Synthesis, grand strategy and discussion

Okay. With that in mind, let's go to the synthesis.

Pattern for successful operation. Successful operation. In one sense you have to have some kind of a goal or aim in mind. Plan […], action […], support […], command—you've got to glue it all together. So what are we talking about here?

Let's start laying it out. What is our goal? In some sense, you're trying to diminish your adversary's freedom of action while improving yours, so that he cannot cope with things that begin to unfold, and you can ⁴². So when you cut his lines of communication, when you disorient and do the kind of thing we're talking about, you're really inhibiting his freedom of action.

And so your plan: you want to probe to unmask his strengths, weaknesses, and maneuvers. In other words, […]. Sun Tzu […] Sever moral ties, disorient his mental images, etc. Mask, distort, magnify […]. Sometimes mask, sometimes distort, sometimes magnify.

That in turn gives you the ability to select initiative or response that is least expected, whether it be morally, mentally, or physically. That'll permit you to establish focus, the main effort together with other efforts, and pursue directions that permit many happenings. Doesn't mean you make them all, but you have all kinds of possibilities. You want to put him on the horns of many dilemmas [Meaning-changing wording unresolved.].

Offer many branches and threaten alternative objectives. You can't get a good picture of what's going on. And then, to keep that operation going, move along paths of least resistance. Right? That allows the paths of least resistance to manifest themselves, and then you just start exploiting. Keep pulling the system down further.

Now here's an interesting one: exploit rather than disrupt or destroy those differences or those features within his system that interfere with his ability to cope with unfolding things. Let me give you an example, particularly in guerrilla warfare. Guerrillas, if you have a corrupt province chief, don't really like to take him out, because if they take out the corrupt province chief and put someone in there good, then they don't have their basis for the guerrilla movement.

So if I have a corrupt province chief, they can use that as a recruitment effort to build up their own guerrilla cadre. So they don't want to take him out, unless it's really bad and the people really demand it. Instead, they'll lever that system to build up their own movement. Of course, after they've got it made, then they'll take him out and probably execute him. But not at the time. They'll use him as a rallying point to build up their own efforts. You see what I'm getting at there? ⁴⁶

Okay, and then subvert, disorient, and disrupt those things that allow him to keep his own act together. [Passage unclear.] And the action: […]. Exploit his vulnerabilities.

Your support: mobile communications, essential logistics. Maintain the pace of operations […]. And command: I call this command with a light touch ⁴⁹. As a matter of fact, these ideas I have here are very, very similar to the ones Mao has ⁵⁰. Very similar things.

How many people have read [… guerrilla warfare]? Anybody? Mao. The last two or three pages ⁵².

Now I want to draw your attention to the plan—

To do that, I want you to read some comments made by Napoleon that have bearing upon those plan and action statements. This is Napoleon speaking.

Look what he's saying there. He says, “Hey, you know, it's a tough job. It's hard to keep track.” If that's the case, invert the argument. If it's tough for him to keep track, what we're saying is that's a human vulnerability, a weakness. So you want to turn it around and feed that. That makes it even more difficult […].

So let's turn the whole argument around. When we do that, we come up with an idea we call grand tactics.

When you're dealing with plans and actions, you're dealing with grand tactics or operations. You're trying to get inside; you're trying to create a tangle, threatening and/or non-threatening. You're trying to enmesh him in an amorphous, [unclear] unpredictable world—[…] doubt, et cetera.

And/or pull him back inside himself. In other words, if a guy can't cope with the world, you tend to pull him back inside himself, which makes him even more disoriented. He can't keep up. Literally pull him back inside himself. And once you do that, thereby […].

You'd be surprised how people like to fall back inside themselves anyway. ³

Okay? Let's go to the second impression.

Where I made a comment about transients […] the intention. You want to state it this way: transients under the action, […] intention. And we stated all these before: probe and test, employ variety, et cetera.

But look at […]. Severing moral ties, disorient, subvert, disorient, disrupt, et cetera. You're doing all these things. Here's what you're trying to do—your payoff. And the key words are either explicit or implicit in these statements. Tie this together with this.

