Earlier this year, The Strategy Bridge asked university and professional military education students to participate in our fourth annual writing contest by sending us their thoughts on strategy.
Now, we are pleased to present the first-place winner, from Maurizio Recordati, a student at American University in Washington, D.C.
Scholars from disparate disciplines have been agonizing over definitions of grand strategy with increasing frequency over the last decades. Not a few scholars have also criticized it for its impracticality and would scrap the concept. Some studies have attempted to organize the literature to bring some clarity to the field.[1] Nina Silove and Lukas Milevski have stressed the downsides of semanticism, which lead scholars to talk past each other and leave the concept in disarray.[2] Silove’s article “Beyond the Buzzword” offers a serviceable categorization of the term as she demonstrates that conceptions of grand strategy may refer to three groups of observable entities: plans, principles, and behaviors. Her contribution unpacks grand strategy ontologically as she looks at the substance behind the definition—the “entity, object, or phenomenon of grand strategy.”[3] The issue at hand is the unquestioned reification of the concept—that is, treating grand strategy as a real thing. The vexing question in the U.S. national security scholarship, “whether the United States has had, can have, or should have a grand strategy,” implicitly elicits such a problem.[4]
An illustration of the idea of containment in the Cold War (Pinterest)
Richard Betts has recently advanced the provocative suggestion that proponents of grand strategy “rescue [it] by definition.” The concept “makes sense abstractly, but falters in application, [it is] honored far more in principle than in practice.” In his view, this prompts scholars to “deflect criticism” by redefining it in “vague” terms, notably by adopting a more inclusive processual concept that embraces adaptation.[5] Betts instead posits grand strategy is a practical plan, that is, a product. I do not debate the worthiness of grand strategy as a tool for guiding U.S. statecraft—it falls outside of my field of study. As a strategic historian, however, I take an interest in showing other disciplines participating in its study that abstract acceptations of the term are worth cultivating. In the process, I suggest an alternative view to Betts’ and argue critics of grand strategy attack it by definition.
The history of the concepts of strategy and grand strategy does not warrant ostracizing adaptive strategies in the name of a specific research agenda at the expense of other disciplines. As historians have demonstrated, strategy (grand or not) was never exclusively the practical product Betts advances. Since it entered the French vocabulary in the late eighteenth century, strategy was sublime and cerebral as well. Military strategists conceived of strategy as a cognitive tool, a function, which should not be denied a priori to its descendant—grand strategy.
The argument of this essay builds on a distinction between stereotype and ideal type. I show that concepts under debate are stereotypical versions of grand strategy. A stereotype is a widely held but fixed and reductive image of a particular entity or phenomenon. As a mold, it solidifies a plastic substance such as a concept into a fixed shape (from Ancient Greek στερεός, stereós: solid). Stereotypical concepts of grand strategy are orthodox in the American international relations community, but should not be taken for granted in other disciplines such as strategy and history. Nonetheless, I argue that grand-strategic historiography also participates in reinforcing grand-strategic stereotypes.
Pericles' Funeral Oration (Perikles hält die Leichenrede) by Philipp Foltz (Wikimedia)
Finally, I illustrate the benefits of abstract concepts for studying grand strategy. My focus shifts from ontology to epistemology. The analysis proceeds from observable entities—as in Silove’s categorization—to the ideas we use to capture images of grand strategy from the past. Weber’s ideal type is a useful abstract cognitive tool at strategic historians’ disposal and a better alternative to stereotype. Clausewitz’s idealization of absolute war and Edward Luttwak’s level of analysis may be used to perform similar tasks. The suggestion is that the historian’s craft prompts scholars to attribute to grand strategy several different cognitive uses. The concept may refer to an observed phenomenon, an object of study, a narrative device, an interpretive framework, and a field of study. The ironic bottom line is that grand strategy’s much decried conceptual multiformity may save it and stimulate its growth. Thus far, criticisms have scraped only the most brittle facets of this many-sided concept.
Since the late 19th century, military scholars have lamented the degeneration of strategy into a blob and an impractical concept.[6] As far as back as in 1892, general Jules-Louis Lewal lamented the ongoing banalization of strategy had “swamped, obscured, and adulterated it.” With vulgarization, the term had become overly vague and quixotic. Over the last decades, grand strategy has become the target of strikingly similar criticisms. Security studies picked up grand strategy from strategic studies, revived it, and gave it different shapes, which would be hardly recognizable to many strategists.[7] Hervé Coutau-Bégarie has lamented that following its securitization, the concept metamorphosed from being a military term into a vague, unworkable framework to guide the state in long term horizons in war and peace. Grand strategy was corrupted, whence “everything became strategic, and strategy was nowhere to be found.”[8] As the French strategist noted, its expanding concerns for “global and human security,” the cacophony of its disparate conceptualizations, and its tendency to “suggest models and stereotypes” have stretched the concept and stripped it of its meaning and utility. Hence, Coutau-Bégarie has urged scholars to “return to a strategic strategy.”[9] A similar line of criticism of grand strategy as it is understood in the U.S. security community found an echo in the Anglo-Saxon strategic literature, notably in the works of Hew Strachan and Lukas Milevski.[10]
Over the last decade, as grand strategy has become all the rage in international relations, foreign policy and security scholars have also started criticizing the concept in the common understanding in their field. Whereas this literature seems content with grand strategy’s transition from its original martial dimension to statecraft, it shows impatience with its lack of practicality in the realm of government, so much so that Stephen Krasner has referred to grand strategy as an “elusive holy grail,” and David Edelstein and Ronald Krebs co-authored a cautionary article against grand-strategic delusions.[11] These political scientists’ concerns with the impracticality of the concept match some strategy scholars’ disinclination to accept grand strategy into the corpus of strategic theory. The dominant view in the latter discipline is that strategy’s raison d’être is pragmatic as it serves the conduct of war or statecraft.[12] It is thus no surprise that, in its most visionary conceptualizations, grand strategy met the resistance of some strategists.[13]
Part of the problem lies with some categorical acceptations of grand strategy that have gained currency, particularly in the international relations literature. The commentary and scholarship of the last few decades tends to reify the concept into a product, which at times shows with glittering attributes as grandiosity, purposiveness, foresight, and coherence. Nina Silove comes to a similar conclusion, but from a different premise. As she puts it, “Most contributions implicitly commit to scientific realism and use grand strategy to refer to a real object or phenomenon, something that exists independently of the mind of the observer.”[14] My ongoing research suggests the hypostatization of grand strategy results not only from rigorous empirical observation but even more often from imagination. Several studies tend to inject models of virtuous strategy into their representations of the past. The attentive reader may trace this latent method in the prescriptive and applied history literatures. Not a few students of grand-strategic history—including trained historians—tend to recreate images of grand strategy not only from the evidentiary record, but also by projecting the features of an ideal grand strategy. One of the fundamental misunderstandings in the existing literature is that which blurs the lines between normative theory and prescription on the one hand and description and interpretation on the other. Read this way, grand strategy is either a deliberate, linear, coherent, and functional model—or it is not grand strategy. In other words, the tangibility of grand strategy depends, at least to some extent, on the subsistence of its purest, imagined qualities.
