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Military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, lithograph by Franz Michelis after an oil painting by (credit: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin — Preussischer Kulturbesitz)

In warfare, coordinated application of all the forces of a nation to achieve a goal. In contrast to tactics, strategy's components include a long-range view, the preparation of resources, and planning for the use of those resources before, during, and after an action. The term has expanded far beyond its original military meaning. As society and warfare have steadily grown more complex, military and nonmilitary factors have become more and more inseparable in the conduct of war and in programs designed to secure peace. In the 20th century the term grand strategy, meaning the art of employing all the resources of a nation or coalition of nations to achieve the objects of war (and peace), steadily became more popular in the literature of warfare and statecraft.

For more information on strategy, visit Britannica.com.

Any plan for achieving goals or objectives. See also creative strategy; marketing plan.

As James Brian Quinn indicated in The Strategy Process: Concepts and Contexts, "a strategy is the pattern or plan that integrates an organization's major goals, policies, and action sequences into a cohesive whole. A well-formulated strategy helps to marshal and allocate an organization's resources into a unique and viable posture based on its relative internal competencies and shortcomings, anticipated changes in the environment, and contingent moves by intelligent opponents." All types of businesses require some sort of strategy in order to be successful; otherwise their efforts and resources will be spent haphazardly and likely wasted. Although strategy formulation tends to be handled more formally in large organizations, small businesses too need to develop strategies in order to use their limited resources to compete effectively against larger firms.

Formulation of an effective business strategy requires managers to consider three main players—the company, its customers, and the competition—according to Kenichi Ohmae in his book The Mind of the Strategist. These three players are collectively referred to as the strategic triangle. "In terms of these three key players, strategy is defined as the way in which a corporation endeavors to differentiate itself positively from its competitors, using its relative corporate strengths and weaknesses to better satisfy customer needs," Ohmae explained.

Quinn noted that an effective business strategy should include three elements: 1) a clear and decisive statement of the primary goals or objectives to be achieved; 2) an analysis of the main policies guiding or limiting the company's actions; and 3) a description of the major programs that will be used to accomplish the goals within the limits. In addition, it is important that strategies include only a few main concepts or thrusts in order to maintain their focus. They should also be related to other strategies in a hierarchical fashion, with each level supporting those above and below. Finally, strategies should attempt to build a strong yet flexible position for the company so that it may achieve its goals whatever the reaction of external forces. "Strategic decisions are those that determine the overall direction of an enterprise and its ultimate viability in light of the predictable, the unpredictable, and the unknowable changes that may occur in its most important surrounding environments," Quinn stated.

Limits on Strategic Choices

The strategic choices available to a company are not unlimited; rather, they depend upon the company's capabilities and its position in the marketplace. "At the broadest level formulating competitive strategy involves the consideration of four key factors that determine the limits of what a company can successfully accomplish," Michael E. Porter wrote in his classic book Competitive Strategy. Two of these limiting factors are internal, and the other two are external. The internal limits are the company's overall strengths and weaknesses and the personal values of its leaders. "The company's strengths and weaknesses are its profile of assets and skills relative to competitors, including financial resources, technological posture, brand identification, and so on," Porter stated. "The personal values of an organization are the motivations and needs of the key executives and other personnel who must implement the chosen strategy."

The external factors limiting the range of a company's strategic decisions are the competitive environment and societal expectations under which it operates. "Industry opportunities and threats define the competitive environment, with its attendant risks and potential rewards," Porter noted. "Societal expectations reflect the impact on the company of such things as government policy, social concerns, evolving mores, and many others. These four factors must be considered before a business can develop a realistic and implementable set of goals and policies."

Once a company has analyzed the four factors, it may then begin developing a strategy to compete under or attempt to change the situation it faces. The approach to strategy development recommended by Porter involves identifying the company's current strategy; revealing underlying assumptions about the company's position, its competitors, or industry trends affecting it; analyzing the threats and opportunities present in the external environment; determining the company's own strengths and weaknesses given the realities of its environment; proposing feasible alternatives; and choosing the one that best relates the company's situation to its environment.