Then you can look at what I call the generalized strategy.

You see, the key idea is to be able to penetrate the system. You can bring that out. Go all the way back to Sun Tzu and work forward. How many times? People don't say it. […] The key idea is to penetrate the inside of the system: his mind, his time, his space, or his moral, mental, physical being.

So then, if you paste it all together, you have your tactics, which feed your grand tactics, which feed your strategy, which feed your strategic aim. And they overlap. […] But it's coherent. See how they all play together.

Another way of thinking about it—what I call an alternative portrait.

[Aside unclear.] It's supposed to pull somebody apart. That's one way to think about it. I'll show you another way so you can take a look.

They tend to be very destructive. The ones we've shown so far are very destructive in nature. So, with that in mind, we can think of it in this sense.

You're synthesizing lethal effort, maneuver, and moral. Here's your idea, and there's your aim. Different ways you can perceive it.

Now, you're talking about a political campaign. Remember earlier we talked about isolating your adversary and maintaining your support base—moral, mental, physical. Isolate his, maintain yours, do not let him do the same.

Go back to Sun Tzu. Remember […]. Know your adversary, know yourself […]. We see some themes that begin to unfold. So let's pull those together.

What I call an underlying insight here: unless you can penetrate his moral, mental, physical being, sever those bonds […]—[…]—it's very difficult.

That, in turn, allows you to isolate him from his allies or any outside support, as well as internally—internally, the body can't function. The name of the game is really penetration and isolation.

Just reflect upon everything we discussed today, all the way back to Sun Tzu: you do see a theme emerge again and again. Okay?

That raises a rather interesting question, which relates to something you asked earlier. How do we connect these notions to a national goal? Move it up.

One, a grand strategy to support the national goal. And the second one is particularly important: pump up our resolve, drain away adversary resolve, attract the uncommitted.

In Vietnam we pumped up theirs, drained away ours, and they attracted the uncommitted. We lost. Which suggests: if you're going to pump up yours, drain away theirs, and attract the uncommitted, you've got to know your enemy, know yourself, and the uncommitted. Remember I said Sun Tzu only had two of those? You've got to know three.

In politics you understand that, because you've got to know your adversary, yourself, and also the people out there. Which way are they going to go?

End conflict on [favorable/unfavorable unclear] terms ⁸. Ensure that peace terms [negation unclear] provide a base for unfavorable future conflict. Now these things are easy to say; they're hard to kind of put together. In an ideal sense […].

In any case, if you paste it together, you can kind of lay out, in one statement, a semblance of what I call a grand strategy. We amplify our spirit and strength. Now in a military or nation-state sense, you're talking about political, economic, social, et cetera. You're talking about strength.

But at the same time, in the basis of it, […]. You're not going to get there—ideologue or ideologue, whatever you want to call them. You'll start filtering stuff through this imprint you've got in your brain. It's probably going to hurt you. Okay.

You don't have to read them all; we've all seen them before. So now we’re back to the national goal. […] That's basically what we're trying to do.

Guess what? That's not a national goal; that's my individual goal. That goal shows at every level, […]. But the point I'm trying to bring out here: these upper two tend to be constructive in nature, whereas the bottom four here tend to be destructive in nature. The upper two tend to operate over a longer time horizon; the bottom four over a shorter time horizon.

And that's the nature of this note. […]

For example, let's say you go in and take a country that spent many years building up its defenses, and it collapses in a few weeks. Well, those citizens would be irate at their leaders, saying, “We spent all this; the whole thing came […].” So you've got a lot going for you as a conqueror, if you behave. If you misbehave, you lose it all.

Because, see, the leaders would be seen as morally corrupt, incompetent, […]. Like France. ¹¹ But if you misbehave—

See, where Hitler really lost the war was primarily […]. So he won many victories, but as he won his victories, he was generating enemies faster than victories. […] Because even when he went into Russia, remember […]. But then he came down very heavy-handed, and he lost all that.