The latest criticisms are targeted most notably at such an oxymoronic understanding of grand strategy as an ideal and yet tangible entity. Those critical observations are per se reasonable, but scrape only the most brittle facet of this many-sided concept. They attack stereotypical versions of grand strategy that are at odds with the very ideas labored by several strategists and historians over the past few decades. Simply put, the critics are pushing at an open door only to beat a dead horse. But scholars of international relations are not attacking a strawman. As I discuss further, some historians who advocate grand strategy did contribute—if unintentionally—to its stereotyping. Moreover, some historians behave as these scholars of international relations; they too imagine grand strategy stereotypically and criticize such reductive concepts. Edward Luttwak’s seminal The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire received a critical treatment in the 1970s, which recalls today’s criticisms in studies of international relations.[15] That his work was plagued with several historical inaccuracies and implausible propositions—as noted in the harsh reviews of classicist historians—nolo contendere, I do not have the expertise to contest it. But Everett Wheeler and Kimberly Kagan had a point when they lamented that many adverse reactions to the book distorted Luttwak’s actual position in their decrying any Roman master plan.[16] Like today’s critics of grand strategy, the classicists who attacked him had a “tunnel vision on what strategy must be,” and Wheeler concluded, “Denial of Roman strategy should not be based on the assumption that all strategy must be optimal.”[17]
Similarly, today’s attacks on grand strategy uphold too exacting a standard of a master plan—a product to guide policy well beyond short-term horizons. In the lay discourse, this is the most obvious way of imagining the concept. To be sure, such an understanding of grand strategy is not unwarranted, as luminaries in the field who advocated for grand strategy, have advanced similar assertive and forward-looking views.[18] Strachan argues these linear and purposive attributes are residuals inherited from grand strategy’s progenitor, nineteenth-century (operational) strategy.[19] After the Cold War, scholarship started conflating the two levels of strategy, which created expectations too high for grand strategy. Linearity and purposiveness suit doctrines for the operational level, with its very specific geographic contexts and short-term horizons, but they hardly apply to long-term statecraft. Strachan challenges, in particular, the prevailing American orthodoxy of grand strategy—notably, Kennedy’s long-term view and Posen’s association of the concept with doctrine.[20] It is thus no surprise that some critics of grand strategy also characterize it as a grand plan or as a concept that is necessarily doctrinaire.[21] More recently, some political scientists even declared that “grand strategic thinking is linear,” making the case that it does not suit a chaotic world.[22] The list of such reductive representations of grand strategy among its critics goes on. Such characterizations suit research agendas that conceive of grand strategy primarily as guidance to U.S. policy, and accessorily, as a cognitive tool. But to reiterate, they ignore important parts of the literature in strategy and history. In fact, today’s dispute over grand strategy seems somewhat of an intramural showdown within the U.S. national security community.
Throughout the nineteenth century, military planning gained prominence in the realm of strategy. Moving and provisioning large armies required forward-looking military commanders to use practical systems, calculations, and checklists.[23] However, from the very moment when the term strategy was reintroduced in the French vocabulary in the late eighteenth century, military theorists and historians have tended to distinguish it from plans.[24] Today, while military strategists inevitably use plans to direct some putatively linear processes, they are circumspect, if not altogether reluctant, to equate planning with their art, knowing that strategy requires coping with nonlinear dynamics.[25] When it comes to grand strategy (statecraft), tying the concept to planning is even less tenable. In their critique, Edelstein and Krebs highlight the inadequacies of strategizing in Washington, which they associate with bureaucracy drawing plans and documents. Such issues are well-known in the historical-strategic literature, and advocates of grand strategy agree with the gist of Edelstein and Krebs’ arguments, but not on narrow conceptualizations of the term.[26] Strategy scholars are skeptical on the merit of “so-called strategic documents” and fully acknowledge the complications nested in the interagency push and pull. They advance a processual view of grand strategy that embraces day-to-day adaptation, reactivity, and muddling through in their descriptions of grand strategy in practice.[27] On the other hand, they detour from the normative road that would lead them to call this behavior astrategic.[28] All this is not to say that we should categorically exclude the idea of grand strategy as a grand plan, but simply that not a few scholars regard blueprints as mere accessories.[29]
Coherence is generally held to be a quasi-necessary condition for the subsistence of a (good) grand strategy—both in normative theory and in history works.[30] In their historical accounts of grand strategy, both political scientists and some historians tend to impute more coherence at the level of implementation than the reality would allow for. This is not merely an effect of injecting normative grand strategy into historiography. The problem also lies in the objective limitations of a historian’s craft. Narrative inescapably attributes coherence and linearity to the past, particularly when it hinges upon longue durée (long-term) perspectives or leans on structural factors such, for example, geopolitics.[31] Grand strategy may function as an emplotment device, which uniforms described behavior, diminishes or ignores tactical oddities, and fixes the field of vision on facile continuities. Thus, historians may package consistent strategies with various degrees of impressionism.