Generic Strategies

The number of potential business strategies are probably as great as the number of different businesses. Each distinct organization must develop a strategy that best matches its internal capabilities and its situation with regard to the external environment. Still, many of the numerous strategies pursued by businesses can be loosely grouped under three main categories—cost leadership, differentiation, and focus. Porter termed these categories "generic strategies," and claimed that most companies use variations of them, either singly or in combination, to create a defensible position in their industry. On the other hand, companies that fail to target their efforts toward any of the generic strategies risk becoming "stuck in the middle," which leads to low profitability and a lack of competitiveness.

COST LEADERSHIP. The first generic strategy, overall cost leadership, can enable a company to earn above average profits despite the presence of strong competitive pressures. But it can also be difficult to implement. In a company pursuing a low-cost strategy, every activity of the organization must be examined with respect to cost. For example, favorable access to raw materials must be arranged, products must be designed for ease of manufacturing, manufacturing facilities and equipment must continually be upgraded, and production must take advantage of economies of scale. In addition, a low-cost strategy requires a company to implement tight controls across its operations, avoid marginal customer accounts, and minimize spending on advertising and customer service. Implemented successfully in a price-sensitive market, however, a low-cost strategy can lead to strong market share and profit margins.

Of course, a low-cost strategy—like any other strategy—also involves risks. For example, technological changes may make the company's investments in facilities and equipment obsolete. There is also the possibility that other competitors will learn to match the cost advantages offered by the company, particularly if inflation helps narrow the gap. Finally, low-cost producers risk focusing on cost to such an extent that they are unable to anticipate necessary product or marketing changes.

DIFFERENTIATION. Companies that pursue a strategy of differentiation try to create a product or service that is considered unique within their industry. They may attempt to differentiate themselves on the basis of product design or features, brand image, technology, customer service, distribution, or several of these elements. The idea behind a differentiation strategy is to attract customers with a unique offering that meets their needs better than the competition, and for which they will be willing to pay a premium price. This strategy is intended to create brand loyalty among customers and thus provide solid profit margins for the company. Although the company may not be able to achieve a high market share using a differentiation strategy—because successful differentiation requires a perception of exclusivity, and because not all customers will be willing or able to pay the higher prices—the increased profit margins should compensate. Naturally, there are risks associated with committing to a differentiation strategy. For example, competitors may be able to imitate the unique features, customers may lose interest in the unique features, or low-cost competitors may be able to undercut prices in a way that erodes brand loyalty.

FOCUS. Companies undertaking a focus strategy direct their full attention toward serving a particular market, whether it is a specific customer group, product segment, or geographic region. The idea behind the focus strategy is to serve that particular market more effectively than competitors on the basis of product differentiation, low cost, or both. Since focusing on a small segment of the overall market limits the market share a company can command, it must be able to make up for the lost sales volume with increased profitability. The focus strategy, too, entails risks. For example, there is always a possibility that competitors will be able to exploit submarkets within the strategic target market, that the differences between the target market and the overall market will narrow, or that the high costs associated with serving the target market will eliminate any advantage gained through differentiation.

Each of the three generic strategies identified by Porter requires a company to accumulate a different set of skills and resources. For example, a company pursuing a low-cost strategy would likely have a much different organizational structure, incentive system, and corporate culture than one pursuing a differentiation strategy. The key to successful implementation of one of the three generic strategies is to commit to it fully, rather than take half-measures that do not distinguish the company in any way.

New Approaches to Strategy Development

In the past, the formulation of strategy—at least in large corporations—was the domain of upper-level management. The traditional approach involved top managers coming up with a strategic direction for the company, setting it forth in an annual written strategic plan, and then disseminating the plan to various departments and employees, who were expected to contribute only within their own spheres of influence. This approach seemed to work fairly well for slow-moving companies in a stable external environment. In recent years, however, the process of developing strategy has changed dramatically in response to changes in the overall business world. "There is little question that the traditional approach to strategic planning, formulated in a different era, is often inadequate to deal with the rapid and continuous changes taking place in today's marketplace; it also fails to take into account the increased demand for autonomy in today's work force," Stephen J. Wall and Shannon Rye Wall wrote in Organizational Dynamics.

