The 33 Strategies of War (45 page)

A novice chess player soon learns that it is a good idea to control the center of the board. This recognition will recur, in novel disguises, in situations far from the chessboard. It may help to seek the equivalent of the center of the board in any situation, or to see that the role of the center has migrated to the flanks, or to realize that there is no board and no singular topology....

C
LAUSEWITZ ON
S
TRATEGY
, T
IHA VON
G
HYZY
, B
OLKO VON
O
ETINGER
, C
HRISTOPHER
B
ASSFORD, EDS
., 2001

These editorials were so well written and so audacious in their criticisms that many began to take a closer look at the Stamp Act, and they did not like what they saw. Adams had never previously gone beyond writing articles, but now that he had lit this fire of discontent, he saw the urgency in stoking it further with action. For many years he had fraternized with working-class people considered riffraff by polite society--dockworkers and the like; now he banded these men into an organization called the Sons of Liberty. The group marched through the streets of Boston shouting a slogan Adams had coined: "Liberty, property, and no stamps!" They burned effigies of political figures who had promoted the Stamp Act. They distributed pamphlets containing Adams's arguments against the act. They also worked to intimidate the future distributors of the stamps, even going so far as to destroy one of their offices. The more dramatic the action, the more publicity Adams would earn, publicity into which he could insert arguments against the act.

Having gained momentum, the relentless Adams would not stop. He organized a statewide work stoppage for the day the act was to become law: shops would close, the courts would be empty. Since no business would be conducted in Massachusetts, no stamps would be purchased. The boycott was massively successful.

Adams's articles, demonstrations, and boycott made a splash in England, and there were members of Parliament who sympathized with the colonists and spoke out against the Stamp Act. Finally King George III had had enough, and in April 1766 the act was repealed. Americans rejoiced at their first show of power. The British were smarting from their defeat, however, and the following year they sneaked in another series of indirect taxes known as the Townshend System.

Clearly they had underestimated their enemy: Adams went to war. As he had with the Stamp Act, he wrote countless articles on the nature of the taxes the English had tried to disguise, once again stirring up anger. He also organized further demonstrations by the Sons of Liberty, now more menacing and violent than ever--in fact, the English were forced to send troops to Boston to keep the peace. This had been Adams's goal all along; he had ratcheted up the tension. Belligerent encounters between the Sons of Liberty and the English troops put the soldiers on edge, and finally a nervous group of them fired into a crowd, killing several Bostonians. Adams called this the Boston Massacre and spread fiery word of it throughout the colonies.

With the people of Boston now bubbling with anger, Adams organized another boycott: no citizen of Massachusetts, not even a prostitute, would sell anything to British soldiers. No one would rent them lodgings. They were shunned in the streets and taverns; even eye contact was avoided. All of this had a demoralizing effect on the British soldiers. Feeling isolated and antagonized, many of them began to desert or find ways to be sent home.

Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and a divided household falls. And if Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand?

L
UKE
11:14

News of the problems in Massachusetts spread north and south; colonists everywhere began to talk about Britain's actions in Boston, its use of force, its hidden taxes, its patronizing attitude. Then, in 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, on the surface a rather harmless attempt to solve the economic problems of the East India Company by giving it a virtual monopoly on the sale of tea in the colonies. The law also levied a nominal tax, but, even so, it would have made tea cheaper in the colonies, because the middlemen--the colonial importers--were to be cut out. The Tea Act, however, was deceptive in its effect, and confusing, and Adams saw in it a chance to apply the coup de grace: it would ruin many colonial tea importers, and it did include a hidden tax, yet another form of taxation without representation. In exchange for cheaper tea, the English were making a mockery of democracy. In language more fiery than ever, Adams began to turn out articles opening up the old wounds from the Stamp Act and the Boston Massacre.

When East India Company ships began to arrive in Boston at the end of that year, Adams helped to organize a nationwide boycott of their tea. No dockworker would unload the cargo, no warehouse would store it. Then, one night in mid-December, after Adams had addressed a town meeting about the Tea Act, a group of members of the Sons of Liberty--disguised as Mohawk Indians, body paint and all--erupted in war whoops, charged to the wharves, boarded the tea ships, and destroyed their cargo, cutting open the cases of tea and pouring them into the harbor, all of this done with great revelry.

This provocative act, which later became known as the Boston Tea Party, was the turning point. The British could not tolerate it and quickly closed down Boston harbor and imposed military law on Massachusetts. Now all doubt vanished: pushed into a corner by Adams, the British were acting just as tyrannically as he had prophesied they would. The heavy military presence in Massachusetts was predictably unpopular, and it was only a matter of months before violence erupted: in April 1775, English soldiers fired on Massachusetts militiamen in Lexington. This "shot heard 'round the world" became the spark for the war that Adams had so diligently worked to kindle out of nothing.

Interpretation

Before 1765, Adams labored under the belief that well-reasoned arguments would be enough to convince the colonists of the rightness of his cause. But as the years of failure piled up, he confronted the reality that the colonists retained a deep emotional attachment to England, as children do to a parent. Liberty meant less to them than did England's provision of protection and a sense of belonging in a threatening environment. When Adams realized this, he reformulated his goals: instead of preaching independence and the ideas of John Locke, he set to work to sever the colonists' ties with England. He made the children distrust the parent, whom they came to see not as a protector but as a domineering overlord exploiting them for its profit. The bond with England loosened, Adams's arguments for independence began to resonate. Now the colonists began to look for their sense of identity not to Mother England but to themselves.

