The 33 Strategies of War (31 page)

War is a physical affair, which takes place somewhere specific: generals depend on maps and plan strategies to be realized in particular locations. But time is just as important as space in strategic thought, and knowing how to use time will make you a superior strategist, giving an added dimension to your attacks and defense. To do this you must stop thinking of time as an abstraction: in reality, beginning the minute you are born, time is all you have. It is your only true commodity. People can take away your possessions, but--short of murder--not even the most powerful aggressors can take time away from you unless you let them. Even in prison your time is your own, if you use it for your own purposes. To waste your time in battles not of your choosing is more than just a mistake, it is stupidity of the highest order. Time lost can never be regained.

Authority: To remain disciplined and calm while waiting for disorder to appear amongst the enemy is the art of self-possession.

--Sun-tzu (fourth century
B.C.
)

REVERSAL

When enemies attack you in overwhelming force, instead of retreating you may sometimes decide to engage them directly. You are inviting martyrdom, perhaps even hoping for it, but martyrdom, too, is a strategy, and one of ancient standing: martyrdom makes you a symbol, a rallying point for the future. The strategy will succeed if you are important enough--if your defeat has symbolic meaning--but the circumstances must work to highlight the rightness of your cause and the ugliness of the enemy's. Your sacrifice must also be unique; too many martyrs, spread over too much time, will spoil the effect. In cases of extreme weakness, when facing an impossibly large enemy, martyrdom can be used to show that your side's fighting spirit has not been extinguished, a useful way to keep up morale. But, in general, martyrdom is a dangerous weapon and can backfire, for you may no longer be there to see it through, and its effects are too strong to be controlled. It can also take centuries to work. Even when it may prove symbolically successful, a good strategist avoids it. Retreat is always the better strategy.

Retreat must never be an end in itself; at some point you have to turn around and fight. If you don't, retreat is more accurately called surrender: the enemy wins. Combat is in the long run unavoidable. Retreat can only be temporary.

The greatest dangers in war, and in life, come from the unexpected: people do not respond the way you had thought they would, events mess up your plans and produce confusion, circumstances are overwhelming. In strategy this discrepancy between what you want to happen and what does happen is called "friction." The idea behind conventional offensive warfare is simple: by attacking the other side first, hitting its points of vulnerability, and seizing the initiative and never letting it go, you create your own circumstances. Before any friction can creep in and undermine your plans, you move to the offensive, and your relentless maneuvers force so much friction on the enemy that he collapses.

This is the form of warfare practiced by the most successful captains in history, and the secret to their success is a perfect blend of strategic cleverness and audacity. The strategic element comes in the planning: setting an overall goal, crafting ways to reach it, and thinking the whole plan through in intense detail. This means thinking in terms of a campaign, not individual battles. It also means knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the other side, so that you can calibrate your strikes to its vulnerabilities. The more detailed your planning, the more confident you will feel as you go into battle, and the easier it will be to stay on course once the inevitable problems arise. In the attack itself, though, you must strike with such spirit and audacity that you put your enemies on their heels, giving irresistible momentum to your offensive.

The following eleven chapters will initiate you into this supreme form of warfare. They will help you to put your desires and goals into a larger framework known as "grand strategy." They will show you how to look at your enemies and uncover their secrets. They will describe how a solid base of planning will give you fluid options for attack and how specific maneuvers (the flanking maneuver, the envelopment) and styles of attack (hitting centers of gravity, forcing the enemy into positions of great weakness) that work brilliantly in war can be applied in life. Finally, they will show you how to finish off your campaign. Without a vigorous conclusion that meets your overall goals, everything you have done will be worthless. Mastering the various components of offensive warfare will give all of your attacks in life much greater force.

Everyone around you is a strategist angling for power, all trying to promote their own interests, often at your expense. Your daily battles with them make you lose sight of the only thing that really matters: victory in the end, the achievement of greater goals, lasting power. Grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the battle and calculating ahead. It requires that you focus on your ultimate goal and plot to reach it. In grand strategy you consider the political ramifications and long-term consequences of what you do. Instead of reacting emotionally to people, you take control, and make your actions more dimensional, subtle, and effective. Let others get caught up in the twists and turns of the battle, relishing their little victories. Grand strategy will bring you the ultimate reward: the last laugh.

Readiness is everything. Resolution is indissolubly bound up with caution. If an individual is careful and keeps his wits about him, he need not become excited or alarmed. If he is watchful at all times, even before danger is present, he is armed when danger approaches and need not be afraid. The superior man is on his guard against what is not yet in sight and on the alert for what is not yet within hearing; therefore he dwells in the midst of difficulties as though they did not exist.... If reason triumphs, the passions withdraw of themselves.