Traditional approaches to strategy development have been criticized for being too rigid, inflexible, and authoritative. Experts claim that these approaches were too concerned with analysis and quantification to be able to predict and adapt quickly to market changes. As a result, new approaches have emerged that no longer relegate strategy to top management; instead, the strategy formulation process involves all individuals in an organization, particularly those who are in direct contact with customers. "A new approach to the strategic planning process, one that involves managers at all levels, can result in a dynamic process that increases competitive advantage," Wall and Wall wrote. "Strategic planning is evolving due to the increasingly urgent need for responsiveness to market changes."

In large measure, the changes that have taken place in business strategy have come as a result of changes in the environment. As the global marketplace has become increasingly volatile and competitive, companies have had to adjust by reducing their time frames for responding to changing customer needs. In addition, the changes in business strategy have come in part because today's workers tend to want and even demand more control over their work lives. The combination of these two factors has resulted in a new value being placed on employee participation in the strategy process. "In an environment in which change is the norm, the insights of those on the front lines take on a new importance, since those close to the action—salespeople and others who deal directly with outside clients—are first to get wind of changes in customer needs," according to Wall and Wall. With this in mind, many companies are now choosing to develop strategy through the creation of multifunctional teams. Combining employees from various functional areas in this way tends to promote strategic thinking, because the groups are able to focus on broad company goals rather than on more limited functional, department, or individual goals. In addition to establishing cross-functional teams within the organization, some companies are beginning to solicit strategic input from their external customers and suppliers as well.

Benefits from the New Approaches

Employee participation in the strategy process not only helps the company to develop a more responsive strategy, but also improves employee morale and commitment to the organization. Companies that encourage such participation are creating a more knowledgeable workforce, which is particularly important for small businesses since intellectual capital is often one of their most valuable assets.

The new, participative approaches to strategy formulation can also enable companies to improve their focus on customer needs by increasing the access of line employees to top management. In fact, hierarchies are designed to filter the information that goes to upper-level managers. But this lack of information can lead to overconfidence and myopic decision making. Similarly, the new approaches can also help companies to remain flexible and responsive to market changes. The greater amount of information that managers receive about the market enables them to adapt the company's strategic direction to take advantage of new circumstances.

Participative strategic development also may help companies to retain key employees, because employees gain satisfaction by being able to direct and see the results of their efforts. "Retaining these highly skilled and trained professionals will become increasingly important as knowledge has more and more to do with the company's ability to build and maintain a competitive advantage," Wall and Wall noted. Finally, participating in strategy formulation may enable managers to make better use of their time. This benefit is particularly helpful because time is always limited as companies try to do more with less people.

Further Reading:

Eccles, Robert, and Nitin Nohria. Beyond the Hype: Rediscovering the Essence of Management. Harvard Business School Press, 1992.

Eisenhardt, Kathleen M. "Strategic Decisions and All That Jazz." Business Strategy Review. Autumn 1997.

Hamel, Gary, and C. K. Prahalad. Competing for the Future. Harvard Business School Press, 1994.

Markides, Constantinos C. All the Right Moves: A Guide to Crafting Breakthrough Strategy. Harvard Business School Press, 1999.

McGrath, Rita Gunther, and Ian MacMillan. The Entrepreneurial Mindset. Harvard Business School Press, 2000.

Mintzberg, Henry, and James Brian Quinn. The Strategy Process: Concepts and Contexts. Prentice-Hall, 1992.

Ohmae, Kenichi. The Mind of the Strategist: Business Planning for Competitive Advantage. Penguin, 1982.

Porter, Michael E. Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. Free Press, 1980.

