ABSTRACT

Strategy is what provides the link between war and policy; it is about making war an instrument to achieve political goals. Some hold a wider interpretation of strategy that encompasses policy instruments other than the military. But once we do that, what we are really talking about is not strategy per se but grand strategy. The role of grand strategy, argued Sir Basil Liddell Hart, ‘is to coordinate and direct all of the resources of a nation, or band of nations, toward the attainment of the political objective of the war’.1 Others go still broader, arguing grand strategy is a state’s theory about how it can best ‘cause’ security for itself, and that there may be military, political and/or economic strategies within an overarching grand strategy.2 There is a great deal of merit to this broadest perspective in that it can help explain the overall foreign and security policy actions of a state. It is a valuable big-picture perspective. But it is not the focus

of this work. Rather, this book takes as its starting point the view that strategy is ‘the use of armed force to achieve the military objectives and, by extension, the political purpose of the war’.3