Great militaries carry all they need to ensure that what can go wrong won’t, or if it does, it won’t matter.[1]

No strategy anticipates all contingencies, every solution creates new problems, and these can, at times, overwhelm.[2]

Professor John Lewis Gaddis is the Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University, where he teaches courses on the Cold War, grand strategy, biography, and historical methods.[3] In 2012, Professor Gaddis received the Pulitzer Prize for the biography George F. Kennan: An American Life.[4]

Despite the arguably problematic title of On Grand Strategy, John Lewis Gaddis writes to educate defence and security professionals. Most important among this educative work is Gaddis’ articulation of three key strategic ideas:

1. The fox and the hedgehog.
2. Testing national resolve.
3. Culminating point.

Professor Gaddis defines grand strategy as the ‘the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.’ For Gaddis, grand strategy is an interdependent link between ‘what’s real and what’s imagined.’[5]

He explains, ‘if you seek ends beyond your means, then sooner or later you’ll have to scale back your ends to fit your means.’ Whatever balance a strategic leader seeks to arrange between ends and means, they ‘won’t have a strategy until they connect these dots [ends and means] – dissimilar though they are – within the situation they are operating.’[6]

Why on Grand Strategy?

Understanding strategy is a fundamental responsibility of defence and security professionals. For our realisation of this responsibility, Professor Gaddis’ addition of the adjective grand to the noun strategy seems unnecessary. Others have argued for strategy without an adjective. Most simply, strategy, as defined by Clausewitz, Gray and Friedman, connects policy with tactics. 

Carl von Clausewitz explains war has a grammar, but not a policy logic, of its own.[7] Colin S. Gray agrees with Clausewitz. Emphasising this idea, Gray explains there is an enduring requirement for leaders and designers of policy and strategy to understand both the ‘grammar’ of war, ‘how war works as war…[as] physical conditions and tactical challenges…[and] action wherein people live and die in combat’, and the policy ‘logic’ of war.[8] 

The simplicity of Clausewitz’s and Gray’s explanation of strategy’s logic and tactic’s grammar is compelling. This simplicity implies that John Lewis Gaddis’ addition of the adjective grand as an adjunct to the idea of strategy is, perhaps, an unwarranted complication. 

A similar argument for simplicity is Brett Friedman’s thesis that the operational level of war blocks the grammar of tactics interacting with the logic of strategy. Through blocking this tactical-strategic interaction, the ‘operational level of war cannot find solid purchase as an idea because there is simply no logical space for it.’[9] In place of logic, the operational level of war is defined and distinguished by ‘levels of command, scale, size and complexity.’[10]

Friedman argues that a more coherent approach to warfighting includes translating strategy into campaigns and, ultimately, into tactical actions. In Friedman’s view, the essence of campaigning is operational art, which imposes a governing logic on operations, tactics, and logistics to achieve intermediate objectives within a campaign.[11]

Despite On Grand Strategy including the seemingly unnecessary adjective, “grand,” the title does not detract from Gaddis’ work as an excellent primer for defence and security professionals to understand, design, and employ strategy. Gaddis enhances our understanding via three key strategic ideas: (1) the fox and the hedgehog; (2) testing national resolve; and (3) culminating point.

The fox and the hedgehog

Isaiah Berlin wrote, ‘the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’[12] Hedgehogs, Berlin explains, ‘relate everything to a single central vision’ through which ‘all that they say and do has significance.’ Foxes, in contrast, ‘pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way.’[13] Gaddis notes that hedgehogs possess a ‘sense of direction’ and foxes a ‘sensitivity to surroundings.’[14]

Phillip Tetlock expanded Berlin’s thinking, describing foxes as relying, for their strategic predictions, on an intuitive ‘stitching together [of] diverse sources of information,’ not on deductions derived from ‘grand schemes.’ The best foxes, ‘shared a self-deprecating style of thinking’ that ‘elevated no thought above criticism.’[15] But foxes tended to be ‘too discursive – too inclined to qualify their claims – to hold an audience.’[16]

Tetlock’s hedgehogs, in contrast, ‘shunned self-deprecation and brushed aside criticism.’[17] Hedgehogs aggressively deployed big explanations and displayed a ‘bristly impatience with those who did not get it.’ If hedgehogs are wrong, they ‘dig deeper’ and become ‘prisoners of their preconceptions,’ trapped in cycles of self-congratulations and fragile pre-eminence.[18]

