The 33 Strategies of War (27 page)

In our own time, the family therapist Jay Haley has observed that for many difficult people acting out is a strategy--a method of control. They give themselves the license to be impossible and neurotic. If you react by getting angry and trying to make them stop, you are doing just what they want: they are engaging your emotions and dominating your attention. If, on the other hand, you simply let them run amok, you put them still more in control. But Haley discovered that if you encourage their difficult behavior, agree with their paranoid ideas, and push them to go further, you turn the dynamic around. This is not what they want or expect; now they're doing what
you
want, which takes the fun out of it. It is the jujitsu strategy: you are using their energy against them. In general, encouraging people to follow their natural direction, to give in to their greed or neuroses, will give you more control over them than active resistance will. Either they get themselves into terrible trouble or they become hopelessly confused, all of which plays into your hands.

Whenever you find yourself on the defensive and in trouble, the greatest danger is the impulse to overreact. You will often exaggerate your enemy's strength, seeing yourself as weaker than is actually the case. A key principle of counterattack is never to see a situation as hopeless. No matter how strong your enemies seem, they have vulnerabilities you can prey upon and use to develop a counterattack. Your own weakness can become a strength if you play it right; with a little clever manipulation, you can always turn things around. That is how you must look at every apparent problem and difficulty.

An enemy seems powerful because he has a particular strength or advantage. Maybe it's money and resources; maybe it's the size of his army or of his territory; maybe, more subtly, it's his moral standing and reputation. Whatever his strength might be, it is actually a potential weakness, simply because he relies on it: neutralize it and he is vulnerable. Your task is to put him in a situation in which he cannot use his advantage.

In 480
B.C.
, when the Persian king Xerxes invaded Greece, he had a huge advantage in the size of his army and particularly his navy. But the Athenian general Themistocles was able to turn that strength into weakness: he lured the Persian fleet into the narrow straits off the island of Salamis. In these choppy, difficult waters, the very size of the fleet, its apparent strength, became a nightmare: it was completely unable to maneuver. The Greeks counterattacked and destroyed it, ending the invasion.

If your opponent's advantage comes from a superior style of fighting, the best way to neutralize it is to learn from it, adapting it to your own purposes. In the nineteenth century, the Apaches of the American Southwest were for many years able to torment U.S. troops through guerrilla-style tactics that were perfectly suited to the terrain. Nothing seemed to work until General George Crook hired disaffected Apaches to teach him their way of fighting and serve as scouts. Adapting their style of warfare, Crook neutralized the Apaches' strengths and finally defeated them.

As you neutralize your enemy's strengths, you must similarly reverse your own weaknesses. If your forces are small, for example, they are also mobile; use that mobility to counterattack. Perhaps your reputation is lower than your opponent's; that just means you have less to lose. Sling mud--some of it will stick, and gradually your enemy will sink to your level. Always find ways to turn your weakness to advantage.

Difficulties with other people are inevitable; you must be willing to defend yourself and sometimes to take the offensive. The modern dilemma is that taking the offensive is unacceptable today--attack and your reputation will suffer, you will find yourself politically isolated, and you will create enemies and resistance. The counterattack is the answer. Let your enemy make the first move, then play the victim. Without overt manipulation on your part, you can control your opponents' minds. Bait them into a rash attack; when it ends up in disaster, they will have only themselves to blame, and everyone around them will blame them, too. You win both the battle of appearances and the battle on the field. Very few strategies offer such flexibility and power.

Authority: The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by a rapid and audacious attack.

--
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

REVERSAL

The counterattack strategy cannot be applied in every situation: there will always be times when it is better to initiate the attack yourself, gaining control by putting your opponents on the defensive before they have time to think. Look at the details of the situation. If the enemy is too smart to lose patience and attack you, or if you have too much to lose by waiting, go on the offensive. It is also usually best to vary your methods, always having more than one strategy to draw on. If your enemies think you always wait to counterattack, you have the perfect setup for moving first and surprising them. So mix things up. Watch the situation and make it impossible for your opponents to predict what you will do.

