Volume 4, Issue 1, Summer 2014
Infinity Journal
Page 2
All strategists should own a dog. Not for the same reason that Pavlov owned a dog, but because of the
perspective that dogs can bring to strategy.
Today, in a world where most people writing or commenting on strategy cannot tell the difference between
strategy and policy, the dog can provide extremely potent input based purely on the fact that no one challenges
dogs when its comes to their personal politics.
A dog belonging to a young and noted strategist recently remarked that Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria,
was doing ‘good enough’ strategy, and certainly better than the U.S. and the UN.The use of organized violence
was maintaining his grip on power. Likewise, we hear the same dog is rumored to have remarked that Russian
President Vladimir Putin seems to have used violence and/or the threat of physical force to achieve and maintain
a position beneficial to his regime.
Had a human being pronounced the same thing, the usefulness of his observation would have been sunk under
a tidal wave of political opinion, masquerading as moral outrage.The same dog would, of course, consider it
utterly ridiculous to suggest that President Assad and President Putin should never have used violence to gain or
sustain their particular policies.
It makes sense to listen to the dogs.They get it.They don’t invoke political opinions.They don’t care about the
policy from a supposedly ethical perspective.They just want to know if violence can be used to achieve the
desired end-state, and how violence may undermine or progress it.
In the future it may well be that a dog comes to write these editorials, if not actually take over the job of being
editor!
William F. Owen
Editor, Infinity Journal
June 2014
A Note From The Editor
