Is strategy an illusion

Strategy is essential and very important part for making war either politically or morally, without effective strategy there is no clear vision for a team or an individual to achieve the task in hand[1]. Without strategy it’s almost useless to go about doing a certain task. People who are very pessimist, to them strategy is an illusion.

As we know that strategy is defined as a plan for using the military assets properly and effectively to attain political objectives or as Clausewitz once said, “The use of engagements for the object of was.” If such a military strategy is to be real and effective rather than an illusion, one must be able to come up with such a plan to attain a certain objective through combat or even to the threat of war and then implement the plan with forces and too keep the plan effective in the time of enemy reactions, such reaction that are also predicted in the plan, and achieve something close to the desired objective that needed to be attained.

As Bernard Brodie writes, “In that respect it is like other branches of politics function of theory is to describe, organize, and explain and note to prescribe.” Strategies can be judged only when one is looking backward, but they are planned only when looking forward.

The making of strategy during the early modern era highlights the impact of some of the aspects such as “Luck versus Genius” and “Culture versus Coercion”. This creates many arguments. According to me two things play an important role in effective strategy making and that are luck and genius. As it is a fact that strategy cannot be judged in advance because any thing can happen in future. So any strategy that may prove to be wrong in near future can be justified before making it and also can be proven to be the best.

Luck versus Genius

Strategy is an illusion since it is not realistic and very complex to judge in advance. This illusion is because people confuse what they know about the result of previously planned strategies or strategic choices with what the can predict as to what the strategists are planning before the real test of strategy[2].

If the strategists want to make the strategy to be useful and efficient, there must be a certain planned criteria for judging between the smart and the stupid strategies and also to evaluate and distinguish between reasonable and excessive risk. This must be done in the view point of the decision maker. Successful strategy must also achieve the objective with a cost that is reasonably acceptable. There must be some sort of a war to better judge the acceptable cost scenario, however it is not possible to explain why there r some causes still that are worth fighting for and some that are not. Because strategic does depends upon amount of risk and the judgments about the value of the stakes, in other words mostly it’s like gambles. What amount of risk is reasonable or u can say tolerable or strategically sensible? Without hindsight it is very hard to predict or distinguish risk from shots in the dark. Risk can be minimized but cannot be controlled. Some times good fortune or luck plays in your favor and is mistaken as genius or brilliant strategic work.

Adolph Hitler, Winston Churchill, and Douglas Macarthur all gambled more than once, and the had a fair sharing between winning and loosing[3].Hitler was the biggest of them all he depending on the luck made many decisions and was victories on many occasions until his two most big mistakes in 1941: that was the attack on Soviet Union and declaring the state of was on United States. In Hindsight most people Judge Hitler to be strategically very foolish, but none can side line the success he got.

High risk does not really take the credit out of strategy. The real logic of the right choice depends upon the expected result. If the interest or objective for which a strategy is planned is greater enough or is more important then the cost of failure or the failure cost is low enough, a gamble can be taken and will be sensible even if the odds of it succeeding are low, luck plays a vital role in this situation and can swing to either side. There is always a function that is preferable by using which we can determine the validity of different choices. If the strategist’s logic is to be proven wrong or faulty in selecting the wrong choices the blame is mostly set on the information provided to them.

As Gen. Henry Pownall wrote in his diary in the year 1940, Churchill was useful, but also a real danger, always tempted by the objective, and never really counted all his resources to see if the objective can be done or not. Churchill’s willingness and effort to have English say choke in their own blood was functionally rational as long as the phrases “death before honor” defined the rank order of values to be served by strategy. We can say simply that Churchill had better luck. And, if we do go back to the conditions in which the judgment was made, by what criteria should we judge the decision? By the objective? Some objectives “cannot fail to be achieved”

For example, U.S. spokesmen declared that the objective of Operation Desert Fox-the four-day bombing of Iraq in 1998-was to “degrade” Saddam Hussein’s capabilities. Any combat action would do that. Strategy cannot be faulted, however, just because the objective it serves is dubious to the observer, if it makes sense in terms of a different value of concern to the
one making the decision. If the decision maker puts priority on a moral value that conflicts with material welfare (e.g., honor), even self-destructive behavior can be strategic.