Conditions are such that the hostile forces favored by the time are advancing. In this case retreat is the right course, and it is through retreat that success is achieved. But success consists in being able to carry out the retreat correctly. Retreat is not to be confused with flight. Flight means saving oneself under any circumstances, whereas retreat is a sign of strength. We must be careful not to miss the right moment while we are in full possession of power and position. Then we shall be able to interpret the signs of the time before it is too late and to prepare for provisional retreat instead of being drawn into a desperate life-and-death struggle. Thus we do not simply abandon the field to the opponent; we make it difficult for him to advance by showing perseverance in single acts of resistance. In this way we prepare, while retreating, for the counter-movement. Understanding the laws of a constructive retreat of this sort is not easy. The meaning that lies hidden in such a time is important.

T
HE
I C
HING
, C
HINA, CIRCA EIGHTH CENTURY B.C.

The best way to fight off aggressors is to keep them from attacking you in the first place. To accomplish this you must create the impression of being more powerful than you are. Build up a reputation: You're a little crazy. Fighting you is not worth it. You take your enemies with you when you lose. Create this reputation and make it credible with a few impressive--impressively violent--acts. Uncertainty is sometimes better than overt threat: if your opponents are never sure what messing with you will cost, they will not want to find out. Play on people's natural fears and anxieties to make them think twice.

If your organization is small in numbers, then do what Gideon did: conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does.... Always remember the first rule of power tactics:
Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

R
ULES FOR
R
ADICALS
, S
AUL
D. A
LINSKY
, 1972

REVERSE INTIMIDATION

Inevitably in life you will find yourself facing people who are more aggressive than you are--crafty, ruthless people who are determined to get what they want. Fighting them head-on is generally foolish; fighting is what they are good at, and they are unscrupulous to boot. You will probably lose. Trying to fend them off by giving them part of what they are after, or otherwise pleasing or appeasing them, is a recipe for disaster: you are only showing your weakness, inviting more threats and attacks. But giving in completely, surrendering without a fight, hands them the easy victory they crave and makes you resentful and bitter. It can also become a bad habit, the path of least resistance in dealing with difficult situations.

Instead of trying to avoid conflict or whining about the injustice of it all, consider an option developed over the centuries by military leaders and strategists to deal with violent and acquisitive neighbors: reverse intimidation. This art of deterrence rests on three basic facts about war and human nature: First, people are more likely to attack you if they see you as weak or vulnerable. Second, they cannot know for sure that you're weak; they depend on the signs you give out, through your behavior both present and past. Third, they are after easy victories, quick and bloodless. That is why they prey on the vulnerable and weak.

Deterrence is simply a matter of turning this dynamic around, altering any perception of yourself as weak and naive and sending the message that battle with you will not be as easy as they had thought. This is generally done by taking some visible action that will confuse aggressors and make them think they have misread you: you may indeed be vulnerable, but they are not sure. You're disguising your weakness and distracting them. Action has much more credibility than mere threatening or fiery words; hitting back, for instance, even in some small, symbolic way, will show that you mean what you say. With so many other people around who are timid and easy prey, the aggressor will most likely back off and move on to someone else.

This form of defensive warfare is infinitely applicable to the battles of daily life. Appeasing people can be as debilitating as fighting them; deterring them, scaring them out of attacking you or getting in your way, will save you valuable energy and resources. To deter aggressors you must become adept at deception, manipulating appearances and their perceptions of you--valuable skills that can be applied to all aspects of daily warfare. And finally, by practicing the art as needed, you will build for yourself a reputation as someone tough, someone worthy of respect and a little fear. The passive-aggressive obstructionists who try to undermine you covertly will also think twice about taking you on.

The following are five basic methods of deterrence and reverse intimidation. You can use them all in offensive warfare, but they are particularly effective in defense, for moments when you find yourself vulnerable and under attack. They are culled from the experiences and writings of the greatest masters of the art.

Surprise with a bold maneuver.
The best way to hide your weakness and to bluff your enemies into giving up their attack is to take some unexpected, bold, risky action. Perhaps they had thought you were vulnerable, and now you are acting as someone who is fearless and confident. This will have two positive effects: First, they will tend to think your move is backed up by something real--they will not imagine you could be foolish enough to do something audacious just for effect. Second, they will start to see strengths and threats in you that they had not imagined.

A certain person said the following. There are two kinds of dispositions, inward and outward, and a person who is lacking in one or the other is worthless. It is, for example, like the blade of a sword, which one should sharpen well and then put in its scabbard, periodically taking it out and knitting one's eyebrows as in an attack, wiping off the blade, and then placing it in its scabbard again. If a person has his sword out all the time, he is habitually swinging a naked blade; people will not approach him and he will have no allies. If a sword is always sheathed, it will become rusty, the blade will dull, and people will think as much of its owner.

