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A theory of strategic culture

a
Yitzhak Klein
a
Department of International Relations , The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem , Jerusalem, Israel
Published online: 24 Sep 2007.

To cite this article: Yitzhak Klein (1991) A theory of strategic culture, Comparative Strategy,
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A Theory of Strategic Culture

YITZHAK KLEIN
Department of International Relations
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jerusalem, Israel

Abstract War's inherent uncertainty makes subjective judgment an inseparable part

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of strategic choice. Strategic cultures, the set of beliefs held by strategic decisionma-
kers regarding the political object of war and the most effective means of achieving
it, arise out of strategy-maker's need to act purposively despite this uncertainty.
Strategic cultures can be compared and analyzed by means of a paradigm that repre-
sents them as a hierarchy of concepts on several levels: political, strategic, and
operational. These concepts must be well-formed and, in particular, well-integrated if
the strategy-maker is to produce good (i.e., successful) strategy.

No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without

first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how
he intends to conduct it. The former is its political purpose; the latter its
operational objective.
—Karl von Clausewitz

Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.

—Karl von Clausewitz

Introduction: Strategy and Subjectivity

When Clausewitz wrote his famous phrase about war being a continuation of politics, he
was defining what war ought to be, not describing common practice. One consistent
theme of On War is how difficult it is in war to identify the course of action that will
genuinely serve one's political purpose, and then guide the struggling along the path one
has chosen for it. Significantly, Clausewitz had no concrete advice to offer the aspiring
commander on how to conduct war so that its purposes are served, the achievement of
political goals. Unlike the military theorists he criticized, Jomini and von Bulow,1 Clau-
sewitz had no strategic or operational formulas to propose, and indeed he decried all
such formulas as misleading.

Part of this work was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship provided by the Lady Davis
Trust.

3
 Y. Klein

The Historical Record

Since Clausewitz's time, strategic planners have not developed any reliable system for
choosing the methods—strategy, operations, force structure—required to pursue the
goals of policy. Different groups of military planners create different solutions to prob-
lems that seem broadly similar,2 or interpret the implications of geography or technology
in different ways.3 Military establishments have adopted diverse military doctrines and
operational styles, justified by a variety of philosophies of war.4 At times national differ-
ences have extended to different conceptions of war's very nature and its role in the
international political system.5 Despite Clausewitz' warning, the role of the ostensible
political purpose of the war in shaping these doctrines has not always been clear. War is
supposed to be a "continuation of policy," but political leaders' instructions to their
military servants are only one source, if an important one, of the ideas that underlie
national strategy. In order to understand how strategy is formed and executed in practice,
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it is not enough to study national policy. One must study strategic culture as well, taking
into account the heterogenous sources of the often conflicting ideas that ultimately guide
the preparation and conduct of war.

A Priori Assumptions in Strategy

Strategy has to make sense, at least to the strategist who authors it. Strategic planners
base their strategies on principles that seem to them sufficient and consistent, that iden-
tify the facts that ought to be taken into account in strategic planning and that form a
logical framework within which the strategy makes sense. To understand a strategy, it is
not sufficient simply to understand the facts on which it ostensibly is based and the
arguments advanced in its favor by its advocates. One must also understand the origins
of the guiding principles and opinions that render the strategy, in its authors' view,
logical and likely to succeed.
The role of such a priori judgments, largely subjective in nature, in strategic plan-
ning has not hitherto received much in the way of systematic, generalized treatment.6
Only over the past decade or so has scholarly attention been paid to the role of subjective
and relative judgments in strategy-making, and indeed in the outcome of war. Terms
such as strategic culture or national style7 have been coined to signify the habits of
thought and action (political, strategic, operational, tactical, or some combination of
these) of particular national military establishments. Attempts have been made to de-
scribe aspects of the strategic cultures of different nations, to predict their consequences
in wartime, and to use them as a basis for prescribing policy.8 All these studies share the
assumption that strategic culture can explain a good deal about the ways nations and
armies behave in war, and even why the win or lose. There are better and worse strate-
gic cultures, and it can be fatal for a nation to go to war on the basis of misconceived or
poorly integrated ideas.9
Unfortunately, most scholars who have used the concept of strategic culture or
national style have been more concerned to tell us what it does, usually in one specific
instance, than what it is or why it exists. The role of subjective factors in strategy-
making and war is a field waiting to be explored,10 but it cannot proceed without at least
a preliminary theory of strategic culture, a theory that explains why subjective judg-
ments are an indispensible part of strategy-making, how they arise, whom they affect,
and how they influence the content and quality of strategy. The present article essays
such a theory. Space does not permit the presentation of extensive case studies of partic-
 A Theory of Strategic Culture 5

