Principles of Strategy in Action: Siege of Syracuse

Principles:

• One person can make the difference between victory and defeat

• Specialised training and knowledge are the most precious commodity in the execution of strategy

• If Alcibiades would have done it, run away

Alcibiades, infamous Athenian politician and desperado who would ultimately work for each of the three major powers of the Aegean, sometimes more than once, is possibly more responsible than anyone else for the downfall of Athens.  In his first career in Athenian politics, he was an orator of great power and good at building patriotic jingoism around wild and doubtful schemes.  His most doubtful scheme was to muster one of the greatest amphibious forces the world had ever seen to attack the city-state of Syracuse in Sicily.  Athens at this time was in the middle of a major war with Sparta.  Syracuse was not involved, but had to be taken out because... well, none of the reasons given sound really plausible, except that Athens wasn’t doing too well against Sparta, but the one thing they were good at was attacking smaller cities and stealing their riches. 

The Syracusan reaction to the most powerful navy in the known world coming to their doorstep was roughly the same level of bewilderment as you might experience if one of the contestants in the middle of a boxing match suddenly left the ring and started punching a member of the audience for no apparent reason.  The Syracusans had little military experience, but they could build a wall, so they did that, and sent ambassadors to Sparta to beg for help.

Sparta, despite its reputation, could be extremely conservative in its military commitments (there’s a reason why the movie 300 is not called 15, 205).  Their weakness was that they had very few militarily-trained Equals, on whose numbers and reputation their external security (against the many peoples they managed to tick off), and internal security (against their large population of enslaved Helots), depended.  Thus, they were actually very squeamish about losing Equals in large numbers, or worse, being seen to lose battles.

Enter Alcibiades, who by this time had defected to Sparta to avoid a death sentence for sacrilege, the first of many such changes of side during his career.  He persuaded the Spartan kings of the need for immediate action.  Act they did- by sending all of four ships.

Fortunately for Syracuse, one of these ships contained Gylippus, a Spartan general.  Gylippus landed, rallied his forces and attempted to link up with the Syracusans.  After some trial and error, he realised they were fair to middling soldiers, but Gylippus publicly attributed their early failure to his own tactical error and inspired them with the confidence they needed to prevent the Athenians from encircling their city with a second wall.  Gylippus’ strategy thereafter was twofold: unite the island of Sicily in the defence of Syracuse, and train the Syracusans in the Spartan way of war. 

Gylippus was a resounding success, turning the armies of Sicily into a force capable of defeating the preeminent power of the ancient world on land and at sea.  He proved both the value of training and the impact of the right person in the right place.  He then tried to embezzle the proceeds of victory and was exiled from Sparta, proving that even a great strategist can be done in by one major character flaw.

As for Alcibiades, having “served” Athens, Sparta, Persia, and then Athens again, he died a pauper in exile, probably at the hands of one of the many thousands of people who wanted the smooth-tongued philandering snake dead.

The Anti-Machiavel 1: Pushing the boundaries of the Ideal Prince

The Anti Machiavel, penned by the future Frederick the Great, is a refutation of Machiavelli’s The Prince that lays out a very different vision of the ideal ruler.  It is not a brilliantly written work, but it is a rare opportunity to delve into the mind of an hereditary ruler preparing for, and thinking deeply about, kingship.  Fredrick himself was by any measure one of the most successful monarchs ever to live, most especially in international and military strategy, and as such his opinion, even prior to his rule, is not that of an outsider to the game of power.

Frederick’s early life was regimented by the will of his father, Frederick William, whose iron character in some ways approached Machiavelli’s ideal ruler.  It may well have been in reaction to close experience of such a man that Frederick wrote his treatise.  Frederick and his father often clashed; the son was of an artistic and philosophical temperament that would give birth to one of Europe’s few genuine philosopher kings, while the father wanted to recreate in his son the hard-headed martinet that he himself was.  The father’s very public abuse of his son culminated in the latter attempting a failed escape to England.

The treatise was distributed and popularised by Voltaire.  While it may seem incongruous for the strategist who, partly through military aggression and political device, would turn a small state surrounded by great powers into an equal of the great Hapsburg Empire, to speak about the qualities of a virtuous ruler, the rupture between theory and practice is intriguingly localised.  Frederick took and held exactly the land that was key to ending the Austrian domination that had plagued his father’s reign and securing his frontier against the Russians, and after that, spent less of his reign at war than any of his contemporaries. 