Wall, Stephen J., and Shannon Rye Wall. "The Evolution (Not the Death) of Strategy." Organizational Dynamics. Autumn 1995.

See also: Business Planning

noun

A method for making, doing, or accomplishing something: blueprint, design, game plan, idea, layout, plan, project, schema, scheme. See planned/unplanned.

Strategy is an ancient concept that has eluded precise definition. The word derives from the Greek strategos, a civil-military official elected by the citizens of Athens to assume leadership in time of war. Most attempts at definition have turned upon a contrast with ‘tactics’ (taktika), the art of making arrangements, or of putting things in position. There is a superficial practicality in the idea, put forward by one 18th-century observer, Heinrich von Bülow, that strategy should refer to any military measures taken beyond the range of the enemy's weapons, while tactics referred to those taken within that range. Yet the original etymology is a useful corrective to the tendency to assume that strategy refers simply to the conduct of military operations on a large scale. Its most essential meaning points to the intellectual and practical reconciliation of military means and political ends. For Clausewitz, strategy was ‘the use of combats for the purposes of the war’. Liddell Hart, similarly, said it was ‘the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy’.

In recent times, as the ends of policy have become more complex and diverse, it has become common for strategy to encompass non-military means as well; though one might argue that for great polities like the Roman empire or the Ming dynasty it has always done so. Expressions like ‘national strategy’ and ‘grand strategy’ typically refer to the full range of methods by which states act internationally, including non-coercive diplomacy, trade, peacetime alliances, humanitarianism, and so on, as well as the actual use or threat of force—the concern of military strategy strictly understood. The adoption of the word ‘strategy’ by private organizations to refer to any deliberate, long-term plan, has further blurred its conceptual distinctiveness.

At a minimum, it seems fair to insist that, as applied to the conduct of states, a strategy is a course of action in which the use of force is not excluded as a matter of principle. Strategic action can be readily distinguished, for instance, from actions governed by market relationships, which are essentially rule-bound and, as a consequence, susceptible to a kind of abstract analysis that has eluded theorists of war. For all its competitive pressures, the market place is a far less confounding environment than the battlefield. The latter, as Hobbes said, is the domain of ‘force and fraud’, which admit no limits in principle, nor any sort of mutually transparent rationality to help ensure that the conduct of one antagonist is understandable to the other.

If strategy is made necessary by the inherent chaos of the international system, it is made possible by the human capacity to anticipate and organize against adversity; to detect—in the conclusion of a pact of friendship between formerly rival cities, or the arranged marriage of an obscure princess to a neighbouring prince, or the discovery of new and fertile lands overseas, or a thousand other contingent events—some remote or proximate threat, to which a forceful response may someday be required. Such responses may be simple or elaborate, cunning or bold, bellicose or pacific; but all will be shaped by deeply rooted geographic, social, economic, and cultural facts, as well as by whatever immediate interests are thought to be at stake. If strategy is, proverbially, a realm of uncertainty, it is because it must account for fundamentally unpredictable behaviour, shaped by assumptions that are rarely fully understood even by those most directly concerned. Moltke ‘the Elder’, one of modern war's greatest practitioners, doubted that strategy could ever be more than a ‘system of expedients’.

All the expedients of strategy nevertheless share a common purpose: to reach military results that alter the political calculations of the belligerents. If there is a central idea around which serious strategic analysis must revolve, it is decisiveness. One might well say, more simply, victory; but the latter is a less useful idea, because it is too prone to be interpreted in purely military terms, and to attribute exaggerated importance to dramatic episodes on the battlefield. The capture of a town, the successful defence of a hill, the destruction of the enemy army in front of you—these are all undeniably victories, to be admired as such. Yet nothing is more common in war than strategically barren victory—meaning military achievements that, however impressive in their own terms, nevertheless fail to alter the political context in which they occur. Such disconnection can be demoralizing to those who fight, and is a common source of civil-military discord, if not, indeed, of defeat. More than a few of history's most skilful soldiers— Charles XII, Napoleon, Lee, the German High Command of both world wars—have single-mindedly pursued tactical success all the way to strategic ruin; while others less gifted by prevailing military standards— Washington, Blücher, Haig, Giap—have achieved strategic decisions favourable to their causes despite tactical results conventionally deemed mediocre, or worse. Among the virtues that strategy can lend to tactics, persistence and the long view are among the most underrated.

