Strategy This page intentionally left blank 1 lawrence freedman Strategy A History 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Lawrence Freedman 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Freedman, Lawrence. Strategy : a history / Lawrence Freedman. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–932515–3 (hardback) 1. Strategy—History. 2. Military history. 3. Strategic culture. 4. Strategic planning. I. Title. U162.F86 2013 320.6—dc23 2013011944 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Judith This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Preface ix part i Origins 1 Origins 1: Evolution 3 2 Origins 2: The Bible 10 3 Origins 3: The Greeks 22 4 Sun Tzu and Machiavelli 42 5 Satan’s Strategy 54 part ii Strategies of Force 6 The New Science of Strategy 69 7 Clausewitz 82 8 The False Science 96 9 Annihilation or Exhaustion 108 10 Brain and Brawn 123 11 The Indirect Approach 134 12 Nuclear Games 145 13 The Rationality of Irrationality 156 14 Guerrilla Warfare 178 15 Observation and Orientation 193 viii C o n t e n t s 16 The Revolution in Military Affairs 214 17 The Myth of the Master Strategist 237 part iii Strategy from Below 18 Marx and a Strategy for the Working Class 247 19 Herzen and Bakunin 265 20 Revisionists and Vanguards 281 21 Bureaucrats, Democrats, and Elites 300 22 Formulas, Myths, and Propaganda 321 23 The Power of Nonviolence 344 24 Existential Strategy 366 25 Black Power and White Anger 391 26 Frames, Paradigms, Discourses, and Narratives 414 27 Race, Religion, and Elections 433 part iv Strategy from Above 28 The Rise of the Management Class 459 29 The Business of Business 474 30 Management Strategy 491 31 Business as War 505 32 The Rise of Economics 513 33 Red Queens and Blue Oceans 525 34 The Sociological Challenge 542 35 Deliberate or Emergent 554 part v Theories of Strategy 36 The Limits of Rational Choice 575 37 Beyond Rational Choice 589 38 Stories and Scripts 607 Acknowledgments 631 Notes 633 Index 719 PREFACE Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth. —Mike Tyson E veryone needs a strategy. Leaders of armies, major corporations, and political parties have long been expected to have strategies, but now no serious organization could imagine being without one. Despite the problems of fi nding ways through the uncertainty and confusion of human affairs, a strategic approach is still considered to be preferable to one that is merely tactical, let alone random. Having a strategy suggests an ability to look up from the short term and the trivial to view the long term and the essential, to address causes rather than symptoms, to see woods rather than trees. Without a strategy, facing up to any problem or striving for any objective would be considered negligent. Certainly no military campaign, company investment, or government initiative is likely to receiving backing unless there is a strat- egy to evaluate. If a decision can be described as strategically signifi cant, then it is obviously more important than decisions of a more routine nature. By extension, people making such decisions are more important than those who only offer advice or are tasked with implementation. Strategies are now offered not only for the life-or-death, make-or-break decisions of great states and large corporations but also for more mundane matters. There is a call for a strategy every time the path to a given destina- tion is not straightforward or whenever judgments are required on resources x p r e f a c e needed, their effective application, and their appropriate sequence. In busi- ness, chief executives may take responsibility for overall strategy, but there are separate strategies for procurement, marketing, human resources, and so on. Doctors have clinical strategies, lawyers have prosecution strategies, and social workers have counseling strategies. Individuals have their own strategies—for developing a career, coping with bereavement, fi lling in tax returns, or even potty-training an infant or buying a car. In fact, there is now no human activity so lowly, banal, or intimate that it can reasonably be deprived of a strategy. For those who want more effective strategies, there are plenty of books offering advice. The multiplicity of audiences shows in the variations of style. Some books rely on a jokey presentation, others on large print or inspira- tional stories from the successful and victorious. There are learned tomes with graphs and charts detailing many complicated factors to be taken into account. Somewhere between are checklists of activities that, if followed care- fully, will at least increase the chances of achieving the right result. There are extended pep talks, encouraging bold thinking and decisive moves and a commitment to victory. These may be no more than collections of clichés, not always consistent, with hints on how to struggle with opponents and bring along prospective allies. Elsewhere there are more philosophical refl ec- tions on the paradoxes of confl ict and the pitfalls of losing fl exibility in the single-minded pursuit of a distant goal. There are even tips on how to be a fantasy strategist while staring at a screen, refi ghting ancient wars or domi- nating aliens in imagined universes with complicated rules and extraordinary weapons. Can the same word apply to battle plans, political campaigning, and business deals—not to mention means of coping with the stresses of every- day life—without becoming meaningless? Columnist Matthew Parris has lamented the ubiquity of the word strategy and the ease with which it becomes attached to any desirable end. He commented on demands for a “growth strategy” in the face of a stagnant and indebted economy but won- dered who would claim a “rain strategy” as an answer to drought. “Every sinner needs a virtue strategy. Every starveling needs a food strategy.” “There exist few modern circumstances,” he observed, “where the removal of the word ‘strategy’ from any passage containing it fails to clarify matters, usu- ally demonstrating the argument’s circularity.” 