Now let's kind of review and expand a little bit differently. I want to go into something here, and then we're going to leave our session. Let's read that chart.

Unifying vision—every once in a while you’ve got to have that unifying vision or unifying ideal. If you can get something like that, you've really got a lot going for you, I'd say. Worth the investment. It takes time. Okay?

And here's the point I'm leading to. It really gives you a theme for what I call survival and conquest in many different directions.

Basically what we're talking about here: unifying vision, grand ideal or overarching theme. Individuals […] societies can shape and adapt, yet offers a way to expose adversaries' flaws. You can do that, boy, you've really got something.

And that's where the Marxists were strong for so long. They had a so-called utopian ideal. In the meantime they're making capitalists look like a bunch of jerks and taking over the world. Wasn't one of the most significant events out of World War I the establishment of the first communist state? World War II permitted what? The expansion of communism. They've gained both ways. They should […] both world wars.

And if they're the focus of evil and the evil empire, how do we explain all this expansion? [Meaning-changing wording unresolved.]

And then, of course, ingredients needed to pursue that vision—these kinds of things. There's your basic aim. Now we've got a problem here. If you tend to be this way, you tend to lose this. If you have this, you don't tend to have that. The Russians and Hitler had this kind of stuff, but they weren't able to do this. We seem to be able to do this, but we have a hard time getting that.

In other words, those are harder to put together […]. But if you can get an external […], a compelling external […], like we had during World War II, […] Hitler, then you can have both this and this. In other words, if something's really perceived as a menace to your society, I don't care whether that's another society or something that's […] over you, if you really make that compelling—

Now, what's happened to the Marxian philosophy? See, they had no track record. Before there were any communist states, there was no track record—all these ideal statements. Now there's a track record; they have a lot of problems. We can expose those problems instead of saying they're just evil. […] You want to say, “Hey, wait a minute,” just start laying it out. […] You've got a lot of problems; you can leverage that if you wanted to. You should.

But do it the way that […]. Don't do it the way that you're down in the sewer. That's not so good, because then you'll hurt yourself. Very important. Okay.

I'm going to skip the Application. ¹⁵ I'll go right to the wrap-up.

Now let's start pasting some things together.

In other words, do you want to be the hoser or the hosee? Let's get down to the fundamentals here.

Now, when you sever his moral bonds—in a sense, with the new things I'm looking at—when you penetrate his system and do certain things, he causes himself to sever his own moral bonds. In other words, where he starts to violate some of his own ideas, not only internal, but external allies too. Okay?

Now I want you to read this chart, and I'll make some comments on it.

Some implications surrounding these things. In a tactical sense, in terms of multidimensional interactions, they suggest spontaneous, synthetic, creative, rather than step-by-step analytical, logical, and discrete.

Know what I'm saying? Increasing [unclear] complexity. […] You know how I define complexity? Some people get unhappy about that. I define it differently. Variety is not necessarily complexity. Variety without harmony, then it's complex. Variety without apparent harmony.

I can have variety; as long as I can see the harmony in it, then it's not complex for me. But if I can't see the harmony, I've got a problem. Variety without harmony. So complexity—one man's complexity may be another guy's harmony. So it's a very personal kind of thing.

In a strategic sense, we want to use that variety and rapidity, so it makes it very difficult. The other guy can't read you, can't keep up.

So basically what we're saying: up here we're trying to pump up—¹⁷—I mean, we're trying to reduce our friction and our time in order to cope with things. Down here we're trying to pump up our adversary's friction and increase his time so he can't cope. In other words, we want to get a mismatch of friction and time, so we get that leverage, make it difficult.

And what I'm suggesting here: if you start setting up very complex arrangements—in other words, where you don't have that harmony with that variety—then you've got a problem. In other words, can you internalize those relationships that you've set up? If you can't internalize them and there are many out there, you've got a problem.

You know, just like when you drive a car, there are a lot of complex things to do. But you don't have to think about it; you do it. It's complex unless you see the harmony. But once you put it together —it’s not complex. So can you set your organization up so people just naturally do it? It operates in a very harmonious way without having to be explicitly detailed. In other words, those implicit connections or bonds […].

