The 33 Strategies of War (64 page)

No matter how good a liar you are, when you deceive, it is hard to be completely natural. Your tendency is to try so hard to seem natural and sincere that it stands out and can be read. That is why it is so effective to spread your deceptions through people whom you keep ignorant of the truth--people who believe the lie themselves. When working with double agents of this kind, it is always wise to initially feed them some true information--this will establish the credibility of the intelligence they pass along. After that they will be the perfect conduits for your lies.

Shadows within shadows.
Deceptive maneuvers are like shadows deliberately cast: the enemy responds to them as if they were solid and real, which in and of itself is a mistake. In a sophisticated, competitive world, however, both sides know the game, and the alert enemy will not necessarily grasp at the shadow you have thrown. So you have to take the art of deception to a level higher, casting shadows
within
shadows, making it impossible for your enemies to distinguish between fact and fiction. You make everything so ambiguous and uncertain, spread so much fog, that even if you are suspected of deceit, it does not matter--the truth cannot be unraveled from the lies, and all their suspicion gives them is torment. Meanwhile, as they strain to figure out what you are up to, they waste valuable time and resources.

During the World War II desert battles in North Africa, the English lieutenant Dudley Clarke ran a campaign to deceive the Germans. One of his tactics was to use props--dummy tanks and artillery--to make it impossible for the Germans to figure out the size and location of the English army. From high-flying reconnaissance aircraft, these dummy weapons would photograph like the real thing. A prop that worked particularly well was the fake airplane made of wood; Clarke dotted bogus landing fields filled up with rows of these around the landscape. At one point a worried officer told him that intelligence had been intercepted revealing that the Germans had figured out a way to distinguish the fake planes from the real ones: they simply looked for the wooden struts holding up the wings of the dummy planes (enlarged photos could reveal this). They would now have to stop using the dummies, said the officer. But Clarke, one of the great geniuses of modern deception, had a better idea: he decided to put struts under the wings of real aircraft as well as phony ones. With the original deception, the Germans were confused but could eventually uncover the truth. Now, however, Clarke took the game to a higher level: the enemy could not distinguish the real from the fake in general, which was even more disconcerting.

If you are trying to mislead your enemies, it is often better to concoct something ambiguous and hard to read, as opposed to an outright deception--that deception can be uncovered and enemies can turn their discovery to their advantage, especially if you think they are still fooled and act under that belief. You are the one doubly deceived. By creating something that is simply ambiguous, though, by making everything blurry, there is no deception to uncover. They are simply lost in a mist of uncertainty, where truth and falsehood, good and bad, all merge into one, and it is impossible to get one's bearings straight.

Authority: One who is good at combating the enemy fools it with inscrutable moves, confuses it with false intelligence, makes it relax by concealing one's strength,...deafens its ears by jumbling one's orders and signals, blinds its eyes by converting one's banners and insignias,...confounds its battle plan by providing distorted facts.

--
Tou Bi Fu Tan,
A Scholar's Dilettante Remarks on War
(16th century
A.D
.)

Appearance and intention inevitably ensnare people when artfully used, even if people sense that there is an ulterior intention behind the overt appearance. When you set up ploys and opponents fall for them, then you win by letting them act on your ruse. As for those who do not fall for a ploy, when you see they won't fall for the open trap, you have another set. Then even if opponents haven't fallen for your original ploy, in effect they actually have.

F
AMILY
B
OOK ON THE
A
RT OF
W
AR
,
Y
AGYU
M
UNENORI
, 1571-1646

REVERSAL

To be caught in a deception is dangerous. If you don't know that your cover is blown, now, suddenly, your enemies have more information than you do and you become their tool. If the discovery of your deceit is public, on the other hand, your reputation takes a blow, or worse: the punishments for spying are severe. You must use deception with utmost caution, then, employing the least amount of people as possible, to avoid the inevitable leaks. You should always leave yourself an escape route, a cover story to protect you should you be exposed. Be careful not to fall in love with the power that deception brings; the use of it must always be subordinate to your overall strategy and kept under control. If you become known as a deceiver, try being straightforward and honest for a change. That will confuse people--because they won't know how to read you, your honesty will become a higher form of deception.

