Strategy vs. Tactics

Today at lunch, I was talking with a friend. She raised a question about some of the things that go into the drafting of a business plan, and I was describing some of the elements of a well-written business plan. Somehow, the issue of the difference between strategy and tactics came up, and I asked her if she knew the difference between strategy and tactics. She did, which surprised me a little bit. However, it got me thinking about those differences and how they play into the effectiveness of a battlefield commander.

Strategy is the “game plan”, if you will. It’s the grand scheme that sets out the final goal of a particular campaign or movement. Tactics, on the other hand, are the means by which the strategy is implemented. Here’s an analogy from my professional life. Coming up with a means of presenting a case to a jury is the strategy. Identifying the witnesses, choosing the exhibits, and coming up with the list of questions to ask that witness are the tactics by which that strategy is implemented. It is possible to be a great strategist and a lousy tactician. It’s also possible to be an excellent tactician but not a good strategist. Those differences become really critical the higher the rank that an officer possesses.

Here’s what I mean by that. An officer may be truly great at designing a grand strategy, but be really bad at making tactical decisions on the battlefield. Here’s a great example of an officer who was a great strategist but who was never known as being much of a tactician–William T. Sherman. Sherman, for instance, designed and implemented the strategy for taking the war to civilians and sapping their will to continue the war. At the same time, Sherman was never considered to be much of a battlefield tactician. In fact, he was generally known as being somewhat cautious and tentative on the battlefield.

William S. Rosecrans is another example of a brilliant strategist who was not great on the battlefield. Rosecrans designed one of the most brilliant campaigns in modern military history in the Tullahoma Campaign, when he, through a series of flanking maneuvers, pushed Braxton Bragg’s army all the way across the State of Tennessee and back to Chattanooga with almost no bloodshed. It covered nearly the entire state and was accomplished without a major battle being fought. However, as plainly demonstrated at Chickamauga, Rosecrans was no battlefield genius. In fact, his battlefield performance often left a LOT to be desired, and his fleeing from the field at Chickamauga and running all the way back to Chattanooga pretty much put the nail in the coffin of Rosecrans’ career as a battlefield commander.

The converse is also true. A guy like John Bell Hood was a truly great tactician on the battlefield at the divisional level, but once he was promoted to corps command and then to army command, he demonstrated no gift for much of anything other than attacking straight ahead. “All of the lion and none of the fox,” Robert E. Lee reportedly said when he learned that Hood had been given command of the Army of Tennessee, and Lee was absolutely correct. In a series of head-long attacks that took little or no account of terrain, strategy, or anything else, Hood pretty much sacrificed an entire army between Atlanta and Nashville.

The truly great captain is the one who has mastered both strategy AND tactics. Those generals are few and far between for what ought to be obvious reasons. The American Civil War produced two such men–Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. Grant demonstrated his tactical brilliance again and again, but in no instance no more so than at Vicksburg. Lee’s remarkable string of battlefield victories is proof positive of his tactical genius, and he had a real gift for strategy–look at how he drove McClellan’s much larger army back from the outskirts of Richmond in the summer of 1862.

The distinction between strategy and tactics is an easy one to confuse, but it’s important never to lose sight of that difference. It’s the difference between a truly great commander and a mediocre one.