Okay, with that in mind, we can look at it a little differently.

We go back and go over all the subcategories […]. What we're really saying here is: variety and rapidity allow us to magnify our adversary's friction, stretch out his time to respond to that. Likewise, we have harmony and initiative in our system to diminish our own friction and compress our time […] variety […].

So if you paste all four of these together, it allows us to literally pull our adversary back inside himself. He can't cope, can't stay on top.

So this tends to be the destructive side, and then you're more on your constructive side here. Remember, you always want to keep in mind […] destructive effort also, because you just don't do destruction. You want to always build up the support for yourself.

How many people here have read Clausewitz? [Intervening words unclear.] Well, in his Book One he said: look, if you're looking at a society, think of three components—the government, the armed forces, and the people. Not bad.

Now, if you're going to put a coup d'état on somebody, all you're doing is trying to replace one government with another. If you're talking about blitzkrieg, you're working against the armed forces and the government. If you're talking about guerrilla warfare, you're primarily working on the people. You're trying to siphon them away from the government and armed forces, so they've got nothing to work with.

Of course, that's politics also: trying to siphon the people away from your adversaries. You get the votes; he doesn't. You get in power; he doesn't. Same game.

So now, with that in mind: if you want to pretend you're a modern Sun Tzu, and you want to make these statements—the art of success. A very simple way of looking at it.

That's good politics. Now let's go to the epilogue, and then we'll finish up. This is the last part of it.

Remember I told you I'm sort of unsettled when I start thinking […] about the so-called principles of war. […]

And of course that's the nature of this chart here, the fact that I was unsettled. So I said: let's look at some principles of war—

—or military art […]. So I'll show them to you from four countries: USA, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and France. You don't have to read them in detail. ³

The key thing is, the USA and the United Kingdom are quite close here. The Soviet Union is a bit different. Plus, the Soviet Union's got the so-called mobility and tempo […]. And the French only have three […].

The point is, they're all different. And Germany doesn't have any, or didn't. I don't know if they have some now or not. So let's critique.

First, it doesn't reveal […] how they interact […] mechanism […]. But the second […] is the more meaningful one. Because what I'm saying here is: scientific laws and principles are the same for all countries and tend to change little over time. On the other hand, we know that it's different for different countries. And over time we see it change.

So if you have a so-called principle of war, think of it in this sense: Newton's second law of motion, F equals ma. You don't have F equals ma for one country, something for another country. F equals ma, or it doesn't equal ma, regardless of whether you're Russian, Chinese, British, American, or what.

I don't know—particularly when you see the different principles, some countries don't even have any. They're talking about the same phenomenon. How can they be principles of war?

So this would suggest I'm saying they're not principles. They seem to be some kind of a laundry list or checklist people are trying to keep in mind, whatever it is. I don't know. They're certainly not principles. They really don't […].

But maybe there's an alternative possibility. Now, we've looked at a lot of stuff, but why not collect these bits and pieces and assemble them and see what we have?

And here are some things we looked at […] to put them together. Remember, we want to compress our time and stretch out the adversary's time. Invert it: you want to compress his and stretch ours out? Boy, certainly not. […]

We want to generate these unequal distributions and basically gain that moral-mental-physical […]. We want to pump down our friction and pump up our adversary's friction. In other words, we're trying to generate all these mismatches in our favor as much as possible.

In other words, the idea being to get inside his OODA loop, or inside his mind-time-space […]. And if we can realize that, it gives the basis to penetrate his organism and bring about his collapse. At the same time, we want to be able to do this: amplify our spirit.

So now we've pasted all that together. My final chart—you're probably wondering when I'm going to get there—what I call a general central theme that we've been talking about here all day.

It took longer than normal because I was digressing. ²⁴

That is it. Are there any questions? Got a comment?

Audience member, inferred: You talked about how maneuver and moral conflict is better than the attrition conflict. […]