The 33 Strategies of War (23 page)

While working to ruin Philip's credit, Elizabeth put an important part of her meager resources into building up England's spy network--in fact, she made it the most sophisticated intelligence agency in Europe. With agents throughout Spain, she was kept informed of Philip's every move. She knew exactly how large the armada was to be and when it was to be launched. That allowed her to postpone calling up her army and reserves until the very last moment, saving the government money.

Finally, in the summer of 1588, the Spanish Armada was ready. It comprised 128 ships, including twenty large galleons, and a vast number of sailors and soldiers. Equal in size to England's entire navy, it had cost a fortune. The Armada set sail from Lisbon in the second week of July. But Elizabeth's spies had fully informed her of Spain's plans, and she was able to send a fleet of smaller, more mobile English ships to harass the Armada on its way up the French coast, sinking its supply ships and generally creating chaos. As the commander of the English fleet, Lord Howard of Effingham, reported, "Their force is wonderful great and strong; and yet we pluck their feathers little by little."

Finally the Armada came to anchor in the port of Calais, where it was to link up with the Spanish armies stationed in the Low Countries. Determined to prevent it from picking up these reinforcements, the English gathered eight large ships, loaded them with flammable substances, and set them on course for the Spanish fleet, which was anchored in tight formation. As the British ships approached the harbor under full sail, their crews set them on fire and evacuated. The result was havoc, with dozens of Spanish ships in flames. Others scrambled for safe water, often colliding with one another. In their haste to put to sea, all order broke down.

The loss of ships and supplies at Calais devastated Spanish discipline and morale, and the invasion was called off. To avoid further attacks on the return to Spain, the remaining ships headed not south but north, planning to sail home around Scotland and Ireland. The English did not even bother with pursuit; they knew that the rough weather in those waters would do the damage for them. By the time the shattered Armada returned to Spain, forty-four of its ships had been lost and most of the rest were too damaged to be seaworthy. Almost two-thirds of its sailors and soldiers had perished at sea. Meanwhile England had lost not a single ship, and barely a hundred men had died in action.

It was a great triumph, but Elizabeth wasted no time on gloating. To save money, she immediately decommissioned the navy. She also refused to listen to advisers who urged her to follow up her victory by attacking the Spanish in the Low Countries. Her goals were limited: to exhaust Philip's resources and finances, forcing him to abandon his dreams of Catholic dominance and instituting a delicate balance of power in Europe. And this, indeed, was ultimately her greatest triumph, for Spain never recovered financially from the disaster of the Armada and soon gave up its designs on England altogether.

Limitations are troublesome, but they are effective. If we live economically in normal times, we are prepared for times of want. To be sparing saves us from humiliation. Limitations are also indispensable in the regulation of world conditions. In nature there are fixed limits for summer and winter, day and night, and these limits give the year its meaning. In the same way, economy, by setting fixed limits upon expenditures, acts to preserve property and prevent injury to the people.

T
HE
I C
HING
, C
HINA
,
CIRCA EIGHTH CENTURY B.C.

Interpretation

The defeat of the Spanish Armada has to be considered one of the most cost-effective in military history: a second-rate power that barely maintained a standing army was able to face down the greatest empire of its time. What made the victory possible was the application of a basic military axiom: attack their weaknesses with your strengths. England's strengths were its small, mobile navy and its elaborate intelligence network; its weaknesses were its limited resources in men, weaponry, and money. Spain's strengths were its vast wealth and its huge army and fleet; its weaknesses were the precarious structure of its finances, despite their magnitude, and the lumbering size and slowness of its ships.

Elizabeth refused to fight on Spain's terms, keeping her army out of the fray. Instead she attacked Spain's weaknesses with her strengths: plaguing the Spanish galleons with her smaller ships, wreaking havoc on the country's finances, using special ops to grind its war machine to a halt. She was able to control the situation by keeping England's costs down while making the war effort more and more expensive for Spain. Eventually a time came when Philip could only fail: if the Armada sank, he would be ruined for years to come, and even if the Armada triumphed, victory would come so dear that he would ruin himself trying to exploit it on English soil.

Understand: no person or group is completely either weak or strong. Every army, no matter how invincible it seems, has a weak point, a place left unprotected or undeveloped. Size itself can be a weakness in the end. Meanwhile even the weakest group has something it can build on, some hidden strength. Your goal in war is not simply to amass a stockpile of weapons, to increase your firepower so you can blast your enemy away. That is wasteful, expensive to build up, and leaves you vulnerable to guerrilla-style attacks. Going at your enemies blow by blow, strength against strength, is equally unstrategic. Instead you must first assess their weak points: internal political problems, low morale, shaky finances, overly centralized control, their leader's megalomania. While carefully keeping your own weaknesses out of the fray and preserving your strength for the long haul, hit their Achilles' heel again and again. Having their weaknesses exposed and preyed upon will demoralize them, and, as they tire, new weaknesses will open up. By carefully calibrating strengths and weaknesses, you can bring down your Goliath with a slingshot.

Abundance makes me poor.

--Ovid (43
B.C.-A.D.
17)

In all this--in selection of nutriment, of place and climate, of recreation--there commands an instinct of self-preservation which manifests itself most unambiguously as an instinct for self-defense. Not to see many things, not to hear them, not to let them approach one--first piece of ingenuity, first proof that one is no accident but a necessity. The customary word for this self-defensive instinct is taste. Its imperative commands, not only to say No when Yes would be a piece of "selflessness," but also to say No as little as possible. To separate oneself, to depart from that to which No would be required again and again. The rationale is that defensive expenditures, be they never so small, become a rule, a habit, lead to an extraordinary and perfectly superfluous impoverishment. Our largest expenditures are our most frequent small ones. Warding off, not letting come close, is an expenditure--one should not deceive oneself over this--a strength squandered on negative objectives. One can merely through the constant need to ward off become too weak any longer to defend oneself.... Another form of sagacity and self-defense consists in reacting as seldom as possible and withdrawing from situations and relationships in which one would be condemned as it were to suspend one's freedom, one's initiative, and become a mere reagent.

