Strategy is the Forgotten Middle Fluff
Strategos
Strategy is the third highest layer of functionality in the CPSOT stack:
- Culture: divides priority between desires.
- Politics: divides power between desires.
- Strategy: reconciles power and desire.
- Operations: arranges power and desire in time and space.
- Tactics: directs the interaction of power and desire with external forces.
Like culture and politics, strategy is an OODA loop, a learning machine that strives to survive and thrive under the constant barrage of outside demands. Eking out survival and even prospering comes after making correct (if fleeting) adaptations to a harsh and changing world. Strategy makes adaptions by reconciling the desires prioritized by culture with the divisions of power made by politics. If reconciliation minimizes the possible clash of desire and power well enough and makes them work as a coherent whole well enough, then the chances of adaption are raised. If not, things will get bumpy.
A new reconciliation is proposed as a hypothesis, a prediction of how the reconciliation will fare. Action throws the reconciliation to the wolves. Crap happens. Feedback is observed. The reconciliation is oriented and then either fed back to the environment or it or a reconfigured variant is submitted for further decision.
Strategy is the tool of politics. It serves politics by taking the divisions of power and cultural desires handed to it and reconciling their often incompatible natures into a new (hopefully) cohesive mix of ends and means. This mix is also stirred by external forces that are felt more strongly by strategy than they are felt by the more insulated culture and politics. The effectiveness of this new reconciliation of power, desire, and outside pressures is measured in the favorable divisions of power it produces and the higher priority desires it satisfies.
Strategy falls under the sway of politics but its twists and turns as it seeks reconciliation can generate effects that shape politics. War, for example, since it’s a strategy, is a continuation of politics under the domination of a “remarkable trinity“:
- primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force;
- the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and
- its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason.
Posterized
The nature of the power used in war (the power of violence) can release raw passions of hatred and enmity in both violator and violated. These strong feelings can distort the original cultural priorities and political goals that the strategy of war was supposed to achieve. Throw in chance and probability and you’ve created a volatile mix. Throughout history, human groups have poorly judged the impact of hostility and change in the strategy of war, especially when choosing when to use itn and when not to use it.
Frederick II seized Silesia from Austria as a rational act of politics, seeking a better division of power between Prussia and Austria. He underestimated the hatred that this act triggered in Marie Theresa, who saw it as a base act of treachery. Her obsession with destroying Frederick produced two wars that not only came close to bagging Old Fritz himself but also his entire kingdom.
Maria Theresa, on the other hand, underestimated the role of chance. After she painstakingly assembled a coalition of France, Russia, and Austria, whose combined military power was several orders of magnitude greater than Frederick’s and had Prussia on the verge of total defeat, Frederick was saved by the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg. Another Frederick nemesis, Elizabeth, Czarina of all the Russias, died suddenly and was succeeded by her nephew Peter III, who was a Frederick groupie. Peter precipitously withdrew from Prussia in exchange for an Frederick original autographed saber, leaving Maria Theresa in a lurch. Maria Theresa had to give up Silesia and live with that little prick up north running around calling himself “the Great”.
Clausewitz expanded on the nature of war and, by extension, all strategy, in Chapter I Book I of On War:
When whole communities go to war…the reason always lies in some political situation and the occasion is always due to some political object. War, therefore, is an act of policy. Were it a complete, untrammeled, absolute manifestation of violence…war would of its own independent will usurp the place of policy the moment policy had brought it into being…War moves on its goal with varying speeds; but it always lasts long enough for influence to be exerted on the goal and for its own course to be changed in one way or another–long enough…to remain subject to the action of a superior intelligence. If we keep in mind that war springs from some political purpose, it is natural that the prime cause of its existence will remain the supreme consideration in conducting it. That, however, does not imply that the political aim is a tyrant. It must adapt itself to its chosen means, a process which can radically change it; yet the political aim remains the first consideration. Policy, then, will permeate all military operations, and, in so far as their violent nature will admit, it will have a continuous influence on them…
We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means. War…is entitled to require that the trend and designs of policy shall not be inconsistent with these means. That, of course, is no small demand; but however much it may affect political aims in a given case, it will never do more than modify them. The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.
Strategy is a “a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse” but politics is not “a tyrant”, able to dictate to strategy absolutely. Strategy must reconcile the nature of its power to the nature of its desires:
This is one of those truths which, to a correct and unprejudiced mind, carries its own evidence along with it; and may be obscured, but cannot be made plainer by argument or reasoning. It rests upon axioms as simple as they are universal; the MEANS ought to be proportioned to the END; the persons, from whose agency the attainment of any END is expected, ought to possess the MEANS by which it is to be attained.
The quality and quantity of political power will allow pursuit of some cultural desires and discourage others. That will shape both cultural priorities and how political power is allocated. Successful adaption is usually found in greater harmony between desires and power, allowing a more productive reconciliation to occur. Mismatches between power and desires create opportunities for external forces to disrupt and increase entropy.
In general, the strategy for employing the military is this: if your strength is ten times theirs, surround them; if five, then attack them; if double, then divide your forces. If your are equal in strength to the enemy, you can engage him. If fewer, you can circumvent him. If outmatched, you can avoid him. Thus a small enemy that acts inflexibly will become the captives of a large enemy.
- Sun-tzu’s Art of War, translated by Ralph D. Sawyer
