‘Strategy and grand strategy: these terms are similar and often used interchangeably. But they are not synonymous, and the differences matter. ‘
‘Strategy is a theory of victory. It explains how to use force in order to achieve political objectives in war. Strategic questions focus on enduring dilemmas about where to send military forces, how much violence to use and when to stop. Many issues stem from these fundamental questions: the role of civilians in war, the economics of mobilisation, the relationship between policymakers and generals, the role of secret intelligence in open combat and the challenges of wartime diplomacy.
Grand strategy is a theory of security. It explains how to make oneself safe in an unsafe world. It answers questions of what kind of military forces to buy, where to send them and when to use them. Grand strategy also discusses how to coordinate military, diplomatic and economic instruments of national power in order to produce durable national security. If strategy is about winning the war, then grand strategy is about winning the peace.’ ¹ https://x.com/i/status/2019401646908862873
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Read the Adelphi’s Introduction by Joshua Rovner:
Exploring the relationship between strategy and grand strategy reveals other curious historical patterns. It tells us, for instance, something unexpected about deterrence.
Durable national security sometimes relies on mutual restraint. Peace should obtain when the balance of military capabilities is such that rivals cannot defeat one another. Mutually assured denial ought to be particularly stable in cases of cross-domain deterrence, that is, when each rival dominates a particular war-fighting domain (e.g., land, sea or air). Great powers with comparative advantages in one domain should avoid fighting great powers who are superior in another. Having no obvious way of overcoming their disadvantages, they should default to peace, because going to war would put their military forces in danger and put their grand strategies at terrific risk. Yet they have done so repeatedly. Why?
Part of the reason is the hubris that comes with grand-strategic success. Great powers grow secure and prosperous by cultivating their capabilities in a preferred domain. But success breeds ambition, and it encourages the belief that they can break out of existing power balances through willpower and cleverness. Ambitious rising great powers are more likely to pick fights with rivals, even when those rivals are clearly superior in other domains. They are also more likely to embrace long-shot strategic approaches that promise quick and decisive victory without having to confront their enemy’s centre of gravity. This sequence of events can end in strategic disaster.
Such was the case in the Peloponnesian War, which I explore in Chapter One. Athens had become wealthy and powerful in the fifth century bce by constructing a naval trading empire. It poured resources into its navy, which it then used to expand trade routes and establish a system of colonies and tributary allies. All of this would be of little use in a war against Sparta, however, given the latter’s dominant army. Sparta’s grand strategy, in contrast, was geographically conservative. It needed to keep its army close to home to protect against external threats and to prevent a slave uprising on the Peloponnese. Over the years Sparta developed technologies and tactics for maximising the combat power of its heavy infantry and won universal acclaim as the strongest land power in ancient Greece. Like Athens, it had slowly implemented a viable and durable grand strategy. Also like Athens, it could not militarily compete outside its preferred domain.
They tried anyway. Athens and Sparta were not blind to the balance of power before the war, yet they convinced themselves that they could work around it. Athens tried to lure Sparta to fight at sea; Sparta tried to lure Athens to fight on land. These attempts failed. Both sides retreated from their early-war fantasies, but neither was willing to make peace. What followed was a grinding conflict with little prospect of decisive battle, an exhausting process that undermined their respective theories of security. Athens and Sparta were deterred from attacking one another’s centre of gravity, and as a result they consigned themselves to protracted war.
We may see this story again soon. The United States, the dominant global maritime power, is increasingly at loggerheads with China, the dominant power on land in East Asia. Both countries have invested in specific military capabilities designed to undermine their rivals without having to attack in the other’s preferred domain. They have also published doctrinal statements that offer the alluring prospect of victory through rapid electronic and information attacks. Such strategies hold out for seizing the initiative and forcing the adversary to capitulate without having to risk a large-scale engagement. Should these fail, however, both sides might find themselves stuck much like the ancients were stuck, committed to war but lacking the ability to win quickly. Novel strategic concepts might undo each great power’s grand strategy.
