Every Tactic Has Its Thorn
Tactics as aesthetics
Tactics is the fifth and final layer of functionality on 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.
Tactics is an OODA loop, a learning machine caught up in the process of ongoing adaption to external forces and their changing demands. Through one adaption may lie survival and prosperity. Through another adaption may lie cataclysm. Learning which is which is the road to victory. Tactics pursues successful adaption through the direct interaction of desire and power with friction and opposing wills. If power and desire can survive direct contact with the abrasive edge of external forces, the road to survival is open. If it is worn down, the chances of successful adaption diminish.
Each new tactic is a new hypothesis, a decision about how well an interaction will work. Once tactical action is taken, external forces push right back, meaning that feedback is rapidly observed. Orientation of tactical observation follows and either action is immediately taken or there is more decision upon what interaction should come next.
Tactics is the means by which operations successfully arranges desire and power in time and space. Such arrangements often require that opposition be cleared out of a certain space at a certain time. If tactical interactions end successfully, operations can make a successful arrangement. Tactical outcomes shape operational outcomes. Tactical success and failure flow up the stack, making the chances for operational, strategic, political, and cultural success or failure either much greater or much reduced. Tactics is where all the other layers meet the road, their sole contact with the outside world.
There is nothing between tactics and the outside environment. The impact of external forces and their shifting requirements is felt directly at the tactical layer. This leaves little time or space for decision. Orientation, the Automatic System, is needed more than decision (the Reflective System) because there’s greater demand for quick reaction on the tactical layer. This makes the development of correct habits and routines a greater need on the tactical layer. Tactics is almost as Automatic as the cultural layer but the cultural layer is Automatic because its closely tied to the hardware of instinct. The tactical layer is Automatic because of the need for speed.
Truth in beauty
Since tactics is easier to reduce to routine and habit than politics, strategy, and operations, military thinkers such as Clausewitz considered tactics more of a science than an art. Principles can be derived from tactical examples and have some hope of application beyond a unique correlation of circumstances. This predictability, Clausewitz asserted, was the first development in the study of war. Accordingly, early works on war like Sun Tzu’s Art of War and the other Seven Military Classics of Ancient China, Aeneas Tacticus How to Survive under Siege, Vegetius’s De rei militari, and Maurice’s Strategikon were often as much tactical manuals as anything else. The specific implementation of tactics rapidly becomes obsolescent but the principles remain, when interpreted with caution, fairly consistent over time.
Much of what people obsess about in discussing ongoing adaption is tactics. Tactics is easy to see and easy to describe. Most everyday social interactions are tactics. The focus logically falls on tactics, leading to a shallow, short-term fixation on exposed edges while the higher, inner layers are neglected or forgotten. The higher layers on the stack, however, provide more staying power for adaption. They are neglected at great peril. A proper approach to adaption involves a balanced approach to all layers of the stack and understanding the individual quirks of each layer as adaption proceeds.
