Strategy (10 page)

In other cultures, stratagems and cunning were considered much more appealing—especially to get out of a tight spot—and commended as essential features of an effective strategy. Lisa Raphals, picking up on Detienne and Vernant's discussion of m
ē
tis, made the comparison with the Chinese term
zhi
. This had a wide variety of meanings from wisdom, knowledge, and
intelligence to skill, craft, cleverness, or cunning. The individual who demonstrated
zhi
appeared as a sage general, whose mastery of the art of deception allowed him to prevail over an opponent of stronger physical force, just like those with m
ē
tis.
⁴
Winning against a weak opponent required nothing special. Real skill was shown by getting into positions that did not allow for defeat and would ensure victory over enemies. Deception was crucial: conveying confusion when there was order, cowardice instead of courage, weakness instead of strength. It also required the ability to determine when the enemy was attempting to deceive. Spies, for example, could help understand enemy dispositions and then judge when to be crafty or straightforward, when to maneuver and when to attack directly, when to commit and when to stay flexible.

The enduring model of the sage warrior was Sun Tzu, as represented by the short book on strategy known as
The Art of War
. Little is known about the author, or even if there was a single author. According to tradition, he was a general who served the king of Wu in Eastern China around 500 BCE, toward the end of China's Spring and Autumn period, although no contemporary references to him have been found.
The Art of War
seems to have been written or at least compiled over the subsequent century during the Warring States period. The context was a competition for influence among a set of individually weak kingdoms at a time when central authority in China had collapsed. Over time the text acquired important commentaries which added to its significance. There are other Chinese military classics from this period, but Sun Tzu remains the best known.

Sun Tzu's influence lies in the underlying approach to strategy. Influenced by Taoist philosophy,
The Art of War
covers statecraft as well as war. As with any ancient text, the language could seem quaint and the references obscure but the underlying theme was clear enough. Supreme excellence in war was not found in winning “one hundred victories in one hundred battles.” Rather, it was better “to subdue the enemy without fighting.” The great strategist had to be a master of deception, using force where it was most effective: “Avoid what is strong to strike what is weak.”
⁵
Defeating the enemy's strategy (or “balk the enemy's plans”) was the “highest form of generalship.” Next came preventing “the junction of the enemy's forces,” followed by attacking “the enemy's army in the field,” and—worst of all—besieging walled cities.

In Sun Tzu's formulaic aphorisms, the key to deception was simply a matter of doing the opposite of what was expected—look incapacitated when capable, passive when active, near when far, far when near. This required good order and discipline. Simulating cowardice, for example, required courage. It also required an understanding of the opponent. If the enemy general was “choleric,” then he could be easily upset; if “obstinate and prone to anger,” insults could enrage him and cause him to be impetuous; if arrogant, he could be lulled into a false sense of superiority and a lowered guard. A dangerous commander, according to Sun Tzu, would be reckless, cowardly, quick-tempered, too concerned with reputation, and too compassionate.

What really made the difference was “foreknowledge.” This could not be “elicited from spirits, nor from gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor from calculations. It must be obtained from men who know the enemy situation” and could acquire information about dispositions, the character of the troops, and the identity of the generals. The enemy's political relationships could also be a target. “Sometimes drive a wedge between a sovereign and his ministers; on other occasions separate his allies from him. Make them mutually suspicious so that they drift apart. Then you can plot against them.”

For East Asian generals, Sun Tzu became a standard text. He was an evident influence in the writings of the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. Napoleon was said to have studied a French Jesuit's translation of
The Art of War
. Though not available in English until the early twentieth century, it came to be taken increasingly seriously as a source of military and—during the 1980s—even business wisdom. The book's approach was most relevant for those facing complex struggles, in which encounters were expected to be indecisive and alliances and enmities were shifting.

The Art of War
did not provide a single route to victory and recognized that while battles were best avoided they sometimes had to be fought. Sun Tzu described relatively simple conflicts, in which bold moves left an enemy helpless or dissolving into disorder. A possible weakness, in a “strong tendency to point out what one should strive for, rather than explain how one should achieve one's aim,” was also a source of strength. Any such explanations would now seem arcane and overtaken by massive changes in military methodology; if Sun Tzu had offered detailed advice on tactics, the book would now tend to be passed over. Instead, students of Sun Tzu are “merely given specific pointers as to what to ponder, but the solution, or the way one chooses to tread, must be one's own.”
⁶

His approach worked best when followed by only one side: if both commanders were reading Sun Tzu, the maneuvers and deceptions could lead
to no decision at all or else an unexpected collision that caught them both unaware. A reputation for deception would lead to a lot of double-guessing, just as one for avoiding battle could turn into a presumption of weakness. In the face of a strong and coherent adversary, clever mind games could take you only so far. If both sides were doing everything possible to avoid a frontal confrontation, then the victor would be the one who could avoid commitment the longest, eventually reaching a point where the enemy had nowhere else to go and so had to fight at a disadvantage or surrender. There was, at any rate, only a limited amount of mystery and subtlety that a leader could cultivate without confusing those being led as much as the opponent. In the end, the point about Sun Tzu was not that he offered a winning formula for all situations but that he offered an ideal type of a particular sort of strategy, based on outsmarting the opponent rather than overwhelming him with brute force.

François Jullien developed an intriguing line of thought by demonstrating the similarities between the Chinese approach to war, as exemplified by Sun Tzu, and the Chinese use of language. He argued that the disinclination to engage in high-risk, potentially destructive direct confrontations in war was also followed in rhetorical conflicts, which were similarly indirect and implicit. Circuitous, subtle forms of expression, both allusive and elusive, could be the equivalents of armies dodging and harrying. By refusing to be pinned down or make an argument with sufficient clarity to be refuted, the initiative could be kept—although this could make for potentially infinite “games of manipulation.”
⁷
Following an indirect approach to discourse would raise the same problems as with battle: when both sides were using identical ploys the contest could be indefinite and it would be hard to reach any sort of closure.