Tetlock argues that we have survived as a species by combining the habits of the fox and the hedgehog. Foxes adapt more easily to rapid changes, but hedgehogs thrive in stable times.[19] While Tetlock favours foxes, quipping that ‘foxes do it better,’ he admits that accomplished strategic leaders will pursue, find, consolidate, and integrate common ground between fox and hedgehog thinking.[20]

Extrapolating this idea, Gaddis argues that strategic leaders enable common ground through metaphorically employing their intellect – as a compass – and their temperament – as a gyroscope (with parallels to Clausewitz’s coup d’oeil).[21] Gaddis further emphasises common ground for strategic leaders through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s test, from 1936, for first-rate intelligence: ‘the ability to hold two opposed ideas [and opposites in behaviour] in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function’.[22] 

For strategic leaders, ‘the habit of hedgehogs’ is to ‘establish the proper relationship between ends and means', because if ‘ends exist only in the imagination, they can be infinite’.[23] In contrast, means, as ‘time, space, scale…place, culture and circumstance’, are ‘stubbornly finite: they’re boots on the ground; ships in the sea; and, the bodies required to fill them’.[24] Gaddis summarises the interdependence of time, space, and scale, where: 

• time includes ‘how to wait, when to act, and where to seek reassurance,’ 
• space is ‘where expectations and circumstances intersect.’ and, 
• scale ‘sets the ranges within which experience accrues.’[25]

Ends and means, proportionally aligned, ‘have to connect if anything is to happen’… ‘they’re never, however, interchangeable’.[26] Importantly, planning draws on ‘principles extending across time and space’, which are then applied, or scaled, with options that proportion potentially infinite ‘aspirations to capabilities’.[27]Niccolò Machiavelli, shared this view stating a leader should ‘proportion your actions to your objective, not to progress from one nebulous city to another, but because some things have been shown to work and others haven’t.’[28] 

Emphasising the point that infinite strategic ends are incongruent with the always finite and usually tactical means, Gaddis quotes Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln, where Daniel Day-Lewis, as President Abraham Lincoln, explains the ‘unpredictability of strategic choice’:[29]

A compass…will point you true north from where you are standing [i.e., strategic ends], but it’s got no good advice about swamps and deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way [i.e., tactical means]. If in pursuit of your destination [ends], you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in the swamp [means]…then what’s the use of knowing true north [ends]? [30]

Through strategic choice, to save the Union of the United States, Lincoln emphasised, ‘fox-like,’ leadership and pragmatism in achieving balance between ends and means:

I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.[31]

Reconciling F. Scott Fitzgerald’s test with the ‘proper relationship between ends and means,’ strategic leaders, employing Lincoln’s thinking, may choose to ‘resolve dilemmas by stretching them over time.’ This requires strategic leaders balancing finite means with defined ends while crystalising ideas through ‘great intensity and clarity.’[32]

Importantly, when defining ends and testing national resolve, strategic leaders, may, prudently, ‘seek certain things now, put off others until later, and regard still others as unattainable.’[33]

Testing national resolve

If you yield on a small matter, you will instantly have to meet some greater demand. 
– Pericles, 432 BCE [34]

Strategy, for a nation, ‘requires a sense of the whole that reveals the significance of respective parts,’ where strategy and statecraft simultaneously demonstrate the ‘ability to grasp interconnectedness’ combined with ‘the unforeseen.’[35] In explaining these ideas, Professor Gaddis compares three events:

• Melian Dialogue, in 416 BCE, between Athens and Melos,
• US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson’s January 1950 ‘defensive perimeter’ speech,[36] and,
• President Kennedy, from May 1961, escalating the Vietnam War. 

These events, separated by twenty-four centuries, are employed by Gaddis to explain how an adversary may ‘test your resolve in a manner that all can see: you can then decide, in consultation with others, what to do, and you can usually determine when you’ve done it.’[37] For our adversaries, ‘small triumphs in a single arena set up for larger ones elsewhere, allowing weak contenders to become stronger.’[38]

In other words, as soon as we define our national areas of influence, our adversaries can then ‘test our nation’s resolve against our own insecurities.’[39] This risk in attempting to define and control national areas of influence occurred for the Athenians at Melos; Secretary Acheson, from June 1950, fighting the Korean War; and for President Kennedy, in 1961, escalating the Vietnam War. 