Moreover, what amount of risk do we consider reasonable? Does the outcome matter, even if the winner took extraordinary risk but was lucky?

Adolph Hitler, Winston Churchill, and Douglas Macarthur all gambled more than once, and all won some and lost some[4]. Hitler rolled the dice several times against the advice of prudent generals, and won stunning victories from the 1930s until his two big mistakes in 1941: attacking the Soviet Union and declaring war on the United States. Churchill’s inspiration contributed to the disaster of Gallipoli in 1915 but also to Britain’s ªnest hour in 1940. In 1950 Macarthur overrode the fears of U.S. military leaders that a landing at Inch on would be a fiasco and he scored a stunning success, then took a similar gamble in splitting his force on the march to the Yalu and caused a calamity. In hindsight most judge Hitler to be strategically foolish, Churchill brilliant, and Mac-Arthur either one, depending on the observer’s political sympathies. Do the strategies chosen warrant such differing verdicts? Or are the prevalent judgments really not about these leaders’ strategic sense, but about the higher values for which they stood?

At the time, Churchill counted on eventualities that were unlikely to occur as he planned- American involvement and victory through air campaigns. But, Churchill was vindicated by events. Perhaps he is judged so favorably because of the values he stood by, not the likelihood of his being correct. Luck plays a very important role in the making of strategy and also to make it effective in each phase of political or combat. A person may be of high intelligence and very genius and can make effective and very well planed strategies but his strategy wont be able to work if he is unfortunate and don’t have luck by his side. These standards, together with the principle that we must judge according to what was reasonable before the fact rather than in light of what becomes afterward, would require condemning some successes and excusing some failures. If we reject the advance to the Yalu, we may also have to reject the assault on Inchon. Apart from Macarthur, military leaders opposed the landing because an overwhelming number of factors made it appear foolhardy.14 one cannot say there was no choice. Other options offered less risk of catastrophic failure. Army Chief of Staff Lawton Collins preferred to use the 70,000 men earmarked for Inchon to support the breakout from the Pusan perimeter or for an amphibious anking operation closer to Pusan.15 These alternatives implied a more costly campaign of attrition back up the peninsula. The success of the long shot at Inchon averted these costs, and yielded one of the most impressive coups de main of the twentieth century. With the comfort of hindsight, one may celebrate that roll of the dice. To see it as strategic genius rather than a stroke of luck, however, or to see it as less reckless than the operations near the Yalu, requires that prop of hindsight which strategic planners do not have.

By criteria of forecasting rather than hindsight, it is also unreasonable to be more critical of Churchill’s promotion of the Gallipoli campaign than of his persistence in 1940[5]. There were errors at the highest level of command in 1915, but they did not doom the campaign. The critical mistakes were operational and tactical choices failures to adapt by the men on the spot.16 as to alternative options, the obstacles to strategic success in the Dardanelles were not overwhelming, and success might have yielded a decisive shift in the fortunes of war years earlier than 1918. Do we give better marks for 1940 because the stakes were so much higher, and thus deserving of absolute commitment? Yes, but because of the moral imperative behind the strategy, not the economist standards of strategy itself. It is hard to keep clear the distinctions between material and moral standards for strategic choice, because in practice it is hard to have any but a seat of- the-pants estimate of the odds for a strategy’s success or its relative costs, or to know the counterfactual (what would happen if a different option is chosen). It is especially easy for many to endorse high-risk commitments on behalf of subjective values such as national honor because it is often unclear how the implications differ from a material standard of interest. Material standards are most often indented with realist theories of international politics, but while generally better than the alternatives for diagnosing