People expect your behavior to conform to known patterns and conventions. Your task as a strategist is to upset their expectations. Surprise them and chaos and unpredictability--which they try desperately to keep at bay--enter their world, and in the ensuing mental disturbance, their defenses are down and they are vulnerable. First, do something ordinary and conventional to fix their image of you, then hit them with the
extra
ordinary. The terror is greater for being so sudden. Never rely on an unorthodox strategy that worked before--it is conventional the second time around. Sometimes the ordinary is extraordinary because it is unexpected.

UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE

Thousands of years ago, military leaders--aware of the incredibly high stakes involved in war--would search high and low for anything that could bring their army an advantage on the battlefield. Some generals who were particularly clever would devise novel troop formations or an innovative use of infantry or cavalry: the newness of the tactic would prevent the enemy from anticipating it. Being unexpected, it would create confusion in the enemy. An army that gained the advantage of surprise in this way could often leverage it into victory on the battlefield and perhaps a string of victories.

The enemy, however, would work hard to come up with a defense against the new strategy, whatever it was, and would often find one quite fast. So what once brought brilliant success and was the epitome of innovation soon no longer worked and in fact became conventional. Furthermore, in the process of working out a defense against a novel strategy, the enemy itself would often be forced to innovate; now it was their turn to introduce something surprising and horribly effective. And so the cycle would go on. War has always been ruthless; nothing stays unconventional for long. It is either innovate or die.

In the eighteenth century, nothing was more startling than the tactics of the Prussian king Frederick the Great. To top Frederick's success, French military theorists devised radical new ideas that were finally tested on the battlefield by Napoleon. In 1806, Napoleon crushed the Prussians--who were still using the once unconventional tactics of Frederick the Great, now grown stale--at the Battle of Jena-Auerstadt. The Prussians were humiliated by their defeat; now it was up to them to innovate. They studied in depth Napoleon's success, adapted his best strategies, and took them further, creating the seeds for the formation of the German General Staff. This new Prussian army played a large role in the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and went on to dominate the military scene for decades.

In modern times the constant challenge to top the enemy with something new and unconventional has taken a turn into dirty warfare. Loosening the codes of honor and morality that in the past limited what a general could do (at least to some extent), modern armies have slowly embraced the idea that anything goes. Guerrilla and terrorist tactics have been known since ancient times; now they have become not only more common but more strategic and refined. Propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, deception, and political means of waging war have all become active ingredients in any unconventional strategy. A counterstrategy usually develops to deal with the latest in dirty warfare, but it often involves falling to the enemy's level, fighting fire with fire. The dirty enemy adapts by sinking to a dirtier level still, creating a downward spiral.

This dynamic is particularly intense in warfare but it permeates every aspect of human activity. If you are in politics and business and your opponents or competitors come up with a novel strategy, you must adapt it for your own purposes or, better, top it. Their once new tactic becomes conventional and ultimately useless. Our world is so fiercely competitive that one side will almost always end up resorting to something dirty, something outside earlier codes of accepted behavior. Ignore this spiral out of a sense of morality or pride and you put yourself at a severe disadvantage; you are called to respond--in all likelihood to fight a little dirty yourself.

Everything which the enemy least expects will succeed the best. If he relies for security on a chain of mountains that he believes impracticable, and you pass these mountains by roads unknown to him, he is confused to start with, and if you press him he will not have time to recover from his consternation. In the same way, if he places himself behind a river to defend the crossing and you find some ford above or below on which to cross unknown to him, this surprise will derange and confuse him....

F
REDERICK THE
G
REAT
, 1712-86

The spiral dominates not just politics or business but culture as well, with its desperate search for the shocking and novel to gain attention and win momentary acclaim. Anything goes. The speed of the process has grown exponentially with time; what was unconventional in the arts a few years ago now seems unbearably trite and the height of conformity.

What we consider unconventional has changed over the years, but the laws that make unconventionality effective, being based on elemental psychology, are timeless. And these immutable laws are revealed in the history of warfare. Almost twenty-five hundred years ago, the great Chinese strategist Sun-tzu expressed their essence in his discussion of ordinary and extraordinary means; his analysis is as relevant to modern politics and culture as it is to warfare, whether clean or dirty. And once you understand the essence of unconventional warfare, you will be able to use it in your daily life.

