This entry is a subentry of Strategy.
To ancient Greeks, strategos, from which we derive strategy, meant simply the general's art; a modern definition, however, would generalize the meaning to a reasoned relationship among military means and the ways they might be used to reach the ends of national policy. For the senior commander of a theater of war, the battle tactics of lower echelons blend into operational strategy in which he uses their combat in the conduct of campaigns designed to achieve war's politically defined purposes. The national military headquarters also uses the means‐ways‐ends calculation while devising a national military strategy, establishing campaign objectives, and building armed forces as one of several instruments contributing to grand strategy, often called national security policy.
Dimensions
In On War, Carl von Clausewitz helped push the domain of strategy beyond the battlefield when he acknowledged that the tactical and operational successes sought by military commanders are but means to political ends. At the highest level, therefore, military strategy and national policy overlap, with the latter shaping and directing military operations and force development. As Clausewitz warned, however, political leaders should not ask their generals to pursue goals unattainable through organized violence, beyond their forces' capacity to attain, and either imposing disproportionate costs or requiring methods so destructive as to preclude a satisfactory peace—summarized as the tests of suitability, feasibility, and acceptability. From the French Revolution, Clausewitz concluded that the strategic calculations of the government and armed forces depend not simply on the State and the army, but also on a sound estimate of popular attitudes—the existence of a national will to carry war to a successful conclusion.
The twentieth century's expanded governmental bureaucracies and financial systems—and revolutions in production and transportation—have added new dimensions to strategy. A government able to mobilize overwhelming human and material resources and convey them to the theater of war can, for example, enable its generals to defeat even opponents more skilled in the operational aspects of strategy. As World War I demonstrated, the capacity to mobilize massive military resources includes the danger that modern industrial powers with sound logistical strategies might fall into a mutually destructive war of attrition that continues until even the victors have paid too great a price for victory.
Though technological superiority may enable a belligerent to escape attrition's blind alley, the Cold War demonstrated that two technologically superior powers possessing the means and the will to destroy one another may create a long‐term strategic impasse that precludes fighting—except through proxies—until one of the powers suffers internal collapse. Because the development and production of increasingly sophisticated modern weapons (and training armed forces in their use) takes years, major powers must also devise peacetime force development strategies that economically build forces for wars they can only anticipate.
Strategy also has a psychological dimension, which may enable a power skilled in propaganda or with a reputation for great resolve and military skill to undermine its opponent's will to resist and gain its political ends with a minimum of combat. As Sun Tzu observed more than two millennia ago, the “acme of skill” is overcoming your enemy's resistance “without fighting,” or, failing that, accepting battle only when strategic success makes victory certain. Although that psychological dimension of warfare may lead to great strategic efficiency, a strategist who overrates his nation's military reputation or underrates his opponent's resolve may so miscalculate the means‐ways‐ends relation as to increase the risk of defeat if threats and reputation do not suffice.
Strategic Concepts
Because strategic concepts represent ways that military and other means might be employed in pursuit of political ends, their principal forms deserve brief description.
In the broadest terms, strategies may be either direct or indirect and sequential or cumulative. Military force supplies the paramount element of a direct strategy whose focus is violent, perhaps sequential assaults on the enemy's main strength with the aim of overcoming his forces in decisive battle and thus rendering him vulnerable to coercion. In the extreme, the destruction becomes so complete as to lead to his political overthrow and might be characterized as a strategy of annihilation. Should a decisive victory prove impossible, the direct approach may end in exhausting the enemy's forces or will through attrition.
Indirect strategies, championed by Basil Liddell Hart, often involve less violence and typically include a series of military, economic, diplomatic, or psychological actions completed in no fixed order but aimed at enemy weaknesses, often locations on his periphery. If successful, the cumulative effect of the attacks will so unbalance the enemy as to cause him to yield or, at least, render him vulnerable to direct assault. Though more passive in nature, the containment strategy of the Cold War era represents another form of indirect approach, one leading to an opponent's internal collapse as prelude to victory.
Maritime and airpower strategies also have an indirect character in that they aim to undermine the enemy's will to resist or deny his armed forces the means to make war. Seapower strategy, whose best known advocate is Alfred T. Mahan, seeks those ends by gaining control of the seas—perhaps in a decisive fleet engagement—and imposing an economy‐strangling blockade. To the same end, weaker naval powers raid an enemy's commerce. To avoid costly ground campaigns, airpower strategists, beginning with Giulio Douhet and Billy Mitchell, advocated bombardment of an enemy's military and industrial base, or, by attacking cities, terrorizing citizens into surrender.
Although deterrence, seeking to prevent war by making even victory unacceptably costly, has long been a factor in strategy, nuclear‐tipped intercontinental missiles made it the distinguishing strategic concept of the Cold War. The nuclear powers typically sought deterrence by threatening an enemy's cities (countervalue strategy), but a desire to limit war's costs should deterrence fail led to consideration of counterforce strategies (attacks on military facilities).
Revolutionary strategy, developed in its modern form by Mao Zedong, aims to overthrow an existing government through a long struggle during which the revolutionaries develop a covert political base amongst the population and strengthen it with propaganda, terrorism, and guerrilla attacks (hence the use of guerrilla warfare for this strategy) designed to discredit and demoralize the government before launching assaults by the rebels' conventional troops on its weakened armed forces. In response, the leading Western powers developed equally multifaceted counterinsurgency strategies.
With the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the United States entered a new strategic environment in which it needed to assess the contribution of armed forces to maintaining regional balances and Third World peacekeeping at a time of public reluctance to pay for forces sufficient to either purpose.
[See also Tactics.]
Bibliography
- Basil H. Liddell Hart, Strategy. 1954;
2nd rev. ed. 1967. - Andre Beaufre, An Introduction to Strategy, 1965.
- Michael Howard, War in European History, 1976.
- Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, 1986.
- Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy, 1987.
- Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein, eds., The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War, 1994
