The 33 Strategies of War (46 page)

The phenomenon is timeless: the soldier who feels he is losing the support of those around him is borne back into an intolerable primitive terror. He fears he will face death alone. Many great military leaders have turned this terror into strategy. Genghis Khan was a master at it: using the mobility of his Mongol cavalry to cut off his enemies' communications, he would isolate parts of their armies to make them feel alone and unprotected. He worked consciously to instill terror. The divide-and-isolate strategy was also used to great effect by Napoleon and the guerrilla forces of Mao Tse-tung, among many others.

Our nature has not changed. Lurking deep in even the most civilized among us is the same basic fear of being alone, unsupported, and exposed to danger. People today are more dispersed and society is less cohesive than ever before, but that only increases our need to belong to a group, to have a strong network of allies--to feel supported and protected on all sides. Take away this feeling and we are returned to that primitive sensation of terror at our own vulnerability. The divide-and-conquer strategy has never been more effective than it is today: cut people off from their group--make them feel alienated, alone, and unprotected--and you weaken them enormously. That moment of weakness gives you great power to maneuver them into a corner, whether to seduce or to induce panic and retreat.

Throughout the 1960s, one of Mao Tse-tung's most loyal and trusted followers was his minister of defense, Lin Biao. No one praised the Chinese ruler more fulsomely than Lin. And yet by 1970 Mao had come to suspect that the flattery was a ruse to disguise his intentions: Lin was plotting to be his successor. And what made Lin particularly dangerous was that, as minister of defense, he had accumulated allies in the military.

Mao went to work with great subtlety. In public he went out of his way to support Lin, as if he, too, saw the minister as his successor. That soothed the natural wariness of the plotter. At the same time, however, Mao also attacked and demoted some of Lin's most important supporters in the military. Lin was a bit of a radical, veering left on most issues; Mao urged him to propose some of his more extreme ideas for restructuring the military, secretly knowing that these ideas would prove unpopular. Lin's support among the higher branches of the military slowly began to thin.

Lin finally realized what Mao was up to, but it was too late. He had lost his power base. Frustrated and scared, he resorted to plotting a coup d'etat, a desperate act that played straight into Mao's hands. In 1971, Lin died under suspicious circumstances in a plane crash.

As Mao understood, in political environments people depend on their connections even more than on their talents. In such a world, a person whose career seems to be waning is one whom few will want to know. And people who feel isolated will often overreact and do something desperate--which of course just makes them more isolated. So Mao created the impression that Lin was losing his connections. Had he attacked Lin directly, he would have gotten bogged down in an ugly fight. Dividing the minister from his power base, and in the process making him appear to be on the decline, was much more effective.

Before you launch an outright attack on your enemies, it is always wise first to weaken them by creating as much division in their ranks as possible. One good place to drive a wedge is between the leadership and the people, whether soldiers or citizenry; leaders function poorly when they lose their support among the people. So work to make them look authoritarian or out of touch. Or steal their foundation, as the Republican president Richard Nixon did in 1972 by wooing the blue-collar types who had traditionally voted Democrat: he split the Democrats' base. (The Republicans have been doing the same thing ever since.) Remember: once your enemy begins to splinter in any way, the rupture will tend to gain momentum. Division usually leads to more division.

In 338
B.C.
, Rome defeated its greatest enemy at the time, the Latin League--a confederation of Italian cities that had formed to block Rome's expansion. With this victory, however, the Romans faced a new problem: how to govern the region. If they crushed the league's members, they would leave a power vacuum, and down the road another enemy would emerge that might prove a still-greater threat. If they simply swallowed up the cities of the league, they would dilute the power and prestige of Rome, giving themselves too large an area to protect and police.

The solution the Romans came up with, which they would later call
divide et impera
(divide and rule), was to become the strategy by which they forged their empire. Essentially they broke up the league but did not treat all of its parts equally. Instead they created a system whereby some of its cities were incorporated into Roman territory and their residents given full privileges as Roman citizens; others were deprived of most of their territory but granted near-total independence; and others still were broken up and heavily colonized with Roman citizens. No single city was left powerful enough to challenge Rome, which retained the central position. (As the saying goes, all roads led to Rome.)

The key to the system was that if an independent city proved itself loyal enough to Rome or fought well enough for Rome, it won the chance of being incorporated into the empire. The individual cities now saw it as more in their interest to gain Rome's favor than to ally themselves elsewhere. Rome held out the prospect of great power, wealth, and protection, while isolation from Rome was dangerous. And so the once proud members of the Latin League now competed against one another for Rome's attention.

Divide and rule is a powerful strategy for governing any group. It is based on a key principle: within any organization people naturally form smaller groups based on mutual self-interest--the primitive desire to find strength in numbers. These subgroups form power bases that, left unchecked, will threaten the organization as a whole. The formation of parties and factions can be a leader's greatest threat, for in time these factions will naturally work to secure their own interests before those of the greater group. The solution is to divide to rule. To do so you must first establish yourself as the center of power; individuals must know they need to compete for your approval. There has to be more to be gained by pleasing the leader than by trying to form a power base within the group.

"Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me."