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

THE GREAT CAMPAIGN

Growing up at the Macedonian court, Alexander (356-322
B.C.
) was considered a rather strange young man. He enjoyed the usual boyish pursuits, such as horses and warfare; having fought alongside his father, King Philip II, in several battles, he had proved his bravery. But he also loved philosophy and literature. His tutor was the great thinker Aristotle, under whose influence he loved to argue about politics and science, looking at the world as dispassionately as possible. Then there was his mother, Olympias: a mystical, superstitious woman, she had had visions at Alexander's birth that he would one day rule the known world. She told him about them and filled him with stories of Achilles, from whom her family claimed descent. Alexander adored his mother (while hating his father) and took her prophecies most seriously. From early on in life, he carried himself as if he were more than the son of a king.

Alexander was raised to be Philip's successor, and the state he was to inherit had grown considerably during his father's reign. Over the years the king had managed to build up the Macedonian army into the supreme force in all Greece. He had defeated Thebes and Athens and had united all the Greek city-states (except Sparta) into a Hellenic league under his leadership. He was a crafty, intimidating ruler. Then, in 336
B.C.
, a disgruntled nobleman assassinated him. Suddenly seeing Macedonia as vulnerable, Athens declared its independence from the league. The other city-states followed suit. Tribes from the north now threatened to invade. Almost overnight Philip's small empire was unraveling.

When Alexander came to the throne, he was only twenty, and many considered him unready. It was a bad time for learning on the job; the Macedonian generals and political leaders would have to take him under their wing. They advised him to go slowly, to consolidate his position in both the army and Macedonia and then gradually reform the league through force and guile. That was what Philip would have done. But Alexander would not listen; he had another plan, or so it seemed. Without giving his enemies in and beyond Macedonia time to organize against him, he led the army south and reconquered Thebes in a series of lightning maneuvers. Next he marched on the Athenians, who, fearing his retribution, begged forgiveness and pleaded to be readmitted to the league. Alexander granted their wish.

The eccentric young prince had shown himself to be a bold and unpredictable king--attacking when he was not meant to, yet showing Athens unexpected mercy. He was hard to read, but his first maneuvers as king had won him many admirers. His next move, however, was still stranger and more audacious: instead of working to consolidate his gains and strengthen the fragile league, he proposed to launch a crusade against the Persian Empire, the Greeks' great enemy. Some 150 years earlier, the Persians had tried to invade Greece. They had almost succeeded, and it remained their dream to try it again and get it right. With Persia a constant threat, the Greeks could never rest easy, and their maritime trade was cramped by the power of the Persian navy.

THE FOX AND THE MONKEY ELECTED KING

The monkey, having danced in an assembly of the animals and earned their approval, was elected by them to be king. The fox was jealous. So, seeing a piece of meat one day in a snare, he led the monkey to it, saying that he had found a treasure. But rather than take it for himself, he had kept guard over it, as its possession was surely a prerogative of royalty. The fox then urged him to take it.

The monkey approached it, taking no care, and was caught in the trap. When he accused the fox of luring him into a trap, the fox replied: "Monkey, you want to reign over all the animals, but look what a fool you are!" It is thus that those who throw themselves into an enterprise without sufficient thought not only fail, but even become a laughing stock.

F
ABLES
, A
ESOP
, S
IXTH CENTURY B.C.

In 334
B.C.
, Alexander led a united army of 35,000 Greeks across the Dardanelle Straits and into Asia Minor, the westernmost part of the Persian Empire. In their first encounter with the enemy, at the Battle of the Granicus, the Greeks routed the Persians. Alexander's generals could only admire his boldness: he seemed poised to conquer Persia, fulfilling his mother's prophecy in record time. He succeeded through speed and by seizing the initiative. Now soldiers and generals alike expected him to head straight east into Persia to finish off the enemy army, which seemed surprisingly weak.

Once again Alexander confounded expectations, suddenly deciding to do what he had never done before: take his time. That would have seemed wise when he first came to power, but now it seemed likely to give the Persians the one thing they needed: time to recover and replenish. Yet Alexander led his army not east but south, down the coast of Asia Minor, freeing local towns from Persian rule. Next he zigzagged east and then south again, through Phoenicia and into Egypt, quickly defeating the weak Persian garrison there. The Egyptians hated their Persian rulers and welcomed Alexander as their liberator. Now Alexander could use Egypt's vast stores of grain to feed the Greek army and help keep the Greek economy stable, while depriving Persia of valuable resources.

As the Greeks advanced farther from home, the Persian navy, which could land an army almost anywhere in the Mediterranean to attack them from the rear or flank, was a worrying threat. Before Alexander set out on his expedition, many had advised him to build up the Greek navy and take the battle to the Persians by sea as well as land. Alexander had ignored them. Instead, as he passed through Asia Minor and then along the coast of Phoenicia, he simply captured Persia's principal ports, rendering their navy useless.

These small victories, then, had a greater strategic purpose. Even so, they would have meant little had the Greeks been unable to defeat the Persians in battle--and Alexander seemed to be making that victory more difficult. The Persian king, Darius, was concentrating his forces east of the Tigris River; he had numbers and his choice of location and could wait in ease for Alexander to cross the river. Had Alexander lost his taste for battle? Had Persian and Egyptian culture softened him? It seemed so: he had begun to wear Persian clothes and to adopt Persian customs. He was even seen worshipping Persian gods.

