, 37.

16. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Ralph D. Sawyer (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1994), 177.

17. A point emphatically made by Niccolò Machiavelli in The Art of War, revised edition of the Ellis Farneworth translation with an introduction by Neal Wood (New York: Da Capo, 1965).

18. To self-regulate, a system—for example a home furnace—must have polarity of opposition. This is the essence of the control mechanism, in this case a thermostat, which keeps a room consistently pleasant—a constant compromise between too hot and too cold.

19. Victory in this case is bounded by the political aims that employ force or the threat of force as the means. Commanders are provided with forces and capabilities, as well as limitations (for the most part rules of engagement that can also, though less often, be established as enabling broader action under specified conditions). Victory may not be destruction of the opponent or even serious incapacitation. It may be simply delay of the opponent, attrition of forces, a feint, or seizure of a particularly valuable position. Regardless, the objective is set externally to the battle, and judgments of its effectiveness to the larger campaign or war goals are determined outside the requirements of any specific battle. When one wins the battle but loses the war, the logic of tactics has replaced the logic of strategy.

20. James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (New York: Ballantine, 1986), 152–53.

21. Ibid., 153.

22. Ibid.

23. Cited in Henry de Claude, “Scientific Uncertainty and Fabricated Uncertainty,” in The Stockholm Lectures (Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 15 December 2011), http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/files/texte-de-claude-henry.pdf.

24. A point made by Alan Beyerchen, “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War,” International Security (Winter 1992/93): 59–90, and Barry Watts, Clausewitzian Friction and Future War, McNair Paper 52 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for National Strategic Studies, 1996).

25. Clearly articulated by astronomer Pierre Simon LaPlace, Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, translation of the 1812 fifth edition by Andrew Dale, in Sources in the History of Mathematics and Physical Science (New York: Springer Verlag, 1994), vol. 13.

26. Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (New York: Morrow, 1979), 34–35.

27. Ibid., 32.

28. If this is true, then everything in existence may be made of nothing. Brian Green, Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).

29. See Douglas Hofsteder, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).

30. Ibid., 17.

31. Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science (Champaign, Ill.: Wolfram Media, 2002), 1158.

32. This example, of course, refers to the American military experience in Vietnam.

33. Clausewitz, On War, 605.

34. For example, Robert Powell, “Crisis Stability in the Nuclear Age,” American Political Science Review 83, no. 1 (March 1989): 61–76; Dean Wilkening, Ken Watman, Michael Kennedy, and Richard Darilek, Strategic Defenses and Crisis Stability (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1989); Barry Posen, “Crisis Stability and Conventional Arms Control,” Daedalus 120, no. 1 (Winter, 1991): 217–32; and Forrest Morgan, Crisis Stability and Long-Range Strike: A Comparative Analysis of Fighters, Bombers, and Missiles (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 2013).

35. Michael Polyani and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 13.

36. See Brian Green, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (New York: Vintage, 2005), 24–25. “A magnetic force field provides a magnet what an army provides a dictator and what auditors provide the IRS: influence beyond their physical boundaries” (40).

37. Craig Reynolds, “Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributional Behavioral Model,” Computer Graphics 21, no. 4 (1987): 25–34.