M
ATTHEW
10:34

When Elizabeth I became queen, England was a nation divided. The remnants of feudalism entailed many competing power centers, and the court itself was full of factions. Elizabeth's solution was to weaken the nobility by deliberately pitting one family against another. At the same time, she occupied the center, making herself a symbol of England itself, the hub around which everything revolved. Within the court, too, she made sure that no individual--except of course herself--gained ascendancy. When she saw that first Robert Dudley and then the Earl of Essex believed themselves her favorites, she quickly cut them loose.

The temptation to maintain a favorite is understandable but dangerous. Better to rotate your stars, occasionally making each one fall. Bring in people with different viewpoints and encourage them to fight it out. You can justify this as a healthy form of democracy, but the effect is that while those below you fight to be heard, you rule.

The film director Alfred Hitchcock faced enemies on all sides--writers, set designers, actors, producers, marketers--any of them quite capable of putting their egos before the quality of the film. Writers wanted to show off their literary skills, actors wanted to look like stars, producers and marketers wanted the movie to be commercial--the whole crew had competing interests. Hitchcock's solution, like Queen Elizabeth's, was to take the central position, in a variant of divide and rule. His carefully crafted role as a public celebrity was part of this: his movies' publicity campaigns always involved him as spokesperson, and he made bit-part appearances in most of his films, becoming an instantly recognizable, endearingly humorous figure. He put himself in the middle of every aspect of production, from writing the script before the shoot began to editing the film when the shoot was finished. At the same time, he kept all the filmmaking departments, even that of the producer, a little out of the loop; information about every detail of the film was kept in his head, his drawings, and his notes. No one could bypass him; every decision went through him. Before the film was shot, for example, Hitchcock would set out in detail the look of the leading lady's costumes. If the costume designer wanted to change anything, she would have to go through him or be caught out in rank insubordination. In essence, he was like Rome: all roads led to Hitchcock.

Within your group, factions may emerge quite subtly by virtue of the fact that people who are experts in their area may not tell you everything they're doing. Remember: they see only the small picture; you are in charge of the whole production. If you are to lead, you must occupy the center. Everything must flow through you. If information is to be withheld, you are the one to do it. That is divide and rule: if the different parts of the operation lack access to all the information, they will have to come to you to get it. It is not that you micromanage but that you keep overall control of everything vital and isolate any potential rival power base.

Throughout the 1950s and '60s, Major General Edward Lansdale was considered America's principal expert in counterinsurgency. Working with President Ramon Magsaysay of the Philippines, he had crafted a plan that had defeated the country's Huk guerrilla movement in the early 1950s. Counterinsurgency requires a deft hand, more political than military, and for Lansdale the key to success was to stamp out government corruption and bring the people close to the government through various popular programs. That would deny the insurgents their cause, and they would die of isolation. Lansdale thought it folly to imagine that leftist rebels could be defeated by force; in fact, force just played into their hands, giving them a cause they could use to rally support. For insurgents, isolation from the people is death.

Think of the people in your group who are working primarily for their own interests as insurgents. They are Cassius types who thrive on discontent in the organization, fanning it into dissension and factionalism. You can always work to divide such factions once you know about them, but the better solution is to keep your soldiers satisfied and contented, giving the insurgents nothing to feed on. Bitter and isolated, they will die off on their own.

The divide-and-rule strategy is invaluable in trying to influence people verbally. Start by seeming to take your opponents' side on some issue, occupying their flank. Once there, however, create doubt about some part of their argument, tweaking and diverting it a bit. This will lower their resistance and maybe create a little inner conflict about a cherished idea or belief. That conflict will weaken them, making them vulnerable to further suggestion and guidance.

Japan's great seventeenth-century swordsman Miyamoto Musashi on several occasions faced bands of warriors determined to kill him. The sight of such a group would intimidate most people, or at least make them hesitate--a fatal flaw in a samurai. Another tendency would be to lash out violently, trying to kill as many of the attackers as possible all at once, but at the risk of losing control of the situation. Musashi, however, was above all else a strategist, and he solved these dilemmas in the most rational way possible. He would place himself so that the men would have to come at him in a line or at an angle. Then he would focus on killing the first man and move swiftly down the line. Instead of being overwhelmed or trying too hard, he would break the band into parts. Then he just had to kill opponent number one, while leaving himself in position to deal with opponent number two and preventing his mind from being clouded and confused by the other attackers awaiting him. The effect was that he could retain his focus while keeping his opponents off balance, for as he proceeded down the line, they would become the ones who were intimidated and flustered.

Whether you are beset by many small problems or by one giant problem, make Musashi the model for your mental process. If you let the complexity of the situation confuse you and either hesitate or lash out without thought, you will lose mental control, which will only add momentum to the negative force coming at you. Always divide up the issue at hand, first placing yourself in a central position, then proceeding down the line, killing off your problems one by one. It is often wise to begin with the smallest problem while keeping the most dangerous one at bay. Solving that one will help you create momentum, both physical and psychological, that will help you overwhelm all the rest.

The most important thing is to move quickly against your enemies, as the Athenians did at Marathon. Waiting for troubles to come to you will only multiply them and give them a deadly momentum.