The 33 Strategies of War (19 page)

Step 7: Build the group myth.
The armies with the highest morale are armies that have been tested in battle. Soldiers who have fought alongside one another through many campaigns forge a kind of group myth based on their past victories. Living up to the tradition and reputation of the group becomes a matter of pride; anyone who lets it down feels ashamed. To generate this myth, you must lead your troops into as many campaigns as you can. It is wise to start out with easy battles that they can win, building up their confidence. Success alone will help bring the group together. Create symbols and slogans that fit the myth. Your soldiers will want to belong.

Step 8: Be ruthless with grumblers.
Allow grumblers and the chronically disaffected any leeway at all and they will spread disquiet and even panic throughout the group. As fast as you can, you must isolate them and get rid of them. All groups contain a core of people who are more motivated and disciplined than the rest--your best soldiers. Recognize them, cultivate their goodwill, and set them up as examples. These people will serve as natural ballasts against those who are disaffected and panicky.

You know, I am sure, that not numbers or strength brings victory in war; but whichever army goes into battle stronger in soul, their enemies generally cannot withstand them.

--Xenophon (430?-355?
B.C.
)

HISTORICAL EXAMPLES

1.
In the early 1630s, Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), a provincial gentleman farmer in Cambridgeshire, England, fell victim to a depression and to constant thoughts of death. Deep in crisis, he converted to the Puritan religion, and suddenly his life took a new turn: he felt he had experienced a direct communion with God. Now he believed in providence, the idea that everything happens for a reason and according to God's will. Whereas before he had been despondent and indecisive, now he was filled with purpose: he thought himself among God's elect.

Eventually Cromwell became a member of Parliament and a vocal defender of the common people in their grievances against the aristocracy. Yet he felt marked by providence for something larger than politics: he had visions of a great crusade. In 1642, Parliament, in a bitter struggle with Charles I, voted to cut off the king's funds until he agreed to limits on royal power. When Charles refused, civil war broke out between the Cavaliers (supporters of the king, who wore their hair long) and the Roundheads (the rebels, so called since they cropped their hair short). Parliament's most fervent supporters were Puritans like Cromwell, who saw the war against the king as his chance--more than his chance, his calling.

Although Cromwell had no military background, he hurriedly formed a troop of sixty horsemen from his native Cambridgeshire. His aim was to incorporate them in a larger regiment, gain military experience by fighting under another commander, and slowly prove his worth. He was confident of ultimate victory, for he saw his side as unbeatable: after all, God was on their side, and all his men were believers in the cause of creating a more pious England.

Despite his lack of experience, Cromwell was something of a military visionary: he imagined a new kind of warfare spearheaded by a faster, more mobile cavalry, and in the war's first few months he proved a brave and effective leader. He was given more troops to command but soon realized that he had grossly overestimated the fighting spirit of those on his side: time and again he led cavalry charges that pierced enemy lines, only to watch in disgust as his soldiers broke order to plunder the enemy camp. Sometimes he tried to hold part of his force in reserve to act as reinforcements later in the battle, but the only command they listened to was to advance, and in retreat they were hopelessly disordered. Representing themselves as crusaders, Cromwell's men were revealed by battle as mercenaries, fighting for pay and adventure. They were useless.

In 1643, when Cromwell was made a colonel at the head of his own regiment, he decided to break with the past. From now on, he would recruit only soldiers of a certain kind: men who, like himself, had experienced religious visions and revelations. He sounded out the aspirants, tested them for the depth of their faith. Departing from a long tradition, he appointed commoners, not aristocrats, as officers; as he wrote to a friend, "I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else." Cromwell made his recruits sing psalms and pray together. In a stern check on bad discipline, he taught them to see all their actions as part of God's plan. And he looked after them in an unusual way for the times, making sure they were well fed, well clothed, and promptly paid.

When Cromwell's army went into battle, it was now a force to reckon with. The men rode in tight formation, loudly singing psalms. As they neared the king's forces, they would break into a "pretty round trot," not the headlong and disorderly charge of other troops. Even in contact with the enemy, they kept their order, and they retreated with as much discipline as when they advanced. Since they believed that God was with them, they had no fear of death: they could march straight up a hill into enemy fire without breaking step. Having gained control over his cavalry, Cromwell could maneuver them with infinite flexibility. His troops won battle after battle.

In 1645, Cromwell was named lieutenant general of the cavalry in the New Model Army. That year, at the Battle of Naseby, his disciplined regiment was crucial in the Roundheads' victory. A few days later, his cavalry finished off the Royalist forces at Langport, effectively putting an end to the first stage of the Civil War.

Interpretation

That Cromwell is generally considered one of history's great military leaders is all the more remarkable given that he learned soldiery on the job. During the second stage of the Civil War, he became head of the Roundhead armies, and later, after defeating King Charles and having him executed, he became Lord Protector of England. Although he was ahead of his times with his visions of mobile warfare, Cromwell was not a brilliant strategist or field tactician; his success lay in the morale and discipline of his cavalry, and the secret to those was the quality of the men he recruited--true believers in his cause. Such men were naturally open to his influence and accepting of his discipline. With each new victory, they grew more committed to him and more cohesive. He could ask the most of them.

Above all else, then, pay attention to your staff, to those you recruit to your cause. Many will pretend to share your beliefs, but your first battle will show that all they wanted was a job. Soldiers like these are mercenaries and will get you nowhere. True believers are what you want; expertise and impressive resumes matter less than character and the capacity for sacrifice. Recruits of character will give you a staff already open to your influence, making morale and discipline infinitely easier to attain. This core personnel will spread the gospel for you, keeping the rest of the army in line. As far as possible in this secular world, make battle a religious experience, an ecstatic involvement in something transcending the present.