With the Stamp Act campaign, then, Adams discovered strategy, the bridge between his ideas and reality. His writings now aimed at stirring up anger. The demonstrations he organized--pure theater--were also designed to create and build anger among the middle and lower classes, key components of the future revolution. Adams's innovative use of boycotts was calibrated to infuriate the British and bait them into rash action. Their violent response contrasted brilliantly with the relatively peaceful methods of the colonists, making them seem as tyrannical as he had said they were. Adams also worked to stir dissension among the English themselves, weakening the bond on all sides. The Stamp Act and Tea Act were actually rather trivial, but Adams strategically manipulated them to manufacture outrage, making them into wedges driven between the two sides.

Understand: rational arguments go in one ear and out the other. No one is changed; you are preaching to the converted. In the war to win people's attention and influence them, you must first separate them from whatever ties them to the past and makes them resist change. You must realize that these ties are generally not rational but emotional. By appealing to people's emotions, you can make your targets see the past in a new light, as something tyrannical, boring, ugly, immoral. Now you have room to infiltrate new ideas, shift people's vision, make them respond to a new sense of their self-interest, and sow the seeds for a new cause, a new bond. To make people join you, separate them from their past. When you size up your targets, look for what connects them to the past, the source of their resistance to the new.

A joint is the weakest part of any structure. Break it and you divide people internally, making them vulnerable to suggestion and change. Divide their minds in order to conquer them.

Make the enemy believe that support is lacking;...cut off, flank, turn, in a thousand ways make his men believe themselves isolated. Isolate in like manner his squadrons, battalions, brigades and divisions; and victory is yours.

--Colonel Ardant du Picq (1821-1870)

KEYS TO WARFARE

Thousands of years ago, our primitive ancestors were prone to feelings of great weakness and vulnerability. To survive in the hostile environment of our early world, animals had speed, teeth and claws, fur against winter cold, and other advantages of power and protection. Humans had none of this and must have felt terrifyingly exposed and alone. The only way to compensate for such weakness was to form groups.

THE THREE OXEN AND THE LION

There were three oxen who always grazed together. A lion had his designs upon them and wanted to eat them, but he could never get at one of them because they were always together. So he set them against each other with slanderous talk and managed to get them separated, whereupon they were isolated and he was able to eat them one after the other.

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

The group or tribe offered a defense against predators and greater effectiveness in the hunt. In the group there were enough people to watch your back. The larger the group, the more it allowed its members to refine that great human invention, the division of labor, and the more different individuals in the group were freed from the immediate needs of survival, the more time and energy they could devote to higher tasks. These different roles were mutually supportive and reinforcing, and the result was a net increase in human strength.

Over the centuries groups became ever larger and more complex. By learning to live in towns and settlements, people found that they could escape the feeling of imminent danger and need. Living with others also offered more subtle psychological protections. In time humans began to forget the fear that had made them form tribes in the first place. But in one group--the army--that primal terror remained as strong as ever.

The standard mode of ancient warfare was hand-to-hand combat, a frightening drama in which individuals were at all times exposed to death from behind and to each side. Military leaders learned early on to form their soldiers into tight, cohesive ranks. Trusting his fellows on either side of him not to retreat and leave him exposed, a soldier could fight the man in front of him with more spirit and confidence. The Romans extended this strategy by placing the youngest, most impetuous fighters in the front ranks, the most experienced and best fighters in the rear, and everyone else in the center. This meant that the weakest soldiers--the ones most prone to panic--were surrounded by those who were braver and steadier, giving them a powerful sense of security. No army went into battle with more cohesion and trust than the Roman legions.

In studying ancient warfare, the great nineteenth-century military writer Colonel Ardant du Picq noticed a peculiar phenomenon: in some of the most celebrated battles (Hannibal's victory over the Romans at Cannae and Julius Caesar's over Pompey at Pharsalus, for example), the losses on each side were fantastically disproportionate--a few hundred for the victors, thousands upon thousands among the vanquished. According to du Picq, what had happened in these cases was that through maneuver the ultimately victorious army had managed to surprise the enemy and splinter its lines into parts. Seeing their ranks breaking up, losing their sense of solidarity and support, and feeling isolated, soldiers panicked, dropped their weapons, and fled--and a soldier who turned his back on the enemy was an easy soldier to kill. Thousands were slaughtered this way. These great victories, then, were essentially psychological. Hannibal was vastly outnumbered at Cannae, but by making the Romans feel vulnerable and isolated, he made them overreact and retreat in confusion: easy pickings.

Roosevelt...disliked being completely committed to any one person. He enjoyed being at the center of attention and action, and the system made him the focus through which the main lines of action radiated....... The main reason for Roosevelt's methods, however, involved a tenacious effort to keep control of the executive branch in the face of the centrifugal forces of the American political system. By establishing in an agency one power center that counteracted another, he made each official more dependent on White House support; the President in effect became the necessary ally and partner of each. He lessened bureaucratic tendencies toward self-aggrandizement; he curbed any attempt to gang up on him. He was, in effect, adapting the old method of divide and conquer to his own purposes....... His technique was curiously like that of Joseph Stalin, who used the overlapping delegation of function, a close student of his methods has said, to prevent "any single chain of command from making major decisions without confronting other arms of the state's bureaucracy and thus bringing the issues into the open at a high level." Roosevelt, like Stalin, was a political administrator in the sense that his first concern was power--albeit for very different ends.

R
OOSEVELT
: T
HE
L
ION AND THE
F
OX
, J
AMES
M
AC
G
REGOR
B
URNS
, 1956