On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis

Author:John Lewis Gaddis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Civilization, Decision-Making & Problem Solving, History, Leadership, Strategy
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2018-04-03T03:00:00+00:00

VI.

“Genius,” Clausewitz writes, “does not consist in a single appropriate gift—courage, for example—while other qualities of mind or temperament . . . are not suited to war.” Instead it requires “a harmonious combination of elements, in which one or the other ability may predominate, but none may be in conflict with the rest.” It demands, in short, an ecological sensibility. “The man responsible for evaluating the whole must bring to the task the quality of intuition that perceives the truth at every point. Otherwise a chaos of opinions . . . would arise, and fatally entangle judgment.”38

How, though, can anyone perceive “truth at every point”? Clausewitz answers by linking strategy to imagination.39 Artists approach truth, he observes, with “a quick recognition” of what “the mind would ordinarily miss or would perceive only after long study and reflection.” His term for this is coup d’oeil, or an “inward eye.”40 It’s what Machiavelli meant by “sketching”—conveying complexity usably.41 Complexity fully rendered would take too long and contain too much, thereby entangling judgment. Complexity as what you want or expect would only confirm what you think you know. You need something in between.

So when your troops get sick, or their horses begin to starve, or tsars don’t follow the scripts you’ve written for them, you sketch what you know and imagine—informed by the sketch—what you don’t: this allows recovering from surprises and moving on. Strategists and artists are, therefore, on the same page in Clausewitz, or, more accurately, pages, given the hundreds he left behind.

But how can planning anticipate surprises? Only by living with contradictions, Clausewitz maintains: “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” He elaborates in a passage Tolstoy could have written:

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