The 33 Strategies of War (54 page)

Now Landon was presented with a dilemma. If he kept going with his centrist appeal, he would bore the public and seem weak. If he moved to the right--the choice he actually took--he would be inconsistent and look desperate. This was pure maneuver warfare: Begin by taking a position of strength--in Roosevelt's case his initial, presidential, bipartisan pose--that leaves you with open options and room to maneuver. Then let your enemies show their direction. Once they commit to a position, let them hold it--in fact, let them trumpet it. Now that they are fixed in place, maneuver to the side that will crowd them, leaving them only bad options. By waiting to make this maneuver until the last six weeks of the presidential race, Roosevelt both denied the Republicans any time to adjust and kept his own strident appeal from wearing thin.

Everything is political in the world today, and politics is all about positioning. In any political battle, the best way to stake out a position is to draw a sharp contrast with the other side. If you have to resort to speeches to make this contrast, you are on shaky ground: people distrust words. Insisting that you are strong or well qualified rings as self-promotion. Instead make the opposing side talk and take the first move. Once they have committed to a position and fixed it in other people's minds, they are ripe for the sickle. Now you can create a contrast by quoting their words back at them, showing how different you are--in tone, in attitude, in action. Make the contrast deep. If they commit to some radical position, do not respond by being moderate (moderation is generally weak); attack them for promoting instability, for being power-hungry revolutionaries. If they respond by toning down their appeal, nail them for being inconsistent. If they stay the course, their message will wear thin. If they become more strident in self-defense, you make your point about their instability.

Use this strategy in the battles of daily life, letting people commit themselves to a position you can turn into a dead end. Never
say
you are strong,
show
you are, by making a contrast between yourself and your inconsistent or moderate opponents.

3.
The Turks entered World War I on the side of Germany. Their main enemies in the Middle Eastern theater were the British, who were based in Egypt, but by 1917 they had arrived at a comfortable stalemate: the Turks controlled a strategic eight-hundred-mile stretch of railway that ran from Syria in the north to the Hejaz (the southwestern part of Arabia) in the south. Due west of the central part of this railway line was the town of Aqaba, on the Red Sea, a key Turkish position from which they could quickly move armies north and south to protect the railway.

The Turks had already beaten back the British at Gallipoli (see chapter 5), a huge boost to their morale. Their commanders in the Middle East felt secure. The English had tried to stir up a revolt against the Turks among the Arabs of the Hejaz, hoping the revolt would spread north; the Arabs had managed a few raids here and there but had fought more among themselves than against the Turks. The British clearly coveted Aqaba and plotted to take it from the sea with their powerful navy, but behind Aqaba was a mountain wall marked by deep gorges. The Turks had converted the mountain into a fortress. The British knew that even if their navy took Aqaba, they would be unable to advance inland, rendering the city's capture useless. Both the British and the Turks saw the situation the same way, and the stalemate endured.

In June 1917 the Turkish commanders of the forts guarding Aqaba received reports of strange enemy movements in the Syrian deserts to the northeast. It seemed that a twenty-nine-year-old British liaison officer to the Arabs named T. E. Lawrence had trekked across hundreds of miles of desolate terrain to recruit an army among the Howeitat, a Syrian tribe renowned for fighting on camels. The Turks dispatched scouts to find out more. They already knew a little about Lawrence: unusually for British officers of the time, he spoke Arabic, mixed well with the local people, and even dressed in their style. He had also befriended Sherif Feisal, a leader of the Arab revolt. Could he be raising an army to attack Aqaba? To the extent that this was possible, he was worth watching carefully. Then word came that Lawrence had imprudently told an Arab chief, secretly in Turkish pay, that he was heading for Damascus to spread the Arab revolt. This was the Turks' great fear, for a revolt in the more populated areas of the north would be unmanageable.

The army Lawrence had recruited could not have numbered more than 500, but the Howeitat were great fighters on camel, fierce and mobile. The Turks alerted their colleagues in Damascus and dispatched troops to hunt Lawrence down, a difficult task given the mobility of the Arabs and the vastness of the desert.