Strategic possibilities are always influenced by the means employed to raise the armed forces intended to achieve them. The ancient phalanx and the medieval host were brought to the battlefield by a complex web of social relationships that were only partly military in character. Such armies might be capable of tremendous violence when brought into contact with each other—a formidable task in itself—but they were also temporary structures, called into existence by immediate threats or opportunities, or in response to some cultural imperative (personal honour, civil obligation, etc.). Such forces had exceedingly limited capabilities, and could engage in sustained combat for only a few hours at a time before losing cohesion. The strategic pursuit or ‘exploitation’ necessary to capitalize upon tactical success did not exist, and wars were accordingly decided, as often as not, by simple exhaustion, or impatience with futility. The standing armies of early modern territorial states possessed greater military efficiency—they could train more regularly, and their officers, although still drawn from a vestigial feudal élite, were more professional in outlook—but their strategic significance lay chiefly in the fact that they existed all year round, and were more firmly at the disposal of the crown. Although it would be wrong to imagine that anything like ‘strategic planning’ existed before the 19th century, standing armies allowed governments to estimate their own strength, and that of potential allies and opponents, more consistently, and so (in theory at least) to integrate military means and political ends more effectively than in the past.

Nevertheless, the tactical limitations of even the best pre-industrial armies were sufficient to restrict feasible strategic objectives to the seizure of a province, the ravaging of a border district, and so on. If such actions might occasionally have far-reaching results, it was a reflection of the fragility of the political base upon which armies, and the governments that employed them, rested. For most governments at most times, the perils of defeat have been more vivid than the promise of victory. Until relatively recently, this asymmetry found expression in the systematic fortification of cities and towns, a genuinely strategic practice demanding much foresight, expense, and protracted effort. From the Bronze Age to the industrial revolution, the ‘typical’ military engagement has in fact been a siege— Marlborough conducted 60, in addition to the four pitched battles that made him famous—and much of what passed for strategy, on land at least, consisted in bringing them about on favourable terms, by fortifying every vital place.

Somewhat different considerations arise for traditional societies that rely on navies to advance their interests. If the goal of strategy is to influence political decisions by force of arms, it is obviously a matter of some importance that political decisions are made on land. Navies have usually achieved their strategic effects less directly than armies, by attacking an adversary's seaborne trade or overseas possessions, or by supporting harassing operations against his coast—for either of which purpose it might, of course, be necessary to suppress (or, for the weaker side, to elude) the enemy navy first. It is historically rare for such measures to achieve decisive results by themselves. When combined with major operations on land the effects of maritime power on an opponent could be profound. Few countries have ever possessed the need, or the means, simultaneously to maintain armies and navies of the first rank. For continental states, immediate threats across land frontiers necessarily predominate, while geographically isolated or island nations like Great Britain and the USA have tended to find large standing armies an unnecessary and politically dangerous burden. The simultaneous application of land and sea power has thus been accomplished for the most part by strategic alliances; and it is perhaps not by chance that maritime powers have often found themselves with exaggerated reputations for artful, if not duplicitous, diplomacy.

These basic strategic patterns were significantly altered, though not, indeed, abolished, by the industrial and democratic revolutions of the late 18th and 19th centuries, which created new means of organizing society for war, and of adapting new scientific and managerial methods to warfare. The strategic possibilities of the modern era have been largely defined by the interactions between mass social mobilization and technological change. Neither was viewed with anything like equanimity by those who first confronted them. The advent of the levée en masse, which made Napoleon's career possible, struck his opponents and successors as a profoundly dangerous development, in which seeds of atavistic escalation and incipient social revolution were clearly visible. Better to rely upon small armies of tactically proficient, politically reliable professionals. Only they, it was thought, could deliver an effective attack; and it was only by well-modulated offensive operations that strategic decisions could be reached at an acceptable social cost.