Moreover, coherence is seldom qualified or justified, as its worthiness is routinely taken for granted.[32] Perhaps this attitude, too, is a legacy of nineteenth-century optimistic and rationalistic ways to operational strategy. Coherence informs the mechanical logic of linear blueprints, and from that perspective, regularity and persistence go a long way. Yet Sun Tzi’s maxims on the benefits of unpredictability may also elicit a few doubts on the value of coherent behavior. Unsurprisingly, Luttwak, who advanced the idea of “paradoxical logic of strategy” and “seemingly contradictory policies” on the level of grand strategy, favors harmony over coherence and consistency.[33] But there are scant examples of questioning the value of coherence—let alone cases of outright skepticism. Nonetheless, it may well be argued that within an adaptative concept of grand strategy, the quality of adherence (i.e., to the environment and to a state’s interests) is at least as worthy as that of coherence. By the same token, I suggest that the attribute of congruence suits both the problem-solving and the ends-based paradigms of strategy better than consistency.
The notion that grand strategy must be eo ipso grand is a widespread canard, and at that, a stereotypical one. Such a view is standard among critical voices but is firmly grounded in some caricatures of grand strategy advocates.[34] Associations to grandiosity are arbitrary, as they depend on one’s chosen conceptualization and, even more so, on the phenomena under scrutiny. Moreover, they hinge on one etymological and one axiological misunderstanding. First, as Freedman reports, the English term is a translation from the French grande stratégie, which referred to the art and knowledge of the “supreme commander and generals of any rank.”[35] As Jeremy Black aptly notes, it is ironic that the term readapted Guibert’s grande tactique and referred to what today passes for military strategy—that is, a narrower plane below today’s grand strategy as statecraft.[36] What is more, the French grande does not translate as grand. In that context, a better rendering would be high or large, as opposed to petite stratégie, for it just connotated the difference with the tactical level. Axiologically speaking, the term was neutral, but its core values evolved over two centuries. Initially, it did not suggest the awesomeness that the adjective grand carries with. A century of historical construction added to the initial inaccurate translation. Scholars reinforced the association to grandness by applying the concept strategy to the preservation of declining global empires or the successful conduct of total war. Some credit the concept with delivering such grand achievements, but even then, several specialists insist that a primal value of grand strategy lies in humility.[37] Its history preaches sermons of prudence, not grandiosity, and precisely because it seeks long-term sustainability, grand strategy requires measure rather than ambition.
Different concepts are not as rigid, not as fixed on intended goals and on the right sequence to achieve them, thus better understanding how grand strategy works in practice. Generally, these are pieces of descriptive analysis of strategic behavior, which may also carry normative attributes. Such approaches accept the inevitable corruption of strategy as it was envisaged ab initio, and, unlike the stereotypical concepts, they focus on strategy in the making, or strategizing, with little deference to its deliberate baseline. As Black puts it, “The understanding of strategy in practice in particular circumstances poses questions that underline the problem with the otherwise apparently attractive concept of optimum strategy.”[38]
One type of such understandings is that of strategy as an adaptative and flexible process.[39] It is telling that one of the most prominent of such perspectives came from business strategy, a field where strategy was predominantly understood as a product and a plan. In his seminal studies on strategy formation, Henry Mintzberg conceptualized emergent and deliberate strategy “as two ends of a continuum along which real-world strategies lie.” He imagined a spectrum between these two pure ideas, in which several hybrid types could be observed. He was interested not so much in the concepts per se, but “especially their interplay,” for “strategy formation walks on two feet, one deliberate, the other emergent.”[40] Military studies offer other possible examples of mixed and variable strategy. In his revisitation of Wylie’s sequential and cumulative strategy, Milevski notes that “the boundary between the two models is blurred to the extent that this dichotomy may represent a spectrum with two idealized poles.” Sequential strategy, which is linear in principle, transforms in practice. Milevski then points to cases of guerrilla strategy, which “attempt to fuse cumulative and sequential strategy into a sort of progression of strategy, in which cumulative strategy creates the foundations for and naturally transforms into a sequential strategy.”[41] For his part, Yarger stresses that strategy encompasses both linear and non-linear dynamics and that its analysis ought to grasp such distinction.[42] In other words, as intentions meet contingencies in a chaotic environment, emergent features transfigure the intended linear path and participate in the strategic process. As Silove notes with a dash of puzzlement, Brands, too, presents a mixed picture, as his concept of grand strategy is both purposive and unconsciously emergent.[43] In Strachan’s words, “Strategy occupies the space between a desired outcome, presumably shaped by national interest, and contingency, and it directs the outcome of a battle or of another major event to fit with the objectives of policy as best as it can. It also recognizes that strategy may itself have to bend in response to events.”[44] The bottom line is that large parts of strategic scholarship recognize the virtues of adaptability and flexibility, particularly as strategy ascends to the level of grand strategy, with its far-reaching geographic, temporal, and political dimensions.
