On Strategy: More Than Just a Bridge by Matt Cavanaugh, Modern War Institute

Strategy is a “bridge,” so sayeth Colin Gray, “because no other idea so well conveys the core function of strategy” which “connects two distinctive entities or phenomena that otherwise would be divided.” Gray then lays a gauntlet, that this metaphor is, of course, “open to challenge by pedants.”

So where do I sign up? I’m feelin’ up for some pedantry.

The metaphorical Strategy Bridge links resources and power to policy and purpose. This is, indeed, an exceptional metaphor, if one describes strategy as a product, an end point, a static, completed thing that has been constructed (in the past tense). This is a strategy that has already been built, what Hal Brands calls “design.” But we also know strategy functions as aprocess, dynamically adapting and reorienting according to the enemy’s zags and zigs (which Brands refers to as “adaptation”). Consider the image above as representing the would-be strategist – the “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” – he has some distant sense of the goal, and experience informs what he expects lurking in the unknown.  He requires both a map with a plan and a compass continually adjusting to true north. Again: design and adaptation. Ifwar is too big for any one academic discipline, then perhaps strategy is too big for a single metaphor.

But where might we find such a metaphor?…

Read on.