The 33 Strategies of War (17 page)

Separate to live, unite to fight.

--Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

KEYS TO WARFARE

The world is full of people looking for a secret formula for success and power. They do not want to think on their own; they just want a recipe to follow. They are attracted to the idea of strategy for that very reason. In their minds strategy is a series of steps to be followed toward a goal. They want these steps spelled out for them by an expert or a guru. Believing in the power of imitation, they want to know exactly what some great person has done before. Their maneuvers in life are as mechanical as their thinking.

To separate yourself from such a crowd, you need to get rid of a common misconception: the essence of strategy is not to carry out a brilliant plan that proceeds in steps; it is to put yourself in situations where you have more options than the enemy does. Instead of grasping at Option A as the single right answer, true strategy is positioning yourself to be able to do A, B, or C depending on the circumstances. That is strategic depth of thinking, as opposed to formulaic thinking.

Sun-tzu expressed this idea differently: what you aim for in strategy, he said, is
shih
, a position of potential force--the position of a boulder perched precariously on a hilltop, say, or of a bowstring stretched taut. A tap on the boulder, the release of the bowstring, and potential force is violently unleashed. The boulder or arrow can go in any direction; it is geared to the actions of the enemy. What matters is not following pre-ordained steps but placing yourself in
shih
and giving yourself options.

Napoleon was probably unaware of Sun-tzu's concept of
shih
, yet he had perhaps history's greatest understanding of it. Once he had positioned his seven corps in their seemingly chaotic pattern along the Rhine and his reserve forces in the Black Forest, he was in
shih
. Wherever Mack turned, whatever he did, the Austrians were doomed. Napoleon had endless options while Mack had only a few, and all of them bad.

It was during this period of post-war introspection and evaluation that one of the fundamental military concepts of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau coalesced into a clearly defined doctrine understandable to and understood by all officers in the Army. This was the concept of
Auftragstaktik
, or mission tactics. Moltke himself inserted in the draft of a new tactical manual for senior commanders the following lines: "A favorable situation will never be exploited if commanders wait for orders. The highest commander and the youngest soldier must always be conscious of the fact that omission and inactivity are worse than resorting to the wrong expedient."...Nothing epitomized the outlook and performance of the German General Staff, and of the German Army which it coordinated, more than this concept of mission tactics: the responsibility of each German officer and noncommissioned officer...to do without question or doubt whatever the situation required, as he saw it. This meant that he should act without awaiting orders, if action seemed necessary. It also meant that he should act contrary to orders, if these did not seem to be consistent with the situation. To make perfectly clear that action contrary to orders was not considered either as disobedience or lack of discipline, German commanders began to repeat one of Moltke's favorite stories, of an incident observed while visiting the headquarters of Prince Frederick Charles. A major, receiving a tongue-lashing from the Prince for a tactical blunder, offered the excuse that he had been obeying orders, and reminded the Prince that a Prussian officer was taught that an order from a superior was tantamount to an order from the King. Frederick Charles promptly responded: "His Majesty made you a major because he believed you would know when not to obey his orders." This simple story became guidance for all following generations of German officers.

A G
ENIUS FOR
W
AR
: T
HE
G
ERMAN
A
RMY AND
G
ENERAL
S
TAFF,
1807-1945
, C
OLONEL
T.N. D
UPUY
, 1977

Napoleon had always aimed at his version of
shih
, and he perfected it in the 1805 campaign. Obsessed with structure and organization, he developed the corps system, building flexibility into the very skeleton of his army. The lesson is simple: a rigid, centralized organization locks you into linear strategies; a fluid, segmented army gives you options, endless possibilities for reaching
shih
. Structure
is
strategy--perhaps the most important strategic choice you will make. Should you inherit a group, analyze its structure and alter it to suit your purposes. Pour your creative energy into its organization, making fluidity your goal. In doing so you will be following in the footsteps not only of Napoleon but of perhaps the greatest war machine in modern times, the Prussian (and later German) army.

Shortly after Napoleon's devastating defeat of the Prussians at the Battle of Jena in 1806 (see chapter 2), the Prussian leaders did some soul-searching. They saw they were stuck in the past; their way of doing things was too rigid. Suddenly the military reformers, including Carl von Clausewitz, were taken seriously and given power. And what they decided to do was unprecedented in history: they would institutionalize success by designing a superior army structure.

At the core of this revolution was the creation of a general staff, a cadre of officers specially trained and educated in strategy, tactics, and leadership. A king, a prime minister, or even a general might be incompetent at war, but a group of brilliant and well-trained officers on the army's staff could compensate for his failures. The structure of this body was unfixed: each new chief of staff could alter its size and function to suit his needs and the times. After each campaign or training exercise, the staff would rigorously examine itself and its performance. A whole section was created for the purpose of these examinations and for the study of military history. The general staff would learn from its mistakes and those of others. It was to be a work permanently in progress.

The most important reform was the development of the
Auftragstaktik
(mission-oriented command system). In German there are two words for "command":
Auftrag
and
Befehl
. A
Befehl
is an order to be obeyed to the letter. An
Auftrag
is much more general: it is a statement of overall mission, a directive to be followed in its spirit, not its letter. The
Auftragstaktik
--inspired by Prussia's archenemy Napoleon and the leeway he gave his marshals--permeated the general staff. Officers were first inculcated with the philosophy of German warfare: speed, the need to take the offensive, and so on. Then they were put through exercises to help them develop their ability to think on their own, to make decisions that met the overall philosophy but responded to the circumstances of the moment. Leading the equivalent of a corps in battle, officers were given missions to accomplish and then were let loose. They were judged by the results of their actions, not on how those results were achieved.

