By Douglas Moran
Winning the battle but losing the war? Thinking strategically and recent eventsUploaded: Aug 18, 2017
In the time and place I grew up, we received repeated lessons about not sacrificing the ultimate victory by insisting
By Douglas Moran
Winning the battle but losing the war? Thinking strategically and recent eventsUploaded: Aug 18, 2017
In the time and place I grew up, we received repeated lessons about not sacrificing the ultimate victory by insisting on winning all the small battles. Sometimes it was in explicit advice from adults and older children, sometimes in stories, and it was constantly in the games we played. It started early in simple board games such as Checkers. Similarly in many sports, the design of the game forces you to constantly tradeoff small defeats in order to better position yourself to win the game. For example, in basketball, there are certain occasions where it is a good tradeoff to use a foul to stop the opponent from scoring, but because you have only a limited number of fouls to give, this is only for special situation.
As I got older, I encountered more stories used to reinforce this: They went from parables and discussion of immediate events to historical accounts. There was the Pyrrhic Victory and other stories where the tactical winner was the strategic loser (example, the Battle of Jutland in WW1). And other stories illustrating "He who defends everything defends nothing" (Frederick the Great) and stories whose lessons were first set down in The Art of War by Sun Tzu. For example, you could use maneuver and/or deception to win a battle with little or no fighting. A head-on battle was to be avoided when possible because there were too many uncertainties and the costs were high.(foot#1)
Intertwined with this was the teaching of discipline, including mental discipline and disciplined decision-making. Of course, different people acquired these skills to different levels, with the military being seen as a last-chance remedial course for boys who flunked. Aside: Some variations of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment (delayed gratification) suggest that self-discipline is partly training.
The advanced lessons were first to understand when, why and how an opponent would lose discipline and then to consider how you might provoke or draw him into doing such. Second was to be alert to him trying to draw you into self-defeating actions.(foot#2) Although it is easy to say that you need to put yourself "in the opponent's shoes", it is also easy to forget to do this in the heat of the moment. The more difficult lesson is recognizing that putting yourself in his shoes is only the first step--it is not enough to look at the on-the-ground situation from his perspective because you are doing that with your biases, priorities, culture... and not his. History is littered with battles and wars lost because a seasoned commander could not take this next step.
Related lessons were "Just because you have the (legal) right to do something, doesn't make it the smart thing to do", or ethical... And the ever popular Drivers Ed lesson "Being dead right doesn't make you any less dead."
----"The Resistance" to Trump----
I find the Resistance moveme