Art Of War: Assess The Value Of Classic Strategies

There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II. It’s unimaginable that we would now use anything even remotely approaching the full measure of our military power (aside from the nuclear option) in the wars we fight. This seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and the Middle East. But the fact is that we were forced to take our soldiers out of Vietnam because we had lost, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along in the Middle East against a hit-and-run organization that we seem unable to stop. Yet no one, including, very likely, the insurgents themselves, believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly America has adopted and has an accurate sense of proportionality.

The American way of war is not ‘one size fits all’ sort-to-speak. The United States has been involved in several different types of wars and military conflicts. Each condition was different and called for a unique strategy. Planners must learn from America’s past wars and use those lessons to devise plans that will decisively defeat the enemy. Because of an ever changing threat, planners must know and understand all of the various types of war, the many war strategies, and recognize the situations where it is appropriate to employ each. There are many nuances in a war that makes each conflict unique, so the military planner must be just as dynamic, creative and flexible in devising a strategic war plan. The nature and essence of war do not change, but the enemy, his tactics, his weapons and his methods do change. And so does the American way of war evolve to defeat every changing enemy

Warfare is a relentless pursuit to gain an edge on the opponent and defeat him as quickly as possible and minimize your own losses. The new American way of war uses massive firepower, excels in advanced technology, and pursues total victory. Backed by U.S. mighty military power, the new American way of war has put on impressive shows in wars in Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. The new American way of war is faster in maneuver, armed with sharper precision firepower, and advanced command and control. This new American way of war, according to Max Boot, avoids the traditional, industrial-age necessity of overwhelming force in favor of maneuver, flexibility, and speed, all empowered by greater use of C4ISR, smart munitions, special

Classical approach to strategy is a reductionist and scientific one. Classicists are influenced by Taylorism which entails rational thinking and breaking problems and situations into their components to solve them while ignoring that the whole is greater than the sum of its components. Obviously, this approach concerns controllable aspects of situations and ignores areas of uncertainty in an endeavor to simplify the surrounding complexity and to achieve the ultimate goal for any

There are two important military theorists that have emerged from the French Revolution. Antoine-Henri Jomini, and Carl von Clausewitz both were considered the brightest military thinkers of the time. Jomini’s The art of war is the best military document of the time and consists of six military, branches they are statesmanship, strategy, grand tactics, logistics, engineering and minor tactics. Jomini’s ideas and thought’s on statesmanship and its relation to war, strategy, grand tactics, logistics, and engineering characterize the nature of WWI better than Clausewitz and can be clearly seen the operational art of WWI.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” (BAM, 2010, p.20) These words were first written down over 2,400 years ago by a Chinese general named Sun Tzu in his famous military strategy treatise known today as The Art of War. These words, in fact the entire book, are just as valid today as they were during Sun Tzu’s lifetime. He was one of the first truly visionary and ethical military leaders in the world. Despite the fact that there is not much known about Sun Tzu today other than his writings, in this essay, I intend to extract his essence from his treatise to prove he was a visionary leader. I will then continue to prove he was also an ethical leader. Finally, I will finish by

Operational art implies that war is the use of military force to achieve a strategic political goal, and that warfare is the methodology in which the government employs its military force to achieve that goal. The concept of operational art as a cognitive process to align actions in space and time is critical to understanding its relationship to war and warfare. As a cognitive process, its strengths and weaknesses derive from the human element. Historical examples demonstrate that those who have the requisite education, training, judgement and foresight employ operational art successfully. Those failing to conceptualize strategy as a continuous process, or who fail to acknowledge changes in conditions, may fail in this process. Therefore, one must understand the relationship between operational art, war, and warfare to successfully plan and execute military action in pursuit of political aims.

One of the main reasons to study world history is to learn from and guard against past mistakes. Today's military leaders should study not only their current enemy’s war tactics and maneuvers but also those of any others that took place in the area to provide context that helps equip an agile mind to make informed decisions. Using the past actions, military leaders could anticipate their moves and

What is the nature of military power and how should it be used to serve national interests? These fundamental questions form the foundation of military strategy. Various answers developed by civilian and military theorists over the past century all center on the idea of controlling conflict by rationally applying military power to achieve a desirable outcome. However, as economic, social, and political contexts evolve, they redefine ideas about power, its utility, and its application. As a result of this reciprocal relationship, theories of strategy, itself an amorphous concept, change. Corbett’s Some Principle of Maritime Strategy, Slessor’s Air Power and Armies, Wylie’s Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control, and

Concept of strategy was first introduced in fifties in organisational literature by faculty of Harvard Business School (Snow & Hambrick, 1980). According to the definition given in Oxford dictionary, “Organizational Strategy are the plans of a large organization about development and dealing with changing markets. These plans must originate from company’s main objective which represents key feature about business of the company. For a strategy to work, it should be divided into smaller achievable targets (Johnson, 2016). One more definition of describes organizational strategy as an expression of how an organization needs to evolve over time to meet its objectives along with a

In this assignment we compare a classic and a systemic perspective of strategy. When talking about strategy one will often find the name Michael Eugene Porter. His books, models, frameworks and theories are often seen as basics in the field of strategy. His most significant and popular framework is the five forces analysis (Porter, 1980). According to Whittington (1993), Porter is placed within the classic approach of strategy. In total he introduces four perspectives which are the classic, the evolutionary, the processual and the systemic. He argues that each perspective had an identifiable decade in which it was dominant. Accordingly, the classic perspective is placed in a timeframe starting at 1960. The main intention in the classic perspective is the maximizing return on investment. Besides Porter, Ansoff and Chandler are important names for the classic approach. Since

This demonstration is going to be developed through three different outlooks. The first one deals with the historical birth of strategy and its main evolution among the centuries. Then we will expose the relations and the interactions of military strategy and business strategy. And finally, we will raise a certain numbers of limits to underline the fact that strategy is not a science.

Crainer and Dearlove (2014) discuss the evolution of strategy concepts from early military strategists (Sun Tzu) to more recent influential works such as Michael Porter’s ‘Five Forces’, Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad’s resource-based ‘Harmonic Strategy’, Richard D’Aveni’s new 7-S framework for hypercompetition, W. Chan Kim and Renée

The history of strategy in military has expanded as technology emerges. Before the 18th Century, the concept of warfare, exist over two levels: strategy and tactics, in modern military leadership, the separation of military and political leadership led to two levels of strategy: grand strategy and military strategy. Grand strategy is the government’s strategy. It sets out the government’s policy on war and peace at a national level. Basil Liddell wrote that grand strategy coordinates and directs all the resources of the nation(s) to the attainment of the political objective of war. The British defence doctrine of 2008 published the hierarchy of command establishing four levels of strategy namely;

Over the past century, military strategies are used as guidance that aligned with its goals and objectives. As an example, a Greek historian,