1 Yet strategy remains the best word we have for expressing attempts to think about actions in advance, in the light of our goals and our capacities. It captures a process for which there are no obvious alternative words, although the meaning has become diluted through promiscuous and often inappropriate use. In this respect strategy is p r e f a c e xi not much different from other related words, such as power and politics . While their exact meanings are explored, rarely to a conclusion, in scholarly texts, their adoption in everyday speech tends to be imprecise, loose, and lazy. There is no agreed-upon defi nition of strategy that describes the fi eld and limits its boundaries. One common contemporary defi nition describes it as being about maintaining a balance between ends, ways, and means; about identifying objectives; and about the resources and methods available for meeting such objectives. 2 This balance requires not only fi nding out how to achieve desired ends but also adjusting ends so that realistic ways can be found to meet them by available means. This process can describe the sim- plest tasks, but when the ends are easily reached, when inanimate objects rather than other people are involved, and when very little is at stake, this barely counts as strategy. By and large, strategy comes into play where there is actual or potential confl ict, when interests collide and forms of resolution are required. This is why a strategy is much more than a plan. A plan sup- poses a sequence of events that allows one to move with confi dence from one state of affairs to another. Strategy is required when others might frus- trate one’s plans because they have different and possibly opposing interests and concerns. The confl icts can be quite mild, for example, between those within the same organization notionally pursuing the same goals but with distinctive responsibilities. As the quote from boxer Mike Tyson illustrates, a well-aimed blow can thwart the cleverest plan. The inherent unpredictabil- ity of human affairs, due to chance events as well as the efforts of opponents and the missteps of friends, provides strategy with its challenge and drama. Strategy is often expected to start with a description of a desired end state, but in practice there is rarely an orderly movement to goals set in advance. Instead, the process evolves through a series of states, each one not quite what was anticipated or hoped for, requiring a reappraisal and modifi cation of the original strategy, including ultimate objectives. The picture of strategy that should emerge from this book is one that is fl uid and fl exible, governed by the starting point and not the end point. Strategy is also frequently presented as a duel, a clash of two opposing wills. This refl ects the term’s military origins and regular comparisons to a wrestling match. It can also be the result of the simple modeling of confl icts encouraged by game theory with the standard two-by-two matrix. Few situ- ations involving strategy are so simple. A boxer in a ring with Mike Tyson might have few options, but his prospects would improve greatly if it was possible to break the rules and bring in a fellow fi ghter from outside the ring. As we shall see, combining with others often constitutes the most astute stra- tegic move; for the same reason, preventing opponents from doing the same xii p r e f a c e can be as valuable. A duel is also a bad metaphor because it suggests a fi ght to the fi nish with only one winner. Yet confl icts can be resolved through build- ing on shared interests or forging a winning coalition with the next available partner. As both types of moves can require complex negotiations, it may be a challenge to convince natural supporters that the necessary concessions have been worthwhile or prudent. So the realm of strategy is one of bargaining and persuasion as well as threats and pressure, psychological as well as physical effects, and words as well as deeds. This is why strategy is the central politi- cal art. It is about getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest. It is the art of creating power. For those who start as powerful, strategy should not be too diffi cult. The sensible application of superior resources tends to be successful. A famous biblical passage observes “that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.” 3 The American writer Damon Runyon added, “But that’s the way to bet.” Fighting against superior force may score high on nobility and heroism but normally low on discretion and effectiveness. This is why underdog strategies, in situations where the starting balance of power would predict defeat, provide the real tests of creativity. Such strategies often look to the possibility of success through the application of a superior intelligence, which takes advantage of the boring, ponderous, muscle-bound approach adopted by those who take their superior resources for granted. The exem- plars of such an approach are Odysseus but not Achilles, Sun Tzu and Liddell Hart but not Clausewitz and Jomini. They would seek victory at a reasonable cost by means of deceits, ruses, feints, maneuvers, speed, and a quicker wit. There is an undoubted satisfaction by winning through wit rather than brute force. The problems come when opponents turn out to be not only better resourced but also as alert, brave, and clever. Strategy ’s etymology goes back to classical Greek. Through the Middle Ages and into the modern era, however, the relevant reference tended to be to the “art of war.” The sort of issues that later came fi rmly under the heading of strategy—the value of alliances, the role of battle, the respective merits of force and guile—were fi rmly in view. The word strategy only began to be used in Britain, France, and Germany in the late eighteenth century, refl ecting an Enlightenment optimism that war—like all other spheres of human affairs— could benefi t from the application of reason. It also refl ected the demands of contemporary warfare, with mass armies and long logistics chains. The employment of force now required careful preparation and theoretical guid- ance. Before, ends and means might be combined in the mind of the warrior leader, who would be responsible for both the formulation and execution of a strategy. Increasingly, these functions were separated. Governments p r e f a c e xiii set objectives they expected the generals to achieve. The generals acquired specialist staffs to devise campaign plans that others would implement. Given the ease with which military metaphors are taken up in other spheres of activity, including the language of command, it is not surprising that political and business leaders adopted the idea of strategy. References to business strategy were rare before 1960. They started to take off during the 1970s and by 2000 became more frequent than references to military strategy. 