Ernst Henseler’s painting of Bismarck’s last great parliamentary speeches. (Napoleon.org)
There are yet other concepts that avoid the clichés of purely deliberate and linear approaches and preserve grand strategy into the realm of abstraction. The first, most diffused such understanding is that of art, or an activity of the mind, which it borrows from its source, military strategy—for centuries, also known as military art.[45] General André Beaufre aptly marked the distinction between strategy, understood as a method of thinking, and a strategy—an overly ambitious product.[46] In essence, the former is what Marshal Ferdinand Foch termed as “an abstract game.”[47] Bismarck is a good incarnation of the strategic player. Marcus Jones presents him as a genius whose greatest strategic achievements were not the product of a long view but of his tactical skills and “expert navigation of uncertain events.”[48] The Iron Chancellor himself had often characterized his statecraft as “continuous gambling.”[49] He viewed politics as an aleatory realm in which precise calculations were mostly ineffective. Grand strategy as art finds its place in historiography and strategic literature but is virtually absent from scholarship in international relations. Qualities such as adaptability and flexibility become apparent in historical and descriptive studies that focus on strategizing. The making of grand strategy is a particular focus in Murray’s collections of historical case studies.[50] Conversely, as Rebecca Friedman Lissner notes, strategizing and choice find no place within the linear logic of structural-realist studies.[51]
The concept of strategy as art is less affirmative and optimistic than the stereotypes of grand strategy. As Tami Biddle puts it, “Because it is so challenging on so many levels, strategy is difficult to practice in any idealized form. But it is not an impossible art.”[52] Grand strategy is hard to capture within normative standards—what works in one context may fail elsewhere. Because he considers strategy “more an art than a science,” Strachan cautions, “[It] needs to be more modest about itself and about what it can deliver...it behooves those who think about it and those who practice it not to be too brazen about its status.”[53] Notably, if grand strategy is an art, it may include styles of play that most purist observers would define astrategic or anti-strategic. In the absence of standards (e.g., coherence, foresight, or purposiveness), modes like opportunism, trial and error, or ad hoc approaches may as well be considered legitimate kinds of strategy—that is, provided that they produce a strategic effect. In other words, strategy as art rescues tactical adroitness from the condescendence of proponents of stereotypical strategy.
Strategy has always been about the production of knowledge. One mode of study was doctrinal, in a Jominian tradition, and its alternative was more cerebral. Clausewitz’s On War was predicated on the idea that thinking hard about war is necessary before waging it. Strategic thought may be viewed as “a route to comprehension rather than to action.”[54] Thus, the concept grand strategy may also function as a cognitive tool.
After the barrage of criticism of his work on the Roman Empire (1976), which refuted the notion that Rome had a master plan (a grand-strategic product), Luttwak tried to clarify his position. In his sequel on Byzantium (2009), he wrote: “Grand strategy is only a level on which different state efforts interact, and therefore, all states inevitably have one.”[55] A level—or, in Liddell Hart’s terminology, a plane—is an abstract analytical category.[56] However, the claim that all states possess one implies that grand strategy is somewhat tangible, at least an observable entity. In an earlier book, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (1987), though, Luttwak had stated that grand strategy could simultaneously be a doctrine, a level of analysis, and “the reality of grand strategy, the conclusive level of strategy as a whole. Of course, only the latter exists universally.”[57] Notwithstanding the unconvincing claim that a level is real, Luttwak was trying to drive home a valid point: it takes an abstract category to reify strategy.
When scholars study grand strategy in history, their point of departure may be an idealized model. A large part of the literature is inspired by the normative standards of virtuous grand strategy—what good grand strategy should be. Thus, the scholar’s risk is to overemphasize—or even imagine—the stereotypical qualities I have discussed above: purposiveness, linearity, foresight, coherence, and grandiosity. A bibliographic review suggests that there is a tendency to reify grand strategies by drawing from that stereotype as much as from evidentiary bases. In other words, the stereotype becomes a paradigm to follow, and its influence is such that some scholars find exactly what they were looking for. This raises eyebrows among earnest historians. It is not uncommon to run into academic reviews chastising works in grand-strategic history for post hoc fallacies and arguments that are “more asserted than demonstrated.” Thus, Betts has a point when he claims that “grand strategy...emerges as a rationalization more than an explanation.”[58] Such modus operandi reads the source material with an analytical framework that is more affirmative than inquisitive. It is more pertinent to auxiliary history—history written in support of other disciplines such as strategy or international relations—and to applied history. Search for theory construction and policy relevance may come at the expense of a genuine historical perspective.
Carl von Clausewitz (Karl Wilhelm Wach/Wikimedia)
There are, of course, different ways of using abstract categories in the study of history, and there are less affirmative approaches than the one described above. Clausewitz’s concept of absolute war offers a good example for strategy students. As Strachan elucidates, the Prussian author was initially inclined to considering it a real phenomenon, not a fiction. Later, “Clausewitz, the historian...had to acknowledge that absolute war could not be a universally applicable model for real wars.” This illumination explains why he treated it as an experience in Book 1, and turned it into “an abstraction against which all wars, not just Napoleonic war, could be measured” in Book 8. Friction became his “way of squaring history with theory.”[59]
By the same token, historians may conceive of grand strategy as an “ideal type.” As Max Weber defines it:
An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct. In its conceptual purity, this construct cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality.[60]
Contrary to a stereotype, an ideal type has no normative vocation and is not conceived to materialize into a historical phenomenon. As Marc Trachtenberg puts it, “...(if it is used correctly), [theory] is not a substitute for empirical analysis. It is an engine of analysis.”[61] Under this guise, grand strategy’s exaggerated qualities and accomplished shape serve to generate hypotheses and questions, not to suggest answers. A historian needs a paradigm, not to follow it, but to poke holes in it. Such a flexible framework facilitates a scholar’s understanding that strategizing is constantly susceptible to the risk of error and strategic performance is regularly subpar.[62] History is a cemetery of failed strategies.[63] Moreover, an interpretive tool as Luttwak’s level of analysis serves to frame integration and collisions of different individual strategies and tactics. As Timothy Sayle notes, “If one reconceptualizes ‘grand strategy’ as a plane upon which the different resources of the state interact, with or without a conscious act of coordination, a different working definition emerges.”[64] From this perspective, it is not necessary to imagine a deus ex machina weaving the plot of a grand strategy, nor is the scholar tempted to impute more linearity and coherence than can be discerned.