In 1778 France entered the American War of Independence, providing vital material support to the impoverished Americans. Yet French assistance went far beyond simply providing ships, soldiers and cash. Working with their American counterparts, French military leaders developed an effective strategy for overcoming British strength. French–American coordination, an exceptional synthesis of naval and land power, remains a model of both coalition warfare and joint operations. Planners carefully tailored military action to achieve shared political objectives, ultimately forcing Great Britain to concede defeat.
What happened next was a calamity. Waging war effectively with ragtag American troops required a huge investment in money and material. In the short term France benefited from bloodying its long-time rival and forcing it to abandon a prized colony. But it incurred an enormous debt in the process, pushing the government towards bankruptcy. This in turn kicked off the extraordinary chain of events leading to the French Revolution and the destruction of the monarchy.
Events played out very differently on the other side of the Channel. British strategists made a series of critical mistakes that enabled the French and American victory. The Royal Navy missed opportunities to attack and perhaps demolish key elements of the French fleet that were vital for sustaining the American cause. Britain’s army suffered from miscommunication and disunity of effort, problems that plagued the early war efforts to destroy continental forces in the northern half of the country. British commanders also blundered badly in the south, leading to the shocking surrender at Yorktown, a loss that effectively ended the war. British strategy in the war was a dismal failure.
After the shooting stopped, however, Great Britain resumed its imperial expansion and the march towards hegemony. Losing the colonies forced it to rethink the value of maintaining a large standing army in North America, and it rid it of colonial troublemakers, who were increasingly unwilling to accept royal rule. For Britain, losing the war was a blessing: instead of policing vast territories full of hostile colonists, it could reinvest in its navy, hold onto the colonies that it needed and strike deals with others for port access and resupply. It returned to practising the art of offshore balancing, spending more than a century maintaining the naval dominance that underwrote its position as the hub of international trade and finance, while cultivating great-power allies in Europe who would do the heavy lifting if any state attempted to conquer the continent. The strategic debacle in the American war brought a grand-strategic reassessment that led to a period of astonishing wealth and power.
French strategic success led to grand-strategic disaster. British strategic failure led to a lasting grand-strategic triumph. Chapter Two explores these surprising outcomes in detail. The French and British experiences deserve special attention because no other historical case puts these strategy–grand strategy distinctions in such stark relief. And no other case better reveals the dangers of mistaking one for the other.
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Strategy and grand strategy also help us interpret more recent history, as I discuss in Chapter Three. Major controversies from the Cold War turn on these concepts. Criticism of US strategy in the Vietnam War, for example, has long focused on the military’s preference for conventional operations. Instead of engaging in a thoroughgoing counter-insurgency campaign, say critics, it chose a tragically ill-suited war of attrition. But the problems in Vietnam were not really the result of combat preferences. The real issue was the lack of an intelligible grand strategy during the period of its major combat operations, in the years between the Cuban Missile Crisis and detente. The fact that grand strategy was in flux made it impossible to settle on a definition of victory. While the main objective was the preservation of an independent non-communist South Vietnam, there was no consensus about how to know when Saigon could stand on its own. Or, more precisely, there was no agreement about the consequences of Saigon’s possible collapse. There was also no consensus on how to apply enough US force to compel North Vietnam to negotiate, while simultaneously weaning South Vietnam off the US security guarantee. Without a clear idea of US grand strategy, policymakers could not settle on the value of the object in the war.
The result was a set of related problems plaguing US strategy. The lack of consensus about political goals led to confusion and doubt about appropriate measures of progress. It also led to hedging and half-hearted proposals from leaders who were not sure what they wanted. Grand-strategic ambiguity deepened fissures among officials from across the national-security establishment, civilian and military alike, all of whom went to war with their own beliefs about the best course of action. Policymakers opted for self-contradictory strategies as they tried to mediate these disputes, making concessions to all the major players rather than choosing winners and losers. About the only thing that military and political leaders shared was frustration about the outcome.
The Vietnam War was nested within the larger Cold War between the superpowers, and nuclear weapons loomed over their rivalry. The value of nuclear weapons in the Cold War divided observers, then and now. Scholars adhering to the ‘nuclear revolution’ thesis have long argued that the weapons were too powerful to use. The weapons were so destructive that it was impossible to calibrate violent means with political ends. Indeed, the notion of ‘victory’ was absurd because any nuclear use invited retaliation in kind. Nuclear weapons were only useful for deterrence, and even that was difficult. This idea influenced scholarship on issues ranging from diplomacy and arms control to crisis stability and the problem of misperception.
