What is Strategy?
By Military Strategy Magazine
What are we talking about? The noun and the adjective, strategy and strategic, are so commonly, indeed casually employed that it can be shocking to appreciate how frequently they are misapplied. Given the very high stakes of this subject for national and international security, misunderstanding and therefore misuse of the concept of strategy can be dangerous and expensive. Fortunately, such perils and costs are as easily avoidable as they are gratuitous. For an efficient definition of strategy, the following has sufficient merit to serve well enough: “Military strategy is the direction and use made of force and the threat of force for the purposes of policy as decided by politics”.(i) This definition obviously and suitably is heavily indebted to Carl von Clausewitz, who told us, “Strategy is the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war”.(ii) What matters most for the definition of strategy is that it must be crystal clear in the necessary assertion that the subject is all about instrumentality. Strategy is about the use made of force for political purposes. Strategy is not the application of force itself, that is warfare and there is a professional term for it – tactics. Combat is tactics and tactical, the use made of that combat is strategy.
All military behaviour has some strategic meaning, be it ever so minor, net positive or negative, but it is not inherently strategic. It may make sense to consider war as having strategic, operational, and tactical levels, but all forces of all kinds behave tactically, just as they all contribute to net strategic effect. Despite conceptual abuses asserting to the contrary, there are no strategic forces. Strategic always refers to the consequences of military behaviour, not to its conduct. “Long-range”, “nuclear”, or “most important”, are not synonyms for strategic. An important reason for this apparent pedantry is to enable, at least encourage, strategic thought about the forces in question. It can be very hard to recognize the need for strategic thought about forces that one has already labelled strategic. Surely, everything they do must be strategic, by definition?
The conceptual architecture of strategy is expressed most economically in the simple three-way formula of policy ends, strategic ways, and military means – with the whole construction fuelled substantially by prevailing assumptions. Since strategy is always future-leaning, rather than retrospective, the unavoidability of assumptions is obvious. It is important to remember that assumptions are never empirically certain; if they were they would be facts. Strategic thoughts and plans for tomorrow or the day after are especially in need of reminder that future events are incapable of empirical verification now. Each leg of the triad for strategy is essential to the integrity of the whole project. If policy goals are either missing from the action or can provide no meaningful guidance, then the strategist cannot select ways in which to achieve (unspecified) ends. Should strategy and its selected ways be absent from proceedings, then the action by the military means must be conducted according to no purposefully intelligent design beyond its immediate tactical opportunistic significance. And finally, if the military means are not able or willing to fight hard enough or smart enough to beat the enemy’s military means, it will not matter what policy goals and strategy might be, because the whole enterprise will collapse in failure.
https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/briefs/what-is-strategy/
