{"id":13812,"date":"2014-05-14T14:30:22","date_gmt":"2014-05-14T04:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=13812"},"modified":"2014-05-15T10:26:11","modified_gmt":"2014-05-15T00:26:11","slug":"the-lost-meaning-of-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-lost-meaning-of-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"The lost meaning of strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Professor<\/a><\/p>\n

Strategy has long been a contested concept. Yet despite all of the debate surrounding the term, strategy ultimately concerns the relationship between military<\/i> means and political<\/i> ends. As the British strategist and military historian Basil Liddell Hart famously observed<\/a>, strategy is \u2018the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfil the ends of policy’.<\/p>\n

Against this backdrop, there\u2019s been some loose language thrown around on the pages of <\/span>The Strategist<\/i> over the last few days. Peter Jennings started us down this slippery slope when he asked \u2018why DFAT doesn\u2019t do strategy\u2019 and implored the Government to task DFAT to develop \u2018a strategic policy framework of the type associated with White Papers\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rob Ayson takes issue with Peter, contending that DFAT is already doing strategy.<\/span><\/p>\n

His assertion is one I find somewhat troubling, however, because unless our diplomats have a few battalions hidden away in the bowels of \u2018Gareth\u2019s Gazebo\u2019 the term \u2018strategy\u2019 applied to DFAT really is a misnomer. In answer to Peter\u2019s question, DFAT doesn\u2019t do strategy because it shouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

In this respect, I also disagree with Peter\u2019s claim that \u2018most strategy isn\u2019t directed to the design and use of military force\u2019. For as strategists going back to Clausewitz have observed, that military component is a defining characteristic of the term when used correctly.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rod Lyon is equally untidy in his contribution when he seeks to circumvent what he terms an \u2018arid debate\u2019 about definitions of strategy by slipping straight into Walter Russell Mead\u2019s definition of \u2018grand strategy\u2019. To be fair to Rod (and to Peter and Rob for that matter) there have been periods in history when definitions of strategy, grand strategy and even foreign policy have become synonymous. The classic case was the Cold War, where the all-consuming nature of the nuclear threat led to a conflation of those terms.<\/span><\/p>\n

But in today\u2019s world of much broader and more diffuse threats and challenges, strategy and grand strategy are no longer one and the same. Grand strategy is a much broader exercise involving the coordination of all of the resources that a nation state has at its disposal\u2014economic, political, geographic, diplomatic, cultural and military\u2014with a view to preserving and enhancing that state\u2019s interests. To define \u2018strategy\u2019 in this way, however, deprives it of almost any meaning. Or as Richard Betts <\/span>more colourfully puts it<\/a>, it risks creating a situation where the \u2018military core may become a pea lost in an amorphous ball of wax\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

It would be all too easy, of course, for Peter, Rob and Rod to dismiss these concerns as academic nitpicking of little relevance to \u2018real world\u2019 policymaking. On this point, the Oxford Professor Hew Strachan begs to differ. In his seminal <\/span>Survival<\/i> article, <\/span>\u2018The Lost Meaning of Strategy\u2019<\/a>, Strachan cautions against the practical dangers in applying the term strategy too liberally. He points to the example of the so-called \u2018War on Terror\u2019, attributing the difficulties America faced in waging that campaign to a product of its failure \u2018to relate means to aims (in a military sense) and to objectives (in a political sense)\u2019. In his terms, \u2018it abandoned strategy\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lest he be accused of anti-Americanism, Strachan is also critical of his own government, particularly the encroachment of its Defence Ministry into the realm of foreign policy and the government\u2019s use of \u2018the armed forces as their agents of peace as well as in war’. In his judgment, Britain no longer has \u2018an identifiable government agency responsible for strategy (despite the Foreign Office\u2019s apparent but perverse claim that that\u2019s its task)\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

Given Australia\u2019s own current preoccupation with \u2018defence diplomacy\u2019, could there be lessons in this for us perhaps? For at its most fundamental, strategy is about enabling the government to use force, if necessary, to achieve its political objectives. As Strachan notes, \u2018strategy is not policy; it is not politics; it is not diplomacy\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

To use strategy interchangeably with such terms only invites incoherence. This is a dangerous path to go down. For as Professor Strachan concludes, \u2018awesome military power requires concepts for the application of force that are robust because they are precise\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

Brendan Taylor is head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University. Image courtesy of Department of Defence<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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As the British strategist and military historian Basil …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54,"featured_media":13815,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[477],"tags":[197,89,312,549,21],"class_list":["post-13812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-strategy","tag-defence-diplomacy","tag-dfat","tag-grand-strategy","tag-strategic-policy","tag-strategy-2"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe lost meaning of strategy | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-lost-meaning-of-strategy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The lost meaning of strategy | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Strategy has long been a contested concept. 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