Strategy

by Lawrence Freedman

  Why did they fight? Richard Wrangham identified the sources of conflict as “improved access to resources such as food, females, or safety.” Power relationships between neighboring communities mattered because of the chimps’ need for ripe fruit, which was in turn a consequence of their digestive systems. When fruit was scarce, individual chimpanzees traveled alone or in small groups to find more; because of the uneven distribution of fruit supplies, the territory of one community could be well endowed while another was bereft. This was a recipe for conflict, and an explanation for why a stronger community would seek to take advantage of a weaker one. Wrangham argued that adult male chimpanzees “assess the costs and benefits of violence” and attack when the “probable net benefit is sufficiently high.” A consequence of a kill was that the relative position of one community was significantly enhanced (as these communities were often not large, the loss of one member made a real difference.). He called this the “imbalance-of-power hypothesis, which stated that coalitionary kills occurred because of two factors: inter-group hostility, and large power asymmetries between rival parties.”8 This explained why killing took place but not the origins of the underlying conflict—the struggle for a scarce and vital resource.

  More striking than the incidence of extreme violence was the calculating attitude to conflict. Goodall observed that “a small patrol will turn and flee if it meets a larger party, or one with more males, even within its own range; whereas if a large party, travelling out of its range, meets a smaller party of neighbors, it is likely to chase or attack.” When there was greater symmetry among the numbers of adult males, the typical result was “visual and auditory display exchanges without conflict.”9 The important point, therefore, was that the apes were astute when it came to working out power balances. They tried to avoid a fight if they were weaker, readily retreating in the face of superior force, but moved in when they were stronger. Thus it is no surprise that no instances of one of the attacking pack getting killed were recorded. What made the difference was not strength in battle but “the relative size and composition of parties when they encounter each other.”10 This pragmatic attitude to violence underlined its instrumentality.

  The evolutionist, therefore, saw strategy as a natural consequence of scarce vital resources and the struggle for survival. But it was not just a question of the survival of the fittest, in terms of raw strength and instinctive aggression. The survivors would also need to have outthought their opponents, to have shown a better grasp of social relationships and how to manipulate them. From the start of time, success could come as much from being smart as being strong, and it was especially smart to get others to help overpower opponents.

  Similar patterns have been discerned in so-called primitive warfare among humans, although what passed for strategy appears to have been “customary and unspoken” and can now be inferred only “from the conduct and effects of warfare.”11 The strategies appear to have been largely attritional, with the enemy being worn down by regular battles and raids, normally with low casualties but also surprise massacres on occasion. Victory would be total: wealth and food plundered, houses and fields destroyed, women and children killed or captured. As logistic support was minimal, it was not possible to engage in prolonged combat or extended maneuvers because either food or ammunition would soon be exhausted. Raids had a number of advantages. They were hard to guard against, as security was normally poor and small groups moving at night were hard to detect, and it was possible to withdraw if the odds looked unfavorable. There was, according to Azar Gat, every incentive to avoid open warfare. Before attempting a killing it was best if the victims were “caught helpless, relatively defenseless, and, above all, little capable of effectively harming the attackers.” These factors led to a “remarkably uniform” pattern of warfare, manifested within “any society of hunter-gatherers and primitive agriculturalists studied.”12

  From the study of these societies and those of chimps we can identify some of the elemental features of strategic behavior.13 These features emerge out of social structures that invite conflict. They require some recognition of the distinctive attributes of individuals who are potential opponents or allies, and sufficient empathy with these individuals’ situations to make it possible to influence their behavior, including by impressing or misleading them. The most effective strategies do not depend solely on violence—though this can play an instrumental role, by demonstrating superiority as much as expressing aggression—but benefit instead from the ability to forge coalitions. Little in the rest of this book will suggest that this list should be expanded. The elements of strategic behavior have not changed, only the complexity of the situations in which they must be applied.

  CHAPTER 2 Origins 2: The Bible

  For by now I could have stretched out my hand and struck you and your people with a plague that would have wiped you off the earth. But I have raised you up for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.

  —Exodus 9:14–16

  AN ALTERNATIVE ACCOUNT of the origins of strategy—indeed, of the origins of everything—comes from the Hebrew Bible. There is no suggestion in the Bible that strategy is in any sense unnatural. Many of the stories revolve around conflicts (sometimes internecine and often with the enemies of Israel) in which trickery and deception are regularly employed. Some stories (David and Goliath being the most obvious example) still influence the way we think and talk about strategy. The best strategic advice in the Bible, however, is to always trust God and obey his laws. God might allow others to shape the game, but he was always the biggest player. When he withheld support the result was often disaster. When he came in on the side of his people the result was never in doubt.

