The 33 Strategies of War (43 page)

Power is deceptive. If we imagine the enemy as a boxer, we tend to focus on his punch. But still more than he depends on his punch, he depends on his legs; once they go weak, he loses balance, he cannot escape the other fighter, he is subject to grueling exchanges, and his punches gradually diminish in force until he is knocked out. When you look at your rivals, do not be distracted by their punch. To engage in any exchange of punches, in life or in war, is the height of stupidity and waste. Power depends on balance and support; so look at what is holding your enemy up, and remember that what holds him up can also make him fall. A person, like an army, usually gets his or her power from three or four simultaneous sources: money, popularity, skillful maneuvering, some particular advantage he has fostered. Knock out one and he will have to depend more on the others; knock out those and he is lost. Weaken a boxer's legs and he will reel and stagger, and when he does, be merciless. No power can stand without its legs.

When the vanes are removed from an arrow, even though the shaft and tip remain it is difficult for the arrow to penetrate deeply.

--Ming dynasty strategist Chieh Hsuan (early seventeenth century
A.D
.)

KEYS TO WARFARE

It is natural in war to focus on the physical aspect of conflict--bodies, equipment, materiel. Even an enlightened strategist will tend to look first at the enemy's army, firepower, mobility, reserves. War is a visceral, emotional affair, an arena of physical danger, and it takes great effort to rise above this level and ask different questions: What makes the enemy army move? What gives it impetus and endurance? Who guides its actions? What is the underlying source of its strength?

The people of Israel cried out to the Lord their God, for their courage failed, because all their enemies had surrounded them and there was no way of escape from them. The whole Assyrian army, their infantry, chariots, and cavalry, surrounded them for thirty-four days, until all the vessels of water belonging to every inhabitant of Bethulia were empty.... Their children lost heart, and the women and young men fainted from thirst and fell down in the streets of the city and in the passages through the gates; there was no strength left in them any longer.... When Judith had ceased crying out to the God of Israel, and had ended all these words, she rose from where she lay prostrate and called her maid and went down into the house where she lived on sabbaths and on her feast days; and she removed the sackcloth which she had been wearing, and took off her widow's garments, and bathed her body with water, and anointed herself with precious ointment, and combed her hair and put on a tiara, and arrayed herself in her gayest apparel, which she used to wear while her husband Manasseh was living. And she put sandals on her feet, and put on her anklets and bracelets and rings, and her earrings and all her ornaments, and made herself very beautiful, to entice the eyes of all men who might see her....... The women went straight on through the valley; and an Assyrian patrol met her and took her into custody, and asked her, "To what people do you belong, and where are you going?" She replied, "I am a daughter of the Hebrews, but I am fleeing from them, for they are about to be handed over to you to be devoured. I am on my way to the presence of Holofernes the commander of your army, to give him a true report; and I will show him a way by which he can go and capture all the hill country without losing one of his men, captured or slain." When the man heard her words, and observed her face--she was in their eyes marvelously beautiful--they said to her "...Go at once to his tent.... And when you stand before him, do not be afraid in your heart, but tell him just what you have said, and he will treat you well."...Her words pleased Holofernes and all his servants, and they marveled at her wisdom and said, "There is no such a woman from one end of the earth to the other, either for beauty of face or wisdom of speech!"...On the fourth day Holofernes held a banquet for his slaves only, and did not invite any of his officers. And he said to Bagoas, the eunuch who had charge of all his personal affairs, "Go now and persuade the Hebrew woman who is in your care to join us and eat and drink with us."...So Bagoas went out from the presence of Holofernes, and approached her...And Judith said, "Who am I, to refuse my lord? Surely whatever pleases him I will do at once, and it will be a joy to me until the day of my death!" So she got up and arrayed herself in all her woman's finery. Then Judith came in and lay down, and olofernes' heart was ravished with her and he was moved with great desire to possess her; for he had been waiting for an opportunity to deceive her, ever since the day he first saw her. So Holofernes said to her, "Drink now, and be merry with us!" Judith said, "I will drink now, my lord, because my life means more to me today than in all the days since I was born."...And Holofernes was greatly pleased with her, and drank a great quantity of wine, much more than he had ever drunk in any one day since he was born. When evening came, his slaves quickly withdrew, and Bagoas closed the tent from outside and shut out the attendants from his master's presence; and they went to bed.... So Judith was left alone in the tent, with Holofernes stretched out on his bed, for he was overcome with wine
.... [
Judith
]
went to the post at the end of the bed, above Holofernes' head, and took down his sword that hung there. She came close to his bed and took ahold of the hair on his head.... And she struck his neck twice with all her might and severed his head from his body. Then she tumbled his body off the bed and pulled the canopy from the posts; after a moment she went out, and gave Holofernes' head to her maid, who placed it in her food bag.... So Bagoas...went into the bedchamber and found him thrown down on the platform dead, with his head cut off and missing. And he cried out with a loud voice and wept and groaned.... Then he went to the tent where Judith had stayed, and when he did not find her he rushed out to the people and shouted, "The slaves have tricked us! One Hebrew woman has brought disgrace upon the house of Nebuchadnezzar! For look, here is Holofernes lying on the ground, and his head is not on him!" When the leaders of the Assyrian army heard this, they rent their tunics and were greatly dismayed, and their loud cries and shouts arose in the midst of the camp.... When the men in the tents heard it, they were amazed at what had happened. Fear and trembling came over them, so that they did not wait for one another, but with one impulse all rushed out and fled by every path across the plain and through the country.... Then the men of Israel, every one that was a soldier, rushed out upon them.... And when the Israelites heard it, with one accord they fell upon the enemy, and cut them down as far as Choba.