The bottom line is that scholars may choose to reify grand strategy a posteriori and reconstruct it with all its imperfections. Or their research may conclude that the phenomenon under scrutiny does not deserve that name. All the same, a study in grand strategy it is. The critics of the concept may declare with a pinch of hyperbole that they “come to bury grand strategy.”[65] Eppur si muove! (And yet it moves!) The ultimate cognitive concept of grand strategy is that of an area of teaching and research. Grand-strategic scholarship is growingly active and includes its critics’ studies, at that. It is not a discipline for, as this essay shows, the scientific interchange among its primary professions (the strategists, the political scientists, and the historians) is still inadequate. More importantly, it calls for the development of an epistemic bedrock. This essay attempts to build in this direction.
Maurizio Recordati is a Ph.D. student at American University in Washington, D.C. He specializes in history and theory of grand strategy and late imperial Russia. His dissertation explores theory and methods for writing grand-strategic history. He holds an MA in Russian and Eurasian Studies from European University in St. Petersburg (EUSP) and a BA in History from the University of Milan.
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Header Image: “The Astronomer” by Johannes Vermeer (Wikimedia)
Notes:
[1] Several studies discuss the concept and definitions of grand strategy. Among the most useful works: Paul Kennedy’s essay “Grand Strategies in War and Peace: Toward a Broader Definition” is worth citing for its seminal role in reviving grand-strategic history in its contemporary focus on statecraft (rather than higher military strategy). Williamson Murray’s collections offer helpful introductions to grand strategy as a historical phenomenon. See Williamson Murray and Mark Grimsley, “Introduction: On Strategy,” in Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox and Alvin Bernstein (eds.), The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994: 1-23; Williamson Murray, “Thoughts on Grand Strategy,” in Williamson Murray, Richard H. Sinnreich, and James Lacey, eds., The Shaping of Grand Strategy: Policy, Diplomacy, and War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 1–33; Williamson Murray, “Introduction,” in Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich (eds.) Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and Peace from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014: 1-16. Lukas Milevski offers an analysis of grand strategy’s historical construction. This is the most comprehensive work on its conceptualization: Lukas Milevski, The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Hal Brands and William Martel offer possibly the most valuable didactic tools for non-adept students in IR and government: William Martel, Grand Strategy in Theory and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012; Hal Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy: Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014. See also Nina Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword: The Three Meanings of ‘Grand Strategy’,” Security Studies, 27:1, 27-57; Frank G. Hoffman, “Grand Strategy: The Fundamental Considerations.” Orbis 58, Issue 4 (2014): 472-485; and Paul D. Miller, “On Strategy, Grand and Mundane.” Orbis 60, Issue 2 (2016): 237-247.
[2] See Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword,” p. 6; and “Introduction” in Lukas Milevski, The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought, pp. 1-26.
[3] Nina Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword,” p. 7.
[4] Ibidem, 5. Lawrence Freedman notes that when the term “strategy” was coined, it became a distinctive product with military professionalization. Nonetheless, both the author who introduced the word, Joly de Maizeroy, and the more famous strategist of that time, Guibert, describe strategy as “sublime.” Freedman makes the case that when strategy entered in the business vocabulary, its understanding as a product became more widespread. Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013: 72, 541, 552, 562.
[5] Richard K. Betts, “The Grandiosity of Grand Strategy,” The Washington Quarterly 42, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 7-10. At p. 10, Betts challenges Hal Brands’ understanding of grand strategy as “process, not a blueprint.” See Hal Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy: Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014: 198-201.
[6] In his words, strategy had become “noyée, obscurcie et en quelque sorte dénaturée.” Jules-Louis Lewal, Introduction à la partie positive de la Stratégie, Paris: Librairie militaire de Baudoin, 1892: passim 2-9.
[7] For an account of the reciprocal skepticism between strategy and security scholars, see Joshua Rovner, “Warring Tribes Studying War and Peace”, War on the Rocks, April 12, 2016: https://warontherocks.com/2016/04/warring-tribes-studying-war-and-peace/ (last access: 01/14/2020).
[8] Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, Traité de stratégie, Paris: Economica, Institut de Stratégie Comparée, 1999: 81.
[9] In his own words: “revenir à une stratégie stratégique.” Ibidem, passim pp. 70-76, 81-82, 96, 120-124, and 441-442.
[10] See, for example, “Strategy: Change and Continuity” in Hew Strachan, The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014; Lukas Milevski, The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016; Lukas Milevski, “Can Grand Strategy be Mastered?”, Infinity Journal, Volume 5, Issue 4, (Summer 2017): 33–36; Adam Elkus, “Must American Strategy Be Grand?” Infinity Journal, Volume 3, Issue 1, (Winter 2012): 26–30; Richard K. Betts, “The Grandiosity of Grand Strategy,” The Washington Quarterly 42, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 7–22. It should be noted that Coutau-Bégarie did not receive credit on this line of argument. The title of Strachan’s article “The Lost Meaning of Strategy,” [on Survival 47, no. 3 (2005): 33-54] sounds like a calque of the French author’s formula, i.e., strategy’s “perte de sens” (Traité de stratégie, p. 441.) See also Paul D. Miller, “On Strategy, Grand and Mundane.” Orbis 60, Issue 2 (2016): 244-245.
