Author : Colin Gray
Release : 2011-05-01
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Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 035/5 ( reviews)
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Book Synopsis Schools for Strategy by : Colin Gray
Download or read book Schools for Strategy written by Colin Gray. This book was released on 2011-05-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because strategic performance must involve the ability to decide, to command, and to lead, as well as the capacity to understand, there are practical limits to what is feasible and useful by way of formal education in strategy. The soldier who best comprehends what Sun-tzu, Clausewitz, and Thucydides intended to say, is not necessarily the soldier best fitted to strategic high command. It is important to distinguish between intellect and character/personality. The superior strategist is ever uniquely a product of nature/biology, personality/psychology, and experience/opportunity. Nonetheless, formal education has its place. Strategic genius is rare, strategic talent is more common, though still unusual. The latter can be improved by formal education, the former most probably cannot. However, there is merit in the educational aspiration to help educate instinct for a better performance. It is fortunate that genius is not strictly required in our strategists since education is apt to be unable to reach it. What we do require is competence based on a talent that can be educated. There is no denying that because strategy is a pragmatic creative activity, the strategist-well-educated or not in a formal sense- ideally has to know what to do, how to do it, and, last but not least, he/she needs to be able to do it. Obviously, biology and psychology shaped by the opportunities granted by experience loom large here. Professors of Strategy cannot so teach their military students that they are truly fit for purpose as strategists-in-action. But professors can help educate the strategic judgment of those soldiers and civilians who are educable. Because it is a practical real-world endeavor, strategy and its strategists do not have to secure a grade of excellence, though that certainly is right as the ambition. By its very nature, our strategy has to be good enough to compete with the enemy's strategy, in the whole strategic context. By that, I mean that even if strategy is relatively uninspired, so complex is competition and war that fungibility may save us. Our generals, or troops, or equipment, or tactics might be less than stellar, but somewhere amidst the myriad facets of statecraft, war, and warfare, we might be able to locate and exploit compensating advantages. Although the classroom (of several kinds) cannot put in what God and nature omitted, it does not follow that strategy cannot be taught to good effect. Any strategically educable person should have their capacity for sound and perhaps superior strategic judgment improved by intense exposure to the small canon of classic texts on general strategic theory. Even though personal experience is the finest teacher, there should be no denying the value in consideration of the wisdom distilled from lifelong learning by the greatest strategic minds of all time. If one is unable to profit as a strategist from careful study of Sun-tzu, Thucydides, Clausewitz, and Edward N. Luttwak, then one should not aspire to the strategic baton-unless one truly is a genius, of course.
