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1-Page Summary of On Grand Strategy
“Grand strategy” describes how to plan and fight wars. It represents the connection between the ends and means of aligning capabilities and aspirations.
Historically, strategy has involved planning and fighting wars. It’s about figuring out how to use your resources to achieve what you want. Strategy is the connection between ends (the goal) and means (the way). The first historical instances of strategy were military, but it goes back even further than that—to when people first started thinking about how they could get what they wanted by using their resources effectively.
The “grand” refers to how much is at stake. Think back to your decisions as a student. Sleeping an extra few minutes and rushing to class might not seem to have had a significant impact on you. However, if you consider all the implications of that action (e.g., what you learn in the course, how it relates to your broader studies, etc.), then the stakes increase: What you learn in the course contributes toward getting your degree; how it relates to your broader studies helps determine which career path you choose; and so on—all contributing toward determining who you are in life and what kind of person/professional people will see when they meet or hear from you later in life. This alignment of ends with means is necessary for states as well as individuals.
“Net assessment” is the contemporary term for sketching out a strategy. ____
Political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli believed that sketching out a situation was the best way to understand it. It includes known elements (climate, geography), probabilities (goals of adversaries, allies’ reliability and cultural constraints) and unknowns in between.
To balance the parts of a system, think about time, space and scale. Any changes in one part will affect all three parts.
Describing people as detail-oriented “foxes” or broader thinking “hedgehogs” reveals their approaches to strategy.
Isaiah Berlin, a Russian émigré and Oxford don, wrote an essay about “Tolstoy’s Philosophy of History” in 1939. He drew on the work of Archilochus from ancient Greece, who compared foxes to hedgehogs. Foxes have detailed knowledge about many things; hedgehogs focus on one big thing.
According to Berlin, Tolstoy’s hedgehog and fox metaphor is a good way of understanding the difference between people who take different approaches to life. Foxes evaluate their decisions based on many factors; they tend to be more flexible in their thinking and approach. Hedgehogs have an overall view that infuses what they do with significance; they are less likely to change their minds once they’ve made up their minds about something.
Philip E. Tetlock, a political psychologist and expert in forecasting, wanted to know if people were accurate or inaccurate when predicting world politics. He looked at predictions made by 284 experts over 27 years using the fox and hedgehog framework. In 2005 he wrote that neither status nor degree of optimism or pessimism affected people’s accuracy. However, how each person thinks did affect their ability to predict the future. Hedgehogs had large explanations for things and avoided self-deprecation while foxes stitch together information from many sources and are willing to criticize any idea they have as well as themselves.
Foxes were good at evaluating contradictions, recalling mistakes without rationalizing them and being self-critical in order to evaluate realistic outcomes. Therefore, they gained the strategic advantage over other animals.
If you try to do everything yourself, as a fox might, you could make mistakes. However, if you go forward without planning for all possibilities like a hedgehog would, some things will fail. Sun Tzu illustrated this in The Art of War when he said that although it’s impossible to predict everything that can happen during battle, being aware of the range of possibilities is better than not knowing anything about what to expect at all. As he wrote:
