The 33 Strategies of War (52 page)

Remember: the power of envelopment is ultimately psychological. Making the other side
feel
vulnerable to attack on many sides is as good as enveloping them physically.

In the Ismaili Shiite sect during the eleventh and twelfth centuries
A.D
., a group later known as the Assassins developed the strategy of killing key Islamic leaders who had tried to persecute the sect. Their method was to infiltrate an Assassin into the target's inner circle, perhaps even joining his bodyguard. Patient and efficient, the Assassins were able over the years to instill the fear that they could strike at any time and at any person. No caliph or vizier felt secure. The technique was a masterpiece of economy, for in the end the Assassins actually killed quite a few people, yet the threat they posed gave the Ismailis great political power.

A few well-timed blows to make your enemies feel vulnerable in multiple ways and from multiple directions will do the same thing for you. Often, in fact, less is more here: too many blows will give you a shape, a personality--something for the other side to respond to and develop a strategy to combat. Instead seem vaporous. Make your maneuvers impossible to anticipate. Your psychological encirclement will be all the more sinister and complete.

The best encirclements are those that prey on the enemy's preexisting, inherent vulnerabilities. Be attentive, then, to signs of arrogance, rashness, or other psychological weakness. Once Winston Churchill saw the paranoid streak in Adolf Hitler, he worked to create the impression that the Axis might be attacked from anywhere--the Balkans, Italy, western France. Churchill's resources were meager; he could only hint at these possibilities through deception. But that was enough: a man like Hitler could not bear the thought of being vulnerable from any direction. By 1942 his forces were stretched across vast parts of Europe, and Churchill's ploys made him stretch them even thinner. At one point a mere feint at the Balkans made him hold back forces from the invasion of Russia, which in the end cost him dearly. Feed the fears of the paranoid and they will start to imagine attacks you hadn't even thought of; their overheated brains will do much of the encirclement for you.

When the Carthaginian general Hannibal was planning what turned out to be perhaps the most devastating envelopment in history--his victory at the Battle of Cannae in 216
B.C.
--he heard from his spies that one of the opposing Roman generals, Varro, was a hothead, arrogant and contemptuous. Hannibal was outnumbered two to one, but he made two strategic decisions that turned this around. First, he lured the Romans onto tight terrain, where their greater numbers would find it hard to maneuver. Second, he weakened the center of his lines, placing his best troops and cavalry at the lines' outer ends. Led by the rash Varro, the Romans charged into the center, which gave way. The Romans pushed farther and farther. Then, just as the Zulus would encircle the British within two horns, the outer ends of the Carthaginian line pushed inward, enclosing the Romans in a tight and fatal embrace.

The impetuous, violent, and arrogant are particularly easy to lure into the traps of envelopment strategies: play weak or dumb and they will charge ahead without stopping to think where they're going. But any emotional weakness on the opponent's part, or any great desire or unrealized wish, can be made an ingredient of encirclement.

That is how the Iranians enveloped the administration of President Ronald Reagan in 1985-86, in what became known as the Iran-Contra Affair. America was leading an international embargo on the sale of weapons to Iran. In fighting this boycott, the Iranians saw two American weaknesses: first, Congress had cut off U.S. funding for the war of the Contras against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua--a cause dear to the Reagan government--and second, the administration was deeply disturbed about the growing number of Americans held hostage in the Middle East. Playing on these desires, the Iranians were able to lure the Americans into a Cannae-like trap: they would work for the release of hostages and secretly fund the Contras, in exchange for weapons.

It seemed too good to resist, but as the Americans entered further into this web of duplicity (backroom deals, secret meetings), they could sense their room to maneuver slowly narrowing: the Iranians were able to ask for more in exchange for less. In the end they got plenty of weapons, while the Americans got only a handful of hostages and not enough money to make a difference in Nicaragua. Worse, the Iranians openly told other diplomats about these "secret" dealings, closing their encirclement by ensuring that it would be revealed to the American public. For the government officials who had been involved in the affair, there was no possible escape route from the mess they had been drawn into. Feeling intense pressure from all sides as news of the deal became public, their attempts to cover it up or explain it away only made the situation worse.

In luring your enemies into such a trap, always try to make them feel as if they are in control of the situation. They will advance as far as you want them to. Many of the Americans involved in Iran-Contra believed they were the ones conning the naive Iranians.

Finally, do not simply work to envelop your opponents' forces or immediate emotions, but rather envelop their whole strategy--indeed, their whole conceptual framework. This ultimate form of envelopment involves first studying the rigid, predictable parts of your opponents' strategy, then crafting a novel strategy of your own that goes outside their experience. Taking on the armies of Islam, Russia, Poland, Hungary, and the Teutonic Order, the Mongols did not merely defeat them, they annihilated them--by inventing a new brand of mobile warfare to use against an enemy mired in centuries-old methods of fighting. This kind of strategic mismatch can lead to victory not just in any given battle but in large-scale campaigns--the ultimate goal in any form of war.

Authority: Place a monkey in a cage, and it is the same as a pig, not because it isn't clever and quick, but because it has no place to freely exercise its capabilities.

--Huainanzi
(second century
B.C
.)

REVERSAL

The danger of envelopment is that unless it is completely successful, it may leave you in a vulnerable position. You have announced your plans. The enemy knows that you are trying to annihilate it, and unless you can quickly deliver your knockout punch, it will work furiously not only to defend itself but to destroy you--for now your destruction is its only safeguard. Some armies that have failed in their envelopments have found themselves later encircled by their enemies. Use this strategy only when you have a reasonable chance of bringing it to the conclusion you desire.

No matter how strong you are, fighting endless battles with people is exhausting, costly, and unimaginative. Wise strategists generally prefer the art of maneuver: before the battle even begins, they find ways to put their opponents in positions of such weakness that victory is easy and quick. Bait enemies into taking positions that may seem alluring but are actually traps and blind alleys. If their position is strong, get them to abandon it by leading them on a wild-goose chase. Create dilemmas: devise maneuvers that give them a choice of ways to respond--all of them bad. Channel chaos and disorder in their direction. Confused, frustrated, and angry opponents are like ripe fruit on the bough: the slightest breeze will make them fall.

MANEUVER WARFARE

Throughout history two distinct styles of warfare can be identified. The most ancient is the war of attrition: the enemy surrenders because you have killed so many of its men. A general fighting a war of attrition will calculate ways to overwhelm the other side with larger numbers, or with the battle formation that will do the most damage, or with superior military technology. In any event, victory depends on wearing down the other side in battle. Even with today's extraordinary technology, attrition warfare is remarkably unsophisticated, playing into humanity's most violent instincts.

Warfare is like hunting. Wild animals are taken by scouting, by nets, by lying in wait, by stalking, by circling around, and by other such stratagems rather than by sheer force. In waging war we should proceed in the same way, whether the enemy be many or few. To try simply to overpower the enemy in the open, hand to hand and face to face, even though you might appear to win, is an enterprise which is very risky and can result in serious harm. Apart from extreme emergency, it is ridiculous to try to gain a victory which is so costly and brings only empty glory....

B
YZANTINE EMPEROR
M
AURIKIOS, A.D
. 539-602

Over many centuries, and most notably in ancient China, a second method of waging war developed. The emphasis here was not destroying the other side in battle but weakening and unbalancing it before the battle began. The leader would maneuver to confuse and infuriate and to put the enemy in a bad position--having to fight uphill, or with the sun or wind in its face, or in a cramped space. In this kind of war, an army with mobility could be more effective than one with muscle.

The maneuver-warfare philosophy was codified by Sun-tzu in his
Art of War
, written in China's Warring States period, in the fifth to third century
B.C.
--over two hundred years of escalating cycles of warfare in which a state's very survival depended on its army and strategists. To Sun-tzu and his contemporaries, it was obvious that the costs of war went far beyond its body counts: it entailed a loss of resources and political goodwill and a lowering of morale among soldiers and citizens. These costs would mount over time until eventually even the greatest warrior nation would succumb to exhaustion. But through adroit maneuvering a state could spare itself such high costs and still emerge victorious. An enemy who had been maneuvered into a weak position would succumb more easily to psychological pressure; even before the battle had begun, it had imperceptibly started to collapse and would surrender with less of a fight.

Several strategists outside Asia--most notably Napoleon Bonaparte--have made brilliant use of maneuver warfare. But in general, attrition warfare is deeply engrained in the Western way of thinking--from the ancient Greeks to modern America. In an attrition culture, thoughts naturally gravitate toward how to overpower problems, obstacles, those who resist us. In the media, emphasis is placed on big battles, whether in politics or in the arts--static situations in which there are winners and losers. People are drawn to the emotional and dramatic quality in any confrontation, not the many steps that lead to such confrontation. The stories that are told in such cultures are all geared toward such battlelike moments, a moral message preached through the ending (as opposed to the more telling details). On top of it all, this way of fighting is deemed more manly, honorable, honest.

More than anything, maneuver war is a different way of thinking. What matters here is process--the steps toward battle and how to manipulate them to make the confrontation less costly and violent. In the maneuver universe, nothing is static. Battles are in fact dramatic illusions, short moments in the larger flow of events, which is fluid, dynamic, and susceptible to alteration through careful strategy. This way of thinking finds no honor or morality in wasting time, energy, and lives in battles. Instead wars of attrition are seen as lazy, reflecting the primitive human tendency to fight back reactively, without thinking.

In a society full of attrition fighters, you will gain an instant advantage by converting to maneuver. Your thought process will become more fluid, more on the side of life, and you will be able to thrive off the rigid, battle-obsessed tendencies of the people around you. By always thinking first about the overall situation and about how to maneuver people into positions of weakness rather than fight them, you will make your battles less bloody--which, since life is long and conflict is endless, is wise if you want a fruitful and enduring career. And a war of maneuver is just as decisive as a war of attrition. Think of weakening your enemies as ripening them like grain, ready to be cut down at the right moment.

The following are the four main principles of maneuver warfare:

Craft a plan with branches.
Maneuver warfare depends on planning, and the plan has to be right. Too rigid and you leave yourself no room to adjust to the inevitable chaos and friction of war; too loose and unforeseen events will confuse and overwhelm you. The perfect plan stems from a detailed analysis of the situation, which allows you to decide on the best direction to follow or the perfect position to occupy and suggests several effective options (branches) to take, depending on what the enemy throws at you. A plan with branches lets you outmaneuver your enemy because your responses to changing circumstances are faster and more rational.

Give yourself room to maneuver.
You cannot be mobile, you cannot maneuver freely, if you put yourself in cramped spaces or tie yourself down to positions that do not allow you to move. Consider the ability to move and keeping open more options than your enemy has as more important than holding territories or possessions. You want open space, not dead positions. This means not burdening yourself with commitments that will limit your options. It means not taking stances that leave you nowhere to go. The need for space is psychological as well as physical: you must have an unfettered mind to create anything worthwhile.

Give your enemy dilemmas, not problems.
Most of your opponents are likely to be clever and resourceful; if your maneuvers simply present them with a problem, they will inevitably solve it. But a dilemma is different: whatever they do, however they respond--retreat, advance, stay still--they are still in trouble. Make every option bad: if you maneuver quickly to a point, for instance, you can force your enemies either to fight before they are ready or to retreat. Try constantly to put them in positions that seem alluring but are traps.

Create maximum disorder.
Your enemy depends on being able to read you, to get some sense of your intentions. The goal of your maneuvers should be to make that impossible, to send the enemy on a wild-goose chase for meaningless information, to create ambiguity as to which way you are going to jump. The more you break down people's ability to reason about you, the more disorder you inject into their system. The disorder you create is controlled and purposeful, at least for you. The disorder the enemy suffers is debilitating and destructive.

So to win a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the highest excellence; the highest excellence is to subdue the enemy's army without fighting at all.

--Sun-tzu (fourth century
B.C
.)

HISTORICAL EXAMPLES

1.
On November 10, 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte completed the coup d'etat that brought him to power as first consul, giving him near-complete control of the French state. For over ten years, France had been convulsed with revolution and war. Now that Napoleon was leader, his most pressing need was peace, to give the country time to recoup and himself time to consolidate his power--but peace would not come easily.

France had a bitter enemy in Austria, which had put two large armies in the field, ready to move against Napoleon: one to the east of the Rhine and the other in northern Italy under General Michael Melas. The Austrians were clearly planning a major campaign. Waiting was too dangerous; Napoleon had to seize the initiative. He had to defeat at least one of these armies if he were to force Austria to negotiate peace on his terms. The one trump card he had was that several months earlier a French army had gained control of Switzerland. There were also French troops in northern Italy, which Napoleon had taken from the Austrians several years earlier.

To plan for the first real campaign under his direction, Napoleon holed himself up in his office for several days. His secretary, Louis de Bourienne, would recall seeing him lying on giant maps of Germany, Switzerland, and Italy laid out wall to wall on the floor. The desks were piled high with reconnaissance reports. On hundreds of note cards organized into boxes, Napoleon had calculated the Austrians' reactions to the feints he was planning. Muttering to himself on the floor, he mulled over every permutation of attack and counterattack.

