M.L.R. Smith

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those derived from personal academic reflection. They do not represent or reflect any views or positions, either formal or informal, of any branch of the Commonwealth of Australia.

Strategy is often understood as the intellectual process through which political purposes are related to the means available for their achievement, usually under conditions of uncertainty and opposition.[1] It is this understanding that provides the starting point for most strategic thought.[2]

Conceiving strategy in these terms, however, invites an earlier question. Before political ends can be related to available means, before courses of action can be compared or resources committed, a situation must first be recognised as requiring strategic judgement. Such recognition is easily overlooked because it appears self-evident. Yet it underlies every strategic consideration that follows.

Rather than asking how strategic judgement should respond once a strategic problem has been identified, this study goes back one step and asks what conditions of political life make strategic judgement necessary in the first place. Only then does it become possible to understand what distinguishes it from other forms of practical reasoning.[3]

The argument advanced here is theoretical rather than prescriptive. It does not propose a new method of strategic practice, nor does it seek to replace the accumulated insights of the strategic tradition or offer practical guidance for future conduct. Its purpose is more modest: to clarify the conditions that make strategic judgement necessary in the first place.

That clarification is nevertheless important. The way strategic problems are understood influences the kinds of questions that are asked of them and the range of responses that appear intelligible. By locating the origins of strategy in the contradictory character of political life, this study offers a more lucid way of reasoning about strategic problems before particular solutions or courses of action are considered.

This enquiry is necessarily conceptual, though it will seek to illustrate its claims through historical examples and allusions. It begins by clarifying the concepts from which strategic practice originates before turning to their historical expression. Deterrence, alliances and insurgency are examined as recurring expressions of the political relationships that give rise to the necessity for strategic judgement.

Although related themes have appeared throughout the strategic literature, from Clausewitz’s reflections on friction and reciprocal action to Edward Luttwak’s account of the paradoxical logic of strategy, those works have been primarily concerned with the dynamics of strategic interaction itself. The present study instead begins with a prior question. It seeks to identify the conditions of political life from which strategic interaction itself emerges.

What is a Problem?

If strategic judgement begins with the recognition of a problem, the first question is what a problem actually is. The language of strategy is saturated with references to problems. Governments confront strategic problems. Military organisations distinguish between strategic, operational and tactical problems. Policymakers seek solutions to security problems, alliance problems and problems of deterrence.[4] The word itself appears so familiar that it rarely invites closer scrutiny.

Yet familiarity should not be mistaken for precision or clarity. To describe something as a problem is already to believe something about the kind of reaction it may require.[5] Scarcity may be described as a problem. Uncertainty may be described as a problem. Violence, instability and political disagreement are all routinely characterised in the same way. The same word is therefore applied to circumstances that differ profoundly in the adjudications they require.

Difficulty alone does not make something a problem. Problems emerge where circumstances require deliberation because not every purpose can be realised simultaneously. It is therefore the necessity of judgement in choosing how to deal with a particular difficulty, as opposed to the presence of adversity per se, that gives the concept of a problem its distinctive meaning for strategy.

Such an observation may appear elementary, yet its implications are far-reaching. If problems are distinguished by the judgements they require, the next question is what gives political problems their particular character, and why some of those problems assume a specifically strategic form.

The Character of Political Problems

Political problems differ from technical problems because they arise from a different set of human connections. Technical problems may be highly complex, yet complexity alone does not make them political. The construction of a bridge may present formidable engineering challenges. Curing a disease may require extraordinary scientific ingenuity. Such problems demand expertise, but they do not ordinarily require the reconciliation of competing collective interests and purposes that gives human endeavour its political character.[6]

Political life differs from technical questions because it consists of individuals and organised groups pursuing purposes that only partially, if ever, coincide. Cooperation is therefore always accompanied by tension because agreement is never, or at least very rarely, complete.[7] Agreements remain contingent because interests evolve, priorities shift and circumstances change. Political exertion, and perhaps human interrelationships more generally, is consequently characterised not by the existence of isolated disagreements or discrete challenges as in fields of science or engineering, but by the persistent generation of new contradictions.