J
UDITH
7:19-15:7

Most people have the problem of seeing war as a separate activity unrelated to other realms of human life. But in fact war is a form of power--Carl von Clausewitz called it "politics by other means"--and all forms of power share the same essential structures.

The most visible thing about power is its outward manifestation, what its witnesses see and feel. An army has its size, its weaponry, its shows of discipline, its aggressive maneuvers; individuals have many ways of showing their position and influence. It is the nature of power to present a forceful front, to seem menacing and intimidating, strong and decisive. But this outward display is often exaggerated or even downright deceptive, since power does not dare show its weaknesses. And beneath the display is the support on which power rests--its "center of gravity." The phrase is von Clausewitz's, who elaborated it as "the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends." This is the part that governs the whole, a kind of nerve center.

To attack this center of gravity, to neutralize or destroy it, is the ultimate strategy in war, for without it the whole structure will collapse. The enemy may have great generals and strong armies, like Hannibal and his invincible army in Italy, but without a center of gravity those armies cannot move and have no force or coherence. Hitting the center will have devastating psychological effects, throwing the enemy off balance and inducing a creeping panic. If conventional generals look at the physical aspect of the enemy army, focusing on its weaknesses and trying to exploit them, superior strategists look behind and beyond, to the support system. The enemy's center of gravity is where an injury will hurt him most, his point of greatest vulnerability. Hitting him there is the best way to end a conflict definitively and economically.

The key is analyzing the enemy force to determine its centers of gravity. In looking for those centers, it is crucial not to be misled by the intimidating or dazzling exterior, mistaking the outward appearance for what sets it in motion. You will probably have to take several steps, one by one, to uncover this ultimate power source, peeling away layer after layer. Remember Scipio, who saw first that Hannibal depended on Spain, then that Spain depended on Carthage, then that Carthage depended on its material prosperity, which itself had particular sources. Strike at Carthage's prosperity, as Scipio eventually did, and the whole thing would fall apart.

To find a group's center of gravity, you must understand its structure and the culture within which it operates. If your enemies are individuals, you must fathom their psychology, what makes them tick, the structure of their thinking and priorities.

In crafting a strategy to defeat the United States in the Vietnam War, General Vo Nguyen Giap determined that the real center of gravity in the American democracy was the political support of its citizens. Given that support--the kind of support the military had had during World War II--the country could prosecute a war with the utmost effectiveness. Without that support, though, the effort was doomed. Through the Tet Offensive of 1968, Giap was able to undermine the American public's support for the war. He had gained an understanding of American culture that allowed him to aim at the right target.

The more centralized the enemy, the more devastating becomes a blow at its leader or governing body. Hernan Cortes was able to conquer Mexico with a handful of soldiers by capturing Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor. Moctezuma was the center around which everything revolved; without him Aztec culture quickly collapsed. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, he assumed that by taking Moscow, the capital, he could force the Russians to surrender. But the true center of gravity in this authoritarian nation was the czar, who was determined to continue the war. The loss of Moscow only steeled his resolve.

A more decentralized enemy will have several separate centers of gravity. The key here is to disorganize them by cutting off communication between them. That was what General Douglas MacArthur did in his remarkable campaign in the Pacific during World War II: he skipped some islands but took key ones, keeping the Japanese extended over a vast area and making it impossible for them to communicate with each other. It is almost always strategically wise to disrupt your enemy's lines of communication; if the parts cannot communicate with the whole, chaos ensues.

Your enemy's center of gravity can be something abstract, like a quality, concept, or aptitude on which he depends: his reputation, his capacity to deceive, his unpredictability. But such strengths become critical vulnerabilities if you can make them unattractive or unusable. In fighting the Scythians in what is now modern-day Iran, a tribe that no one could figure out how to defeat, Alexander the Great saw the center of gravity as their complete mobility on horseback and their fluid, almost chaotic style of fighting. He simply plotted to neutralize the source of this power by luring them on to enclosed ground in which they could not use their cavalry and pell-mell tactics. He defeated them with ease.

To find an enemy's center of gravity, you have to erase your own tendency to think in conventional terms or to assume that the other side's center is the same as your own. When Salvador Dali came to the United States in 1940, intent on conquering the country as an artist and making his fortune, he made a clever calculation. In the European art world, an artist had to win over the critics and make a name as "serious." In America, though, that kind of fame would doom an artist to a ghetto, a limited circle. The real center of gravity was the American media. By wooing the newspapers, he would gain access to the American public, and the American public would make him a star.

Again, in the civil war between Communists and Nationalists for control of China in the late 1920s and early '30s, most of the Communists focused on taking cities, as the Bolsheviks had done in Russia. But Mao Tse-tung, an outsider within the dogmatic Chinese Communist Party, was able to look at China in a clear light and see China's center of gravity as its vast peasant population. Win them to his side, he believed, and the revolution could not fail. That single insight proved the key to the Communists' success. Such is the power of identifying the center of gravity.

We often hide our sources of power from view; what most people consider a center of gravity is often a front. But sometimes an enemy will reveal his center of gravity by what he protects the most fervently. In bringing the Civil War into Georgia, General William Tecumseh Sherman discovered that the South was particularly anxious to protect Atlanta and the areas around it. That was the South's industrial center of gravity. Like Sherman, attack what the enemy most treasures, or threaten it to make the enemy divert forces to defend itself.

In any group, power and influence will naturally devolve to a handful of people behind the scenes. That kind of power works best when it is not exposed to the light of day. Once you discover this coterie holding the strings, win it over. As president during the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt faced problems from so many sides that it was difficult for him to know where his energy should go. In the end he decided that the key to enacting his reforms was winning over Congress. Then, within Congress, there were particular leaders who held the real power. He concentrated on wooing and seducing these leaders with his great charm. It was one of the secrets to his success.