Hew Strachan has often argued that the field of strategic studies tends to use the term “strategy” quite differently to how Carl von Clausewitz did. Strachan’s argument is that in Clausewitz’s time “strategy” was concerned with the art of winning a war, whereas today “strategy” is often concerned with whether a war should be waged and to what end.

Strachan argues that this “distinction – strategy as the use of the battle for the purposes of war and strategy as the use of war for the purposes of policy – has become muddled” as the term “strategy” moved from the domain of military commanders to political leaders. In other words, current uses of the term “strategy” often encompass a higher level of the political-military interface than Clausewitz himself ever did, despite the Prussian’s popularity in the field.

To be clear, Strachan does not argue that political leaders in the 19th century and earlier did not strategise as to how their decisions to wage war could serve political goals, just that they did not use the term “strategy” in this way (consistent with accounts by Lawrence Freedman and others).

Strachan adds that qualifying terms, such as “military strategy” and “grand strategy”, mark important distinctions but do not sufficiently overcome this muddle because these terms now have many meanings themselves.

Some years ago, Jeffrey Meiser made a similar point on Twitter, noting that some definitions of “military strategy” emphasised winning a war while others emphasised using the military to achieve a political goal. Several responses to his tweet expressed strong disagreement, arguing that there was no real difference, but by my reading of various definitions he was right. The objectors were imposing assumptions that were not explicit in many definitions of military strategy, and that would not account for ways that military force can achieve political goals short of waging war (such as deterrence and compellence) despite this being a major focus of the field since the 1950s.

So, there is often a need to clarify the assumptions behind different uses of the term strategy, because definitional debates with strategic studies can be no less contentious than definitional debates within terrorism studies. While many in strategic studies would agree that strategy concerns both political leaders and the military commanders below them, different definitions imply different political-military dynamics and divisions of responsibility.

For example:

• Is strategy concerned with winning a war (implying that it is primarily the responsibility of military commanders, though accepting that political leaders have ultimate authority)?
  
• Or is strategy concerned with decisions about whether to wage war (implying that it is primarily the responsibility of political leaders, though with expert input from military commanders)?
  
• Or is strategy concerned with the interactions that both political leaders and military commanders have with many other parts of government (implying that military commanders should not necessarily have greater input than any other part of the public bureaucracy)?

Broader definitions of strategy can implicitly invoke higher layers of the political-military interface and thereby mean quite different things (and have different implications for civil-military relations) in ways that are not always acknowledged.

For example, in one article Richard Betts defined strategy “a plan for using military means to achieve political ends, or as Clausewitz put it, ‘the use of engagements for the object of the war.’” Yet what Betts proposed in the first half of the sentence, “a plan for using military means to achieve political ends”, is broader than the definition from Clausewitz he quotes in the second half and implies a greater role for political leaders. Political decisions about whether to threaten war or initiate a war would fit under Betts’ definition, “a plan for using military means to achieve political ends”, but not under the Clausewitz quote that Betts’ presented as equivalent to his own definition.

It could be argued that because Clausewitz’s conception of war centred on political purposes, his definition of strategy implicitly encompassed today’s broader definitions, but that would be a stretch. As Hew Strachan argued, that might be how people read Clausewitz today, but it is not how people read him in the 19^th century.

To help anyone working through different definitions of strategy, the table below divides common based on their embedded assumptions that implicitly invoke different layers of the political-military interface. I first made it some years ago for my own interest in disentangling some of the strategic studies literature but have enjoyed revisiting it as I work my way through The New Makers of Modern Strategy.

The table centres on two core distinctions:

• The first distinction is the type of power involved. This is the distinction between military strategy (concerned with the use of military power) and grand strategy (concerned with the use of all elements of national power).
  
• The second distinction is the scope of the ends sought. This is the distinction between whether the term strategy is concerned with narrower ends (winning a war) or broader ends (the purposes for which a war might be fought or for which all elements of national power, including military power, might be mobilised).

It could be argued that this last distinction is false, and that the idea of winning a war is inseparable from achieving the intended political ends of a war. However, as shown in the argument above and the table below, this relationship is not explicit in all definitions of strategy.

On the military strategy side (the first two rows), there is also some synergy between this approach to dividing definitions and Lukas Milevski’s argument that Western definitions of military strategy invoke several different logics. Milevski argues that some definitions invoke an adversarial logic of overcoming an enemy (pointing to the concept of operational art and more contentiously the concept of an operational level of war) while other definitions invoke an instrumental logic of achieving a political end (pointing to the popular ends-ways-means model).

The former logic is apparent in the table’s first row, the narrow conception of military strategy, while the latter logic is apparent in the second row, the broader conception of military strategy. However, this argument does not apply to definitions of grand strategy, as even the narrower definitions explicitly state the importance of a political end (and Milevski’s article does not claim to address grand strategy, as he has done that elsewhere).

Milevski’s argument, in the same article, about the distinction between “decision making” and “performance” are also not addressed by this table, which is concerned with common strategic studies definitions of strategy rather than the game theoretic definitions which Milevski addressed under the rubric of “decision making”.

The table does not address the many definitions of strategy outside the political-military concerns of strategic studies, such as business strategy. The aim is to help people interested in strategic studies to make sense of the many definitions floating about in the field and choose those appropriate to the dimensions of the political-military interface that they are interested in.

Military strategy, narrower conception Concerned with the use of military actions to win a war (implicitly adversarial logic, overcoming an enemy) Examples: “the art of the general” – common translation of Greek term “strategos”. “the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war” – Carl von Clausewitz. “The purpose of tactics is to win battles. The purpose of strategy is to win wars.” – David T. Zabecki.