Strategy is not always an illusion, but it often is. The defenses of strategy offered in the responses to each critique above are valid but wobbly. A few of the critiques are weaker than their popularity would suggest (e.g., the Freudian view in Critique 3), but most are stronger than generally realized. All the critiques are valid in some cases, to some degree, yet strategy does sometimes work. It would take a massive project of systematic investigation to begin to determine how often and how much effective strategy is an illusion or a reality[6]. The answers about strategy that politicians and generals have to lie in the gray area between condense and nihilism. How much do the problems of strategy matter? How can effective strategy be practical more often? In some cases, the weakness of strategy may not matter much; an artless use of force may be effective nonetheless. This happens most easily for a superior power that confronts an enemy too weak to counter that superiority. The United States can and itself in that position often; it could hardly have failed against Grenada or Panama however it chose to apply its military capacity. In recent cases of conventional war, the United States also enjoyed technological advantages so great that, even more than European colonial expeditions whose Maxim guns made native resistance futile, U.S. forces could engage in one-sided attrition campaigns against Iraqis and Serbs, using invulnerable air power and uniquely skilled armored forces to whittle them down with impunity. Even for a superior power, however, simple attrition does not guarantee success at acceptable cost. Reliance on attrition may still pose high costs if the opponent, though weaker, is not helpless. The United States proved willing to bear very high costs to subdue the Confederacy, Germany, and Japan, because the objectives at stake were very high in value. It proved willing to bear moderate costs against Korean and Vietnamese communists when they appeared to be the wedge for worldwide Leninism, and was prepared to take thousands of casualties against Iraq when it threatened Western oil supplies. Few causes after the Cold War, however, will present stakes that seem important enough to accept much two-sided attrition. The United States was not willing to bear even low costs against barracks bombers in Beirut or a Somali warlord. Effective exploitation of an advantage in attrition also requires the ability to target the adversary. This is easier in a conventional International Security 25:2 46 engagement than in irregular warfare, where the weaker enemy can use strategy to raid, evade, and subvert. Irregular combat is more typical of contemporary conflict than are set-piece conventional battles.

Except for the least difficult military challenges, there is no alternative but to engage in strategy unless one is willing to give up the use of force as an instrument of policy[7]. To develop strategy, despite the many obstacles surveyed, requires care in assuming the links between the ultimate political objectives sought and the military objectives set out in a campaign plan. In this it matters a great deal whether political objectives are absolute—achieved wholly or not at all—or can be achieved by degree, in proportion to effort[8]. Another important general distinction is between types of strategy: those whose aim is to control an outcome, by conquest, or to coerce the adversary to capitulate, by torture.94 Objectives that can be achieved partially or by coercion sometimes tempt policymakers because they seem susceptible to limited investment of force; those that are absolute or achieved by elimination of enemy capability are often preferred by military officers, because they leave fewer ambiguities about results and do not depend on changes in enemy will. But it is hard to eliminate an enemy’s capability to resist without waging total war, and most wars by far are limited. The challenge is particularly great when a government pursues an absolute objective with a limited coercive strategy. An assumption that simply hurting an adversary will achieve a desired result is sure to ªall the bill only if the objective is to punish past behavior rather than control future behavior[9]…95 Contrasting examples include the American bombing of North Vietnam and of Serbia. These campaigns aimed to induce Hanoi and Belgrade to cease military action against South Vietnam and Kosovo, by indicting pain on their home territories without invading and subduing them[10].

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.      Robert Greene. 2007. The 33 strategies Of War.Joost Elffer Books.

2.      B. H. Liddell Hart.1991.Strategy.122.Meridian.

3.      Mark Mazower.2008.How the Nazi’s Ruled Europe.192.

4.      Ron Rosenbaum.1999.Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins for His Evil.66.

5.      Carlo D’Este.2008. Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945.53.

6.      Colin S. Gray.2007. Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy

7.      Richard K.2000.International Security.50.USA.Harvard College.

8.      John Ellis.1990. Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War.55.

9.      Paul Kennedy.1992. Grand Strategies in War and Peace.192.USA

10.  Robert A. Doughty.2008. Pyrrhic Victory.255.UK.

[1] Robert Greene. 2007. The 33 strategies Of War.Joost Elffer Books.
[2] B. H. Liddell Hart.1991.Strategy.122.Meridian.
[3] Mark Mazower.2008.How the Nazi’s Ruled Europe.192.
[4] Ron Rosenbaum.1999.Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins for His Evil.66.
[5] Carlo D’Este.2008. Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945.53.
[6] Colin S. Gray.2007. Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy
[7] Paul Kennedy.1992. Grand Strategies in War and Peace.192.USA.
[8] John Ellis.1990. Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War.55.
[9] Robert A. Doughty.2008. Pyrrhic Victory.255.UK.
[10] Robert A. Doughty.2008. Pyrrhic Victory.255.UK.