H
AGAKURE
: T
HE
B
OOK OF THE
S
AMURAI
, Y
AMAMOTO
T
SUNETOMO
, 1659-1720

Reverse the threat.
If your enemies see you as someone to be pushed around, turn the tables with a sudden move, however small, designed to scare
them
. Threaten something they value. Hit them where you sense they may be vulnerable, and make it hurt. If that infuriates them and makes them attack you, back off a moment and then hit them again when they're not expecting it. Show them you are not afraid of them and that you are capable of a ruthlessness they had not seen in you. You needn't go too far; just inflict a little pain. Send a short, threatening message to indicate that you are capable of a lot worse.

Seem unpredictable and irrational.
In this instance you do something suggesting a slightly suicidal streak, as if you felt you had nothing to lose. You show that you are ready to take your enemies down with you, destroying their reputations in the process. (This is particularly effective with people who have a lot to lose themselves--powerful people with sterling reputations.) To defeat you will be costly and perhaps self-destructive. This will make fighting you very unattractive. You are not acting out emotionally; that is a sign of weakness. You are simply hinting that you are a little irrational and that your next move could be almost anything. Crazy opponents are terrifying--no one likes fighting people who are unpredictable and have nothing to lose.

Play on people's natural paranoia.
Instead of threatening your opponents openly, you take action that is indirect and designed to make them think. This might mean using a go-between to send them a message--to tell some disturbing story about what you are capable of. Or maybe you "inadvertently" let them spy on you, only to hear something that should give them cause for concern. Making your enemies think they have found out you are plotting a countermove is more effective than telling them so yourself; make a threat and you may have to live up to it, but making them think you are working treacherously against them is another story. The more veiled menace and uncertainty you generate, the more their imaginations will run away with them and the more dangerous an attack on you will seem.

Establish a frightening reputation.
This reputation can be for any number of things: being difficult, stubborn, violent, ruthlessly efficient. Build up that image over the years and people will back off from you, treating you with respect and a little fear. Why obstruct or pick an argument with someone who has shown he will fight to the bitter end? Someone strategic yet ruthless? To create this image, you may every now and then have to play a bit rough, but eventually it will become enough of a deterrent to make those occasions rare. It will be an offensive weapon, scaring people into submission before they even meet you. In any event, you must build your reputation carefully, allowing no inconsistencies. Any holes in this kind of image will make it worthless.

Brinkmanship is...the deliberate creation of a recognizable risk, a risk that one does not completely control. It is the tactic of deliberately letting the situation get somewhat out of hand, just because its being out of hand may be intolerable to the other party and force his accommodation. It means harassing and intimidating an adversary by exposing him to a shared risk, or deterring him by showing that if he makes a contrary move he may disturb us so that we slip over the brink whether we want to or not, carrying him with us.

T
HINKING
S
TRATEGICALLY
, A
VINASH
K. D
IXIT AND
B
ARRY
J. N
ALEBUFF
, 1991

Injuring all of a man's ten fingers is not as effective as chopping off one.

--Mao Tse-tung (1893-1976)

DETERRENCE AND REVERSE INTIMIDATION IN PRACTICE

1.
In March 1862, less than a year after the start of the American Civil War, the Confederates' situation looked bleak: they had lost a series of important battles, their generals were squabbling, morale was low, and recruits were hard to find. Sensing the South's great weakness, a large Union army under Major General George B. McClellan headed toward the Virginia coast, planning to march from there west to Richmond, the capital of the South. There were enough Confederate troops in the area to hold off McClellan's army for a month or two, but Southern spies reported that Union troops stationed near Washington were about to be transferred to the march on Richmond. If these troops reached McClellan--and they were promised by Abraham Lincoln himself--Richmond would be doomed; and if Richmond fell, the South would have to surrender.

The Confederate general Stonewall Jackson was based in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley at the head of 3,600 men, a ragtag group of rebels he had recruited and trained. His job was merely to defend the fertile valley against a Union army in the area, but as he pondered the developing campaign against Richmond, he saw the possibility of something much greater. Jackson had been a classmate of McClellan's at West Point and knew that underneath his brash, talkative exterior he was basically timid, overly anxious about his career and making any mistakes. McClellan had 90,000 men ready for the march on Richmond, almost double the available Confederate forces, but Jackson knew that this cautious man would wait to fight until his army was overwhelming; he wanted the extra troops that Lincoln had promised him. Lincoln, however, would not release those forces if he saw danger elsewhere. The Shenandoah Valley was to the southwest of Washington. If Jackson could possibly create enough confusion as to what was happening there, he could disrupt the Union plans and perhaps save the South from disaster.