[11] David M. Edelstein and Ronald R. Krebs, “Delusions of Grand Strategy: The Problem With Washington's Planning Obsession,” Foreign Affairs 94, no. 6 (2015): 109-16.
[12] Raymond Aron’s formula of strategy as a “praxéologie”, a “science de l’action,” has gained currency in the French school of strategy and, most notably, in the scholarship of Lucien Poirier (Raymond Aron, Paix et guerre entre les nations, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1962.) As Bernard Brodie pithily put it, “strategic thinking … is nothing if not pragmatic … Above all, strategic theory is a theory for action (Bernard Brodie, War and Politics, New York: Macmillan, 1973: 452.)
[13] See, for example, Hew Strachan, “Strategy and Contingency,” in The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
[14] Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword,” p. 6. Betts and Edelstein & Krebs argue grand strategies are often a product of rationalization. Betts, “The Grandiosity of Grand Strategy,” p. 11; David M. Edelstein and Ronald R. Krebs, “Delusions of Grand Strategy: The Problem With Washington’s Planning Obsession,” Foreign Affairs 94, no. 6 (2015): 111.
[15] Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970.
[16] Everett L. Wheeler, “Methodological Limits and the Mirage of Roman Strategy: Part I,” The Journal of Military History 57, no. 1 (1993): 8. Kimberly Kagan later made the case that “definitions and concepts in the field of Roman grand strategic studies have not kept the pace with the increasing sophistication of their counterparts in the field of modern grand strategy.” Too often, historians of Rome unacquainted with the concept conceived grand strategy in the reductive terms of grand design or “systematic plan.” This “unfortunate equation”, she claims, “has had baleful effects on this discussion.” Kimberly Kagan, “Redefining Roman Grand Strategy,” The Journal of Military History 70, no. 2 (April 1, 2006): 334-335.
[17] Everett L. Wheeler, “Methodological Limits and the Mirage of Roman Strategy: Part II,” The Journal of Military History 57, no. 2 (1993): 218, 222.
[18] Silove provides a summary of US scholarship propounding the idea that grand strategy is a “grand plan” and includes names that shaped the field such as Paul Kennedy, Geoffrey Parker, Stephen Waltz, and Peter Feaver. Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword,” pp. 8-13.
[19] As Strachan notes, such a brand of strategy had gained currency with the two nineteenth-century strategy giants. Jomini’s approach was conspicuously “prospective and purposeful”: to him, strategy was a science - centered on operational planning, which largely ignored contingency. Clausewitz advanced a consequentialist and purposive view: one by one, tactical gains would turn into strategic success. The Prussian author, Strachan continues, is more often remembered for concepts as “friction” and “chance” than for planning. Yet his book VIII, which consists of his more mature thoughts, is prudential and purposive; tellingly, it is titled “War plans.” Hew Strachan, “Strategy and Contingency,” in The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013: 242-244. Colin Gray, a devoted reader of the Prussian strategist, had previously rebuked Alan Beyerchen’s thesis of Clausewitz as a “chaos theorist.” In his words, “what Clausewitz argues in On War is that by careful planning and the ‘genius’ of the commander, warfare’s undoubted non-linearities, tendency towards chaos, and awesome complexity, generally can be, and are, mastered well enough.” Colin Gray, “Approaching the Study of Strategy,” in Ralph Rotte and Christoph Schwarz eds., International Security and War Politics and Grand Strategy in the 21st Century, Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science PublishersPublisher’s, 2011: 14. Cfr. Alan Beyerchen, “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War,” International Security, 17: 3, Winter 1992/93: 59-90.
[20] Paul M. Kennedy, “Grand Strategy in War and Peace: Toward a Broader Definition”, in Paul M. Kennedy (ed.), Grand Strategies in War and Peace, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Barry Posen had famously contended that grand strategy is a chain of political and military ends and means” and that “military doctrines are critical components of national security policy or grand strategy.” As Silove notes, Posen does not define grand strategy, simply refers to it as a “theory.” Tellingly, Poses defines doctrine. Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword,” p. 6. Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984: 13, 25 [emphasis mine]. In his 2014 book, Restraint, Posen labors a less assertive view: “A grand strategy is not a rule book; it is a set of concepts and arguments that need to be revisited regularly.” Barry R. Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014: 1.
[21] Edelstein and Krebs associate the making of grand strategy in Washington to a “planning obsession.” Edelstein & Krebs, “Delusions of Grand Strategy.” For his part, Richard Betts has maintained that planning is a “necessary condition for implementing any intention” and thus submitted the definition of grand strategy as a “practical plan.” Richard K. Betts, “The Grandiosity of Grand Strategy,” The Washington Quarterly 42, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 8. Ionut Popescu is extremely categorical in associating policy planning to an imagined “grand strategy school,” as he attempts to advance a putatively alternative approach based on learning and adaptation. He imagines a division of the field in two alternative schools “grand strategy” vs. “emerging strategy.” The former group includes political scientists as Posen and William Martel, and historians as John Gaddis and Hal Brands. Conveniently, this categorization does not include other scholars who do use the term and even advocate grand strategy, but do not necessarily associate it to planning (e.g. Lawrence Freedman, Edward Luttwak, Williamson Murray, and Richard Sinnreich.) Popescu promotes the benefits of Henry Mintzberg’s “emergent strategy,” but as I discuss further, he misinterprets Mintzberg’s rationale in his conceptualization of the term (see footnote n. 40.) Ionut C. Popescu, “Grand Strategy vs. Emergent Strategy in the conduct of foreign policy,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 41:3 (2018): 438-460.
