The 33 Strategies of War

Robert Greene · 2006

Thesis

Everyday life is a form of warfare, conducted by subtler means, and the principles that great commanders and military theorists discovered, about mental discipline, organization, defense, attack and indirect conflict, apply to the struggles of work, politics and personal life, giving whoever understands them a decisive advantage over those who do not.

The main ideas

Conflict is unavoidable. Those who deny it are at the mercy of those who accept it.
The first war is against one's own mind: confusion, old habits, panic and complacency.
A group fights well only with clear command, flexible units and shared purpose.
Defense means choosing battles, conserving strength and turning an attacker's energy against him.
Offense should be planned from the end backward, aimed at the enemy's center of gravity and closed on terms that last.
Unconventional warfare, through deception, alliances, misdirection and pressure from within, is the most common form of conflict in daily life.

Strategy as a discipline

Robert Greene's book is organized as 33 strategies in five parts, each strategy illustrated by historical episodes and drawn from the military classics, among them Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz and Napoleon's campaigns. His premise is that conflict pervades ordinary life, in offices, politics and relationships, but that most people meet it with emotion, wishful thinking and improvisation.

Strategy, in Greene's account, is the alternative: a habit of seeing a situation clearly, thinking several moves ahead, knowing one's aims and resources, and acting from calculation rather than reaction. The military examples matter because war is where the cost of bad strategy is highest and the lessons clearest.

He presents each strategy as a principle with a reversal, the conditions in which it fails or its opposite applies, so that the book is a set of tools rather than a single doctrine.

Implication: treat recurring conflicts at work and in public life as strategic problems to be planned, rather than as emotional events to be endured.

Self-directed war

The first part concerns the war within. Its four strategies are: declare war on your enemies, the polarity strategy; do not fight the last war, the guerrilla-war-of-the-mind strategy; amidst the turmoil of events, do not lose your presence of mind, the counterbalance strategy; and create a sense of urgency and desperation, the death-ground strategy.

The polarity strategy holds that clarity comes from identifying opponents: knowing what one is against sharpens what one is for. Greene's example is Margaret Thatcher, who framed the 1979 election as a crusade against socialism and branded the moderates in her own party as "wets"; the chapter's reversal notes that she eventually made too many enemies. The second strategy warns against applying the lessons of past successes to new situations. The third asks for emotional control under pressure. The fourth draws on the idea of fighting with no line of retreat, as when Hernán Cortés destroyed his ships after landing in Mexico, leaving his men no option but to advance.

The mechanism is that most strategic failures begin in the mind, with confusion about goals, attachment to old methods, panic or a lack of urgency.

Implication: before engaging any opponent, settle your own aims, discard methods that worked under different conditions and remove easy routes of retreat.

Organizational war

The second part concerns groups. Its strategies are: avoid the snares of groupthink, the command-and-control strategy; segment your forces, the controlled-chaos strategy; and transform your war into a crusade, through morale strategies.

Greene argues that a group needs a single, clear chain of command, because committees and consensus produce compromise and delay. But that command must not mean central control of every detail. The controlled-chaos strategy divides an organization into units that can act on their own initiative within a shared purpose, as Napoleon did when he organized his army into corps under marshals who were given a mission and left to carry it out, which made it faster than its rigidly commanded opponents. Morale, finally, comes from giving people a cause larger than themselves and from leaders who share their hardships.

The mechanism is that speed and adaptability come from decentralized execution, while coherence comes from unified direction and shared purpose.

Implication: give one person clear authority over the goal, give teams freedom over the means and connect the work to a purpose people believe in.

Defensive war

The third part treats defense as an active strategy. Its four strategies are: pick your battles carefully, the perfect-economy strategy; turn the tables, the counterattack strategy; create a threatening presence, deterrence strategies; and trade space for time, the nonengagement strategy.

Greene argues that resources are always limited, so a defender must fight only where the odds favor it and refuse battles that drain strength. Counterattack lets an aggressive opponent overextend and then strikes when he is exposed. Deterrence makes an attack seem too costly to attempt, through reputation and the appearance of strength. Nonengagement gives up ground, retreating rather than fighting, to buy time until conditions improve.

The mechanism is that an attacker commits resources and exposes himself, while a patient defender can conserve strength and choose the moment of response.

Implication: in a conflict you did not choose, do not respond to every provocation. Conserve your resources, let the opponent overextend and act when the balance has shifted.

Offensive war

The fourth part covers offense, beginning with grand strategy: lose battles but win the war. Greene argues that a campaign should be planned from its ultimate goal backward, so that individual defeats can be accepted if they serve the larger aim.

The strategies that follow include: know your enemy, the intelligence strategy; overwhelm resistance with speed and suddenness, the blitzkrieg strategy; control the dynamic, forcing strategies; hit them where it hurts, the center-of-gravity strategy, which takes from Clausewitz the idea of striking the source of an opponent's strength, illustrated by Mao Zedong's recognition that China's center of gravity was its vast peasant population; defeat them in detail, the divide-and-conquer strategy; expose and attack your opponent's soft flank, the turning strategy; and envelop the enemy, the annihilation strategy, whose model is Hannibal's encirclement of a larger Roman army at Cannae.

The part ends with three strategies about finishing: maneuver them into weakness, the ripening-for-the-sickle strategy; negotiate while advancing, the diplomatic-war strategy; and know how to end things, the exit strategy. Greene argues that a war ended badly, with resentment or loose ends, plants the next one.

Implication: before starting any campaign, define what winning looks like and how it will end, and aim at what the opponent depends on most.

Unconventional war

The fifth part, which like the fourth contains eleven strategies, covers what Greene calls unconventional or dirty war: conflict waged indirectly. Its strategies include: weave a seamless blend of fact and fiction, misperception strategies; take the line of least expectation, the ordinary-extraordinary strategy; occupy the moral high ground, the righteous strategy; deny them targets, the strategy of the void; seem to work for the interests of others while furthering your own, the alliance strategy; give your rivals enough rope to hang themselves, the one-upmanship strategy; take small bites, the fait accompli strategy; penetrate their minds, communication strategies; destroy from within, the inner-front strategy; dominate while seeming to submit, the passive-aggression strategy; and sow uncertainty and panic through acts of terror, the chain-reaction strategy.

Greene's argument is that in daily life, where open conflict is socially costly, most struggles take these indirect forms. Understanding them serves defense as much as attack: a person who recognizes passive aggression, manufactured moral outrage or incremental seizure of ground can counter them.

The mechanism is that indirect methods avoid the resistance that open attack provokes, by working through perception, morality and other people's interests.

Implication: learn to recognize indirect tactics when they are used against you, and respond to the strategy rather than to the surface of each move.

Limits

Its evidence is a selection of historical anecdotes. Each strategy is supported by episodes chosen because they illustrate it, and failure is examined only briefly, in a short reversal at the end of each chapter.
It compresses military theory into maxims. Clausewitz and Sun Tzu wrote about war between states; their concepts, such as the center of gravity, lose much of their meaning when applied to office politics or personal relationships.
Its final part treats deception, manipulation and terror as tools for everyday use, and the book offers little guidance on when such methods are justified.

The Prince — the earlier argument that a ruler must master war and indirect methods.
The 48 Laws of Power — Greene's rules of power, of which this book is the strategic counterpart.
The 50th Law — the fearlessness Greene argues these strategies require.