ular national strategic cultures, and in any event only one case study has as yet been
carried out that specifically incorporates the theory presented here." However, certain
illustrative aspects of specific strategic cultures are presented in appendices A and B.

The Scope of the Theory

Though the formation of strategic culture has interesting sociological and historical
aspects, that is not the focus here. Strategy is a goal-oriented endeavor, involving the
pursuit of a political objective through the use of force. Our purpose is to examine how
strategic culture influences this goal-oriented activity. From this stems our definition of
strategic culture: "the set of attitudes and beliefs held within a military establishment
concerning the political objective of war and the most effective strategy and operational
method of achieving it." Our investigation of the aspects of war that give rise to strategic
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culture will further establish the appropriateness of this definition.

The questions, "What does strategic culture do," and "How does it do it?" are
more amenable to theoretical treatment than the question, "What are the sources of
strategic culture?" Every particular national strategic culture is conditioned by its own
set of sources, such as history, geography, national culture and politics, economics,
technology, etc. Many of the existing works on strategic culture examine the sources of
specific strategic cultures. Taken together, these works show that it would be futile to try
to develop some kind of a priori formula to explain just which factors "ought" to
influence strategic culture, and in what fashion. Every strategic culture is unique, and
has unique sources.12 What strategic cultures share is a common origin in the nature of
war, a common structure, and a common way of influencing strategic decisionmaking
that permits analysis and comparison.

The Genesis of Strategic Culture

Strategic culture arises out of a dilemma that lies at the heart of war. War is supposed to
serve policy, but it is not an easy or natural servant thereof. Those who engage in war
seek to make it serve a purpose, but war resists being used in such a fashion. Two
fundamental, interrelated aspects of war lie at the hear of this resistance: its uncertainty,
and its adversarial nature.

War's Dual Nature

War simultaneously presents two kinds of objectives. The first is the policy objective of
the war, the point of the entire business. The second objective is a military one: to beat
the enemy, and to avoid being beaten by him. These two objectives are supposed to be
welded into one; the commander must seek to beat the enemy in such a fashion as to
bring about the desired political result. They are however, distinct, and there can be no
greater error than to assume that because one has identified one's political objective,
one's military objective must flow naturally or obviously therefrom.
Political leaders may possess their own policy agenda, but on the battlefield one's
agenda is set by the enemy. "In war," Clausewitz wrote, "the will is directed at an
animate object who reacts. " l 3 The enemy's active, adversarial mind is the chief obstacle
to success, whether it be winning a battle or wringing from victory a political achieve-
ment. The enemy's plans and preparations for war, his strategic and operational choices
during his conduct of it, set one's own strategic requirements. His resolution, even in the
 6 Y. Klein