[22] Daniel Drezner, Ronald Krebs, and Randall Schweller, “The End of Grand Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 3 (May 1, 2020): 107–117.
[23] Freedman, Strategy: A History: 74-75. For his part, Strachan maintains that planning acquired relevance in business schools and was later reinjected into military strategy. See Hew Strachan, “Strategy and Contingency” in International Affairs 87, no. 6 (November 2011): 1294.
[24] As Joly de Maizeroy put it: “in order to formulate plans, strategy studies the relationship between time, position, means, and different interests, and takes every factor into account… [Strategy] is the province of dialectics, that is to say, of reasoning, which is the highest faculty of the mind” [emphasis mine]. Quoted by Jean-Paul Charnay, in André Corvisier (ed.), A Dictionary of Military History and the Art of War, English edition ed. John Childs, Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1994: 769, cit. Strachan, “Lost Meaning,” p. 35. And as Strachan puts it, “a strategic plan is not the same as strategy.” Hew Strachan, “The Future of Strategic Studies: Lessons from the Last ‘Golden Age,’” in New Directions in Strategic Thinking 2.0: ANU Strategic & Defence Studies Centre's Golden Anniversary Conference Proceedings, edited by Russell W. Glenn, Acton ACT, Australia: ANU Press, 2018: 165.
[25] For Antulio Echevarria, a war plan is but “the practical face of strategy.” Antulio J. Echevarria, II, “Is Strategy Really a Lost Art?”, SSI US Army War College, 13 September 2013. As Harry Yarger puts it, “Planning … relies on a high degree of certainty—a world that is concrete and can be addressed in explicit terms. In essence, it takes a gray world and makes it black and white through its analysis of the facts and assumptions about the unknown. Planning is essentially linear and deterministic, focusing heavily on first-order cause and effect. It assumes that the future results can be precisely known if enough is known about the facts and the conditions affecting the undertaking.” See Harry Yarger, Strategic Theory for the 21st Century: The Little Book for Big Strategy, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, February 2006: 10, 21, 22.
[26] It should be noted that Edelstein and Krebs preach the same principles of numerous grand strategy advocates: they favor “pragmatism,” “flexibility,” “focusing on specific challenges,” “creativity,” prudence (“do no harm,”), all of which are attributes of the art of strategy. Edward Luttwak acknowledges that “the highly diversified bureaucratic apparatus of modern states is itself a major obstacle to the implementation of any comprehensive scheme of grand strategy.” Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, (Rev. and enl. ed.), Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001: 260. Beatrice Heuser devotes the epilogue of her Evolution of Strategy to “Strategy-making versus bureaucratic politics.” As she puts it, “Since their usage has become widespread, [strategic documents] have been characterized more by contradictions and compromises resulting from bureaucratic politics than by a logical application of explicit principles.” Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010: 490. See also Tami Davis Biddle, Strategy and Grand Strategy: What Students and Practitioners Need to Know, Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute and U.S. Army War College Press, 2015: 38-40.
[27] Cit. Williamson Murray, “Introduction,” in Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich (eds.) Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and Peace from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014: 5. For his emphasis on day-to-day policymaking and adaptation, see Williamson Murray, “Thoughts on Grand Strategy,” in Williamson Murray, Richard H. Sinnreich, and James Lacey, eds., The Shaping of Grand Strategy: Policy, Diplomacy, and War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011: 3-4. His characterizing strategy as an adaptive process dates from his first book specifically on the making of strategy. Williamson Murray and Mark Grimsley, “Introduction: On Strategy,” in Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox and Alvin Bernstein (eds.), The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994: 1. See also Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
[28] For his part, Betts categorically divorces adaptation and emergence from grand strategy: “although adaptation is good and soundly tactical, it is not strategy per se.” Betts, “The Grandiosity of Grand Strategy,” p. 10.
[29] See, for example, the section “Think of grand strategy as a process, not a blueprint” in Hal Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy: Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014: 198-201.
[30] This equally applies to the imperfect synonym of “coherence”—“consistency.”
[31] John P. LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire 1650-1831, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
[32] This term may suggest, for example, coherence between different tactics, ‘horizontal’ integration between different agencies, ‘vertical’ consistency between means and ends, or simply regularity.
[33] Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, p. 261.
[34] Tellingly, Drezner, Krebs, and Schweller’s Foreign Affairs critical piece is “America must think small.” Betts’ essay refers directly to “the grandiosity of grand strategy.” Both works are cited above.
[35] Lawrence Freedman, “The Meaning of Strategy, Part I: The Origins,” Texas National Security Review, Vol. 1, Iss. 1, November 2017: 100. According to Freedman, the term was coined by François Nockhern de Schorn. [Freedman transcribes the title and page incorrectly: it is “idées,” not “Dees,” p. 200.] See François De Nockhern Schorn, Idées raisonnées sur un système general suivi et de toutes les connoissances militaires et sur une methode etudier lumineuse pour la science de la guerre avec ordre et discernement en trois parties avec sept tables methodiques, Nuremberg et Altdorf: chez George Pierre Monath, 1783: 200.
[36] Black, Military Strategy, p. 8
[37] As Frank Hoffman picturesquely puts it, strategy is an “appetite suppressant pill.” Frank Hoffman, “Strategy as Appetite Suppressant,” War on the Rocks, March 3, 2020: https://warontherocks.com/2020/03/strategy-as-appetite-suppressant/ (last access: May 28, 2020.)
