Strategy Is Dead. Long Live Strategy! Hannah Arendt on Imperial and Total War

Strategy Is Dead. Long Live Strategy!

Hannah Arendt on Imperial and Total War

Patricia Owens

University of Oxford

The word strategy is derived from the ancient Greek term for generalship. It is conventionally
understood as the threat or use of military means to achieve political ends or objectives. As a
‘system of expedients’, it is concerned with the central issue in political ethics, the
relationship between means and ends. Strategy secures the political end through war, although
the end is always in danger of being overrun by violent means (Arendt, 1972). The political
end, what the political is, changes with time and place and is in constant dispute. Following
Clausewitz’s reading of the social and political conditions of his day, modern strategists
usually view politics in terms of a trinity, composed of leadership, armed forces, and the
population in a given territory. But what is the political end? Human societies have
perennially used what Max Weber described as ‘diabolical means’ in the struggle over its
determination.

Although the term strategy is Greek in origin, the ‘classical’ era of strategic thought emerged
in late 18

and early 19

century Europe in conjunction with the developing system of nation-

states. The assumptions of classical strategy, much military history, and modern strategic
studies derive directly from this period (Gray, 1999). The ‘political’ meant ‘policy’ and
‘policy’ meant national policy. Traditional strategy understood itself as the art of making war
useful for the attainment state goals. As a result, the strategic studies field begins with the
assumption that states are the primary actors in world politics, and they are defined by their
monopoly on the use of force. Militaries generate violence which is instrumentally deployed
to achieve state objectives. The military is a means for the continuation of politics, narrowly
understood as the rational strategies of state officials or other political authorities. Clausewitz
understood this in terms of the need of sovereign states, if they were to be sovereign, to
subordinate war to their instrumental political ends.

Despite the apparent longevity of this classical model, there has been much recent confusion
about the proper meaning of strategy. For the traditional military historian, strategy confronts
nothing less an ‘existential crisis’. In the words of Hew Strachan, the term ‘has acquired a
universality which has robbed it of meaning, and left it only with banalities’ (2005: 34).
Consider the Bush administration’s so-called ‘global war on terror’ and related ‘forward
strategy of freedom’. If strategy is a military means, wedged between politics and war, is it
possible for ‘freedom’ itself to be a strategy? The conceptual confusion signals the conflation
of strategy with policy and misunderstanding about the character of military concepts. The
classical distinction between prevention and pre-emption, for example, has clearly been lost.
The Bush administration uses the term pre-emption, originally an operational principle, to
describe a policy of preventive war.

The apparent confusion is more than semantic. The linguistic awkwardness of the ‘war on
terror’ is a product of uncertainty about what war itself is (Hammes, 2004). Strategy, war,
policy, and the political are not the same. But increasingly strategy and policy are treated as
synonymous. (The business community have invented the word ‘strategize’ to think through
almost everything they do. Type ‘strategic studies’ into the Amazon.com search engine; the
first two books are Strategic and Tactical Considerations on the Fireground and Health
Information: Management of a Strategic Resource Study Guide. They have nothing to do with
war.) What has led to this apparent confusion? And how should students of war respond?

One possible and fairly recent contributing factor has been the proliferation of ‘security’
agendas in both policy circles and the academy (Buzan, 1983). When the clashing ideologies
and nuclear threats of the Cold War apparently gave way to a new ‘globalized’ order old-style
war was to be a thing of the past (Kaldor, 1999; Duffield, 2001; Munkler, 2005). Not
strategic, but security studies was to be home for the new generation of students interested in