The Religious Origins of Western Strategy
The West’s uneasiness with misdirection might be rooted in Christianity.
By James R. Holmes
April 16, 2014
Here’s a less-than-holy puzzle for Holy Week. It came to me in church on Palm Sunday. (Sick, I know.) Strategists are forever going the rounds about whether Eastern and Western civilizations have starkly different ways of diplomacy and war. Conventional wisdom says yes. Sun Tzu, that exponent of unorthdoxy, deception, and surprise, is the face of Eastern warfare. Take that, barbarian! Clausewitz, by contrast, exhorts commanders to concentrate force at a single point of impact, pummeling enemies into submission. Carl the Great gives Western warfare its modus operandi. Right?
Sort of. Your humble scribe submits that a difference of degree rather than kind separates Oriental from Occidental martial traditions. It is indubitably true that the Eastern way of combat prizes indirection, deception, and surprise. Yet Sun Tzu sounds mighty Clausewitzian when he urges the general to strike suddenly and decisively, like a bird-of-prey making a snack of some lesser but tasty creature. And for their part, Westerners aren’t just about hammering away at one another in contests of brute, guileless strength. Historian John Hale makes much of Odysseus, who embodies a subculture of cunning and craft – mêtis, to use the Greek word – within Western warmaking.
Nonetheless, the Western canon clearly frowns on strategies of indirection, even if it doesn’t proscribe them entirely. That could make a difference in the minds of decisionmakers. Why? No less a personage than Pope Francis hints at an answer. The pontiff reminds the faithful that evil still walks among us, and that Satan is a tempter. A whiff of impropriety clings to methods associated with Satan here in the lands formerly known as Christendom, a.k.a. the West.
King’s College scholar Lawrence Freedman devotes an entire chapter of his masterwork – titled Strategy, oddly enough – to Satan’s strategy in Milton’s Divine Comedy. The fallen angel and his confederates first try Clausewitzian methods, venturing a force-on-force engagement with God’s army. Good luck with that. The demons essay such tactics as artillery fusillades, to little avail. There was a stigma to battlefield gunnery in Milton’s day, much as unconventional weapons are in disrepute today. As a former naval artilleryman, I resolutely protest having my profession portrayed as satanic!
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