On Strategy
Believe me, it's not what it appears
Like if you want using the keys below; only I can see who you are.
Walcott, Iowa, and Wall, South Dakota may seem unlikely places to discuss strategy, examining these institutions, how they got there and how they survive, provides an excellent introduction to strategic development.
For those who have never been to Walcott, Iowa, it is the home of the world's largest truck stop—all the signs say so. To earn this distinction, the ne plus ultra of road trip rest and fuel emporiums rises from the Iowa prairie along Interstate 80. It began in 1964 as a simple gas station and lunch counter, according to the website, and has by this writing grown to a sprawling complex that offers everything from a museum to a pet wash stand, four eateries, a laundromat, a chapel, truck and car repair services, and even a chiropractor besides a regular doctor and the fuel found at any such, smaller establishment. It’s also next to several restaurants, motels, repair shops and other facilities for the weary traveler.
You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.
Leon Trotsky
Wall Drug started even earlier, in 1931, offering free ice water to thirsty travelers in the Badland's summer heat. When I saw it, over fifty other storefronts had joined the Wall Drug store, selling everything from food to footgear, books to jewelry, tourist souvenirs (including ubiquitous bumper stickers), and fuel. How these two mid-America roadside behemoths got where they are, how they got to be bigger than their host communities, is, of course, part marketing, but also, the strategy of giving the customers not just what they want, but what they don’t expect where they get it.
Amateurs think strategy and professionals think logistics
Omar Bradley
Alfred T. Mahan's series of Naval War College lectures, published as The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 (1890) were inconsequential compared to the 110-page introduction that formalized strategic thought and theory for the first time. Though there had been tactical and philosophical books since time out of mind, Mahan laid out how national leaders should plan to survive. Using Britain as a model, he outlined a fleets-make-bases-make-ports-make-trade-makes-money-makes-fleets formula that, although unacknowledged, had been in use ever since people made wood swim and carry loads.
This model of strategy served not only military gain but also the advancement and securing of economic power essential for national survival.
To emphasize this point, Mahan wrote his introduction out of economic necessity because publishers had rejected his original manuscript, so he wrote the famous introduction to sell it. That this formalization of what every major state since the beginning of recorded history had practiced should come from a naval officer from the greatest commercial power of its age was almost anticlimactic. Of all human enterprises until Mahan’s time, ships and the sea were simultaneously the most lucrative and the most expensive to build and maintain. The United States, of all the world's commercial powers, took advantage of their many international coasts and harbors to build an overseas trading empire that dwarfed its competitors and its partners in the 20th Century.
Scratch any historian, politician, wargamer, monarch, or businessperson and you'll likely get a different definition for "strategy" from each.
Each will be correct—as far as their specialized viewpoint is concerned. Politicians need to keep getting elected, so their concern is for their electorate, which often means jobs. Monarchs have some of the same concerns-though usually for their own fortunes (and necks, sometimes) and for those of their supporters. Business always looks for markets, for resources, for labor, but most often for political and economic stability. Wargamers, working in a unique environment altogether from the rest, seek to succeed in whatever game they are playing at the moment, but only within the confines of the game. For the historian, "strategy" is the sum of what companies, social groups, leaders, empires and states plan to do, and what they actually execute to achieve their goals. As such, "strategy" is the overall idea that monarchs, tradesmen, politicians or anyone else start out with—or what they develop over years or centuries—to either achieve a defined goal, to ensure their commonweal, or to just survive.
Air power speaks a strategic language so new that translation into the hackneyed idiom of the past is impossible.
Alexander de Seversky
Strategy has been an evolution, a development of policy-making that stretches back millennia, and was sometimes driven by accident, sometimes by design. Like air power extended the reach of military forces, the automobile made both Walcott and Wall possible. But too there’s geography, and the tremendous role played by simply stopping or being in the right place at the right time, like both Walcott and Wall. Human communities grow where there are resources and conditions that support them. Even if commercial enterprises like Walcott’s I-80 truck stop and Wall Drug make their own conditions, that's not always possible. Drive along an interstate highway in the US on either side of Wall or of Walcott, and that becomes apparent. Successful stops are close to on and off ramps for easy access. But almost as many tall road signs stand next to empty concrete slabs as stand next to thriving businesses. Those that are further down the frontage roads or farther from the ramps rarely survive more than a few years without a nearby community unless they offer something else that weary travelers needed or, like Wall Drug did in the beginning, gave away ice water in summer. Wall Drug didn’t have a competitor for miles when they started giving away ice water, but since then it has placed signs as far away as Copenhagen, Denmark, and bumper stickers on six continents. Providing what the traveler needs is a strategic decision; providing what royal subjects or constituents need is, too.
America's highways and byways show the results of someone’s strategic decisions.
In some places along the highway are the artifacts of failed truck stops, motels and even whole towns that may have thrived once, but no longer. Many of the abandoned gas stations along the highway lost business when the range of vehicles increased, others because the price of fuel made their continued operation unprofitable, and still others because the owners retired or died and nobody else wanted to run it. But these relics of bygone days were often the casualties of strategic changes made by their competitors and the changing tastes of consumers that they failed to meet. Often as not, they are the losers in a strategic game they lost, or perhaps, as Trotsky suggests, that they didn't even consciously play.
Nations and empires come and go like truck stops and drugstores on the interstate.
Social groups and countries, like the truck stops and the drugstores that fail while others succeed, are all subject to someone’s strategy. The trick for everyone is being able to take advantage of successful strategies or be able to withstand bad strategic decisions.
Strategy in one sentence.
If luck is the sum of opportunity and preparation, you are strategic when you are preparing for your next opportunity.
Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries
David Beer, on Roads to the Great War, says:
We learn much in Steele's Battalion about the overall American experience in France during the final year of the war. We meet notable figures such as George Marshall and General Pershing, and we encounter some interesting British and American Army characters. Inevitably, since Steele always serves in machine gun units and by the end of the war is commanding a machine gun battalion, we get in-depth descriptions of the workings of these weapons and their use.
And Finally...
On 9 August:
1678: Jonas Bronck, a Swedish-born settler, bought some 500 acres of land on the east side of the Harlem River from native Americans…or not; sources differ on just about everything about the settlement and even Bronck himself. Regardless of where he was from or what he did on this day, Bronk established the first European settlement in the area, and they named the Bronx River after him.
1945: Operation AUGUST STORM, or simply the Manchurian Operation, begins as Soviet forces cross into Manchukuo the same day the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and the US dropped a second nuclear weapon on Japan, at Nagasaki. The double shock was enough to convince the Showa Emperor Hirohito that he had to take drastic steps to end the conflict.
And today is NATIONAL VEEP DAY, recognizing the US Presidential succession plan and celebrates Gerald Ford, the only President to serve without being elected as Vice President or President, became President the day after Richard Nixon's resignation on this day in 1974.