[38] Jeremy Black, Military Strategy A Global History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020: 3. For Brands, “Grand strategy […] can never be a game of perfect; it can only be a game of good enough.” Brands, What Good Is Grand Strategy? P. 193.
[39] Richard Sinnreich offers a good example of such approach: Richard H. Sinnreich, “Victory by trial and error: Britain’s struggle against Napoleon,” in Murray, Williamson, and Richard Hart Sinnreich (eds.) Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and Peace from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
[40] Henry Mintzberg and James A. Waters, “Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent,” in Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 6, No. 3. (Jul. - Sep., 1985): 257, 271. For this reason, Popescu’s elevating emergent strategy as an alternative to grand strategy fundamentally misses Mintzberg’s rationale. In the real world, Mintzberg observes disparate kinds of realized strategies, which include both deliberate and emergent elements.
[41] Lukas Milevski, “Revisiting J. C. Wylie’s Dichotomy of Strategy: The Effects of Sequential and Cumulative Patterns of Operations,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 35:2 (2012): 224, 232, 233 [emphasis mine.] It should be noted that Wylie was a practitioner and was prone to conceiving of strategy as a product rather than as an abstract activity. Ibid., 226.
[42] Harry Yarger, Strategic Theory for the 21st Century: The Little Book for Big Strategy, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, February 2006: 10, 21.
[43] Hal Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy: Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014: 6, 9, cited in Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword,” p. 5.
[44] Hew Strachan, “Strategy and Contingency,” in The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013: 251. See also Williamson Murray and Mark Grimsley, “Introduction: On Strategy”: 1.
[45] To Joly de Maizeroy, who is credited with coining the term “strategy” in its first modern Western version, “[Strategy] is the province of dialectics, that is to say, of reasoning, which is the highest faculty of the mind.” Quoted by Jean-Paul Charnay, in André Corvisier (ed.), A Dictionary of Military History and the Art of War, English edition ed. John Childs, Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1994: 769, cit. Strachan, “Lost Meaning,” p. 35. Edward Mead Earle’s definition is canonic in the Anglo-sphere and includes grand strategy: “Strategy is the art of controlling and utilizing the resources of a nation—or a coalition of nations—including its armed forces, to the end that its vital interests shall be effectively promoted and secured against enemies, actual, potential, or merely presumed. The highest type of strategy—sometimes called ‘grand strategy’—is that which so integrates the policies and armaments of the nation that the resort to war is either rendered unnecessary or is undertaken with the maximum chance of victory.” Edward Meade Earle ed., Makers of Modern Strategy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1943, p. viii.”
[46] André Beaufre, Introduction à la stratégie, Paris: Librairie Fayard/Pluriel (2012): 24. In French, the difference is makes is that between “la stratégie” and “une stratégie.”
[47] Ibidem, 34. In French: “un jeu abstrait.”
[48] Marcus Jones, “Strategy as character: Bismarck and the Prusso-German question, 1862-1878,” in Williamson Murray, Richard H. Sinnreich, and James Lacey (eds.), The Shaping of Grand Strategy: Policy, Diplomacy, and War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011: 80-81.
[49] Marcus Jones, “Bismarckian strategic policy, 1871-1890,” in Murray, Williamson, and Richard Hart Sinnreich (eds.) Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and Peace from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014: 238.
[50] Murray, Knox, and Bernstein (eds.), The Making of Strategy; Murray, Sinnreich, and Lacey (eds.), The Shaping of Grand Strategy; Murray and Sinnreich (eds.) Successful Strategies.
[51] Rebecca Friedman Lissner, “What Is Grand Strategy? Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield,” Texas National Security Review: Vol. 2, Iss. 1, (November 2018): 57-58.
[52] Biddle, Strategy and Grand Strategy, p. 58.
[53] Hew Strachan, “Strategy in theory; strategy in practice,” Journal of Strategic Studies 42, no. 2 (2019): 188.
[54] Strachan remarks the difference between Jean-Jacques Langendorf’s biography of Jomini and Raymond Aron’s book on Clausewitz were titled Faire la guerre and Penser la guerre (“To Make War” and “To Think War.”) Hew Strachan, “Strategy in theory; strategy in practice,” Journal of Strategic Studies 42, no. 2 (2019): 177. Jean-Jacques Langendorf, Faire la guerre: Antoine-Henri Jomini (2 vols), Geneva: Georg, 2001–2004. Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz (2 vols), Paris: Gallimard 1976.
[55] Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009: 409.
[56] Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy (2nd Rev. Ed.), London: Faber and Faber, 1967: 322; cited in Biddle, Strategy and Grand Strategy, p. 28.
[57] Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace: 208 [emphasis mine.]
[58] Richard K. Betts, “The Grandiosity of Grand Strategy,” p. 11.
[59] Hew Strachan, Carl von Clausewitz’s On war: a biography, Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre (2008): 149-152.
[60] Max Weber and Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (trans. and ed.), Max Weber on the Methodology of Social Sciences; translated and edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, New York: Free Press, 1949: 90 [emphasis original.]
[61] Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006: 32 [emphasis original.]
[62] Laure Bardiès, “Le raisonnement stratégique,” in Stéphane Taillat et al. Guerre et stratégie, Presses Universitaires de France, 2015: 55-56.
[63] Williamson Murray, “Introduction,” in Murray, Williamson, and Richard Hart Sinnreich (eds.) Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and Peace from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014: 2.
[64] Timothy A. Sayle, “Defining and Teaching Grand Strategy,” The Telegram, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Temple University, vol. 4, January 2011: https://www.fpri.org/docs/media/201101.sayle_.teachinggrandstrategy.pdf
[65] Cit. Drezner, Krebs, and Schweller, “The End of Grand Strategy.”