  The questions of the literalness of the Bible and the issues it raises about free will and causation have long been at the heart of theological debate. If everything can be put down to God’s intent, what role is there for distinctive human desires? Is human intent a product of God’s intent, or can it develop independently? For the student of strategy, the Bible makes for frustrating reading. Its stories display evident human frailties, with a pronounced tendency for deception as a vital strategic practice. When an individual was in a tough spot and there was a crafty way out, it tended to be taken. For example, Jacob, with his mother’s connivance, tricked his blind father into giving him the blessing intended for his elder brother, Esau. Jacob was tricked in turn by his prospective father-in-law, so he ended up with two wives rather than one. And finally, Jacob was deceived by his sons into believing that his favorite son, Joseph, had been killed rather than sold into slavery. The Bible acknowledges the moral ambiguity involved in trickery, and the outrage of the deceived, yet also accepts its value in the face of superior but unworthy power. In a world of flawed human beings, deception comes naturally and often.

  There are two possible explanations for the latitude allowed by God in human behavior. The first is that there is nothing in the end to be learned from all of this because all actions are subject to a higher manipulation. The second is that humans are able to make their own calculations, but in the end only one strategic judgment matters: whether or not to obey God. After recasting biblical stories using game theory, Steven Brams concluded that God was a “superlative strategist.”1 Given his starting advantages, anything less than superlative would appear something of a disappointment. But Brams noted that God enjoyed omniscience but not omnipotence. He was not a mere puppetmaster but rather was affected by the choices of the other players. To help explain God’s purpose and his later strategy, Brams drew on the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. God created the world for “His own glory,” but this would be pointless unless it could be appreciated. “He needed a setting in which to be great.” This was only possible after the creation of the world, “for now He had someone who could admire Him and to whom to compare Himself—and how favorably.”2 On this reading, God created strategy by allowing choice, because he wanted people t
o choose obedience through an act of will rather than because they were programed to do so. Even if individuals were part of a divine plan that had been set out at the moment of creation, they were allowed the sensation of choice and the ability to calculate and plan. The Bible tells of human choices regularly being manipulated by God to create the situations in which his greatness would become apparent.

  The issue came up as soon as man and woman were formed to take control of the new world that God had created. After placing Adam and Eve in Eden, God immediately set a test. In his first words he explained that they could “eat from any fruit in the garden.” One critical exception was fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. “If you eat its fruit,” God warned Adam, “you will be doomed to die.” We must assume that Eden was created with these tests in mind. If God really did not want Adam and Eve to lapse, it would have been simple not to put the fruit there in the first place. The test was soon failed. Eve tasted the forbidden fruit and then persuaded Adam to do the same. In the face of God’s anger, Adam blamed his own ignorance but also Eve—the “woman whom you gave me”—and so pushed the blame back to God.

  The source of the Fall was the serpent who persuaded Eve to disobey. The translations of the serpent’s strategy vary from “subtle” to “crafty” and “cunning.” He convinced Eve that there was no risk and much to gain. The reason the fruit was forbidden was not because of death but because of power. “God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.” The serpent was accusing God of deception. Perhaps he had a point. Once the fruit was eaten, God did consider Adam and Eve to have become “like one of us” because they could now differentiate good from evil. If they had also taken from the Tree of Life, they would have avoided death. It was precisely for this reason that God expelled them from Eden; had they managed to eat of this tree, God’s threat would have been neutralized and they could have anticipated everlasting life.3 Instead, Adam and Eve became mortal and were now doomed to die (though Adam managed to struggle on until he was 930 years old). Banishment from Eden consigned man to extracting a living from the soil and woman to suffering in childbirth. The serpent was condemned to slither around on his belly and eat dust.4

  The Ten Plagues as Strategic Coercion

  The point at which God asserted his greatness to his chosen people was when he arranged the escape of the Jews from Egypt, where they were kept as slaves. One reading of the story of Exodus is that it was not so much about freeing the Israelites from slavery as about asserting God’s greatness by establishing a people beholden to him and ensuring that they—and others—were in awe of his power. Under this interpretation, the Exodus story becomes a gigantic manipulation. The Israelites were encouraged to leave a country they were in no hurry to leave. Not surprisingly, they moaned thereafter when they were stuck in the desert, while God used the plagues to drive home the message of his power and superiority over Egyptian gods.

  Diana Lipton has suggested that the Exodus reflected less a concern that the Israelites were being oppressed and more one that they were being seduced by Egyptian life and were in the process of being assimilated.5 The Israelites had entered Egypt because of Jacob’s son Joseph, who had risen to high rank in Egyptian society. They were led out by Moses, an Israelite who had grown up among the Egyptians but was persuaded by God to assert the distinctive identity of the Israelites. Moses acted largely as God’s agent in all his dealings with Pharaoh.