Domestically, he strove to be the philosopher king that he describes in many ways.  He promulgated only one image of himself, and that depicted a worn old man.  He appeared before his troops in plain officer’s uniform, and consistently led from the front, often sharing the dangers of his men- his uniform is preserved and shows the stains and scars of field life.  He never presented himself as other than a common man, and, true to his philosophy, this only endeared him to his subjects.  He was a patron of the arts and the philosophes, and a talented amateur composer in his own right.  More than this, he promulgated a complete legal code for the first time, setting up the expectation of consistent justice, abolishing torture, and, for the first time, subordinating the crown and government to a sovereign state through particular legal obligations.  He improved the educational system and elevated religious toleration to active accommodation, uniting a German world that had suffered the brunt of religious wars.  Fredrick also concerned himself with actively shaping the economy, both for military purposes and for the general welfare of his subjects.

In Frederick, we have a highly educated, cultured, benevolent ruler, military genius (Napoleon considered him to be the greatest tactician of all time), and devilishly clever international operator (for example, among the many tactics that led up to the partition of Poland, he introduced debased counterfeit currency to the Polish economy).  He was not perfect, and certainly ruthless in foreign policy.  He did what was necessary for Prussia to survive in an era of consolidating nation-states.  He will certainly go down as a minor villain in Polish history.  Nevertheless, within all his territories, he began to succeed in bridging the gap of imagination between moral rule and utility, in a way that few before him had ever attempted.  The attempt of a man who both of the intellectual and artistic elite of his time, and, from the first weeks of his reign, an ambitious military commander, to resolve from these seemingly disparate extremes a form of leadership that unites pragmatism and moral benevolence, is one of the more fascinating episodes in the history of strategy.

Why Strategy?

The world today contains an ever-greater number of associations whose objective is to effect positive change in our world.  What many, though by no means all, have in common, is creative and effective strategy.  Strategy is sometimes considered to reside in the realms of warfare and politics, where, to be fair, the greatest investigation has been done and the most useful principles extracted.  My thesaurus includes under strategy: “plan, scheme, policy, approach, tactic, line of attack, stratagem.”  To many, the second will always be a stumbling block.  Strategy to some seems like the province of scheming Machiavellis and bloodthirsty military leaders. 

But there is a far more interesting and enlightening way to view strategy.  The approaches taken by a species to surviving and thriving in its environment are called “strategies.”  Some of the greatest positive movements in our world have succeeded through a well-planned, highly strategic approach of non-violent civil disobedience.  The Indian independence movement, led by Ghandi, the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King, the Czech dissident movement led by Vaclav Havel- these are only a few of the prominent items on a much longer list.  None of these victories would have been possible without clear strategy, deep psychological insight and organisation.

What made these strategies superior to those that opposed them was their breadth of vision, their insight into human psychology and human society. 

What then is strategy? 

Strategy is everything about how we relate to ourselves, to each other, to our communities, to the world, from the moment we gain the ability of conscious choice.  It is everything.  Our choice of worldview, of associates, of faith, of passions, of careers, and especially of goals and the definition of what is in our interests, all this is strategy, because, in the global sense, strategy is everything that helps us to live and thrive. 

But does not strategy suggest conflict?

No.  The greatest strategies are those which alleviate conflict, which create positive-sum relationships.  We hear less about them, at least when they are successful. 

However, the strategies we do hear about, which find their way most obviously into the historical record, are mostly strategies employed in conflict.  Even a strategist whose goal is peace can learn most effectively by studying conflict, albeit with a critical eye.  Without such understanding, I would argue, such goals cannot prosper, because the logic of conflict is very much at play in our world on many levels and cannot be defeated by the logic of peace unless proponents of the latter truly understand it.

The Strategist Does Not Wear Blinders

I realise very clearly that many of those who study strategy from a military or political perspective would dismiss the deeper aspects and broader applications of strategy, and that many of those who are concerned with these aspects and applications are squeamish and dismissive of the more classical realms of strategy and suspicious of those who understand them.  Nonetheless, I cannot turn my back on the fundamental unity of the strategic realm, much as it may be fractured and twisted by the limits of the vision and understanding of its practitioners.  To that end, I must accept going in that half of my readers will dislike at least half of my posts. 

So much the better.  One of the attributes of the successful strategist is the attempt to attain deep understanding even of perspectives with which he disagrees.  A strategist’s fundamental activity is the breaking down of barriers to understanding caused by prejudice and ideology, particularly within her or his own mind. 

Welcome

Greetings to all and sundry.  This blog will wend its way through the history, philosophy, sociology and psychology of strategy and leadership. 

Its mission is the big picture- to push the boundaries investigating the strategies of human life, conflict and achievement, in order to show the patterns that connect the philosophies of the great strategists, the fates of generals, civilisations and everyday people on the field of life, and the moral and humanitarian enlightenment for which our species continues to struggle. 

Our field is strategy.  Our weapons and our objectives are in a sense one and the same: open minds, open eyes, open hearts, a desire to seek wisdom, a sense of humour, a willingness to transgress boundaries of theory and ideology, and a sense of wonder.  Tally-ho.