The School of Strategy, the Art of Amateurs

No two heads of state could be more dissimilar in ambitions or temperament than Abraham Lincoln and Louis XIV. Yet when it came to the conduct of their wars, they shared much in common. Both kept their generals on a tight leash, spending many hours a day in correspondence directing operations: Louis at his writing desk, Lincoln in the telegraph office. They paid especial attention to the theaters closest to their capitals—the Low Countries and northern Virginia, respectively (Louis established a courier service so efficient that a message sent in the morning could receive a reply that evening).

Lincoln in the telegraph office.

Neither man had experience commanding troops in the field, and both made serious mistakes as a result of their micro-management. Yet they also had good reason to take the approach they did. Fighting a war is very different from winning it, and their generals—though professionals in tactics and operational art—did not always see the larger picture. Domestic political constraints, economic factors, and foreign relations had just as much an effect on the course of the war as battlefield victories. In the realm of strategy, the generals were just as much amateurs as the heads of state.

In all of warfare, the leap from operational art to strategy is the hardest to make. Whereas operational art is in many ways an extension of tactics, dealing with the same sorts of considerations, strategy is different in both kind and scale. The problems it seeks to address are of a fundamentally different nature, as are the tools to effect it—yet by the very nature of the problem, it is almost impossible to train anyone to practice good strategy.

The Pointed Arch

In its broadest sense, strategy is the art of accomplishing major national objectives. This encompasses far more than military force alone: it extends to industrial production, economics, diplomatic relations, domestic politics, and so forth. It is the logical extension of synergistic cooperation in warfare, from combined-arms tactics, to joint operations, to whole-of-government strategy. Good strategy is therefore a collaboration of a broad base of subject-matter experts.

Yet unlike other levels of warfare, nothing prepares practitioners from these separate fields to work together. An infantryman is not trained in the specifics of artillery employment, but is trained from the very beginning to fight as part of a combined-arms team. Junior officers frequently gain experience working alongside other services well before they are expected to plan or conduct joint operations. By contrast, there are far, far fewer opportunities for a military officer to work with industrial policy, economic warfare, or diplomacy before he reaches the three- or four-star level. Strategy is like the rib vaulting in a Gothic cathedral: the separate elements only converge at the very top.

The vault of Laon Cathedral.

This is especially true in the age of modern communications, where strategic questions are only decided at the highest level as a matter of course. Whereas in earlier centuries, relatively junior officers and diplomats were routinely entrusted with strategic decisions when deployed in distant theaters, it is now extremely rare for generals, admirals, or ambassadors to be allowed the freedom to do the same on their own initiative—that is reserved for a Chief of Staff or National Security Council at a minimum. Practically speaking, this means there is no apprenticeship for the exercises of strategic decision-making.

Between Ends and Means

The difficulties run much deeper than mere structure or experience. Even if we restrict our view to high-intensity conflicts in which military factors overwhelm all others, there is an inherent difficulty to strategy that makes it more recondite than other levels. The reason for this comes down to two intertwined factors: the enemy’s will and formulating a theory of victory.

Unlike tactical and operational objectives, which are assigned by higher headquarters, strategic objectives are the responsibility of the same people responsible for achieving them—namely, political leaders and their military advisers. While war aims can be defined at the outset in accordance with stated national interest, they must also be reassessed as the conflict takes on lives of their own; reality forces a pragmatic compromise between “What do I want?” and “What can I accomplish?”.

This becomes much, much more difficult when human will is taken into account. Moral factors are critical at all levels of war, down to the individual fighter, but have the most potential to shape the outcome at the strategic level. Whereas it may be possible to force an enemy off a hill or to make a position logistically untenable through physical force alone, only in the most extreme circumstances can it squash resistance altogether. This, in effect, makes strategy a question of defining a theory of victory that is acceptable to the enemy.

Which greatly complicates the problem. Unreasonable demands early in a conflict can provoke an adversary to fight on long after he might otherwise have; equally, they might cow him into agreeing to a compromise he never would have otherwise entertained. The practical effect is that the exact same justification—sparing lives and resources—can be used for either approach. Nor does history provide much guidance. More-or-less predictable patterns of behavior may emerge over the long haul as strategic competitors train each other to calculate probable consequences from given actions, but it only takes one Napoleon to overturn all expectations of reasonable war aims.

It is this ineffable human element—more than technological change between wars—that causes strategists to “fight the last war”. Unlike tactical and operational concepts, which can be modeled according to varying parameters, strategic problems must be treated as unique problems unto themselves.

Moltke was really speaking of operational art when he described strategy as a “system of expedients”, but he may as well have been speaking of the highest level of interstate competition. It is an arena in which everyone is in some way an amateur; success only comes through a felicitous combination of worldly experience, judgment, and luck.

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