The shifting alignments of European diplomacy before 1914 illustrate the point: alliances did not remove political contradiction so much as rearrange competing interests and tensions that ultimately set the scene for the subsequent conflagration. The outcome of the First World War sowed the seeds for the Second, which in turn laid the foundation for the period of the Cold War.[8] The pattern recurs throughout the history of international politics.[9] Political settlements therefore remain transient rather than permanent. Every settlement establishes a new accommodation from which further disagreements emerge. Political order is not the elimination of contradiction but its temporary alleviation.

Political problems thus possess a distinctive quality. Every settlement becomes part of the circumstances from which subsequent problems arise, making political life less a process of resolution than of continuing accommodation.[10] The effort of politics therefore becomes a perpetual practice of situational management whose purposes, interests and circumstances remain in constant motion. The question, then, is what distinguishes those situations under which political judgement assumes a specifically strategic character.

The Orientation of Strategic Judgement

If political problems surface from the ever-shifting dynamics of collective human experience, strategic judgement cannot consist merely in the application of fixed principles. The social circumstances which politics reflects are themselves altered by strategic action, ensuring that each judgement contributes to the conditions within which subsequent deliberations must be made. Strategy therefore cannot be understood as the application of predetermined solutions to recurring problems. Rather, it consists in the exercise of judgement within webs of association whose political meaning remains contingent.

Here, then, we can discern clearly how strategic acumen differs fundamentally from technical expertise. Technical expertise depends upon stable relations between cause and effect. By contrast, strategic expertise requires the interpretation of political circumstances whose future development cannot be known in advance. The strategic problem lies in understanding the context within which available means acquire their political significance.

Statesmen from Metternich to Castlereagh to Kissinger recognised that successful strategic conduct depended less upon solving social contradictions than their prudent management.[11] Strategy requires the capacity to reconcile competing purposes while recognising that every judgement becomes part of the political circumstances confronting those that follow. The exercise of strategic judgement is therefore inherently provisional because the contradictions from which strategic problems arise admit no final settlement.

Clausewitz and Strategic Judgement

One of Carl von Clausewitz’s crucial insights was to recognise that strategy cannot be reduced to the application of formal rules because war unfolds within this evolving social milieu.[12] Seen in this light, his conception of friction, chance and uncertainty reflects the deeper appreciation that strategic judgement must respond to circumstances whose course cannot be foreseen.[13]

It is from these observations that Clausewitz’s rejection of strategy as the mechanical application of universal principles can be readily appreciated, in contrast to the approach associated with contemporaries such as Antoine Henri Jomini. Strategic judgement must therefore be exercised because every decision, whether large or small, contributes to the environment within which subsequent decisions are made. No solution, whether victory in a single battle or success in war itself, can remain stable because every strategic success creates new dynamics upon which it depends.[14]

Clausewitz’s insight has since been developed in different ways by later strategic theorists. Edward Luttwak, for example, argues that strategy operates according to a distinctive ‘paradoxical logic’, in which actions frequently produce outcomes opposite to those originally intended. Strategic success generates new vulnerabilities; strength invites countervailing responses and attempts to impose order often create fresh instability. Luttwak’s account, like Clausewitz’s, rejects linear or technical conceptions of strategy in favour of an understanding rooted in interaction, adaptation and political contingency.[15]

The present argument shares this rejection of linear strategic reasoning but asks a prior question. Rather than examining the paradoxical character of strategic outcomes themselves, it seeks to explain why such paradoxes arise in the first place. The answer advanced here is that strategy unfolds within a political world whose contradictory character ensures that every successful judgement simultaneously transforms the circumstances within which subsequent judgements must be exercised.

Clausewitz’s analysis points towards a more fundamental conclusion. Human societies are characterised by contradictions that no settlement can ultimately resolve. It is this condition that makes strategic judgement indispensable, since no rule can determine the appropriate course of action. Wherever competing political purposes interact under conditions of persistent contradiction, judgement is required. War represents the most intense manifestation of this wider condition, as he discerned in his acknowledgement that ‘the result in war is never final’.[16]

If no result is ever final, strategy cannot expect to seek the closure of political problems as it is a mode of reasoning directed towards the accommodation of contradiction rather than its elimination. Strategy, in that sense, is the classic exemplar of the infinite game.[17]

The Problem of Strategic Success

If strategic reasoning exists to manage political contradiction, the question becomes how its success should be judged. Conventional discussions of strategy generally assume that success consists in the attainment of preset objectives. Actions are regarded as successful where intended purposes are realised, and unsuccessful where they are not. That understanding is straightforward enough but becomes increasingly difficult to sustain once politics is recognised as a process rather than a sequence of discrete events.

