This entry is a subentry of Strategy.
Shielded by broad oceans and neighbors presumptively friendly but certainly weak, the United States has scarcely needed the ingenuities of strategy since it survived a most bloody civil war to acquire the world's richest economy. It is those who fight against the odds, outweighed defenders or overambitious attackers, who must try to circumvent enemy strengths and exploit enemy weaknesses by obeying the paradoxical (seemingly contradictory) logic of strategy, as opposed to commonsense “linear” logic.
At each level, the paradoxical logic of strategy usually precludes the most efficient action, for the latter is inherently predictable and can therefore be anticipated, blocked, or circumvented. At each level, the paradoxical logic entails risks, possibly catastrophic (e.g., long, thin, deep penetration offensives can be cut off and encircled). But at each level, the high‐risk/high‐payoff methods inspired by the paradoxical logic can allow the weak to prevail over the strong, though never reliably.
At the tactical level, paradoxical action, i.e., the deliberately “bad” move, can be the good move if it yields surprise, thus reducing the enemy to a nonreacting object—if only temporarily, if only partially. Surprise is thus the supreme advantage, for it suspends the entire predicament of warfare, characterized precisely by the presence of a reacting enemy.
At the operational level, the logic favors the disruption of the enemy's physical or mental preparations by maneuver over the systematic destruction of his forces by head‐on combat, for in the latter (“attrition”), sheer strength must prevail.
At the level of theater strategy, narrow‐deep penetrations and outflanking thrusts on the offensive, or elastic maneuvers on the defensive, are likewise favored over broad‐front advances or firm defenses, both of which require a superiority of means to yield victory. In nonterritorial force strategies, there are the aerial, maritime, or space equivalents, where again ingenuity can prevail over sheer strength.
Finally, at the level of grand strategy, the logic favors artful combinations of intelligence, diplomacy (the leveraging of force by threatening or reassuring), material inducements, deception and subversion (undermining the enemy by terror, propaganda, and substitution), as well as concrete military strength, as opposed to strength alone or accompanied by material inducements, whereby the results obtained depend on the military and economic resources expended.
The United States and its armed forces have by contrast generally been able to prevail in modern times by straightforwardly efficient and correspondingly reliable methods, which obey only the “linear” logic of common sense. At every level—tactical, operational, theater strategic, or grand strategic—the sheer strength of U.S. military forces and an abundance of economic means have usually sufficed to yield success at low risk, though not at low cost.
There have been exceptions, of course, as in the case of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's very bold theater‐level outflanking maneuver of September 1950: North Korea's victorious invasion forces were cut off and destroyed by the U.S. forces inserted into their deep rear by the high‐risk/high‐payoff Inchon landing.
In the 1991
Earlier, during the Vietnam War, on the other hand, a vast superiority of means was outmaneuvered by an enemy that stubbornly refused to concentrate into efficiently targetable mass formations—and no strategical remedy was found when sheer firepower was thus frustrated.
The origin of Western strategical thought is unambiguously found in the words attributed to Heracleitus of Ephesus (c. 500 B.C.): “Men do not understand … [the coincidence of opposites]: there is a ‘back‐stretched connection’ like that of the bow….” and “the equilibrium of all things existent is due to the clash of opposing forces.” Deemed obscure by the ancients, Heracleitus has been made transparent by our experience of nuclear deterrence, whereby the peaceful had to be constantly ready to attack, and nuclear weapons could only be useful if unused. That fully uncovered for all the paradoxical logic of strategy, the “back‐stretched” connection that unites opposites. Long before Heracleitus, many a cunning fighter had won by surprising his enemy—something only possible when better ways of attacking, hence expected ways, are deliberately eschewed. In war's coincidence of opposites, the bad move is good because it is bad, and vice versa.
Carl von Clausewitz, the modern strategist, extended the logic beyond the coincidence of opposites, revealing the dynamics of reversal: victory turns into defeat after its culminating point by exhausting the will to fight and/or overstretching the until‐then victorious forces and/or frightening neutrals into enmity and allies into neutrality. War itself is transformed into peace beyond its culminating point, by consuming the means and the will to fight, and/or because the costs of warmaking (human, material) devalue the perceived losses of war termination (thus, the abandonment of South Vietnam was accepted when too many American lives were lost). Again, because the destructive capacity of nuclear weapons exceeded the culminating point of advantageous destruction, they were too effective (militarily) to be effective (politically). Their season of maximum importance was therefore short (1945–69), and their significance in world politics has not ceased to decline since then—only hollow great power pretenders such as India and Pakistan and second‐rate countries of the Iran/Iraq type still strive to acquire them.