This prudent consensus was eroded by the increasing lethality of modern weapons. By the middle decades of the 19th century, it was clear that the modern battlefield could only be mastered by mass armies far larger than any country could afford to maintain in peacetime. Regular armies became training organizations for vast streams of conscripts, whose rapid mobilization and dispersed deployment became central to the military art. Such forces were regarded as wasting assets. Although railways and the telegraph made their mobilization possible—which in turn made intensive, continuous military planning necessary—their staying power under fire was open to question; and once concentrated for battle, the difficulties of moving, supplying, and manoeuvring armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands quickly become intractable.

It was, moreover, reasonable to assume that wars to which a large proportion of society's able-bodied men were committed could not go on for long before being brought to a halt by economic failure or social unrest at home. To be politically useful, strategic decisions had to be obtained quickly. For this purpose, two prospects stood out: pre-emptive attack, in which the enemy's forces might be engaged and destroyed before their mobilization or deployment was complete; and strategic envelopment, which sought to mitigate the effects of modern firepower by directing large forces against the flanks and rear of the enemy, far more rapidly and deeply than small, slow-moving armies of even a generation before could have contemplated. These methods, continuously modified by technological advance, dominate the conduct of land operations in the era of the world wars, and in most other major conflicts to this day. Yet the modern strategist's governing ideal of swift, decisive results, achieved by rapidly evolving, intensely violent, well-controlled manoeuvre, has remained elusive, largely because it rests upon a foundation of what has proven to be an unjustified social pessimism. Advanced societies at war are not fragile machines, prone to economic breakdown and revolutionary decay. Once aroused, their military energies have proven extraordinarily resistant to strategic manipulation, or to defeat by other than attritional means—a strategy in itself, to be sure, but one with scant appeal to professional soldiers.

The impact of industrialization on naval warfare has been equally complex. The emergence of an integrated global economy rapidly increased the value of water-borne trade, and hence of those things that navies were best suited to attack. Few advanced societies at the turn of the 20th century were producing all the necessities of life within their own borders, and their resulting dependence on unfettered access to the oceans appeared to present a profound strategic opportunity, which even traditional continental powers sought, for a while, to seize. At the same time new technologies conspired to produce warships of enormous tactical power, but limited strategic range and endurance. The great steam-and-steel fleets of the day were poorly suited to the classic missions of blockade and guerre de course, and were shockingly vulnerable to underwater weapons when brought close to shore. The proliferation of railways and paved highways also reduced the relative advantage of mobility that seaborne forces had enjoyed in the past. The maturation of submarines and naval aviation, both deeply suspect at first appearance, have combined to assure that naval forces remain an essential source of modern military strength, most decidedly so when a state's strategic interests span the globe. Yet the promise that naval power might somehow suffice to dominate events on land, or render the grinding clash of armies unnecessary, has gone unfulfilled.

Navies were the first military institutions to confront the dilemmas of technological change on a scale capable of altering strategic calculations. As late as the 1840s, the working life of a first-class warship could reasonably be expected to exceed that of the men who sailed her. Thirty years later, such comforting assumptions had been displaced by the realization that some new method of laying guns, or designing engines, or compounding armour plate, could require a generation's military investment to be discounted at sickening rates. It is the fear, as much as the fact, of technological obsolescence that matters. Precisely because significant technologies almost always arise first in civil society, it is rare for any state to remain at a technological disadvantage to its competitors for long. Military advantages based upon technical means are notable mainly for their evanescence—which only heightens the need to keep up. The fortress-builders of the pre-industrial world did not fear that some device might arise to render their life's work irrelevant. Such anxieties, while easily exaggerated, are no longer completely absurd. They have made the ‘arms race’, a metaphor first employed in connection with naval building programmes, a distinctive feature of the modern strategic landscape.

