Military Strategy: US Military Strategies

Strategy-as-practice (S-a-P) is an approach to strategy concerned about what strategic actors actually do and the kinds of activities they do when they strategize (Jarzabkowski, 2003; Johnson, Melin & Whittington, 2003; Whittington, 1996, 2002). Strategy is complex, to illustrate the complexity of the concept of strategy table 1.1 is offered with selected definitions of strategy (Louw & Venter, 2013:9). According to Ehlers and Lazenby (2010:3), “A strategy can therefore be defined as an effort or deliberate action that an organisation implements to outperform its rivals” According to the history, the concept of strategy was in its origin associated with the military (Louw & Venter, 2013:11). “The word strategy has been handed down from the

Ireland, R.D., Hoskisson, R.E. and Hitt, M.A. 2012. Understanding Business Strategy Concepts Plus. Boston: Cengage Learning.

During this last half of the twentieth century the US military was under siege from all sides, internal and external. The root cause of this situation can be traced back to Vietnam and the governments lack of true commitment. What resulted was the near destruction of the US military. The military managed to come out in the end to become perhaps the best military in the world by completely reevaluating itself and reorganizing almost every aspect . The primary focus will be on the reorganization of the Army and Air force, and how they were affected by the disaster of Vietnam. The US military managed to come out one top through completely reorganizing the way the military works and thinks. Focusing

Strategy is a set of complicated tactics formulated by the executives of a company directed towards the achievement of company’s goal (Salmela, 2002). It is about all the path ways that a company would follow to reach its ultimate goal. It is a company’s strategy which helps to identify what it does better than the other companies in the industries, which may be different from what it does best. For successful strategy formulation and implementation, a company should know the needs of customers and should have knowledge of its competitors. Through a good strategy a company would identify that opportunity which makes it different from the others (Thompson, 2005).

The American Army 's history, composition, and structure predisposed the leadership to a rigid fixation on conventional warfare. In contrast to the British army-as-force-projection model, the American Army found its first task a matter of national survival. This historical trend - the continued perception of the Army fighting a war of annihilation - helped in many ways to keep the Army purely focused on its military objectives. Unconditional surrender was the name of the game, and smaller political goals were seen at best as derivative to, and at worst, preventative of the fabled 'total victory '. The varied composition of personnel which make up the US army also ensured a degree of formality, and a deference to rank. The structure, born of open-combat wars at large scale, was constituted around large divisions, which often rotated officers and manpower in and out. In short, everything within the Army was organized -rigidly- around the principle of a large scale conventional war. What worked against the Germans would work against the Russians.

The challenges were that there was not a well-trained army, the white male population size, the loyalist, and money.

The U.S. military undertakes operates in over 100 countries, including the U.K., Germany, Italy, Bahrain, Brazil, South Korea, Australia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Japan just to name a few. Military might rules the

The American’s strategy for the war was that of winning small battles, and mostly avoiding large war. They knew that their army was not capable of defeating the British in a large war. They were outnumbered and out supplied, but they knew they could defeat them by wearing them down little by little. The British army relied on resources from overseas, thus allowing them to weaken over time without those resources readily being available and plentiful.

According to Meyer, (2010), strategy is the action that company can take to achieve its desired goals. When it comes to a company, thinking can be said to be either long-term or short-term. When translated into action, it is what is called operations or projects. However there are differences between operations and

Strategic planning involves making decisions about the organization’s long-term goals and strategies and how the organization decides to implement their goals (Bateman, Snell, Konopaske, pg. 113). Strategies help organizations to have a clear perspective on how to go about accomplishing the goals they have in place. All organizations have a clear vision of what their mission and purpose as a company is, they know how to fulfill the mission, vision, and purpose and they know how to ensure that they accomplish all their goals. However, the route the organization takes to define these things determines how effective they will be.

strategies. For the military, an overhaul of the whole concept of Defence has gradually changed as cyber security is streamlined into defence policy coupled with economic influence and globalisation. ‘In the military, information and intelligence operations, routine administrative functions, and a wide array of everyday jobs have been increasingly developed and transformed with the support of interconnected electro-electronic devices’ .

Alfred Chandler(1963) defines strategy as ‘ the determination of the long-run goals and objectives of an enterprise and the adoption of courses of action of an enterprise and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals’. And Michael porter(1996) sees it as ‘Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value’.

‘Strategic Management’ is a very complex term as many eminent researchers and scholars have had different views and conclusions on strategy. According to White (2004), “Strategic Management involves both systematically developing an idea together with its implications and testing the empirical validity & usefulness of that idea against the real world.” Thus strategy is not only about planning for future but also about confirming the validity of the hypothesis considered and implementing it successfully. Strategy formation may take various forms such as implicit, explicit or emergent. Implicit strategy is a strategy formed by intuitions of an individual. As per implicit strategists, strategic management is about reading the environment

A strategy is said to be a plan that is made for the long term success of a product or brand. It is extremely important to have a strategy in order to figure out a direction towards which any company is able to focus all its resources efficiently and achieve desired outcomes. Formulating effective strategies is a considerably long process in itself that combines analysing several factors, situations and issues that are already present in a company and looking to improve on them alongside trying to implement various innovations and ideas to collectively create a direction towards which they can move and direct the resources available to them.

Strategy is important because the resources available to achieve these goals are usually limited. Strategy is also about attaining and maintaining a position of advantage over adversaries through the successive exploitation of known or emergent possibilities rather than committing to any specific fixed plan designed at the outset.