GRAND STRATEGY: A SHORT GUIDE FOR MILITARY STRATEGISTS
THOMAS BRUSCINO JANUARY 4, 2024 7 MIN READ
The idea of “grand strategy” that is so important to national security must also be important to military professionals.
For decades, the security studies community has argued that America needs a “real,” “new,” or at least “good” grand strategy, and the debate shows no sign of slowing down. The idea of “grand strategy” that is so important to national security must also be important to military professionals. But before military strategists can do their work within the context of “grand strategy,” they should be clear about what the term “grand strategy” means, which is particularly tricky because policymakers and theorists alike often combine and confuse its two main meanings. The purpose here is to offer a guide to both meanings and their significance to military strategy.
Wartime Grand (or National) Strategy
The earlier meaning of grand strategy focused on the overall national and coalition approach to winning a specific war. Often called “national strategy” by Americans, this version of grand strategy came “not from the military chiefs but from the war cabinets and their advisers, above all the Prime Minister or President”(vii). B.H. Liddell Hart called this sort of grand strategy “war policy,” a “higher strategy…to co-ordinate and direct all the resources of a nation, or band of nations, towards the attainment of the political object of the war” (335-336, 366).
For example, the military leadership of the United States in the Civil War launched multiple mutually supporting army campaigns and blockaded and attacked key southern ports with the navy, while the government mobilized troops and materially support forces in the field, developed policies for emancipation of slaves and mobilization of freedmen, and continued diplomatic efforts to prevent foreign recognition of and aid to the rebellion.
https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/grand-strategy-for-military-strategists/