In the next few weeks, the Englishman's movements were baffling, to say the least: his troops moved not north toward Damascus but south toward the railway town of Ma'an, site of a storage depot used to supply Aqaba, forty miles away. No sooner had Lawrence appeared in the area of Ma'an, however, than he disappeared, reemerging over a hundred miles north to lead a series of raids on the railway line between Amman and Damascus. Now the Turks were doubly alarmed and sent 400 cavalry from Amman to find him.

For a few days, there was no sign of Lawrence. In the meantime an uprising several miles to the south of Ma'an surprised the Turks. An Arab tribe called the Dhumaniyeh had seized control of the town of Abu el Lissal, directly along the route from Ma'an to Aqaba. A Turkish battalion dispatched to take the town back found the blockhouse guarding it destroyed and the Arabs gone. Then, suddenly, something unexpected and quite disturbing occurred: out of nowhere Lawrence's Howeitat army emerged on the hill above Abu el Lissal.

The warrior and the statesman, like the skillful gambler, do not make their luck but prepare for it, attract it, and seem almost to determine their luck. Not only are they, unlike the fool and the coward, adept at making use of opportunities when these occur; they know furthermore how to take advantage, by means of precautions and wise measures, of such and such an opportunity, or of several at once. If one thing happens, they win; if another, they are still the winners; the same circumstance often makes them win in a variety of ways. These prudent men may be praised for their good fortune as well as their good management, and rewarded for their luck as well as for their merits.

C
HARACTERS
,
J
EAN DE LA
B
RUYERE
, 1645-1696

Distracted by the local uprising, the Turks had lost track of Lawrence. Now, linking up with the Dhumaniyeh, he had trapped a Turkish army at Abu el Lissal. The Arabs rode along the hill with enormous speed and dexterity, goading the Turks into wasting ammunition by firing on them. Meanwhile the midday heat took its toll on the Turkish riflemen, and, having waited until the Turks were sufficiently tired, the Arabs, Lawrence among them, charged down the hill. The Turks closed their ranks, but the swift-moving camel cavalry took them from the flank and rear. It was a massacre: 300 Turkish soldiers were killed and the rest taken prisoner.

Now the Turkish commanders at Aqaba finally saw Lawrence's game: he had cut them off from the railway line on which they depended for supplies. Also, seeing the Howeitat's success, other Arab tribes around Aqaba joined up with Lawrence, creating a powerful army that began to wend its way through the narrow gorges toward Aqaba. The Turks had never imagined an army coming from this direction; their fortifications faced the other way, toward the sea and the British. The Arabs had a reputation for ruthlessness with enemies who resisted, and the commanders of the forts in back of Aqaba began to surrender. The Turks sent out their 300-man garrison from Aqaba to put a stop to this advance, but they were quickly surrounded by the swelling number of Arabs.

On July 6 the Turks finally surrendered, and their commanders watched in shock as Lawrence's ragtag army rushed to the sea to take what had been thought to be an impregnable position. With this one blow, Lawrence had completely altered the balance of power in the Middle East.

Interpretation

The fight between Britain and Turkey during World War I superbly demonstrates the difference between a war of attrition and a war of maneuver. Before Lawrence's brilliant move, the British, fighting by the rules of attrition warfare, had been directing the Arabs to capture key points along the railway line. This strategy had played into Turkish hands: the Turks had too few men to patrol the entire line, but once they saw the Arabs attacking at any one place, they could quickly move the men they had and use their superior firepower to either defend it or take it back. Lawrence--a man with no military background, but blessed with common sense--saw the stupidity in this right away. Around the railway line were thousands of square miles of desert unoccupied by the Turks. The Arabs had been masters at a mobile form of warfare on camelback since the days of the prophet Mohammed; vast space at their disposal gave them infinite possibilities for maneuvers that would create threats everywhere, forcing the Turks to bunker themselves in their forts. Frozen in place, the Turks would wither from lack of supplies and would be unable to defend the surrounding region. The key to the overall war was to spread the revolt north, toward Damascus, allowing the Arabs to threaten the entire railway line. But to spread the revolt north, they needed a base in the center. That base was Aqaba.