Jullien offered a contrast with the Athenians. They saw the advantages in decisive action that brought both war and argument to a quick close, thereby avoiding the expense and frustrations of prolonged confrontation. Warfare was direct and battle based, with troops organized into phalanxes to ensure maximum impact against the enemy, and victory coming to those with the requisite strength and courage. The generals were capable of deception and understood the advantages of surprise, but they did not want to waste time in games of dodging and harassment. In the same way, the Athenians were straightforward in argument. Whether in the theater, the tribunal, or the assembly, orators would make their cases directly and transparently, with points open to refutation, within a limited time period. There could therefore be decisive arguments as there were decisive battles. In these battles of persuasion in which—as Thucydides put it—arguments were “hurled
forcefully against each other,” the decision would come from a third party such as a jury or the electorate.

This was an appealing contrast, and it may be that the approach to battles of persuasion reflected broad and enduring cultural preferences that affected attitudes to any confrontation. The suggestion, however, of a strong Greek preference for “decisive” battle came from Victor David Hanson's controversial argument that the terms for a continuing Western way of war were set in classical times.
⁸
Critics have challenged this theory on the basis of the analysis of Greek warfare and the subsequent history.
⁹
Beatrice Heuser has demonstrated emphatically that at least one strong strand in Western military thought up to the Napoleonic wars was to avoid pitched battles: “Few believed either in the inevitability or the unconditional desirability of battle.”
¹⁰
Quintus Fabius Maximus, who gave his name to the “Fabian strategy,” was initially derided as the “delayer” because of what seemed to be a cowardly strategy in the face of the pillaging advance of Hannibal's Carthaginian army. But after the Roman defeat at Cannae in 17 BCE, the wisdom of the approach was acknowledged. For some thirteen years thereafter, the Romans avoided pitched battles, while harassing Hannibal's supply lines, until he finally gave up and left Italy.

The Roman treatise on warfare best known through the Middle Ages, when the vital lessons were all still believed to be contained in classical texts, was the
De Re Militari
of Vegetus. Because similar constraints of resources, transport, and geography were faced during the Middle Ages, the key issues were logistical and an offensive army unable to forage and pillage would get into trouble. The relevant line from the
De Re Militari
stated that battle was the “last extremity” and should only be followed when all other plans had been considered and expedients tried. Where the odds were too great, battle should be declined. Better to employ “stratagem and finesse” to destroy the enemy as much as possible in detail and then intimidate them. Vegetus expressed, in terms similar to Sun Tzu, a preference for starving enemies into submission rather than fighting them (“famine is more terrible than the sword”), and spoke of how it “is better to beat the enemy through want, surprises, and care for difficult places (i.e., through maneuver) than by a battle in the open field.”
¹¹
There has been a debate on whether medieval warfare was really so battle averse. Clifford Rogers argued that commanders were more prepared to seek battle—at least when on the offensive—but he was far from insisting that the decisive battle was the dominant mode of warfare.
¹²

The Byzantine emperor Maurice's
Strategikon
had a similar take at the start of the seventh century: “[I]t is well to hurt the enemy by deceit, by raids or by hunger, and never be enticed to a pitched battle, which is a demonstration
more of luck than of bravery.” To indicate that there was another view, Heuser quoted Henri, duke of Rohan, writing during the Thirty Years' War that “of all actions of war the most glorious and the most important is to give battle,” and regretting that wars were then “made more in the fashion of the fox than of the lion, and … based more on sieges than on combat.” But Heuser then noted that he saw no combat and that those who had experience of war were much more cautious. Maurice de Saxe, who led the French forces in the early eighteenth century, saw pitched battles as best avoided:

Nothing so reduces the enemy to absurdity as this method: nothing advances affairs better. Frequent small engagements will dissipate the enemy until he is forced to hide from you.
¹³

Using armies for occasional raiding, assaulting the economic life of the enemy, and threatening and demoralizing the enemy's population provided an alternative form of coercion to battle. Most importantly, when accounting for success—for example, with regard to the Hundred Years' War—“political elements were always more significant than military ones,” even with talented strategists in command and after victory in pitched battle.
¹⁴
The English made the most of their local allies in France just as the French sought to encourage the Scots to distract the English at home.

As the retrospective label “Hundred Years' War” indicates, conflicts might move through distinctive stages but lack decisiveness because the underlying disputes were never fully resolved. In this respect, the role of battle was quite different at this time from how it later became understood. Commenting on the strategic considerations behind one of the most famous battles of this war, when the English under Henry V beat the French at Agincourt in 1415, Jan Willem Honig urged that battle be viewed in terms of the complex conventions of the time, in which sieges, hostages, political demands, and even massacres all had their allotted place. Both sides moved warily toward battle, appearing to both seek and fear it at the same time, and worked their way through an elaborate script, before the two armies confronted each other for the vital encounter. Behind all of this, argued Honig, was the “metaphysical mystique” surrounding battle, for it reflected a view of war as litigation with God as the judge and battle as decisive as a divine judgment. It came when all other forms of dispute settlement had been exhausted.

The result was a competition in risk which was tempered by the mutually shared fear of appealing to God, the ultimate judge. This fear, and the doubt that any good medieval Christian had regarding the justice of his cause and the strength of his faith, produced an incentive to
develop and adhere to a set of conventions which kept the armed interaction between opponents within certain bounds.