face of defeat, determine how long, intense, and costly the struggle for victory will be.
He always retains the ability to do the unexpected and turn the course of events down
paths one has not anticipated.
The enemy's opposition thus ensures that the relationship between policy and the
strategic and operational means required to implement it is indeterminate. Nothing can
guarantee that any particular choice of forces and methods, any particular strategy, will
lead to success. The danger arising from this uncertainty is not that the commander will
be left, bewildered, to wonder what he should do next. The opposite is the case. If the
commander is not certain of his own purposes, the enemy can always be relied upon to
supply him with one. The enemy's forces, his actions, press every minute for a response
of some kind. It is as easy to respond instinctively to the challenge of the enemy as it is
difficult to determine the response that will actually serve one's political purpose.
The strategic planner and the commander are thus confronted by two simultaneous,
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potentially competitive sets of goals: those of policy, which derive from the national
interest, and the demands of the battlefield. The enemy, his forces, strategy, decisions in
the field, are a present threat and challenge. They appear concrete and immediate, as
opposed to the call of policy, tenuous and uncertain. The adversarial, military aspect of
war thus actively distracts those who wage it from the pursuit of the policy objectives
that are its ostensible justification.
The highest task of strategy-making, and the most difficult, is to bridge this gap
between the political aspect of war and its strategic and operational aspect; that is, to
determine that "this particular policy objective can be achieved by attaining this particu-
lar military objective." Clausewitz' claim that war has its own grammar but not its own
logic describes an ideal that must be striven for, not something that happens naturally. In
real life grammar of the battlefield attempts to impose its own logic, and the logic of
politics may seem to be at variance with it. The betrayal of political objectives in
obedience to the perceived dictates of the battlefield is a very common theme in the
history of war.
Simple and obvious instances can deceive one as to the true nature of the difficulty
of finding and using the appropriate strategy and forces to achieve one's political goal.
There could be little doubt of the military results that would satisfy the Republican
party's political objectives with regard to the Confederacy or, to take an even more
extreme case, Rome's with respect to Spartacus. On a less extreme level, the strategic
objectives corresponding to Frederick the Great's political objectives were simple to
comprehend, although their operational execution was exceedingly difficult. But at Leip-
zig Napolean must have rued his too-easy satisfaction with the outcomes obtained in the
campaigns of Jena, Auerstadt, and Wagram. The campaign of 1918 in France demon-
strated not so much the inadequacy of strategy (for by that time both sides had learned to
function tolerably well in the strategic environment that had proved so bloodily frustrat-
ing for the three previous years) as the inadequacy even of successful strategy, as then
understood both by political and military leaders, to attain a political objective worth
having.

The Role of Strategic Culture

The dichotomy between the demands of policy and the dictates of the battlefield is an
inescapable part of war. Nonetheless, military planners cannot afford to agonize,
Hamlet-like, over the divergent tendencies of politics and the battlefield. They must
operate out of some coherent intellectual framework that tells them what to do, defining
 A Theory of Strategic Culture 7

their objective and identifying the means they are to use to achieve it. Without such a
framework, no serious planning or preparation for war can take place. This framework
is strategic culture.
By the same token, however, there is no truly objective' method by which this
framework can be derived. It arises as a response, as a way of coping with the uncer-
tainty involved in choosing military means whereby to pursue a political goal. It may, of
course, be well-grounded in common sense and based on highly probable assumptions.
Yet these can only be, at best, assumptions. It must always be borne in mind not only
that war is uncertain, but that its uncertainty subjects the planner to inherently contradic-
tory influences. Devising military strategies, therefore, is an accident-prone business.

Strategic Culture and the Strategic Decisionmaker

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Strategic planners, of course, try to overcome the uncertainty inherent in planning for
war. They attempt to arrive at an objective assessment of their own and the enemy's
resources and strengths, as the key to developing the proper strategy that will yield the
desired political objective. Indeed, military professionals may feel that only an academic
could suggest that forming a correct strategy involves an epistemological conundrum.
Military planners are neither conscious of nor feel the need to apply a synthetic analyti-
cal framework to the study of the problems they confront. To the contrary: Their job is
to be as hard-headed and free of preconceptions as possible, to perceive themselves and
the enemy truly and to plan on the basis of facts. What need have they for strategic
culture? Why assume that they fall into one?