2.
In 1931 the twenty-three-year-old Lyndon Baines Johnson was offered the kind of job he had been dreaming of: secretary to Richard Kleberg, newly elected congressman from Texas's Fourteenth Congressional District. Johnson was a high-school debating teacher at the time, but he had worked on several political campaigns and was clearly a young man of ambition. His students at Sam Houston High--in Houston, Texas--assumed that he would quickly forget about them, but, to the surprise of two of his best debaters, L. E. Jones and Gene Latimer, he not only kept in touch, he wrote to them regularly from Washington. Six months later came a bigger surprise still: Johnson invited Jones and Latimer to Washington to work as his assistants. With the Depression at its height, jobs were scarce--particularly jobs with this kind of potential. The two teenagers grabbed the opportunity. Little did they know what they were in for.

The pay was ridiculously low, and it soon became clear that Johnson intended to work the two men to their human limit. They put in eighteen-or twenty-hour days, mostly answering constituents' mail. "The chief has a knack, or, better said, a genius for getting the most out of those around him," Latimer later wrote. "He'd say, 'Gene, it seems L.E.'s a little faster than you today.' And I'd work faster. 'L.E., he's catching up with you.' And pretty soon, we'd both be pounding [the typewriter] for hours without stopping, just as fast as we could."

Jones didn't usually take orders too well, but he found himself working harder and harder for Johnson. His boss seemed destined for something great: that Johnson would scale the heights of power was written all over his face--and he would bring the ambitious Jones along with him. Johnson could also turn everything into a cause, making even the most trivial issue a crusade for Kleberg's constituents, and Jones felt part of that crusade--part of history.

The most important reason for both Jones's and Latimer's willingness to work so hard, though, was that Johnson worked still harder. When Jones trudged into the office at five in the morning, the lights would already be on, and Johnson would be hard at work. He was also the last to leave. He never asked his employees to do anything he wouldn't do himself. His energy was intense, boundless, and contagious. How could you let such a man down by working less hard than he did?

THE WOLVES AND THE DOGS AT WAR

One day, enmity broke out between the dogs and the wolves. The dogs elected a Greek to be their general. But he was in no hurry to engage in battle, despite the violent intimidation of the wolves. "Understand," he said to them, "why I deliberately put off engagement. It is because one must always take counsel before acting. The wolves, on the one hand, are all of the same race, all of the same color. But our soldiers have very varied habits, and each one is proud of his own country. Even their colors are not uniform: some are black, some russet, and others white or ash-grey. How can I lead into battle those who are not in harmony and who are all dissimilar?'
In all armies it is unity of will and purpose which assures victory over the enemy.

F
ABLES
, A
ESOP
, S
IXTH CENTURY B.C.

Not only was Johnson relentlessly demanding, but his criticisms were often cruel. Occasionally, though, he would do Jones and Latimer some unexpected favor or praise them for something they hadn't realized he had noticed. At moments like this, the two young men quickly forgot the many bitter moments in their work. For Johnson, they felt, they would go to the ends of the earth.

And indeed Johnson rose through the ranks, first winning influence within Kleberg's office, then gaining the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself. In 1935, Roosevelt named Johnson Texas state director for the recently built National Youth Administration. Now Johnson began to build a larger team around the core of his two devoted assistants; he also built loyalties in a scattering of others for whom he found jobs in Washington. The dynamic he had created with Jones and Latimer now repeated itself on a larger scale: assistants competed for his attention, tried to please him, to meet his standards, to be worthy of him and of his causes.

In 1937, when Congressman James Buchanan suddenly died, the seat for Texas's Tenth District unexpectedly fell empty. Despite the incredible odds against him--he was still relatively unknown and way too young--Johnson decided to run and called in his chips: his carefully cultivated acolytes poured into Texas, becoming chauffeurs, canvassers, speechwriters, barbecue cooks, crowd entertainers, nurses--whatever the campaign needed. In the six short weeks of the race, Johnson's foot soldiers covered the length and breadth of the Tenth District. And in front of them at every step was Johnson himself, campaigning as if his life depended on it. One by one, he and his team won over voters in every corner of the district, and finally, in one of the greatest upsets in any American political race, Johnson won the election. His later career, first as a senator, then as U.S. president, obscured the foundation of his first great success: the army of devoted and tireless followers that he had carefully built up over the previous five years.

Interpretation

Lyndon Johnson was an intensely ambitious young man. He had neither money nor connections but had something more valuable: an understanding of human psychology. To command influence in the world, you need a power base, and here human beings--a devoted army of followers--are more valuable than money. They will do things for you that money cannot buy.

That army is tricky to build. People are contradictory and defensive: push them too hard and they resent you; treat them well and they take you for granted. Johnson avoided those traps by making his staff want his approval. To do that he led from the front. He worked harder than any of his staff, and his men saw him do it; failing to match him would have made them feel guilty and selfish. A leader who works that hard stirs competitive instincts in his men, who do all they can to prove themselves worthier than their teammates. By showing how much of his own time and effort he was willing to sacrifice, Johnson earned their respect. Once he had that respect, criticism, even when harsh, became an effective motivator, making his followers feel they were disappointing him. At the same time, some kind act out of the blue would break down any ability to resist him.

Hannibal was the greatest general of antiquity by reason of his admirable comprehension of the morale of combat, of the morale of the soldier, whether his own or the enemy's. He shows his greatness in this respect in all the different incidents of war, of campaign, of action. His men were not better than the Roman soldiers. They were not as well-armed, one-half less in number. Yet he was always the conqueror. He understood the value of morale. He had the absolute confidence of his people. In addition, he had the art, in commanding an army, of always securing the advantage of morale.

C
OLONEL
C
HARLES
A
RDANT DU
P
ICQ
, 1821-70