4 It is through the literature on management and business that the use of the word has spread. As organizations’ plans and policies, at least their most important and far-reaching ones, came to be described as “strategic,” it was not too large a jump for individuals to use the term when considering how best to make professional choices. The social and philosophical move- ments of the 1960s encouraged the “personal” to become more “political,” potentially introducing strategy into more basic relationships. Corporations acquired planning staffs which set targets for others to fol- low. Politicians hired consultants who advised on how to win elections. And then those with experience in these tasks wrote and lectured on the prin- ciples of strategy, offering prescriptions that might bring success in poten- tially diverse settings. The rise of strategy has therefore gone hand in hand with bureaucratization of organizations, professionalization of functions, and growth of the social sciences. It refl ected the hope that the specialist study of economics, sociology, politics, and psychology would make possible a more comprehensible and therefore more predictable world, so that all moves could be better informed and judged, tailored more effectively to the circumstances of the moment. One response to the advance of the strategists was to challenge their pre- sumptions of control and the centralized power structures they encouraged. Strategy has been presented as a conceit and an illusion, a pretense that the affairs of the multitudes can be manipulated from above by an elite. Instead of the deliberate decisions of a few, critics pointed to the countless moves of innumerable individuals, unable to see the big picture yet coping as well as they can in the circumstances, leading to outcomes that nobody had intended or even desired. This critique has encouraged demands for decentralized decision-making and empowered individuals. In turn, this encouraged strat- egy as a more personal response to the vicissitudes of everyday life. This book describes the development of these different approaches, from rigorous centralized planning processes at one extreme to the sum of numer- ous individual decisions at the other. It shows how in these distinct mili- tary, political, and business spheres, there has been a degree of convergence around the idea that the best strategic practice may now consist in forming xiv p r e f a c e compelling accounts of how to turn a developing situation into a desirable outcome. The practice of thinking of strategy as a special sort of narrative came into vogue as the 1960s turned into the 1970s, and disillusion set in with the idea that large enterprises and even wars could be controlled by means of a central plan. Developments in cognitive psychology and contem- porary philosophy came together to stress the importance of the constructs through which events are interpreted. As a history, this book aims to provide an account of the development of the most prominent themes in strategic theory—as they affect war, poli- tics, and business—without losing sight of the critics and dissidents. Readers might be surprised by some of the characters that appear, and by chapters that barely seem to mention strategy at all. This is because of the importance of the theories that set the terms for strategy. These establish the problems the strategists must address and the circumstances in which they operate, as well as their forms of political and social action. The result is that this book is not so much about planning for confl ict or the application of practical intelligence to forms of uncertainty but rather about relationships between theory and practice, and indeed theories as a form of practice. Strategy pro- vides a way into a whole range of discourses: abstract formulations of what it means to act rationally and postmodern musings on domination and resis- tance; propositions on causation and insights into the working of the human brain; and practical advice on how best to catch enemies in battle, undermine rivals in elections, and launch a new product into the market. Strategists have addressed the effi ciency of various forms of coercion as well as inducements, human nature under stress, the organization of large groups of people on the move, negotiating techniques, visions of a good society, and standards of ethical conduct. The approach I have adopted here does not follow any particular school of social science. In fact, I have sought to show how the ascent of certain schools can be explained by academic strategies. Toward the end I develop the idea of strategic scripts as a way of thinking about strategy as a story told in the future tense. I believe this follows from the lines of analysis developed during the course of the book, but I hope readers enjoy the history even if they do not accept the analysis. What fascinates me about strategy is that it is about choice and because these choices can be important the reasoning behind them is worthy of careful examination. It is about decisions that mat- ter to those making them, dealing with personal advancement and group survival, but also views and values that are deeply held, businesses that affect the livelihoods of many, the opportunity to shape a nation’s future course. To study strategy in this way is potentially subversive of those forms of social