Triple-Quote: Conflating Stratagems for Strategy
“Chinese culture has no strategic logic at all, but it owns a strategic culture of which they are terribly proud. Not only Sun Tzu…also a whole body of classics. There are seven famous strategic classics but there is also more extensive literature. Unfortunately, none of it is actually authentic strategy. What it is, it’s a bag of tricks. It is stratagems…but there is no real strategy in it.”
“Many people see strategy as a high-level, long-term plan. Sun Tzu’s bing-fa was, to a large degree, a reaction against this view. His definition was much closer to the definition of strategy used in modern game theory: a chosen set of methods reacting to possible situations. These methods set are chosen with a big-picture view of mission and the competitive environment. Because of this, some might call Sun Tzu’s work a book of tactics.”
ScienceOfStrategy.org, on ‘The Difference Between Strategy and Tactics as Seen by Sun Tzu’
“Doing the JPP, the NATO OPP, the MDMP…they [planners] will look at Center of Gravity: ‘My enemy, I will do a Center of Gravity Analysis. Should I follow Strange, Iron, Kem, Riley? How should I structure? Should I make the critical vulnerabilities over here? All of that is trapped in the tactical maze. And they’re not aware of their epistemology because they’re just thinking about methods.”
Synthesis: Easterners, and particularly the Chinese, are often thought of as being inherently more strategically-minded than the West (and the tired Go-Chess comparison is often trotted out to illustrate this thought). But in the first quote, Luttwak challenges this idea and actually turns it on its head. For Luttwak, “strategy begins with the acknowledgement of the other,” which was not a necessity for China, a largely inwardly focused empire. Luttwak highlights that China’s history abounds with stratagems - a bag of tricks or methods, rather than actual strategy.
In the second quote, an online website for strategy inadvertently supports this idea by redefining strategy in essentially a tactical manner, as a menu of methods, as stratagems.
In the third quote, from a discussion about Western operational planning, Ben Zweibelson and Shimon Naveh highlight the tacticization of operational planning and its reliance on methods. In this respect, Western military leaders share more with their Chinese counterparts than they realize, as both approaches center on the imposition of ones plans on the enemy rather than a dialectic or discourse between adversaries.
-LM