The British were as hidebound as the Turks and simply could not picture a campaign of a group of Arabs led by a liaison officer. Lawrence would have to do it on his own. Tracing a series of great loops in the vast spaces of the desert, he left the Turks bewildered as to his purpose. Knowing that the Turks feared an attack on Damascus, he deliberately spread the lie that he was aiming for it, making the Turks send troops on a wild-goose chase to the north. Then, exploiting their inability to imagine an Arab attack on Aqaba from the landward side (a failing they shared with his British countrymen), he caught them off guard. Lawrence's subsequent capture of Aqaba was a masterpiece of economy: only two men died, on his side. (Compare this to the unsuccessful British attempt to take Gaza from the Turks that same year in head-on battle, in which over three thousand British soldiers were killed.) The capture of Aqaba was the turning point in Britain's eventual defeat of the Turks in the Middle East.

The greatest power you can have in any conflict is the ability to confuse your opponent about your intentions. Confused opponents do not know how or where to defend themselves; hit them with a surprise attack and they are pushed off balance and fall. To accomplish this you must maneuver with just one purpose: to keep them guessing. You get them to chase you in circles; you say the opposite of what you mean to do; you threaten one area while shooting for another. You create maximum disorder. But to pull this off, you need room to maneuver. If you crowd yourself with alliances that force your hand, if you take positions that box you into corners, if you commit yourself to defending one fixed position, you lose the power of maneuver. You become predictable. You are like the British and the Turks, moving in straight lines in defined areas, ignoring the vast desert around you. People who fight this way deserve the bloody battles they face.

4.
Early in 1937, Harry Cohn, longtime chief of Columbia Pictures, faced a crisis. His most successful director, Frank Capra, had just left the studio, and profits were down. Cohn needed a hit and a replacement for Capra. And he believed he had found the right formula with a comedy called
The Awful Truth
and a thirty-nine-year-old director named Leo McCarey. McCarey had directed
Duck Soup
, with the Marx Brothers, and
Ruggles of Red Gap
, with Charles Laughton, two different but successful comedies. Cohn offered McCarey
The Awful Truth
.

McCarey said he did not like the script, but he would do the picture anyway for a hundred thousand dollars--a huge sum in 1937 dollars. Cohn, who ran Columbia like Mussolini (in fact, he kept a picture of Il Duce in his office), exploded at the price. McCarey got up to go, but as he was leaving, he noticed the producer's office piano. McCarey was a frustrated songwriter. He sat down and began to play a show tune. Cohn had a weakness for such music, and he was entranced: "Anybody who likes music like that has got to be a talented man," he said. "I'll pay that exorbitant fee. Report to work tomorrow."

Expanding on the issue of directive control, Lind introduces the reader to a decision-making model known as the Boyd cycle. Named for Col. John Boyd, the term refers to the understanding that war consists of the repeated cycle of observation, orientation, decision, and action. Colonel Boyd constructed his model as a result of his observations of fighter combat in the Korean War. He had been investigating why American fighter pilots had been consistently able to best enemy pilots in dogfights. His analysis of opposing aircraft led to some startling discoveries. Enemy fighters typically outperformed their American counterparts in speed, climb, and turning ability. But the Americans had the advantage in two subtly critical aspects. First, the hydraulic controls allowed for faster transition from one maneuver to another. Second, the cockpit allowed for a wide field of view for the pilot. The result was that the American pilots could more rapidly observe and orient to the tactical situation moment by moment. Then, having decided what to do next, they could quickly change maneuvers. In battle, this ability to rapidly pass through the observation-orientation-decision-action loop (the Boyd cycle) gave the American pilots a slight time advantage. If one views a dogfight as a series of Boyd cycles, one sees that the Americans would repeatedly gain a time advantage each cycle, until the enemy's actions become totally inappropriate to the changing situations. Hence, the American pilots were able to "out-Boyd cycle" the enemy, thus outmaneuvering him and finally shooting him down. Colonel Boyd and others then began to question whether this pattern might be applicable to other forms of warfare as well.

T
HE
A
RT OF
M
ANEUVER
,
R
OBERT
R. L
EONHARD
, 1991