"Addicts of attrition," as Simpkin calls them, generally cannot think beyond the battle, and they consider that the only way--or at least the preferred way--to defeat an enemy is to destroy the physical components of his army, especially the combat portions (armored fighting vehicles, troops, guns, etc.). If the attrition addict appreciates war's intangibles at all (such as morale, initiative, and shock), he sees them only as combat multipliers with which to fight the attrition battle better. If the attrition warrior learns about maneuver, he sees it primarily as a way to get to the fight. In other words, he moves in order to fight. Maneuver theory, on the other hand, attempts to defeat the enemy through means other than simple destruction of his mass. Indeed, the highest and purest application of maneuver theory is to
preempt
the enemy, that is, to disarm or neutralize him before the fight. If such is not possible, the maneuver warrior seeks to
dislocate
the enemy forces, i.e., removing the enemy from the decisive point, or vice versa, thus rendering them useless and irrelevant to the fight. If the enemy cannot be preempted or dislocated, then the maneuver-warfare practitioner will attempt to
disrupt
the enemy, i.e., destroy or neutralize his center of gravity, preferably by attacking with friendly strengths through enemy weaknesses.

T
HE
A
RT OF
M
ANEUVER
,
R
OBERT
R. L
EONHARD
, 1991

By the end of March 1800, Napoleon had emerged from his office with a plan for a campaign in northern Italy that went far beyond anything his lieutenants had ever seen before. In the middle of April, a French army under General Jean Moreau would cross the Rhine and push the eastern Austrian army back into Bavaria. Then Napoleon would lead a 50,000-man force, already in place in Switzerland, into northern Italy through several different passes in the Alps. Moreau would then release one of his divisions to move south and follow Napoleon into Italy. Moreau's initial move into Bavaria, and the subsequent scattered dispatch of divisions into Italy, would confuse the Austrians as to Napoleon's intentions. And if the Austrian army at the Rhine was pushed east, it would be too distant to support the Austrian army in northern Italy.

Once across the Alps, Napoleon would concentrate his forces and link up with the divisions under General Andre Massena already stationed in northern Italy. He would then move much of his army to the town of Stradella, cutting off communications between Melas in northern Italy and command headquarters in Austria. With Melas's troops now isolated and the mobile French army within reach of them, Napoleon would have many excellent options for dislocating and destroying them. At one point, as he described this plan to Bourienne, Napoleon lay down on the giant map on his floor and stuck a pin next to the town of Marengo, in the center of the Italian theater of war. "I will fight him here," he said.

A few weeks later, as Napoleon began to position his armies, he received some troubling news: Melas had beaten him to the punch by attacking Massena's army in Northern Italy. Massena was forced back to Genoa, where the Austrians quickly surrounded him. The danger here was great: if Massena surrendered, the Austrians could sweep into southern France. Also, Napoleon had been counting on Massena's army to help him beat Melas. Yet he took the news with surprising calm and simply made some adjustments: he transferred more men to Switzerland and sent word to Massena that he must do whatever he could to hold out for at least eight weeks, keeping Melas busy while Napoleon moved into Italy.

Within a week there was more irritating news. After Moreau had begun the campaign to push the Austrians back from the Rhine, he refused to transfer the division that Napoleon had counted on for Italy, claiming he could not spare it. Instead he sent a smaller, less experienced division. The French army in Switzerland had already begun the dangerous crossings through the Alps. Napoleon had no choice but to take what Moreau gave him.

By May 24, Napoleon had brought his army safely into Italy. Absorbed with the siege at Genoa, Melas ignored reports of French movements to the north. Next Napoleon advanced to Milan, close to Stradella, where he cut Austrian communications as planned. Now, like a cat stealing up on its prey, he could wait for Melas to notice the trap he was in and try to fight his way out of it near Milan.

On June 8, however, once again more bad news reached Napoleon: two weeks before he had hoped, Massena had surrendered. Napoleon now had fewer men to work with, and Melas had won a strong base in Genoa. Since its inception the campaign had been plagued with mistakes and unforeseen events--the Austrians attacking early, Massena retreating into a trap at Genoa, Moreau disobeying orders, and now Massena's surrender. Yet while Napoleon's lieutenants feared the worst, Napoleon himself not only stayed cool, he seemed oddly excited by these sudden twists of fortune. Somehow he could discern opportunities in them that were invisible to everyone else--and with the loss of Genoa, he sensed the greatest opportunity of all. He quickly altered his plan; instead of waiting at Milan for Melas to come to him, he suddenly cast his divisions in a wide net to the west.