Military strategy, broader conception Concerned with the use or threat of war to achieve policy goals (implicitly instrumental logic, achieving a political end)   Examples: “a plan for using military means to achieve political ends” – Richard Betts. “the bridge that relates military power to political purpose” – Colin Gray. “the use that is made of force and the threat of force for the ends of policy” – Colin Gray again. “the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy” – Basil Liddell Hart. “Military strategy can no longer be thought of, as it could for some countries in some eras, as the science of military victory. It is now equally, if not more, the art of coercion, of intimidation and deterrence. The instruments of war are more punitive and acquisitive. Military strategy, whether we like or not, has become the diplomacy of violence.” – Thomas Schelling.

Grand strategy, narrower conception Concerned with the use of all elements of national power to win a war (implicitly a major or global war, not a “limited war”).   Examples: “the mobilisation and deployment of national resources of wealth, manpower and industrial capacity, together with the enlistment of those of allied and, when feasible, neutral powers, for the purpose of achieving the goals of national policy in wartime” – Michael Howard. “to co-ordinate and direct all the resources of a nation, or band of nations, toward the attainment of the political object of the war.” – Basil Liddell Hart.

Grand strategy, broader conception Concerned with the use of all elements of national power to achieve policy goals beyond military victory (implicitly global or similarly ambitious goals, such as maintaining a favourable international order, rather than less “grand” goals)   Examples: “the art of the statesman” – common phrase, in this case taken from C.R. Smith. “the capacity of the nation’s leaders to bring together all of the elements, both military and nonmilitary, for the preservation and enhancement of the nation’s long-term (that is, in wartime and peacetime) best interests.” – Paul Kennedy. “the conceptual framework that helps nations determine where they want to go and how they ought to get there; it is the theory, or logic, that guides leaders seeking security in a complex and insecure world.” – Hal Brands.

Last November the Australian Journal of Defence and Strategic Studies published a review I wrote of Antulio J Echevarria II’s excellent book War’s Logic: Strategic Thought and the American Way of War.

However, the review can be quite hard to find as the journal does not link to each article individually, only to the PDF of the entire edition. As the journal is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, I have created a separate PDF of the review itself to make it more accessible.

You can access the review here or read the beginning of it below.

The American way of war has always mattered greatly for Australia. Decisions made in the United States over when, and how, to wage war have long influenced Australia’s military fortunes. The American way of war has in turn depended on how American strategic thinkers have understood the logic of war, which has itself evolved over time in response to global politics, technological developments, intellectual trends and changes in American society. Antulio Echevarria’s new book, War’s Logic: Strategic Thought and the American Way of War, guides us through this tumultuous intellectual history. The book’s value lies both in what it reveals about American military thought and what it reveals about the logic of war itself.

War’s Logic explains the ideas of 12 American strategic thinkers from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, who he divides into four groups.

First are the traditionalists, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Billy Mitchell, both military veterans and tireless enthusiasts of sea power and air power, respectively. Despite the different eras they wrote in, with Mahan 39-years older, they both brought Swiss theorist Antione Jomini’s core principles, prioritising offensive action, into their own military domains.

The second group are the civilian strategy intellectuals, Bernard Brodie, Robert Osgood, Thomas Schelling and Herman Khan. They gained prominence after the Second World War and prioritised the need to avoid a third world war given the transformative impact of nuclear weapons. New understandings of war’s logic followed: Brodie and Osgood’s promotion of limited war; Schelling’s view of war as bargaining and strategy as coercion (deterrence and compellence); Kahn’s advocacy of a nuclear escalation ladder that could itself function as a form of bargaining. Yet the apparent failure of limited war doctrine in Vietnam, along with the easing of Cold War tensions in the 1970s, reduced the influence of the civilian strategists.

This prompted the rise of Echevarria’s third group, the military intellectuals, Henry Eccles, J C Wylie, and Harry Summers. While the strategy intellectuals had been concerned with how to prevent military escalation (despite coercively wielding the threat of war for the purpose of bargaining), the military intellectuals restored space to focus on how to conduct war for the purpose of winning. Both Eccles and Wylie advanced the idea of strategy as control, an approach that Echevarria credits with synthesising both the traditionalist emphasis on offensive action with the civilian strategist emphasis on constraining military action to ensure it serves the purposes of policy. All three thinkers, particularly Summers, played a role in the post-Vietnam Clausewitz revival within the United States military.

The final group are the operational artists, John Boyd, William Lind and John Warden. These thinkers gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, when the idea that nuclear weapons made conventional war obsolete had lost its hold. Their priority was to create the intellectual foundations for the United States to once again wage war successfully. They restored the seemingly archaic idea of winning wars through winning battles, but with new twists. Boyd and Lind, respectively best known for the OODA Loop (observe, orient, decide and act) and Fourth Generation Warfare, sought to prioritise indirect attacks through the idea of manoeuvre warfare, where synchronised air and ground operations could use speed and surprise to overcome the need for grinding attrition. Warden promoted a different version of manoeuvre warfare based on air power, which paved the way for ideas such as effects-based operations. Like Eccles, Wylie and Summers, this group focused more on the conduct of war itself than th control of war through policy, but they went far further. In Echeverria’s account, Boyd, Lind and Warden’s ideas of prioritising operational art amounted to an intellectual insurrection.

This is the story that War’s Logic tells, and Echevarria is well suited to tell it. He is a professor at the US Army War College and brings both military and scholarly credentials to the formidable task of synthesising a nation’s strategic thought across a contentious century. …

If that sounds of interest, read the full review (about 4000 words including footnotes) here.

I should also mention that something went wrong with Footnote 30, and through some sort of Zotero accident I somehow pasted in a chunk of the blurb of the book I was citing. The footnote should simply say “Ben Mckelvey makes the argument that the US-led counter-network operations incentivised killing for its own sake and helped establish the context for the Australian war crimes.”