But US leaders never embraced the revolution. Instead of viewing nuclear weapons solely as tools of deterrence, they invested in technologies to reduce the cost of war. They hoped that more accurate warheads could target enemy forces without threatening enemy cities. Better intelligence and surveillance might allow the US to take out enemy nuclear forces at the outset of any war. And as cost-reduction scenarios became plausible, deterrent threats would become more credible, improving everyone’s security.
The theory of the nuclear revolution also failed to explain leaders’ fear of proliferation. If nuclear weapons were great for deterrence but lousy for battle, then Washington should have been sanguine as the technology spread. It might even have been optimistic, since proliferation would, under the theory, lead countries to become cautious. Instead, US leaders worried that the spread of nuclear weapons would spin out of control, and they spent decades trying to prevent it.
Strategy and grand strategy provide a way of reconciling these arguments. The nuclear-revolution thesis does not appear to pass the historical test in terms of grand strategy. If the nuclear revolution affected grand strategy, the US should have settled for a small arsenal for the sole purpose of deterrence. It should have abandoned efforts to integrate nuclear and conventional forces. US leaders should have recognised that defences against nuclear attack were futile. And they should have managed the process of proliferation so that states, both great and regional powers alike, enjoyed the security benefit of a reliable second-strike capability. None of these things happened.
The theory fares better at the level of strategy. While nuclear weapons have not changed everything, one critical fact remains: no state has used them in anger since 1945. States have been perfectly willing to use other novel military technologies on the battlefield, suggesting that there is something abnormal about these weapons that changes how leaders think about them. Cold War leaders blanched when confronted with operational plans for nuclear use. And in crises they stepped back from the brink, over and over. Leaders were not willing to take the kind of risks with nuclear weapons that they took with conventional military forces – precisely what the nuclear-revolution thesis predicts.
The nuclear dilemma is not a Cold War anachronism, as the persistent debates over nuclear weapons attest. The strategy–grand strategy framework provides a new way of understanding current controversies. Today’s nuclear hawks argue that policy should not be constrained by a theory that fails at the level of grand strategy. From their perspective, the arsenal provides a number of important benefits to US foreign policy beyond its utility in wartime. But for more cautious critics, the strategic level matters most. If there is no rational argument for using nuclear weapons in anger, then there is little to be gained from posturing with them for other purposes. The risks of wartime catastrophe far outweigh the marginal peacetime benefits of a larger force.
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Strategy and grand strategy shed light on other contemporary controversies, including counter-terrorism. The war on terrorism posed an immediate challenge to strategists after 9/11, because the endgame was unclear. US officials wanted to destroy al-Qaeda, not coerce it into some negotiated settlement. But what it meant to destroy a transnational organisation was up for debate, not least because any militant group could claim the al-Qaeda banner after Osama bin Laden and his cohort were dispatched. As a result, the strategic goal was nebulous.
Grand strategy helped bring the US counter-terrorism approach into focus, as I explain in Chapter Four. The goal of grand strategy is security, which is a general condition rather than a specific objective. Victory was not the point. Instead, counter-terrorism sought to reduce the risk of violence at a sustainable cost. Over four administrations, the US gradually transformed its ‘global war on terrorism’ into something more like air policing, the British approach to imperial control in the Middle East and North Africa in the interwar period. Rather than requiring large land forces to garrison distant countries, it envisioned the use of special-operations forces, intelligence and drone strikes for what it called over-the-horizon strikes. This vision did not imagine an end state, just as there is no moment in which police can declare victory over crime. Even withdrawals from war zones do not mean the end of counter-terrorism; the US has continued to conduct operations with great energy since exiting Afghanistan.
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Future conflicts will include emerging technologies that raise the possibility of radical changes to the conduct of war. States are already incorporating novel tools like malicious code and artificial intelligence (AI) in their conventional military forces. According to some observers, the ability to operate in new domains like cyberspace might give first movers a dramatic advantage. The ability to operate effectively in the digital domain will allow forces to coordinate efforts over vast distances in real time. The ability to disrupt and disable others’ communications through cyberspace might prevent the enemy from organising a successful defence. The upshot is a vision of rapid, low-casualty conflict, where the outcome is determined not by who controls territory but by who controls information flows.