Political purposes are themselves subject to revision. Objectives that appear attainable at one moment may lose their significance at another, while new contradictions emerge even where earlier ones have been successfully accommodated. Strategic success therefore cannot consist simply in the attainment of particular objectives, because the purposes those objectives are intended to serve are themselves subject to revision.

All this may seem highly theoretical, or even slightly tautologous. Yet this is not merely a theoretical proposition. It is the historical experience from which modern strategic thought itself materialises. Clausewitz’s reflections on the Napoleonic Wars were shaped by precisely this phenomenon.[18] Napoleon’s victories ultimately produced the hostile coalition that brought about his downfall, demonstrating that military success generated political circumstances requiring further strategic management.[19]

Likewise, although the United States prevailed in nearly every major force-on-force engagement in Vietnam, military success proved insufficient to secure its political objectives.[20] More recently, Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan achieved repeated battlefield successes without producing durable settlements.[21] In each case, military success remade the social environment without resolving the contradictions that gave rise to conflict in the first place.[22]

From Clausewitz onwards, the relationship between military success and political uncertainty has been repeatedly recognised, yet it is equally repeatedly rediscovered. That continuous rediscovery should be enough to give scholars of strategy pause for thought, but it rarely does.

Each generation appears tempted to believe that decisive military success will finally resolve political contradictions rather than merely create new political circumstances requiring further judgement. The persistence of this expectation is itself revealing. It reflects, seemingly, a recurring human desire to search for certainty and closure in a domain where certainty is inherently elusive, together with a preference for determinate solutions over the complex, and contingent, human sphere.

In summary, then, effective strategy should concern the exercise of judgement rather than the pursuit of definitive solutions. Success consists not in escaping contradiction but in responding to it as competing purposes confront new circumstances. Strategy remains an infinite game because no political settlement can exhaust the contradictions from which strategic problems arise.

The Practice of Strategic Judgement

If strategic success depends upon sound judgement, it becomes necessary to ask what this involves. The concept of ‘judgement’ in this context can be held to denote the capacity to determine how competing purposes may best be reconciled in particular circumstances. It is less a matter of applying doctrine than of reasoning practically about contingent situations, where every decision becomes part of the context within which subsequent decisions must be taken. Strategy is therefore inherently recursive: each attempt to resolve one problem creates the conditions in which the next must be addressed.

Accordingly, strategic judgement requires the capacity to distinguish between contradictions that can be accommodated, those that can only be managed, and those that, for the time being, cannot be reconciled. It relies on recognising which possibilities remain open, which should be preserved, and which courses of action unnecessarily foreclose future political choices. Strategy thus demands prudence rather than certainty, discrimination rather than mechanical consistency, and continual reassessment rather than adherence to established plans.

President Abraham Lincoln’s conduct of the American Civil War illustrates the practical operation of strategic judgement. Throughout the conflict, the relationship between military operations, constitutional authority and political purpose demanded successive adjustments in strategic direction while preserving the overarching objective of restoring the Union.[23]

The Emancipation Proclamation exemplified this process. Introduced as a wartime measure under the President’s constitutional war powers, it simultaneously transformed the political character of the U.S. Civil War, strengthened the Union’s diplomatic position by making European recognition of the Confederacy politically more difficult, and altered Confederate strategic calculations. Strategic success came to depend less upon adherence to an original plan than upon the exercise of political judgement as each major decision created new conditions requiring further strategic adaptation.[24] The war itself would continue, but the purposes and strategic opportunities through which it was prosecuted did not remain the same.

