Strategy: A History

"He lays out quite nicely how complex and convoluted that history is. The term ‘strategy’ dates from the Greco-Roman period but then it doesn’t come back into vogue until the 18th century or so. People are still doing strategy, they’re just not calling it that. That makes it difficult if you’re tracing the history of an activity. But he does it very well. Articulating the business of the general is what we’re talking about here as far as what strategy is—which is different from business strategy. But it all comes down to achieving some sort of an advantage or leverage over whatever competition you’re facing. If you don’t have any competitors, then all you need is a plan. If you’re in an environment where you have competitors, you need a strategy because you have to deal with the competition in some way and that’s where strategy really comes into play. It is a practice more than just a theory. Oh, it has become something of a craze. If you want to sell a book, put the word strategy somewhere in the title. When things happen on the international political level—when we begin losing conflicts—the outcry from the pundits is, ‘We have no strategy!’ or ‘The strategy we have is broken!’ Then, books start appearing about how to do strategy better or what the real principles of strategy are. So, now you’ve got this natural attraction to the term and people start using it more and more. You see more courses developed on strategy, what it is or isn’t. You can really gain a lot of attention by becoming one of those overnight strategy experts—maybe not enough to make a small fortune, but at least you can achieve some recognition. There was a strategy. Whether it was good or not is the issue, and whether the goals were really achievable. Again, the nature of politics works against the nature of strategy because there are always political wars going on between various parties involved, and the struggle for power never really ends. So whatever the incumbent party is—Republican or Democrat for the US—there’s an opposition that is looking to find weakness and looking to reduce the credibility of the incumbent administration, to show it’s incompetent, to undermine it. Which means that people are reluctant, sometimes, to articulate what their ends really are. Without that knowledge, the military can’t really achieve as much as it might need to make the strategy work. “There are any number of ideas about what the nature of war is” On the other hand, that ambiguity can work to the advantage of a party too. You can claim victory, even if your original ends weren’t exactly met. You can claim ‘all we really wanted to do was x and we did it; so we were successful, and now we can begin withdrawing. The war is over, the major combat operations are over.’ You try to shape perceptions of what it was you did compared to what you wanted to achieve. It’s your own internal deception plan, I suppose. Whether or not people will actually buy it is another thing. Also, wars go into different phases. What the aims were in the beginning aren’t necessarily what they’re going to be in the middle or the end. It is constantly open to change. It sure did. There are lots of theories as to why it happened, but the goals initially were very limited, involving only special operating forces advising South Vietnamese soldiers. Then there was a gradual escalation over time for various reasons, there was ‘mission creep’ as it’s called in the military. In a sense you can also have ‘war creep’ or ‘strategy creep.’ It can be a little of both. Part of it was that Johnson did not want to be seen as the first US president to lose a war, so he escalated gradually to keep that from happening. But he really didn’t want to be in the war. He wanted to get on with his great society program. He wanted to devote energy and attention and resources to improving living conditions, living standards, education, civil rights—all those things. He found the war to be an albatross around his neck, but he couldn’t get out of it, so he was advised, without escalating. But that only drew him in deeper. The military, of course, didn’t want to lose either, so it looked to escalate as well, though it would have preferred to go in with maximum effort at the outset. Yes. There’s an arrogance of power at times, and certainly there was in Vietnam. Racial attitudes came into play as well—there was an arrogance that prevented fully understanding the Vietnamese people. There was also a lack of intelligence sources, aside from CIA estimates and so on. By that I mean the intelligence networks we had weren’t as productive as they were, say, in World War II when we had broken the German and Japanese codes. Those breakthroughs told us a lot. We had to use that information wisely, of course, but it told us when the Germans or Japanese were making big moves. It wasn’t always 100% actionable—at times they still pulled off surprises—but by large we had the intelligence upper hand. In Vietnam, we didn’t have that kind of information. Some of the sources that came out after the war from the Vietnamese archives, even Chinese and Russian sources, show that, at times, we were closer to winning than we thought. We just didn’t know it. The Chinese and the Russians were wondering how much more material they were going to have to throw into the war. Had we had that kind of information instead of making estimates, then we could have taken a different course of action, perhaps."