Unconventional warfare has four main principles, as gleaned from the great practitioners of the art.

Work outside the enemy's experience.
Principles of war are based on precedent: a kind of canon of strategies and counterstrategies develops over the centuries, and since war is so dangerously chaotic, strategists come to rely on these principles for lack of anything else. They filter what's happening now through what happened in the past. The armies that have shaken the world, though, have always found a way to operate outside the canon, and thus outside the enemy's experience. This ability imposes chaos and disorder on the enemy, which cannot orient itself to novelty and collapses in the process.

Your task as a strategist is to know your enemies well, then use your knowledge to contrive a strategy that goes outside their experience. What they might have read or heard about matters less than their personal experience, which dominates their emotional lives and determines their responses. When the Germans invaded France in 1940, the French had secondhand knowledge of their blitzkrieg style of warfare from their invasion of Poland the year before but had never experienced it personally and were overwhelmed. Once a strategy is used and is no longer outside your enemy's experience, though, it will not have the same effect if repeated.

Unfold the extraordinary out of the ordinary.
To Sun-tzu and the ancient Chinese, doing something extraordinary had little effect without a setup of something ordinary. You had to mix the two--to fix your opponents' expectations with some banal, ordinary maneuver, a comfortable pattern that they would then expect you to follow. With the enemy sufficiently mesmerized, you would then hit it with the extraordinary, a show of stunning force from an entirely new angle. Framed by the predictable, the blow would have double the impact.

Make a false move, not to pass it for a genuine one but to transform it into a genuine one after the enemy has been convinced of its falsity.

T
HE
W
ILES OF
W
AR
: 36 M
ILITARY
S
TRATEGIES FROM
A
NCIENT
C
HINA
,
TRANSLATED BY
S
UN
H
AICHEN
, 1991

The unconventional maneuver that confused enemies, though, would have become conventional the second or third time around. So the wily general might then go back to the ordinary strategy that he had used earlier to fix their attention and use it for his main attack, for that would be the last thing the enemy would expect. And so the ordinary and the extraordinary are effective only if they play off each other in a constant spiraling manner. This applies to culture as much as to war: to gain attention with some cultural product, you have to create something new, but something with no reference to ordinary life is not in fact unconventional, but merely strange. What is truly shocking and extraordinary unfolds out of the ordinary. The intertwining of the ordinary and extraordinary is the very definition of surrealism.

Act crazy like a fox.
Despite appearances, a lot of disorder and irrationality lurks beneath the surface of society and individuals. That is why we so desperately strain to maintain order and why people acting irrationally can be terrifying: they are demonstrating that they have lost the walls we build to keep out the irrational. We cannot predict what they will do next, and we tend to give them a wide berth--it is not worth mixing it up with such sources of chaos. On the other hand, these people can also inspire a kind of awe and respect, for secretly we all desire access to the irrational seas churning inside us. In ancient times the insane were seen as divinely possessed; a residue of that attitude survives. The greatest generals have all had a touch of divine, strategic madness.

The secret is to keep this streak under control. Upon occasion you allow yourself to operate in a way that is deliberately irrational, but less is more--do this too much and you may be locked up. You will in any case frighten people more by showing an occasional flash of insanity, just enough to keep everyone off balance and wondering what will come next. As an alternative, act somewhat randomly, as if what you did were determined by a roll of the dice. Randomness is thoroughly disturbing to humans. Think of this behavior as a kind of therapy--a chance to indulge occasionally in the irrational, as a relief from the oppressive need to always seem normal.

Keep the wheels in constant motion.
The unconventional is generally the province of the young, who are not comfortable with conventions and take great pleasure in flouting them. The danger is that as we age, we need more comfort and predictability and lose our taste for the unorthodox. This is how Napoleon declined as a strategist: he came to rely more on the size of his army and on its superiority in weapons than on novel strategies and fluid maneuvers. He lost his taste for the spirit of strategy and succumbed to the growing weight of his accumulating years. You must fight the psychological aging process even more than the physical one, for a mind full of stratagems, tricks, and fluid maneuvers will keep you young. Make a point of breaking the habits you have developed, of acting in a way that is contrary to how you have operated in the past; practice a kind of unconventional warfare on your own mind. Keep the wheels turning and churning the soil so that nothing settles and clumps into the conventional.