Pulling these threads together, it can be asserted that strategic judgement is the disciplined exercise of prudential political reasoning directed towards the accommodation of contradiction in the pursuit of political purposes. Its task is neither to eliminate contradiction nor to discover permanent solutions, but to determine how competing political purposes may best be reconciled in practice.

The explanatory value of this conception ultimately rests on its power to illuminate strategic practice across diverse contexts. The following sections examine some common themes across the spectrum of strategy – deterrence, alliances and insurgency – to consider whether viewing each through the lens of strategic judgement reveals more clearly their underlying strategic logic.

Demonstration I – Deterrence

Deterrence usually refers to the prevention or dissuasion of an opponent from taking a particular course of action through the ultimate threat of force.[25] While this captures its immediate purpose, it can also encourage deterrence to be viewed principally as a stable correlation between threat and compliance.[26]

Under the conception of strategy advanced here, deterrence should be more accurately conceived as the exercise of strategic judgement directed towards conditioning the judgements of others. Its purpose extends beyond preventing conflict to influencing adversarial behaviour through the management of perceived costs, risks and opportunities. Its effectiveness therefore depends upon the quality of judgement brought to bear upon particular circumstances rather than upon assuming that deterrence, once established, can sustain itself.[27]

Deterrence illustrates this broader conception of strategic deliberation. Its successful practice rests upon the prudent interpretation of political purpose, strategic risk and adversarial intent. It seeks to render political contradiction manageable by sustaining enduring strategic rivalry without allowing that rivalry to culminate in war. In this respect, deterrence is less a stable strategic condition than a political accomplishment.

Demonstration II – Alliances

Alliances are institutional arrangements through which states pursue common security interests.[28] This understanding, however, can encourage alliances to be seen as enduring structures of security cooperation rather than as political associations requiring interpretation, reinterpretation and adjustment.

Through the lens of strategic judgement alliances are better appreciated as instruments through which governments pursue common purposes while accommodating divergent interests. Shared interests may bring governments together, yet those interests remain open to political reinterpretation. Alliances survive because governments regard cooperation as preferable to available alternatives despite the persistence of underlying political contradictions.[29]

The repeated realignments of European coalitions during the Napoleonic Wars or within NATO since 1949 remind us that those alliance systems that persist over time do so because governments judge them politically expedient rather than because interests are permanently shared. Changes in leadership, domestic politics, external threats and shifts in the distribution of power always alter the context within which alliances are maintained. Strategic judgement therefore remains essential because policymakers are repeatedly required to determine whether alliance cooperation still serves their long-term goals.

Alliances illustrate the wider argument in this article. Their management depends upon judgement rather than institutional permanence, because cooperation must continually be reassessed in light of ever-changing circumstances.

Demonstration III – Insurgency

At first sight, insurgency might appear a less obvious illustration of strategic judgement than deterrence or alliances, since it is commonly treated as a form of warfare rather than as a political relationship. Yet it is precisely for this reason that insurgency provides an instructive example. It demonstrates that even forms of conflict conventionally understood in military terms derive their strategic significance from political judgement.

The notion of insurgency is often cast as a form of warfare through which organised groups employ military force to challenge established political authority.[30] Framed in these terms, insurgency can readily be viewed principally as a military contest rather than as a political struggle. Military action acquires strategic significance through its political effects, with tactical success inseparable from the deliberations through which its consequences are interpreted. Each operation contributes to the circumstances informing subsequent strategic decisions.[31] The value of insurgency as an illustration lies precisely in demonstrating that even forms of conflict commonly treated as military problems derive their strategic significance from political judgement

Across widely differing examples of insurgency, military operations alter the political relationships upon which the conflict itself depended, demonstrating that strategic success can never be understood in purely military terms.[32] Changes in governance, public support, external assistance and the legitimacy of political authority require governments and insurgents alike to reassess the political consequences of military action.[33] The eventual strategic success of either an insurgent or counter-insurgent force therefore depends not solely upon military performance, but upon recognising how each operation reconfigures the political setting in which subsequent decisions should be taken.

The condition of insurgency illustrates the wider conception of strategy proposed in this article. Military action derives its strategic value from the political effects it produces rather than from tactical success alone. Strategic judgement therefore remains indispensable because military success cannot eliminate the competing purposes that sustain political conflict.