No new technology has had more far-reaching strategic consequences than the aeroplane, and the ballistic missiles that have followed in its wake. Those who embraced what immediately became known (in imitation of the navalists) as air power, did so for two competing reasons. To some, air power offered the last increment of technological proficiency necessary to preserve industrialized war as a plausible instrument of policy. Aeroplanes could see what could not otherwise be seen, strike what could not otherwise be struck, and so break the bloody stalemate that always threatened to emerge whenever modern armies came within weapons' range of each other. Aeroplanes, in these terms, were simply the most recent in a series of technological advances that would finally make modern warfare swift and efficient. Others doubted that the leavening effects of ‘tactical’ air power could be that great. As an independent, strategic weapon, however, the aeroplane's possibilities seemed unlimited. By providing a means of striking directly at the social and political fabric of the adversary, strategic air power captured the quintessence of what ‘strategy’ was always supposed to mean—the maximally effective application of military force for political ends. By dissolving all meaningful distinction between armed forces and the civil societies they protected, war in the air would make war as conventionally understood a thing of the past. Above the enemy's cities, strategy and tactics would become one.

It would be vain, in the shadow of nuclear weapons, to declare the apocalyptic pretensions of strategic air power disproved; though it is fair to say that the expectations of those who conceived of air forces as components of modern combined arms operations have been more fully vindicated by events. Nevertheless, the unique possibilities afforded by war in the air continue to exert enormous sway. At the end of the 20th century, strategic air power—meaning the independent use (or threat) of air strikes to achieve direct political effects—dominates both ends of the conflict spectrum. Nuclear deterrence remains the ultimate guarantee of security for most of the large countries in the world, who either possess such weapons themselves or have allies that do. At the same time, precision guided munitions and stealth technology have made air weapons the preferred instruments for the conduct of low-intensity conflict and coercive diplomacy by advanced societies.

Whether this last, superficially surprising adaptation of air power will justify the hope that has been placed in it by its political masters remains to be seen. The history of strategy in the industrial era has been dominated, to a degree that is perhaps not easily appreciated, by the need to control the escalatory pressures that arise in societies at war, for the most part by technical and managerial means that are supposed to make war less destructive (if only by ending it quickly), more efficient, and more predictable in its political effects. The record, to say the least, is mixed. The quest for decisiveness that is at the heart of strategic decision-making has always concealed elements of desperation, not to say despair. In this sense, all strategic choices are bad choices. Yet the consequences of dispensing with them entirely remain unfathomable.

Bibliography

• Bond, Brian, The Pursuit of Victory (Oxford, 1996).
• Murray, Williamson, Knox, MacGregor, and Bernstein, Alvin (eds.), The Making of Strategy (Cambridge, 1994).
• Paret, Peter (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton, 1986).
• Strachan, Hew, European Armies and the Conduct of War (London, 1983)

— Daniel Moran

Fundamentals
Historical Development
Land Warfare Strategy
Naval Warfare Strategy
Air Warfare Strategy
Nuclear Warfare Strategy and War Plans

ˈstræṭǝjē n. pl. -ies 1. a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim: time to develop a coherent evacuation strategy.

2. the art of planning and directing overall military operations and movements in a war or battle. Often contrasted with tactics.

3. a plan for such military operations and movements: nonprovocative defense strategies.