The Limitations of Strategic Empiricism

A closer look at the process of "objective" strategic analysis reveals that it cannot be so
straightforward. Perceiving the "facts" about an adversary really means perceiving a
few salient facts about him from among the myriad of facts, of greater or lesser rele-
vance, that are there to learn. Choosing the relevant facts requires some kind of frame of
reference through which one can decide what is important and what is not. How does
one form such a frame of reference—specifically, a frame of reference that will guide
one in the search for a strategy that is useful from the point of view of policy?
It is instructive to recall at this point Clausewitz's nearest attempt at finding a
solution to this problem. In a short passage entitled "Ends and Means in Strategy,"
Clausewitz identifies the ends, or object, of strategy, as "those which will lead directly
to peace"14—no more. Presumably Clausewitz means peace on one's own terms, not the
enemy's. This passage gives us so little to go on as to make us suspect that Clausewitz in
fact had no wisdom to convey concerning the way to choose a strategic objective. But in
a subsequent passage, entitled "Strategy Derives the Means and Ends to be Examined
Exclusively From Experience," Clausewitz explains his reticence: "If a scientific exam-
ination were meant to produce [the proper objectives of strategy], it would become
involved in all those difficulties which logical necessity has excluded from the conduct
and the theory of war," i.e., it could not provide direct guidance concerning the objec-
tive to choose in any specific situation any more than strategic theory can provide
guidance for any specific engagement, and for the same kind of reason: the enemy's
political valuation of the objective one has chosen, and the lengths to which he is willing
to go to defend it, are always within his province, not ours.
Clausewitz continues: "We therefore turn to experience and study the sequence of
 8 Y. Klein

events related in military history. The result will, of course, be a limited theory, based
only upon the facts recorded by military historians"15 From whom, no doubt, one can
learn much. But the reason for Clausewitz' characterization of such theory as "limited"
is that military historians observe selectively, and what they write is passed through the
prism of what they consider important and relevant. Their readers, in turn, pass their
writing through prisms of their own devising.
What, then, guides the strategic planner in making his decisions? How, in an envi-
ronment of uncertainty and insufficient information, does he decide what is important,
i.e., relevant to his mission? Some aspects of the problem may yield to careful analysis;
some only to retrospection. Some must of necessity remain imponderable. Genius, per-
haps, is the only way to describe the facility for making such choices correctly, and even
genius can be mistaken. Moreover, genius can be found in a position to make such
choices only rarely. And in any case, what would genius rely upon in choosing? Only
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upon an elevated understanding and interpretation of personal and historical experience,

subjective assessment (though unquestionably based upon as many hard facts as were
available) of the enemy's mind and our capabilities. Even the antithesis of genius, a
large military establishment, can do no other.
It is false, therefore, to imagine that strategic shortcomings can be overcome simply
by studying the enemy with sufficient intensity, if study of his forces, structure, actions,
etc. is all that is meant. Such study can yield only limited theory, a theory based on the
things that seem important to the observer, not necessarily to the subject of his observa-
tions. However congruent may be the methods of thought and analysis of military pro-
fessionals in different national military establishments, at some point the are likely to
diverge. Given the variability of human thinking and perception, anything else is un-
likely. That point of divergence is the point at which fate may begin to prepare for one
side or the other the kind of ugly surprise that lies at the bottom of great military
disasters.16
Strategic and operational choice derived simultaneously from two sources, at once
complementary and contradictory. On the one hand lie "objective" circumstances, the
actual tools of war available to the military planner, the political environment, and above
all the enemy, his capabilities, and his intentions, as far as they can be ascertained. On
the other hand is strategic culture, an indispensable but subjective guide to the planner's
decisions, guiding his interpretation of the facts, lending potency to his intuition, but at
the same time the product of ambiguous sources, potentially a source of prejudice and
self-deception.

Strategic Culture and the Study of Strategy

For the professional strategist, the study of history in general is indispensable in disci-
plining thought and gaining much-needed vicarious experience. But empiricism, whether
in the study of history or of a contemporary adversary, can never be more than an
uncertain guide to the solution of any particular strategic problem. The problem in
choosing correct strategy does not lie so much in getting answers to the questions one
has about one's adversary, though that can involve difficulties enough. The problem is to
ask the right questions. The best way to choose those questions is to get them from the
enemy himself; to study not only what he does but the concerns to which, in his own
mind, his actions are responses.
When in military literature authors analyze strategies, their own or another nation's,
they often begin by listing the circumstantial factors, such as geopolitics, economics,