The Future of Strategy

Colin S. Gray

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745687971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Strategy is not a modern invention. It is an essential and enduring feature of human history that is here to stay. In this original essay, Colin S. Gray, world-renowned scholar of strategic thought, discusses the meaning of strategy and its importance for politicians and the military as a means of achieving desired outcomes in complex, uncertain conditions.

Drawing on a wide range of examples from the Great Peloponnesian War to the Second World War, Vietnam, and the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gray ably shows how great military thinkers of the past and present have acted strategically in their various ideological, political, geographical and cultural contexts. Looking to the future, he argues that strategy will continue to provide a vital tool-kit for survival and security, but that the global threat posed by nuclear weapons remains an on-going challenge without obvious practical solutions. As Gray boldy asserts, there is no promised land ahead, only hard and dangerous times that will require us to master the theory and practice of strategy to secure our own future.

1
Politics the Master

The Argument: Basics of Strategy as Enduring Narrative

In this opening chapter I explain the meaning of strategy, and in particular why and how it is connected so umbilically to our human nature and also to our practice of political behaviour. While there are other ways in which we need to contextualize strategy, by far the most important are those flagged here in this chapter. We devise and have strategy because of our human needs – most especially for security – and strategy has to be made, and to a degree executed, in a process that is always political in its nature. This is the triptych that lies at the heart of this book and runs as a master theme throughout.

Strategy can be about many things, but primarily it must always be about politics. The reason for this is that politics provides the enabling mechanism for community action. It is true that politics can take a wide array of forms, often clearly different from each other. However, with regard to the enabling of strategy, which has to be a political process, almost any such fulfils the same essential purpose. This process, whatever its local colour, confers legitimacy of authority on some executive body, which allows that body to decide, and perhaps act, on behalf of a whole political community. My aim here is to explain the nature of strategy, particularly in the context of its ever-shifting character. The more obvious changes to strategic phenomena have been so great that it is scarcely surprising that misunderstanding and even confusion have been rife. The history of strategy – or strategic history, a term I prefer – is amply littered with misconceptions, most of which are readily avoidable and indeed correctable.

Strategy in a more or less military context has been a permanent feature of human experience. This well-evidenced claim is key to understanding most aspects of our subject. We do strategy very much because we have no prudent alternative. We may do it poorly, but that is another matter. To be blunt, we do strategy because our human political condition demands it. Our human condition, more generally, also commands that we do politics. My argument comprises the austere dual claims that historical experience has allowed us no prudent choice other than to behave both politically and strategically. Recurrent controversy about Strategic Studies, or the relevance of strategy in the future, betrays a failure to comprehend the enduring human condition. Often, students considering the study of politics are confronted with the need to choose among a competing array of options. All too infrequently is it explained to them that strategy in its military connection, rather grim and old-fashioned as it may appear, is not merely an optional extra for politics. Contrary to appearances perhaps, this book is not written in any important sense to advocate for Strategic Studies. When explained properly, the case for the study of strategy all but makes itself.¹

While we cannot know specific details about the exact character of the future, we are well informed about its recurring features, thanks to our access to our strategic history.² The details of this will often be uncertain or contested, but still it is possible to be reasonably sure what happened and why. It may seem contradictory to argue in the same breath that we can find evidence of change which was sometimes very rapid, and yet that little of lasting significance alters. The proposition that strategy has stayed the same across time is crucial for understanding my argument. Strategy is an eternal and ubiquitous subject.³ This rather elementary, though imperial, idea meets some popular resistance from people who are persuaded that, because time moves on, so must the important elements in its manifestation. But the function of strategy is not necessarily to understand the contemporary realities of strategic choice, which shifts to reflect the pressures and needs of particular circumstances, times and personalities. In this book I draw a sharp distinction between the idea of strategy – singular, expressed in one general theory applicable to all historical times, places and circumstances – and strategies in the plural. The latter are the choices made by particular historical people and institutions, given the assets available to them at the time and the unique desiderata of their contexts. The biggest challenge is to be able to cope with the superficially contrasting evidence of both change and historical continuity. What unites Pericles of Athens, Julius Caesar, Edward I (and III), Moltke the Elder and the Younger, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig and Generals George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower and David Petraeus is the fact that all attempted to practise strategy – though naturally within the scope of the material and ideational cultures of their day. They all needed and sought to be strategists.