E
CCE
H
OMO
, F
RIEDRICH
N
IETZSCHE
, 1888

KEYS TO WARFARE

Reality can be defined by a sharp series of limitations on every living thing, the final boundary being death. We have only so much energy to expend before we tire; only so much in the way of food and resources is available to us; our skills and capacities can go only so far. An animal lives within those limits: it does not try to fly higher or run faster or expend endless energy amassing a pile of food, for that would exhaust it and leave it vulnerable to attack. It simply tries to make the most of what it has. A cat, for instance, instinctively practices an economy of motion and gesture, never wasting effort. People who live in poverty, similarly, are acutely aware of their limits: forced to make the most of what they have, they are endlessly inventive. Necessity has a powerful effect on their creativity.

The problem faced by those of us who live in societies of abundance is that we lose a sense of limit. We are carefully shielded from death and can pass months, even years, without contemplating it. We imagine endless time at our disposal and slowly drift further from reality; we imagine endless energy to draw on, thinking we can get what we want simply by trying harder. We start to see everything as limitless--the goodwill of friends, the possibility of wealth and fame. A few more classes and books and we can extend our talents and skills to the point where we become different people. Technology can make anything achievable.

Abundance makes us rich in dreams, for in dreams there are no limits. But it makes us poor in reality. It makes us soft and decadent, bored with what we have and in need of constant shocks to remind us that we are alive. In life you must be a warrior, and war requires realism. While others may find beauty in endless dreams, warriors find it in reality, in awareness of limits, in making the most of what they have. Like the cat, they look for the perfect economy of motion and gesture--the way to give their blows the greatest force with the least expenditure of effort. Their awareness that their days are numbered--that they could die at any time--grounds them in reality. There are things they can never do, talents they will never have, lofty goals they will never reach; that hardly bothers them. Warriors focus on what they
do
have, the strengths that they
do
possess and that they must use creatively. Knowing when to slow down, to renew, to retrench, they outlast their opponents. They play for the long term.

Through the final years of French colonial rule in Vietnam and on through the Vietnam War, the military leader of the Vietnamese insurgents was General Vo Nguyen Giap. In first the French and then the Americans, he faced an enemy with vastly superior resources, firepower, and training. His own army was a ragtag collection of peasants; they had morale, a deep sense of purpose, but little else. Giap had no trucks to carry supplies, and his communications were nineteenth century. Another general would have tried to catch up, and Giap had the opportunity--he had the offer of trucks, radios, weapons, and training from China--but he saw them as a trap. It wasn't only that he didn't want to spend his limited funds on such things; in the long run, he believed, all they would do was turn the North Vietnamese into a weaker version of their enemy. Instead he chose to make the most of what he had, turning his army's weaknesses into virtues.

Trucks could be spotted from the air, and the Americans could bomb them. But the Americans could not bomb supply lines they could not see. Exploiting his resources, then, Giap used a vast network of peasant coolies to carry supplies on their backs. When they came to a river, they would cross it on rope bridges hung just below the surface of the water. Right up to the end of the war, the Americans were still trying to figure out how North Vietnam supplied its armies in the field.

Meanwhile Giap developed hit-and-run guerrilla tactics that gave him enormous potential to disrupt American supply lines. To fight, move troops, and ferry supplies, the Americans used helicopters, which gave them tremendous mobility. But the war ultimately had to be fought on the ground, and Giap was endlessly inventive in using the jungle to neutralize American air power, disorient American foot soldiers, and camouflage his own troops. He could not hope to win a pitched battle against superior U.S. weaponry, so he put his effort into spectacular, symbolic, demoralizing attacks that would drive home the futility of the war when they appeared on American TV. With the minimum that he had, he created the maximum effect.

Armies that seem to have the edge in money, resources, and firepower tend to be predictable. Relying on their equipment instead of on knowledge and strategy, they grow mentally lazy. When problems arise, their solution is to amass more of what they already have. But it's not what you have that brings you victory, it's how you use it. When you have less, you are naturally more inventive. Creativity gives you an edge over enemies dependent on technology; you will learn more, be more adaptable, and you will outsmart them. Unable to waste your limited resources, you will use them well. Time will be your ally.

If you have less than your enemy, do not despair. You can always turn the situation around by practicing perfect economy. If you and your enemy are equals, getting hold of more weaponry matters less than making better use of what you have. If you have more than your enemy, fighting economically is as important as ever. As Pablo Picasso said, Even if you are wealthy, act poor. The poor are more inventive, and often have more fun, because they value what they have and know their limits. Sometimes in strategy you have to ignore your greater strength and force yourself to get the maximum out of the minimum. Even if you have the technology, fight the peasant's war.

This does not mean that you disarm or fail to exploit what advantages you may have in materiel. In Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. campaign against Iraq in 1991, American military strategists made full use of their superior technology, particularly in the air, but they did not depend on this for victory. They had learned the lesson of their debacle twenty years earlier in Vietnam, and their maneuvers showed the kind of deceptive feints and use of mobility associated with smaller, guerrilla-like forces. This combination of advanced technology and creative flair proved devastating.