This is not the first time that states have pondered the implications of war in new domains. Seventeenth-century naval technologies opened the blue-water oceans for trade as well as battle. Contemporaneous observers argued that naval mastery would confer outsize political power, because control of sea lanes would allow states to dominate commerce and set the terms of naval engagements. At the same time, they worried that failure to rapidly develop and field capital ships would put the state in a position of permanent inferiority to more technologically savvy rivals. Over time, however, observers learned the limits of naval technology. Their existential concerns gave way to more modest expectations. The same pattern of hope, fear and resignation describes the experience of observers at the dawn of strategic bombing in the interwar period, as well as the dawn of the space age.
Interestingly, the pattern holds for both strategy and grand strategy, as I argue in Chapter Five. Strategists in all these transitional periods imagined that wars in new domains would be short and decisive. They urged leaders to exploit the advantages that new technologies offered and warned them about the dangers of procrastination. Grand strategists made similar arguments about operating in new domains. Control of sea lanes opened up an avenue for durable security, and relinquishing control meant open-ended insecurity. Airpower theorists also called for investments in large bomber fleets and dedicated air forces, not just to win wars but also to deter any potential challengers from starting them.
If this history is a useful guide, then the current rhetoric is probably ahead of reality. Those who seek to fight in new domains will struggle to operationalise new concepts, not least because they need skilled personnel who are in high demand in the private sector. Recruiting and retaining these professionals will be difficult because firms offer the potential for higher salaries, better benefits and more flexibility. Organisational performance will also lag behind technological promises because of bureaucratic friction. Integrating advanced data and communications systems into conventional operations requires the kind of coordination that will prove difficult to sustain, especially in wartime. More importantly, fierce competition among rival states foreshadows a cat-and-mouse contest as offensive innovations lead to defensive responses. Technological advantages may be important, but they will not endure. At some point states will have a better sense of the uses and limits of cyberspace operations and AI-powered information offensives.
But we have not yet reached that point. The great powers are competing aggressively for technology advantages, and their leaders are not lowering expectations. Instead, they are urging innovation and warning about the dangers of falling behind. They see a future in which national security is inseparable from information security. Economic prosperity relies on secure and reliable financial transactions; social stability relies on robust and resilient infrastructure; and military capability relies on information technologies built into weapons systems and on communications networks that coordinate fielded forces. Modern great powers believe earnestly that the quality of grand strategy rests on the mastery of advanced technologies. They believe the same about strategy in future wars, and they worry openly about nightmare scenarios, of sudden and overwhelming losses to savvier enemies.
Such fears will probably lessen over time. The problem in the interim period, however, is a wicked mix of enthusiasm and alarm. Great powers that fixate on technology are likely to choose strategies based on visions of short conflicts where the outcome is a function of relative technological sophistication. They are also likely to believe that the outcome will determine the state’s security long after the war is over. These beliefs inspire a sense of urgency to planning, because while there is a possibility for a quick and decisive victory, there is little margin for error. The reality of war, of course, might be very different. Offensive technologies can fail under fire, and defenders may adapt in novel and unexpected ways. Military leaders under these circumstances might scramble to adjust their theories of victory – if they do not jettison them entirely. Pre-war strategic assumptions often fall apart when the shooting starts, a pattern well known to military historians and war fighters alike. Less well understood is the curious and counter-intuitive relationship between strategy and grand strategy. That is the subject of this book.
Joshua Rovner is an Associate Professor of International Relations in the School of International Service at American University. He previously served as the John Goodwin Tower Distinguished Chair in International Politics and National Security at SMU, and as a professor of strategy and policy at the US Naval War College. In 2018–19 he served as scholar-in-residence at the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command. Rovner is the author of Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence (Cornell University Press, 2011), and the co-editor of Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the 21st Century (Columbia University Press, 2018) and Chaos Reconsidered: The Liberal Order and the Future of International Politics (Columbia University Press, 2023).