No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected.

--Julius Caesar (100-44
B.C
.)

HISTORICAL EXAMPLES

1.
In 219
B.C.
, Rome decided it had had enough of the Carthaginians, who had been stirring up trouble in Spain, where both city-states had valuable colonies. The Romans declared war on Carthage and prepared to send an army to Spain, where the enemy forces were led by the twenty-eight-year-old general Hannibal. Before the Romans could reach Hannibal, though, they received the startling news that he was coming to them--he had already marched east, crossing the most treacherous part of the Alps into northern Italy. Because Rome had never imagined that an enemy would attack from that direction, there were no garrisons in the area, and Hannibal's march south toward Rome was unimpeded.

His army was relatively small; only some 26,000 soldiers had survived the crossing of the Alps. The Romans and their allies could field an army of close to 750,000 men; their legions were the most disciplined and feared fighters in the world, and they had already defeated Carthage in the First Punic War, twenty-odd years earlier. But an alien army marching into Italy was a novel surprise, and it stirred the rawest emotions. They had to teach these barbarians a lesson for their brazen invasion.

Legions were quickly dispatched to the north to destroy Hannibal. After a few skirmishes, an army under the Roman consul Sempronius Longus prepared to meet the Carthaginians in direct battle near the river Trebia. Sempronius burned with both hatred and ambition: he wanted to crush Hannibal and also to be seen as the savior of Rome. But Hannibal was acting strangely. His light cavalry would cross the river as if to attack the Romans, then retreat back: Were the Carthaginians afraid? Were they ready to make only minor raids and sorties? Finally Sempronius had had enough and went in pursuit. To make sure he had sufficient forces to defeat the enemy, he brought his entire army across the freezing-cold river (it was wintertime), all of which took hours and was exhausting. Finally, however, the two armies met just to the west of the river.

It is assumed that Alexander encamped at Haranpur; opposite him on the eastern back of the Hydaspes was Porus, who was seen to have with him a large number of elephants....... Because all fords were held by pickets and elephants, Alexander realized that his horses could neither be swum nor rafted across the river, because they would not face the trumpeting of the elephants and would become frantic when in the water or on their rafts. He resorted to a series of feints. While small parties were dispatched to reconnoitre all possible crossing places, he divided his army into columns, which he marched up and down the river as if he sought a place of crossing. Then, when shortly before the summer solstice the rains set in and the river became swollen, he had corn conveyed from all quarters to his camp so that Porus might believe that he had resolved to remain where he was until the dry weather. In the meantime he reconnoitred the river with his ships and ordered tent skins to be stuffed with hay and converted into rafts. Yet, as Arrian writes, "all the time he was waiting in ambush to see whether by rapidity of movement he could not steal a passage anywhere without being observed." At length, and we may be certain after a close personal reconnaissance, Alexander resolved to make the attempt at the headland and island described by Arrian, and in preparation he decided on a manoeuvre almost identical with that adopted by General Wolfe in his 1759 Quebec campaign. Under cover of night he sent out his cavalry to various points along the western bank of the river with orders to make a clamour, and from time to time to raise the battle-cry; for several nights Porus marched his elephants up and down the eastern bank to block an attempted crossing until he got tired of it, kept his elephants in camp, and posted scouts along the eastern bank. Then "when Alexander had brought it about that the mind of Porus no longer entertained any fear of his nocturnal attempts, he devised the following stratagem": Upstream and along the western bank he posted a chain of sentries, each post in sight and hearing of the next one, with orders to raise a din and keep their picket fires burning, while visible preparations were made at the camp to effect a crossing....... When Porus had been lulled into a sense of false security and all preparations were completed at the camp and the crossing place, Alexander set out secretly and kept at some distance from the western bank of the river so that his march would not be observed....

T
HE
G
ENERALSHIP OF
A
LEXANDER THE
G
REAT
,
J. F. C. F
ULLER
, 1960