As the Persian army retreated east of the Tigris, large areas of the Persian empire had come under Greek control. Now Alexander spent much of his time not on warfare but on politics, trying to see how best to govern these regions. He decided to build on the Persian system already in place, keeping the same titles for jobs in the governmental bureaucracy, collecting the same tribute that Darius had done. He changed only the harsh, unpopular aspects of Persian rule. Word quickly spread of his generosity and gentleness toward his new subjects. Town after town surrendered to the Greeks without a fight, only too glad to be part of Alexander's growing empire, which transcended Greece and Persia. He was the unifying factor, the benevolent overseeing god.

Epistemologically speaking, the source of all erroneous views on war lies in
idealist
and
mechanistic
tendencies.... People with such tendencies are subjective and one-sided in their approach to problems. They indulge in groundless and purely subjective talk, basing themselves upon a single aspect or temporary manifestation
[
and
]
magnify it with similar subjectivity into the whole of the problem.... Only by opposing idealistic and mechanistic tendencies and taking an objective all-sided view in making a study of war can we draw correct conclusions on the question of war.

S
ELECTED
M
ILITARY
W
RITINGS
, M
AO
T
SE-TUNG
, 1893-1976

Finally, in 331
B.C.
, Alexander marched on the main Persian force at Arbela. What his generals had not understood was that, deprived of the use of its navy, its rich lands in Egypt, and the support and tribute of almost all of its subjects, the Persian Empire had already crumbled. Alexander's victory at Arbela merely confirmed militarily what he had already achieved months earlier: he was now the ruler of the once mighty Persian Empire. Fulfilling his mother's prophecy, he controlled almost all of the known world.

Interpretation

Alexander the Great's maneuvers bewildered his staff: they seemed to have no logic, no consistency. Only later could the Greeks look back and really see his magnificent achievement. The reason they could not understand him was that Alexander had invented a whole new way of thinking and acting in the world: the art of grand strategy.

In grand strategy you look beyond the moment, beyond your immediate battles and concerns. You concentrate instead on what you want to achieve down the line. Controlling the temptation to react to events as they happen, you determine each of your actions according to your ultimate goals. You think in terms not of individual battles but of a campaign.

Alexander owed his novel style of strategizing to his mother and to Aristotle. His mother had given him a sense of destiny and a goal: to rule the known world. From the age of three, he could see in his mind's eye the role he would play when he was thirty. From Aristotle he learned the power of controlling his emotions, seeing things dispassionately, thinking ahead to the consequences of his actions.

Trace the zigzags of Alexander's maneuvers and you will see their grand-strategic consistency. His quick actions against first Thebes, then Persia, worked psychically on his soldiers and on his critics. Nothing quiets an army faster than battle; Alexander's sudden crusade against the hated Persians was the perfect way to unite the Greeks. Once he was in Persia, though, speed was the wrong tactic. Had Alexander advanced, he would have found himself controlling too much land too quickly; running it would have exhausted his resources, and in the ensuing power vacuum, enemies would have sprung up everywhere. Better to proceed slowly, to build on what was there, to win hearts and minds. Instead of wasting money on building a navy, better simply to make the Persian navy unusable. To pay for the kind of extended campaign that would bring long-term success, first seize the rich lands of Egypt. None of Alexander's actions were wasted. Those who saw his plans bear fruit, in ways they themselves had been entirely unable to predict, thought him a kind of god--and certainly his control over events deep in the future seemed more godlike than human.

There is, however, much difference between the East and the West in cultural heritages, in values, and in ways of thinking. In the Eastern way of thinking, one starts with the whole, takes everything as a whole and proceeds with a comprehensive and intuitive synthesization
[
combinaton
]
. In the Western way of thinking, however, one starts with the parts, takes
[
divides
]
a complex matter into component parts and then deals with them one by one, with an emphasis on logical analysis. Accordingly, Western traditional military thought advocates a direct military approach with a stress on the use of armed forces.

T
HE
S
TRATEGIC
A
DVANTAGE
: S
UN
Z
I
& W
ESTERN
A
PPROACHES TO
W
AR
, C
AO
S
HAN, ED
., 1997

To become a grand strategist in life, you must follow the path of Alexander. First, clarify your life--decipher your own personal riddle--by determining what it is you are destined to achieve, the direction in which your skills and talents seem to push you. Visualize yourself fulfilling this destiny in glorious detail. As Aristotle advised, work to master your emotions and train yourself to think ahead: "This action will advance me toward my goal, this one will lead me nowhere." Guided by these standards, you will be able to stay on course.

Ignore the conventional wisdom about what you should or should not be doing. It may make sense for some, but that does not mean it bears any relation to your own goals and destiny. You need to be patient enough to plot several steps ahead--to wage a campaign instead of fighting battles. The path to your goal may be indirect, your actions may be strange to other people, but so much the better: the less they understand you, the easier they are to deceive, manipulate, and seduce. Following this path, you will gain the calm, Olympian perspective that will separate you from other mortals, whether dreamers who get nothing done or prosaic, practical people who accomplish only small things.