  The favored strategy was coercive, using threats to persuade the target—in this case Pharaoh—to yield. The challenge was to influence the target’s calculations, so that the potential cost of not complying exceeded the potential cost of losing what was currently held. The Israelite slaves were valuable to Egypt, so the threat had to be substantial. Coercive threats must be credible to be effective, yet those issued by Moses depended on a god not worshiped by Egyptians. There was no immediate reason to take him seriously. The first challenge was therefore how to change this perception. That was not difficult. The greater challenge was to get Pharaoh to respond. The strategy, a standard form of coercion involving a progressive “turning of the screw” in an attempt to find the target’s threshold of pain, led to regular promises of compliance upon which Pharaoh equally regularly reneged.

  Moses initially demanded that Pharaoh “let my people go” in relatively modest terms. He asked that the Hebrew slaves be allowed to go into the wilderness for a three days’ journey to pray and sacrifice. If not, Pharaoh was told, then “the Lord our God [might] fall upon us with pestilence, or with the sword.” The first people to be coerced in this story, therefore, were the Jews themselves. Moses presented them as caught between the power of Pharaoh and an even more powerful God. Pharaoh’s response was to deny any knowledge or respect for this god and to make the Hebrews’ lives even more miserable by telling them to find their own straw for their bricks. This extra suffering immediately undermined Moses’s confidence and credibility.

  Pharaoh was not punished at first. Instead, to persuade him to take God more seriously, he was treated to a demonstration of God’s power. Moses’s brother Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh and it became a serpent. Surprisingly, Pharaoh’s magicians performed the same trick, but then Aaron’s rod swallowed up all the other rods. This had no impact on Pharaoh. Tricks involving rigidified snakes were quite common in Egypt. So Moses tried but failed to make his point in a non-punitive manner. Pharaoh remained unconvinced of God’s power.

  There then followed the ten plagues. First the river turned to blood. This made little impression either. Pharaoh’s magicians claimed they could also transform water into blood. Then out of the river came an abundance of frogs. Pharaoh hesitated and said that the Hebrews could go, but changed his mind when the frogs were removed. After a plague of gnats, the court magicians were stumped. At last a trick that they could not reproduce. They acknowledged the “finger of God,” but Pharaoh was still unmoved. With swarms of flies Pharaoh weakened but again reneged when the plague was lifted. Next was the killing of Egypt’s cattle, followed by everyone being covered in boils. Moses was told by God to go to Pharaoh and say on his behalf:

  Let my people go that they may serve me. For I will at this time send all my plagues upon thine heart, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people; that thou may knowest that there is none like me in all the earth. For now I will stretch out my hand, that I may smite thee and thy people with pestilence; and thou shalt be cut off from the earth. And in very deed for this cause have I raised thee up, for to shew in thee my power; and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth. As yet thou exaltest thou myself against my people, that thou wilt not let them go?6

  Then came a threat of hail and advice that Pharaoh tell everyone to get themselves and their beasts home before the hail lest they die. This started to make the Egyptians uneasy. Some took the advice and sought shelter; others did not. Only the former survived the subsequent hailstorm.

  Pharaoh, now anxious, agreed he was wicked and that the Hebrews could go, once the thunder and lightning stopped. Again he reneged, raising the stakes: by breaking a promise, Pharaoh had become a sinner on his own terms. After a plague of locusts, with the deadline for compliance the next day, Pharaoh’s servants had a go at him: “How long shall this man be a snare unto us? Let the men go, that they may serve the Lord their God: knowest thou not yet that Egypt is destroyed?” Pharaoh relented and called in Moses and Aaron. He started to bargain. Who would go? Moses said everyone, with their flocks and herds. Pharaoh was only prepared to let the men and children go. He knew the women were irrelevant to acts of worship, and the only reason to take flocks and herds was if there was no intention to return. Moses’s demands were now getting complex. The modest initial demand, an opportunity for the Hebrew men to leave for a while to pray, was being transformed into something much more complete.

  After the eighth plague, locusts devouring all the fruits and herbs that had survived the hail, negotiations
soon resumed. Pharaoh was contrite, but only until the locusts were blown away. The ninth plague, three days of complete darkness, was most alarming for a kingdom that worshiped the sun and dreaded a persistent eclipse. Like the third and the sixth, this plague was quite unannounced. It was a warning that the time for negotiation was over. Once the darkness lifted, Pharaoh agreed that everyone could go—other than the flocks and herds. Moses said it had to be everyone and everything. It was now evident that this would be no excursion for prayer and sacrifice but a permanent departure from Egypt. Furious, Pharaoh broke off negotiations: “Take heed to thyself, see my face no more; for in that day thou seest my face thou shalt die.” Moses agreed he would not return.

  God said there would be one more plague and this would be successful. The Hebrews, spared all the previous plagues, were told to prepare. By daubing their houses with blood from sheep or goats God would know to pass over them when he smote the firstborn of the Egyptians. At midnight on the fourteenth day of the month there was not a house in Egypt “where there was not one dead.” This caused great misery and consternation. Moses and Aaron were summoned and told to leave. So eager were the Eyptians to be rid of them that all the Israelites and their livestock were allowed to depart, with jewelry and raiments and what else they required.