4. the art and science of developing and using political, economic, psychological, and military forces as necessary during peace and war, to afford the maximum support to policies, in order to increase the probabilities and favorable consequences of victory and to lessen the chances of defeat.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

From the Greek, ‘generalship’. In game theory, the sense of the distinction between ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical’ is retained. A strategy is a plan for dealing with every possible move by the other player(s) at every stage in the game. The number of strategies open to a player in a game of any complexity is astronomical. Even in a trivial game such as noughts-and-crosses (tic-tac-toe) the first player has nine legal opening moves. To each of the second player's eight legal responses the first player has seven legal replies, thus 504 strategies for the first two moves alone, and a total of 20,160 (9 × 8 × 7 × 6 ×  5 × 4 × 3) strategies for the complete game. Most of these strategies would of course be extremely silly, and many of them are identical because of the rotational symmetry of the game. However, the example shows that analysis of strategies must depend on ruthlessly eliminating all but a tiny number of them. The usual way of doing this is to ask what is the best strategy against the best possible strategy by one's opponent(s). If everybody is playing a strategy such that nobody can better his or her chances by unilateral departure from his or her own strategy, the game is said to be in equilibrium and the players' strategies are called equilibrium strategies.

The art of planning a campaign. The term is usually used in a military context, but it has been adopted in sport to describe the overall game plan of coaches and managers. Compare tactics.

(DOD) The art and science of developing and employing instruments of national power in a synchronized and integrated fashion to achieve theater, national, and/or multinational objectives. See also military strategy; national strategy.

LearnThatWord.com is a free vocabulary and spelling program where you only pay for results!

Quotes:

"The best armor is to keep out of gunshot." - Francis Bacon

"One must change one's tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one's superiority." - Napoleon Bonaparte

"I don't know a greater advantage, than to appreciate the worth of an enemy." - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in." - Andrew Jackson

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip." - Elmore Leonard

"The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy." - Friedrich Nietzsche

See more famous quotes about Strategies

• Types and Techniques of Warfare - strategy: long-term deployment and use of military forces and national resources with intent to achieve position of advantage
• Strategy and Tactics - strategy: careful, cleverly devised plan or series of maneuvers for attaining a specific goal or result
• Order, Hierarchy, and Systems - strategy: detailed plan or method for obtaining specific goal

For other uses, see Strategy (disambiguation).

A strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a vision. Strategy is all about gaining (or being prepared to gain)a position of advantage over adversaries or best exploiting emerging possibilities. As there is always an element of uncertainty about future, strategy is more about a set of options ("strategic choices") than a fixed plan. It derives from the Greek "στρατηγία" (strategia), "office of general, command, generalship".^[1]

Contents 1 Military strategy 2 Strategies in game theory 3 See also 4 References

Military strategy

Main article: Military strategy

Strategies in game theory

Main article: Strategy (game theory)

In game theory, a strategy refers to one of the options that a player can choose. That is, every player in a non-cooperative game has a set of possible strategies, and must choose one of the choices.

A strategy must specify what action will happen in each contingent state of the game—e.g. if the opponent does A, then take action B, whereas if the opponent does C, take action D.

Strategies in game theory may be random (mixed) or deterministic (pure). That is, in some games, players choose mixed strategies. Pure strategies can be thought of as a special case of mixed strategies, in which only probabilities 0 or 1 are assigned to actions.

Strategy based games all have a similar objective where the player thinks through a sequence of solutions to determine the preferred favorite in order to defeat the opponent. Chess is a common strategy game played throughout the world.

See also

• Odds algorithm (Odds strategy)           
• Strategic planning

References

1. ^ στρατηγία, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library

Look up strategy in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

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Common misspelling(s) of strategy

• startegy
• stradegy

Dansk (Danish)
n. - strategi

Nederlands (Dutch)
strategie

Français (French)
n. - stratégie

Deutsch (German)
n. - Strategie, Taktik

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - στρατηγική, στρατηγικό σχέδιο, μεθόδευση

Italiano (Italian)
strategia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - estratégia (f)

Русский (Russian)
стратегия, использование хитрости в достижении намеченной цели, метод

Español (Spanish)
n. - estrategia

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - strategi, taktiskt grepp, manöver

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
策略, 军略

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 策略, 軍略

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 용병학, 전술, 계략

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 戦略, 計略, 策略, 計画

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) استراتيجيه, فن الخطط الحربيه وادارة الحرب, السوق‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮אסטרטגיה, תכסיסנות, תכסיס, תחבולה‬

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