Reading Military Strategy Magazine (MSM) is a truly humbling experience for me. The simple reason is that we work with many very good writers and thinkers. That is not something we take for granted, especially when those in many governments and militaries consistently fail to rise to the tests that strategy presents and fail to use the work correctly.
Emily Meierding, Jeffrey A. Larsen, and James J. Wirtz raise the problematic use of the word “strategic”, among the six excellent articles we present in this edition. At the time of writing, they were unaware that the British Government was about to announce a “Strategic Defence Review.”
The only problem is that something about the “Strategic Defence Review” needs to be more strategic. It is entirely economic and political. The use of the word strategic is a hand wave to the idea that evidence-based military decision-making will somehow enable the entire process to succeed where the seven others I have witnessed in my adult life since about 1981 have failed. Only since 1998 has the word “Strategic” featured in their titles.
Observing that “Strategy” has become mostly meaningless usually invites the rebuttal that “the meaning of words evolves.” Yet Clausewitz’s definition still stands above all others. In 400 years, Strategy never had a non-military meaning. So how has the meaning of the words “Tactics,” “War,” “Warfare,” or “Policy” evolved? None of them have. Words like “hot”, “Cool”, and “Bitching” may have multiple context-driven meanings. Strategy is not in that set.
To call yourself a “Strategist” in the presence of most of us who work on MSM invites immediate ridicule. People who really do real strategy are not often called strategists, and those who do are usually merely students of strategy. Moreover, Strategy is a practical skill or else it counts for nothing. That skill may require a vast body of understanding, but unless you know how to conduct the tactics that give strategy its application, any audience has little reason to feel confident. Sir Julian Corbett, who had one of the finest strategic minds of all time, never seems to have referred to himself as a Strategist. He purposely stayed clear of Naval Tactics as something done by practitioners. Still, from both a historian’s perspective and a quiet student of Clausewitz, he clearly understood the use of engagements for the purpose of the war while Sir Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty in 1914, had no understanding to speak of, a condition he failed to resolve for the rest of his life.
The study of strategy is not an academic pursuit unless you reduce the meaning of the word strategy and fail to define it in terms that give clear meaning to what is being studied so that practice may be better.
William F. Owen
Editor, Military Strategy Magazine
Volume 9, Issue 4
September 2024