Conclusion

This article has articulated the proposition that strategy constitutes a distinctive form of political judgement arising from the contradictory character of political life. It has sought to make explicit a conception of strategic thought that has often remained implicit within the strategic tradition. Strategic problems emerge because collective political life generates contradictions that cannot be permanently resolved. The need for strategic judgement therefore reflects the enduring character of politics itself.

Strategy is consequently less a search for definitive solutions than the disciplined exercise of practical reasoning directed towards the accommodation of contradiction. Every political judgement becomes part of the circumstances within which subsequent judgements are made. The work of strategy therefore lies in interpreting political relationships, weighing competing purposes and determining what accommodations remain possible.

The discussions of deterrence, alliances and insurgency illustrate the broader applicability of this conception across diverse strategic contexts. Although these domains differ markedly in their purposes, methods and historical circumstances, each demonstrates that strategic success depends upon continual reassessment rather than the application of fixed solutions. Taken together, strategy is an ongoing practice of political judgement.

Plainly, the foregoing argument in no sense seeks to redefine the practice of strategic theorising so much as to clarify its underlying logic. The central implication of this argument is that strategy should be conceived as a form of practical wisdom through which political contradiction is accommodated. It follows that strategy cannot culminate in definitive solutions, because political contradiction remains an enduring condition, perhaps the only truly permanent condition, of political life.

References

[1] M.L.R. Smith and Stone, John, ‘Explaining Strategic Theory’, Infinity Journal, Vol. 1, No. 4 (2011), pp. 27-30.
[2] Michael Howard, The Causes of War (London: Counterpoint, 1983), p. 86.
[3] Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
[4] Andrew Carr, ‘Strategy as Problem Solving’, Parameters, Vol. 54, No. 1 (2024), pp. 123-137.
[5] Jules J.S. Gaspard and M.L.R. Smith, ‘The Problem with Strategy as Problem-Solving’, Military Strategy Magazine, Vol. 10, No. 1, (2025), pp. 33-40.
[6] For the classic distinction between technical knowledge and practical conduct, see Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, pp. 15-37.
[7] Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) (originally published in 1962), pp. 19-54.
[8] A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954); Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2012).
[9] See for example, A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961); Norman Stone, World War Two: A Short History (New York: Basic Books, 2013).
[10] Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, pp. 15-37.
[11] See Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Paul Bew, Castlereagh: A Life (London: Quercus, 2011); Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
[12] Carl von Clausewitz, On War (trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 87-89.
[13] M.L.R. Smith, ‘The Occam’s Razor of Strategic Theory: The Relevance of Clausewitz for Political Conduct’, Military Strategy Magazine, Special Edition, ‘The Continuing Relevance of Clausewitz’ (December 2020), pp. 28-32.
[14] M.L.R. Smith, ‘Quantum Strategy: The Interior World of War’, Infinity Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, (2012), pp. 10-13.
[15] Edward Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 3-86.
[16] Clausewitz, On War, p. 80.
[17] Simon Sinek, The Infinite Game (New York: Random House, 2019).
[18] Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 382-395.
[19] See Charles J. Esdaile, The Wars of Napoleon (London: Longmans, 1995).
[20] See Harry G. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1982); Andrew F. Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,1986).
[21] See for example Carter Malkasian, The American War in Afghanistan: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).
[22] For a discussion of this point see Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2005).
[23] James M. McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 170-201.
[24] James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), pp. 224-255.
[25] Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 35-91.
[26] See Stephen Cimbala, ‘Forever MAD: Essence and Attributes’, Armed Forces and Society, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1985), pp. 95-107; Lawrence Freedman, ‘Framing Strategic Deterrence’, The RUSI Journal, Vol. 154, No. 5 (2009), pp. 16–23.
[27] For a discussion see Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).
[28] Stephan Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 1-16.
[29] Glenn H. Snyder, Alliance Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 165-200.
[30] David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York: Praeger, 1964), pp. 1-10.
[31] M.L.R. Smith and David Martin Jones, The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency: Strategic Problems, Puzzles, and Paradoxes (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
[32] See for example, Karl Hack, The Malayan Emergency: Revolution and Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 191-339.
[33] See Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).