The general staff (with a few interruptions) was in place from 1808 to the end of World War II. During that period the Germans consistently outfought other armies in the field-including the Allies in World War I, despite the severe limitations of trench warfare. Their success culminated in the most devastating military victory in modern history: the 1940 blitzkrieg invasion of France and the Low Countries, when the German army ran rings around the rigid defenses of the French. It was the structure of their army, and their use of the
Auftragstaktik
, that gave them more options and greater potential force.

The German general staff should serve as the organizational model for any group that aims at mobility and strategic depth. First, the staff's structure was fluid, allowing its leaders to adapt it to their own needs. Second, it examined itself constantly and modified itself according to what it had learned. Third, it replicated its structure through the rest of the army: its officers trained the officers below them, and so on down the line. The smallest team was inculcated with the overall philosophy of the group. Finally, rather than issuing rigid orders, the staff embraced the mission command, the
Auftragstaktik
. By making officers and soldiers feel more creatively engaged, this tactic improved their performance and sped up the decision-making process. Mobility was written into the system.

The key to the
Auftragstaktik
is an overall group philosophy. This can be built around the cause you are fighting for or a belief in the evil of the enemy you face. It can also include the style of warfare--defensive, mobile, ruthlessly aggressive--that best suits it. You must bring the group together around this belief. Then, through training and creative exercises, you must deepen its hold on them, infuse it into their blood. Now, when you unleash your corps on their missions, you can trust their decisions and feel confident in your power to coordinate them.

The Mongol hordes led by Genghis Khan in the first half of the thirteenth century were perhaps the closest precursors to Napoleon's corps. Genghis, who preached a philosophy of Mongol superiority, was a master of mobility in warfare. His segmented forces could disperse and concentrate in complicated patterns; the armies that faced them were shocked at how chaotic they seemed, so impossible to figure out, yet they maneuvered with amazing coordination. Mongol soldiers knew what to do, and when, without being told. For their victims the only explanation was that they were possessed by the devil.

The sinister coordination of the Mongols, however, was actually the result of rigorous training. Every winter in peacetime, Genghis would run the Great Hunt, a three-month-long operation in which he would scatter the entire Mongol army along an eighty-mile line in the steppes of Central Asia and what is now Mongolia. A flag in the ground hundreds of miles away marked the hunt's endpoint. The line would advance, driving before it all the animals in its path. Slowly, in an intricately choreographed maneuver, the ends of the line would curve to form a circle, trapping the animals within. (The hunt's endpoint would form the center of the circle.) As the circle tightened, the animals were killed; the most dangerous of them, the tigers, were left till last. The Great Hunt exercised the Mongols' ability to communicate through signals at a distance, coordinate their movements with precision, know what to do in different circumstances, and act without waiting for orders. Even bravery became an exercise, when individual soldiers would have to take on a tiger. Through hunting and a form of play, Genghis could instill his philosophy, develop cohesion and trust among his men, and tighten his army's discipline.

[
Tom
]
Yawkey was thirty years old when he bought the Red Sox, a hopelessly bankrupt team that had won only forty-three games the previous season and averaged only 2,365 paying customers. The ball club became his toy. Because he loved his players, he spoiled them rotten. And because he spoiled them rotten, they praised him to the skies.... There is a well-publicized exchange in which Bobby Doerr asks Tommy Henrich why the Red Sox weren't able to beat the Yankees in big games. "Weren't we good enough?" Doerr asks. It wasn't that they weren't good enough, Henrich answers. "Your owner was too good to you. The Red Sox didn't have to get into the World Series to drive Cadillacs. The Yankees did."...
[
The Red Sox organization
]
was an amateur operation...pitted against the toughest, most professional operation of all time.

H
ITTER
: T
HE
L
IFE AND
T
URMOILS OF
T
ED
W
ILLIAMS
, E
D
L
INN
, 1993

In unifying your own hordes, find exercises to increase your troops' knowledge of and trust in each other. This will develop implicit communication skills between them and their intuitive sense of what to do next. Time will not then be wasted in the endless transmission of messages and orders or in constantly monitoring your troops in the field. If you can disguise these exercises as play, as in the Great Hunt, so much the better.

Throughout the 1940s and '50s, two great baseball organizations did battle: the Boston Red Sox, built around Ted Williams, and the New York Yankees, with their great hitter Joe DiMaggio. The owner of the Red Sox, Tom Yawkey, believed in pampering his players, creating a pleasant environment for them, developing friendships with them. A happy team would play well, he thought. For this purpose he went drinking with his men, played cards with them, checked them in to nice hotels on tour. He also meddled in managerial decisions, always with an eye toward making things better for his players and keeping them happy.

The Yankees' philosophy was very different, emphasizing discipline and victory at all costs. The organization's separate parts stayed out of one another's business--they understood the team ethos and knew they would be judged on results. The manager was left to make his own decisions. Yankee players felt an intense need to live up to the team's winning traditions; they were afraid of losing.