Is it merely the alignment of ends, ways, and means?
Strategy is the deliberate alignment of means to goals, a product of competent leaders operating within effective policy making systems that account for chance, ambiguity, and uncertainty. A good strategy continuously adapts to shifting conditions and is predicated on understanding historical patterns of themselves, allies, and the enemy.
Strategy making is a process, one that involves competent leaders and systems. According to Williamson Murray and Mark Grimsley, the process for making strategy involves a combination of “internal political influences, the idiosyncrasies of individual behavior, and the pressure of external events and threats.” Strategic decisions are often made with incomplete information and under pressure to act quickly. Nevertheless, it becomes clear that a good — that is successful — strategy is often the result of a process instead of one genius.
Also critical to making coherent strategy is having clearly articulated policy or national goals by which all elements of strategy can be aligned. After all, war is but “a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means.” Peter Mansoor and Williamson Murray’s edited volume Grand Strategy and Military Alliances (2016) clarifies that political cohesion is the primary determinant in maintaining alliances, which points to the overall importance of planning at the grand strategic and policy levels. Regardless, those leaders who realistically align the means at their disposal with grand strategic goals are the most successful at making and implementing strategy through history. Those who do not, fail, especially those who create virtual echo chambers of thought that do not welcome robust debate and discussion. Good strategy requires a system of discourse and dialogue. Successful strategy results from adaptation and a robust understanding of history.
A good strategy is evident from some of the first writings on the subject. Thucydides writes glowingly of the Spartan King Archidamnus’s ability to understand his strategic environment and plan for an inevitable war with Athens. The Spartans understanding of Athenian precedent and their ability to adapt to changing conditions in the war — particularly the need for a large navy — ensured their eventual, albeit fleeting, success.
Athenian strategic precedent was set by yet another forward-thinking strategist, Themistocles, who established plans to ensure Athens was prepared for war against Persia and Sparta. Themistocles’ actions included privileging naval power, evacuating the city during the Persian invasion, and constructing fortifications — forming the foundation of Athenian strategyduring the Peloponnesian War.
The Roman Empire represents another ancient example of strategy. Many Romanists deny the existence of strategic thought in the Roman empire, mostly as a push back against Edward Luttwak’s The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (1976). Luttwak argues that the Roman Empire employed a robust strategy and that the firm subordination of tactical priorities, martial ideals, and warlike instincts to political goals were the essential condition of the empire’s strategic success.
Historian James Lacey agrees and adds that their overarching strategy was built on preventing enemies from interfering with their core economic zones and that Rome’s defense of its frontier “produced the singularly most successful strategy in global history.” Roman success was — like Sparta — predicated on resilience. This time over a four-hundred-year period.
Good strategy relies on equal parts leadership and systems. A strategy must be planned, considered, debated, and then implemented with precision and care. Overreliance on one leader, such as Phillip II in the 16th century, is a recipe for failure. According to historian Geoffrey Parker, Phillip II’s grand strategy was doomed primarily by information overload and his tendency toward micromanagement.
Leaders and systems must nonetheless prepare a strategy that is resilient and readily adaptable. Historian Richard Sinnreich attributes Britain and her allies’ success against Napoleon to the constant “adaptation underwritten by effective diagnosis of changes in the operating environment.” The Union’s experience in the American Civil War further drives this point as Union policy and strategy shifted from conciliation to pragmatism and finally to what historian Mark Grimsley calls “hard war.”
This evolution of strategy was borne of military and political necessity as Abraham Lincoln and his final Army commander Ulysses S. Grant realized what was necessary to preserve the Union by leveraging political support through restrained yet pressured action on the enemy’s will to resist. Dowding’s Fighter Command strategy in the Battle of Britain represents another example of a strategy built to adapt to complicated and unpredictable challenges.
World War II provides ample examples of successful and unsuccessfulstrategies in action. The Axis powers could not cooperate and decide on common goals, dooming their cooperative effort before it started. During the war, the Germans failed to merge all levels of war and were unable to put available means toward strategic ends. Furthermore, for a nation-state that previously allowed military officers to dominate strategic thought, Germany came to rely on political leaders to guide strategy throughout the interwar period.
Adolf Hitler increasingly distrusted his military officers and relied only on his ideas — eschewing a process and making decisions based on ideology and intuition rather than strategic analysis. This fostered an echo chamber that precluded the free exchange of ideas through discourse and dialogue necessary for good strategy. To illustrate the inability of good operations to make up for bad strategy, in 1942, German military leaders tried to compensate through increased operational offenses aimed at securing Russia’s oil fields and the Suez Canal. Germany’s military leaders decided to ignore strategic issues, and German could not regain the initiative while also failing to develop a defensive strategy. “War,” according to late German historian Wilhelm Diest, “had become the end in itself.”
In contrast, the Allies of World War II nurtured an environment in which leaders argued, discussed, and debated — in an often passionate manner — that ultimately resulted in the successful prosecution of the war as available means were organized to meet strategic ends in a resilient and adaptable manner. Historian Peter Mansoor reiterates this point while also demonstrating that President Roosevelt’s deft political maneuvering was essential to making strategy in World War II. Like the Grand Alliance of World War II, alliances are another necessary component of strategy as whenever great powers fight other great powers without an alliance, they lose, and those alliances are most potent when both powers need each other.
The American effort in Vietnam represents a case where an inability to meld tactics, operations, strategy, and policy into a coherent whole had disastrous consequences. H.R. McMaster argues that the Vietnam war was lost before it even began because of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ disconnect between political and military leaders. In this regard, the United States lacked a long-term national strategy, and no amount of on-the-ground military success could make up for this failure. Krepinevich focuses on the operational and tactical levels, arguing that the United States might have won had it adapted a small-unit pacification concept in South Vietnam.
However, when considered alongside McMaster’s work, it is difficult to see long-term victory in a corrupt country like the Republic of Vietnam with no strategic end-state raised by military and political leaders in Washington. A more recent American example comes from the American invasion of Iraq, which lumbered along until the 2007 surge of ideas and forces provided a much-needed strategic realignment that nested policy goals with operations and reality on the ground.
Ultimately, all national planning and power elements must be nested into coherent strategic and policy goals to be effective. Indeed, mistakes in operations can be overcome, but success comes from a malleable strategy decided not by one tyrannical leader but by all parties involved to reach a consensus.
Williamson Murray and Mark Grimsley write in The Making of Strategy that “Strategy is a process, a constant adaptation to the shifting conditions and circumstances in a world where chance, uncertainty, and ambiguity dominate.” Therefore, successful strategies involve making complex and challenging choices while weathering constant surprises and setbacks. Those choices demand adaptation. A good strategy is a resilient and adaptable plan that results from deliberations and not one person’s echo chamb