A few professional historians challenge the idea advanced here that strategy is effectively an eternal necessity for prudent human behaviour. Instead, they claim that our contemporary idea of strategy can be dated only to the 1770s. This is probably true. Our modern understanding, and indeed use, of the term ‘strategy’ assuredly dates only to 1771.⁴ However, the idea that history was devoid of attempts at strategic thought and practice prior to the late eighteenth century is absurd.⁵ Our whole human history is a protracted strategic narrative, regardless of what it was called and how it was defined at the time. What is more, even when the meaning of a fairly novel concept (as in the nineteenth century when strategy focused on battle and its consequences) shifts noticeably, as strategy moved in its meaning towards policy, it is essential not to forget what did not and could not shift.⁶ Functional strategists in the past could speak in Greek, Latin, French, German or whatever, and certainly were ordered in thought and behaviour by the needs of their contemporary historical contexts. But strategy is and has always been a function whose essential logic is resistant to the vagaries of particular times and places. This enduring logic holds that strategy is all about the attempted achievement of desired political ENDS, through the choice of suitable strategic WAYS, employing largely the military MEANS then available or accessible. To this fundamental triptych of ends, ways and means, it is advisable to insist upon adding the vital ingredient of ASSUMPTIONS. This fourth element is always important and typically reigns unchallenged as the greatest source of mischief for entire strategic enterprises. At least, this has been my personal experience in strategic argument conducted over five decades.

Nothing is more important than recognition of the essential Trinitarian logical nature of the interdependent strategy function. The elementary, indeed the elemental, strategic logic of the mutual dependencies of ends, ways and means (never forgetting assumptions) united functioning strategists across millennia and cultures. Problems in contemporary strategy are ever changing, but they all have common roots. It has been an eternal human strategic reality that desired political ends can only be pursued in accessible ways and by means that are mobilizable. Even though strategists and those they sought to advise have been capable of adopting almost awesomely improbable assumptions, the game has always had to be about ends, ways, and means – though ends, meaning desired consequences, are not independently sovereign. With the possible exception of nuclear realities after 1945, it is not possible to explain our human (strategic) history except with reference to the strategy function, even though it has frequently been misunderstood by contemporaries who let their political ambitions and desires drive their assumptions down a rose-strewn path.

I should probably restate what some readers might have found difficult to accept. I am arguing that strategy has not changed as a broad function through the ages, and indeed that it could not do so given the material and ideational actualities within which it is bound. Of course, polities and their leaders can and do make mistakes – it is often less than obvious just what contemporary ways and means can accomplish. However, there is a discipline about the strategy function that is literally beyond cultural influence. Cunning plans and good fortune can certainly deliver success despite the odds calculated from a simple assessment of relative combat strengths, but plans that depend upon enemy folly and luck have a way of ending in frustration, or much worse (e.g. Stalingrad, 1942–3, or Dien Bien Phu, 1954).

Roots of Strategy: Human Nature and Politics

Of course the details of change in strategic history can be highly significant, in the space of only a generation (which is to say twenty or thirty years). Nothing in this text denies evidence of change in character of detail. However, change – usually movement – is much easier to spot than continuity, with the inevitable consequence that the latter often escapes due notice. This is unfortunate for understanding of the meaning of the past for the present and future. It can be quite a challenge to explain persuasively why there is an enduring sense in past strategic choices that are relevant to the subject of strategy in history. While the past is done and gone, along with many of its consequences, the contemporary strategist needs the ability to understand the past in terms of an historical context that is still unrolling in detail. The Romans will not invade Britannia again, but the reasons why first Julius Caesar, then Emperor Claudius, did so in the first century BC continue to be relevant to strategy and its politics in the twenty-first century. In order to justify this bold claim, it is important to recognize the key elements of the argument, and the evidence needed to support them. The proposition that strategy is a timeless feature in human history can be summed up in three closely linked claims that can be fairly easily proved. The argument has the following mutually supporting constituent parts, which need to be considered as a whole.

1. Human nature Despite changes in culture and circumstances, human beings both as individuals and in society have revealed a common nature in the characteristics they are able to detect or surmise across boundaries of time and place.⁷ We have no difficulty understanding Herodotus and Thucydides, even though they were writing nearly 2,500 years ago. The latter historian speaks eloquently and persuas...