Strategy

6 ideas

1. Dislocation precedes and replaces decisive battle

   The aim of strategy is not to seek battle but to create a situation so disadvantageous to the enemy that, if it does not by itself produce the decision, a battle will easily finish it. Dislocation is achieved physically, by moving against the enemy's rear, communications, or line of retreat, and psychologically, by the commander's sense of being trapped. The psychological effect grows out of the physical move and is what actually breaks resistance.

2. Frontal assault stiffens the resistance it attacks

   A direct advance along the line of natural expectation pushes the enemy back onto his reserves and supplies, so he gets stronger as he retreats. Surveying decisive campaigns across twenty-five centuries, Liddell Hart argues that nearly all were won by an approach that first unbalanced the opponent and very few by a head-on push. The frontal attack therefore wastes force at the point where the opponent is best prepared to absorb it.

3. Line of least expectation and resistance

   Physically, the line of least resistance is the route the enemy has defended least. Psychologically, the line of least expectation is the course he is least ready for. An effective move follows both at once, because an unguarded route that the enemy anticipates will quickly be closed, and a surprising route through strength will still be blocked.

4. Alternative objectives keep the opponent on the horns

   Choose a line of operation that threatens several objectives at once, so the enemy cannot tell which is the real target and must spread his forces to cover all of them. The plan should also branch like a tree, with a ready alternative if one line is blocked, so that flexibility preserves the initiative after the first move is countered. A single, predictable objective lets the defender concentrate everything in one place.

5. Grand strategy aims at the better peace

   Military victory is a means, and the object of war is a peace that is better than the prewar state, at least from one's own point of view. Grand strategy must therefore coordinate economic, diplomatic, and moral resources and limit destruction, because exhausting oneself or embittering the enemy through total war ruins the peace that follows. Winning the war at the cost of the postwar condition is strategic failure.

6. Sherman's march through Georgia

   After taking Atlanta, Sherman cut loose from his own supply line and marched to the sea through the Confederacy's economic heartland, living off the land and aiming each move between two possible objectives so the defenders could not concentrate. By striking the South's resources and morale instead of seeking its field armies, he collapsed Confederate capacity and will more effectively than Grant's costly frontal battering in Virginia. Liddell Hart presents it as the model of an indirect approach aimed at an enemy's economic and psychological base.

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