On March 22, Jackson's spies reported that two-thirds of the Union army stationed in the Shenandoah Valley, under General Nathaniel Banks, was heading east to join McClellan. Soon an army near Washington, led by General Irvin McDowell, would move toward Richmond as well. Jackson wasted no time: he marched his men fast to the north to attack the Union soldiers still in the valley, near Kernstown. The battle was fierce, and at the end of the day Jackson's soldiers were forced to retreat. To them the engagement seemed to have been a defeat, even a disaster: outnumbered nearly two to one, they had suffered terrible casualties. But Jackson, always a hard man to figure out, seemed oddly satisfied.

One classic response to a particularly vicious beanball was exemplified by a play Jackie Robinson made in the summer of 1953. Sal Maglie of the New York Giants was "Sal the Barber," mostly because his high inside fast balls "shaved" hitters' chins. Maglie was candid and friendly when he wasn't pitching. "You have to make the batter afraid of the ball or, anyway, aware that he can get hurt," Maglie told me matter-of-factly one afternoon over drinks at his apartment in Riverdale. "A lot of pitchers think they do that by throwing at a hitter when the count is two strikes and no balls. The trouble there is that the knockdown is expected. You don't scare a guy by knocking him down when he knows he's going to be knocked down." "Then when, Sal?" I asked. "A good time is when the count is two and two. He's looking to swing. You knock him down then and he gets up shaking. Now curve him and you have your out. Of course, to do that you have to be able to get your curve over the plate on a three-and-two count. Not every pitcher can." Maglie could break three different curves over the plate, three and two. He had particular success against such free-swinging sluggers as Roy Campanella and Gil Hodges. But it is simplistic to say Maglie intimidated Campanella and Hodges. Rather, his unpredictable patterns disrupted their timing and concentration. He had less success with Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson, and one day in Ebbets Field, by throwing a shoulder-high fast ball behind Robinson, Maglie brought matters to detonation. The knockdowns thrown at
[
Cookie
]
Lavagetto, the fatal pitch thrown at Ray Chapman, roared toward the temple. A batter gets away from that pitch by ducking backward. (Chapman's freeze reaction, though not unknown, is rare.) Angered or frustrated by Robinson that afternoon in Brooklyn, Maglie threw his best fast ball behind the hitter, shoulder high. That was and is dangerous and inexcusable. As a batter strides forward, he loses height. Reflex makes him duck backward. A batter's head moves directly into the path of the fast ball thrown behind him shoulder high. Robinson started to duck into Maglie's pitch and then his phenomenal reflexes enabled him to stop, as it were, in mid-duck. The ball sailed just behind the back of Robinson's neck. Robinson glared but did not lose his poise. Maglie threw an outside curve, and Robinson bunted toward Whitey Lockman, the Giant's first baseman. By making Lockman field the bunt, Robinson was forcing Maglie to leave the pitcher's mound and cover first. There he would be in Robinson's path, and Jack, going at full and full-muscled tilt, intended to run over Maglie, signing his name in spikes on the pitcher's spine. Saturnine, Faustian, brooding Sal Maglie refused to leave the mound. At a critical moment, the Barber lost his nerve. Davey Williams, the Giants' second baseman, rushed over, and as he was reaching for Lockman's throw, Robinson crashed into him, a knee catching Williams in the lower back. Robinson's knee was so swollen a day later that he could not play. Williams never really recovered. He dropped out of the major leagues two seasons later, at twenty-eight.... "Actually," Robinson himself said a few days later, "I'm sorry that Williams got hurt. But when Maglie threw behind me, he was starting a really dangerous business, and I was going to put a stop to it before he hit Gil or Campy or Pee Wee in the head...." After that I saw Maglie start eight games against the Dodgers, but I never saw him throw another fast ball behind a hitter. The grim, intimidating beanballer had been intimidated himself, and by a bunt.

T
HE
H
EAD
G
AME
, R
OGER
K
AHN
, 2000