Enemies react, therefore straightforward “engineering” methods routinely fail in war. But they are persistently seductive, because war is so much simpler when the enemy is ignored. In World War II, both the British Bomber Command and the U.S. “strategic” air forces (then under the U.S. Army) kept asking for the means (additional thousands of bombers) in order to destroy physically the industrial sources of German and Japanese military power and thus win the war by airpower alone. But, as Prime Minister Winston Churchill kept pointing out, if the bombing did begin to succeed, Germans and Japanese would not passively await defeat, but would instead strengthen their air defenses and disperse their industries, for in war, “all things are always on the move simultaneously.”
Eventually, bombing proved very effective (in part by forcing the diversion of German and Japanese resources to air defense) but quite insufficient on its own. This did not stop Robert S. McNamara from repeating exactly the same error in the 1960s with his Mutual Assured Destruction policy, which was meant to stabilize deterrence and stop the nuclear arms race. McNamara began with the very sound claim that a reliable ability to destroy half the Soviet Union's population and three‐quarters of its industrial capacity was ample to deter, but he ignored the possibility that Soviet leaders might not want what he wanted, the paralysis of mutual deterrence. In fact, they kept aiming for a nuclear superiority that was entirely meaningless according to McNamara—but not according to them. In the end, it was the open‐ended technological challenge of President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) that forced the Soviet leadership to give up military accumulation to try domestic reforms instead—with fatal results for their system.
Conflict unfolds at the several distinct levels, which interpenetrate much more easily downward than upward. In World War II, all German tactical‐, operational‐, or even theater‐level victories (notably over France in 1940) were nullified by Adolf Hitler's choice of the wrong allies (Italy, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia) and the wrong enemies (the Anglo‐American‐Soviet coalition) at the level of grand strategy. Even if the D‐Day landing had been repulsed and the Soviet army had ceased to fight, Germany would still have been ultimately defeated—by the fission bomb. As for Japan, given its utter inability to march on Washington to impose a favorable peace, the brilliant success of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was worse than useless: had the pilots of the Japanese navy failed miserably, evoking ridicule instead of hatred, American public opinion might not have been so aroused and the United States might have dealt less harshly with Japan.
Different grand strategies can be evaluated by the degree of their reliance on force. It was the high strategic achievement of the United States that it successfully protected numerous allies throughout the Cold War by relying primarily on the “armed suasion” of nuclear deterrence, while having to fight seriously only in Korea and Indochina. That was only possible because an American diplomatic elite that had been very small, and military elites that had been very provincial, were able to develop rapidly an entire culture of multilateral diplomacy and alliance management, notably to create NATO and preserve its unity in the face of constant difficulties and frequent crises. The precondition of that historic success was, however, the extraordinary evolution of American public opinion, from the isolationist presumption that lasted until 7 December 1941 to a remarkably sophisticated understanding of the value of allies—even inconstant, demanding, and deliberately irritating allies.
It was only when the diplomatic and military elites persisted in pursuing diplomatic and military priorities after the Cold War had ended (c. 1990) that American public opinion started to withdraw its consent from their aims and methods. Symptomatic of this divergence, while much of elite opinion still saw Japan as a valuable ally, popular opinion recognized it as a direct economic competitor. But the more obvious change was the collapse of public support for military intervention. Having correctly understood that, in Cold War conditions, any locality could be important once it became the scene of Soviet‐American contention, no matter how worthless economically or lacking in any sort of American presence or connections, public opinion reacted to the end of the Cold War by generally refusing to sanction large “discretionary” military interventions in the absence of immediate and compelling justifications for the same.
[See also Land Warfare; Tactics.]
Bibliography
- M. Marcovich, ed., Heraclitus: Greek text with a short commentary, 1967.
- Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, 1976.
- George T. Dennis (Transl.) Maurice's Strategikon: Handbook of Byzantine military strategy (Philadelphia Pa.: Pennsylvania University Press, 1984).
- Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, 1987;
2nd ed. 1992. - Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein, eds., The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War, 1994.
- N. P. Milner, Vegetius: Epitome of military science
2nd rev. ed. 1996
