Volume 2, Issue 2, Spring 2012
Infinity Journal
Page 5
Strategy: Some Notes for a User’s Guide
Colin S. Gray
to be brilliant – unless you have some major weaknesses for
which strategy needs to compensate – or when the enemy
has an exceptionally gifted strategist in charge, or you
suffer truly bad luck (there is much to go wrong in war). The
potential gap between military operational aims and policy
goals should be filled by strategy. In fact,without strategy how
can you decide on operational military aims? What are you
trying to accomplish? How do you know without guidance
from the strategy bridge?[iii]
Let us make the heroic assumption that the political process
has produced a sensible and stable outcome that can
function well enough as policy guidance. In this event it is
possible for prudent policy to be subverted, perhaps fatally,
by inadequacy in its instruments. It is commonplace to claim
that if strategy is absent, weak, or simply wrong, despite
the relative high quality of its political direction, tactical
excellence will not rescue the project. If one is fighting the
wrong war militarily, though not politically, then indeed policy
success is likely to prove fatally elusive. However, faulty or at
least confused conceptualization is apt to be a guilty party in
this case. When strategy is nowhere in sight, let alone plainly
effectively in command, it may be that the essential unity of
strategy and tactics has not been understood. Strategy and
tactics constitute a unity. Strategy is theory (of desired and
intended cause and effect) that has to be practiced not only
by tactical behaviour, but also as that behaviour.Theory and
practice are one.
The proposition that one
has
a strategy, but one
does
tactics
is false. When one does tactics, one also behaves tactically
for strategic effect, i.e., one behaves strategically (for good or
ill).There is need to beware of the confused misconceptions
which hold, plausibly but nonetheless wrongly, either (1) that
it is easier to correct faulty tactics than faulty strategy, or its
logical polar opposite (2) that it is easier to adjust strategy
than tactics — the second misconception which would
appear to be merely commonsensical on empirical grounds.
One can hold a meeting and in a matter of hours shift
strategy; whereas major tactical changes may well require
the retraining and at least partial reequipping of a whole
army. If strategy is understood only to be the direction given
to a military instrument, then this logic holds. However, the
strategic ways in which military means will be used cannot
be separated in practice from what those means can do,
behaving tactically as they must. Strategy and tactics are
a
gestalt
. Many scholars and not a few practitioners of
statecraft and warfare have difficulty grasping this argument.
Strategy can only be practiced tactically. All strategy has to
be done by tactics, and all tactical effort has some strategic
effect, but not all such effort reflects, expresses, and enables
purposeful strategy.The operational level of war is a concept
and practice that has serious potential to fuel confusion
about the essential wholeness of strategy and tactics.[iv]
Strategic sense:
The idea of operational art to direct large military forces in
campaigns is only sensible.The problem lurks not in the idea,
but rather in the consequences in practice of the idea when
very senior command fails to exercise a tight enough strategic
grip on tactical behaviour, no matter that it is organized and
directed operationally. In his book
The Generals
(about Allied
military leadership in the war in Asia, 1941-45), Robert Lyman
talks about the need for generals to conduct their operational
tasks with“strategic sense”.[v] So, the operational level of war
ought not to be regarded by its commanding generals as a
politics-free or politics-lite zone wherein a professional military
can do its thing untroubled by policy considerations. But, if
strategy is missing or confused, strategic sense will be hard to
demonstrate, because the generals will not know how and
why their efforts should contribute to success overall.
When political guidance worthy of the name is weak or
missing from the action, the strategy bridge cannot function.
Strategists need to know the political ends that can be
advanced purposefully by the instrumental effect of their
tactical enablers. In order to practice strategy, each element
of the relevant trinity of ends, ways, and means is essential.
Everyone functions in conflict to strategic effect, but such
effect is realized both with and without the benefit of strategy.
It is tempting to argue that history abhors a vacuum, and
that therefore the political ends that strategists require will
be provided by someone, whether or not legitimate political
authority is up for the duty. Most likely, one can suggest,
the senior leadership of the military instrument will step up
to attempt to play the policymaker’s role, in actuality if not
formally. The interface between war and peace inherently is
almost as challenging to the strategist as is the conduct of
war itself. In 1918, the Allies did not inflict a military defeat
fully adequate to match their political ambitions for an
orderly and peaceful post-war world. In 1945, the enemy in
Europe was beaten soundly enough, unlike 1918, but the
Western Allies compromised the post-war order in Europe
by not exploiting adequately the military advantages that
they enjoyed all too briefly. Both in 1918-19 and 1945-46, the
victorious Western military power melted away so rapidly
that the desired post-war order was severely compromised.
[vi] The statesmen laboured hard, in the face of daunting
difficulties,and it is easy to be wise with hindsight.As usual the
Owl of Minerva only flies at dusk. Nonetheless, one is obliged
to note that strategic sense was seriously lacking when it
was needed most. Unlike the situation in 1814-15, in 1919
and 1945 the most successful British, French, and American
military commanders made no significant contribution to the
shaping of the post-great war political order. Strategic sense
would seem to have been exhausted by the effort required
for successful war-making.
What is strategy?
There are many definitions, but they all must have at their
core the strategy function, which is to provide coherence
between ends, ways, and means. My definition of 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 adjust the wording for grand strategy to substitute
“all among the total assets of a security community,
including its military instrument”, for “force and the threat of
The interface between war and
peace inherently is almost as
challenging to the strategist as is
the conduct of war itself.