In turn, risk exponentially expands, as the Athenians and the United States realised, into national insecurities, ‘ancient quarrels’, and indefinitely designed strategic ends.[40] Emphasising a common lack of proportionality between means and ends, Geoffrey Parker explains that prospect theory – where ‘leaders…risk more to avoid losses than to achieve gains’ – biases decision makers toward the ‘persistently disproportionate’ employment of finite means to infinite strategic ends.[41] As Gaddis notes, if national ‘credibility is always in doubt, then capabilities must become infinite or bluffs must become routine.’[42]

In achieving proportionality, Gaddis explains the, sometimes, ‘calamitous effects of too great a precision and too great a decisiveness in political life.’ Examining Elizabeth I’s decision making proportionality at war in 1588 against Phillip II of Spain, Gaddis notes:[43]

Elizabeth used dithering, which looks irresponsible…to remind her advisers…to hold off her suitors, thus balancing their states; and, when the balance at last turned against her, to lure the Spanish Armada into the English Channel where, by trusting her admirals, she sprang a massive mousetrap.

Precision and decisiveness in each of these situations, could have entrapped her. 

In other words, Elizabeth I’s strategic ends included balancing states, which could become an endless or infinite task. However, when her strategic ends of balancing states became unachievable, Elizabeth I skilfully and successfully employed her finite means, the English fleet, at a time and place of her own design and choosing.

Culminating point

Gaddis observes that with ‘training, discipline and superior leadership, armies can temporarily suspend the all-too-human instinct to flee from danger.’ Similarly, Clausewitz employs the concept of the culminating point to describe military forces ‘defeating themselves by exhausting themselves.’[44] 

In time, through ‘friction…degrading the functioning of the multiple parts on which armies depend,’ war’s violent grammar is superseded by a policy logic, ‘always in the making,’ that surrounds and confounds actual fighting.[45] Said differently, ‘as triumph tops antecedents, war’s grammar becomes its logic.’[46] Gaddis explains:

Heroics drain you. Offensives slow as supply lines lengthen. Retreats invite counterattack. Leaders rise so far above fundamentals as to lose sight of them altogether.[47]

Gaddis emphasises that the culminating point of military campaigns is regularly revisited, including the Persians in Greece, 492–449 BCE; Athenians in Sicily, 416-413 BCE; Romans in the Teutoburg Forests, Autumn 9 CE; Spanish in the English Channel, July 1588; British in North America, 1775-83; Napoleon in Moscow, 1812; and Japanese in New Guinea / Solomon Islands, 1942. In these campaigns, leaders failed to ‘perceive the truth at every point…[meaning] landscapes, logistics, climates, the morale of their troops and the strategies of their enemies.’[48]

Clausewitz reinforces this point, concluding that ‘the good general must know friction in order to overcome it whenever possible, and in order not to expect a standard of achievement in operations which this very friction, makes impossible.’[49] For Clausewitz, military genius requires the ‘inquiring rather than the creative mind, the comprehensive rather than the specialised approach, [and] the calm rather than the excitable head.’[50] 

Clausewitz explains why loss of psychological balance in war becomes the military balance, leading to campaign culmination which ignores:[51] 

War is an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will. Attached to force are certain, self-imposed, imperceptible limitations hardly worth mentioning. 

Force – that is physical force – is thus the means of war; to impose our will on the enemy is its objective.[52]  

Gaddis warns that democracies may defeat themselves, especially when they bear ‘deaths more easily than questions about the purposes of wars.’[53] If the purpose of war is too ambitious, it will exhaust, or culminate, the always finite available means. 

In turn, finite means affect leaders whose ‘minds lose their former incisiveness’.[54] Through exhaustion, uncertainty, and human frailty, including bias, leaders ‘forget the strategy with which they began’.[55] In other words, campaign proportionality between ends and means is lost and the ‘inertia of the whole gradually comes to rest on the commander’s will alone.’[56]

Then, in culmination, leaders underestimate or ignore the principle that ‘the political objective is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.’[57] 

Conclusion

On Grand Strategy is as an excellent primer for defence and security professionals to understand, design, and employ strategy. 

Professor Gaddis defines grand strategy as ‘the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.’ Grand strategy is an interdependent link between ‘what’s real and what’s imagined.’[58]

Gaddis explains, ‘if you seek ends beyond your means, then sooner or later you’ll have to scale back your ends to fit your means.’ Whatever balance a strategic leader seeks to arrange between ends and means, they ‘won’t have a strategy until they connect these dots [ends and means] – dissimilar through they are – within the situation they are operating.’[59]