Have not read Freedman's entire book yet but the parts I have read are useful.
Excerpts:
Above all, he argues, it is about employing whatever resources are available to achieve the best outcome in situations that are both dynamic and contested: “It is about getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest. It is the art of creating power.”…Sir Lawrence examines this idea in three main forms. The first is the “strategy of force”, which deals with the military sort, from Clausewitz to nuclear game theory and the rise of asymmetric warfare today. The second is “strategy from below”, which looks at political varieties, particularly those of 19th-century professional revolutionaries such as Karl Marx, who saw themselves as the general staff of the downtrodden. And the third is “strategy from above”, which examines the development of strategy in business, mainly a late-20th-century phenomenon, at least in its most self-conscious form. In all three spheres strategy is seen as the way to get a decisive and thus lasting result.
Why a strategy is not a plan
Strategies too often fail because more is expected of them than they can deliver
Nov 2nd 2013 |From the print edition
Strategy: A History. By Lawrence Freedman. Oxford University Press USA; 751 pages; $34.95. Buy from Amazon.com
EVERYONE, it seems, is in need of a strategy. Governments have lots of them: strategies for health care, energy, housing, and so on. Each area of policy is made to seem more purposeful if there is a strategy behind it. Similarly, no company these days would dare to admit it lacks one. If things are going badly it will often be put down to the lack of good strategy. People even talk about using it to improve their lives—from coping with stress to losing weight or just making other people like them more.
Related topics
Over time, the word “strategy” has been drained of meaning by ubiquity and overuse. Sir Lawrence Freedman’s aim in his magisterial new book, “Strategy: A History”, is to find a workable definition of what strategy is and to show how it has evolved and been applied in war, politics and business. Above all, he argues, it is about employing whatever resources are available to achieve the best outcome in situations that are both dynamic and contested: “It is about getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest. It is the art of creating power.”
Sir Lawrence, who for more than 30 years has been one of Britain’s foremost historians of military strategy, examines how the origins of the word can be found in Greek mythology and the Bible. A recurrent theme emerges: the dichotomy between strategies based on the application of superior force (personified by the heroic Achilles) and those based on the application of guile (personified by the crafty Odysseus, who came up with the idea of the Trojan horse). Guile is more seductive because it offers the possibility of cleverness defeating brute power.
A few hundred years after Homer’s “Iliad”, Sun Tzu, a Chinese general, was writing “The Art of War”, a book that celebrates cunning by arguing that the way to win is by always doing the opposite of what your opponent expects. Sun Tzu gave birth to a long tradition that believed strategic goals could often best be achieved by avoiding the destructive uncertainty of pitched battle. It was preferable to use “stratagem and finesse” to defeat an enemy—famine was a favourite tactic of Sun Tzu’s—than to expose yourself to “the chance of arms”. His teachings are still used in business schools and military academies today.
No one is more associated with strategies founded on deceit and psychological manipulation than Niccolò Machiavelli, who is also still studied. However, as Sir Lawrence argues, guile alone can be overrated, particularly against enemies that are clever as well as strong. Machiavelli believed that his prince needed both the cunning of the fox and the strength of the lion to keep power. If David’s slingshot had missed the gap in Goliath’s helmet, which unaided by God it might well have done, things would have gone badly for him.
It is, however, not really until the late 18th century, partly as a consequence of the Enlightenment and partly through the impact on military and political thinking of the Napoleonic wars, that the concept of strategy as it is usually understood today made its first appearance. It was seen as a way of uniting operational art in the military sphere with political objectives. As Carl von Clausewitz, a great Prussian strategist, put it: “War is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means.”
(Continued at the link below)
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