Why no academic discipline studies strategy

And J.C. Wylie's approach to studying the most important subject there ever was

We study bugs. We study trees and forests. We study people and culture and history. Why not strategy?

Some would say we do, for example, in military organizations and schools. Nearly all those are courses covering case studies of the past, which is essentially a story about a past strategy that went well or ill. That can be helpful to the student in that they learn what came before. Having a working knowledge of the history of strategy in a given field is helpful.

But this is not the same as studying strategy. Imagine a medical school where the students only read about past surgeries, and never practiced with patients or held the scalpel themselves. Or a law school where the students only read about past cases, never advocated for a plaintiff or defendant themselves. A civil engineer who read about the Brooklyn Bridge and Panama Canal projects, and that’s it. Limited, right?

When it comes to strategy, it seems we’ve fractured the focused study of success into so many fields that we’ve divided and conquered the entire endeavor.

Or there’s another problem. We just don’t take it seriously, even though it’s hard to imagine a more serious matter, particularly in the military sphere.

That’s just what Rear Admiral J.C. Wylie seems to have been after in his classic, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control. Wylie wrote that while the term “Military Mind” was something of a “catch phrase,” he reminded readers there are, in fact, some “very real military minds” that “will, sooner or later, as they have in the past, have a profound effect on our nation and on our society and its civilization.” But, unfortunately, while several “other fields of human activities” like politics and economics have been exhaustively researched,

“only the tremendous social upheaval of war itself has never really been studied with a fundamental and systematic objectivity that would lead the student (and the practitioner) to recognize and better understand a basic pattern of thought, a theory, that did or could influence the conduct of war, influence the basic matter of whether or not a people or a nation might survive.”

Wylie dismissed the “automatic rebuttal,” that thinkers like Clausewitz and Mahan had trod this terrain before. “In one fashion or another,” Wylie acknowledged these previous theorists had “studied and juggled around the detailed specifics or statistics of war,” yet, he countered, “none of them has set himself the task of trying to make a little clearer why wars are managed the way they are.” Wyle’s goal, then, was to “understand a little better the paths that are followed by the strategic mind at work,” to “examine some of the patterns of thought that the military mind does use, and to speculate on some that perhaps it might use.”

Wylie’s approach was to focus not on fighting, but on war: “It is warfare, not battles, and strategy, not tactics or techniques, that should properly be the social science.” This meant studying the “whole of the thing,” instead of “counting the bullets or tracing the route of the nth division on a large-scale map.”

In conclusion, Wylie contextualized his work, and the ways in which war might best be studied:

“I do not claim that strategy is or can be a “science” in the sense of the physical sciences. It can and should be an intellectual discipline of the highest order, and the strategist should prepare himself to manage ideas with precision and clarity and imagination in order that his manipulation of the physical realities, the tools of war, may rise above the pedestrian plane of mediocrity. Thus, while strategy itself may not be a science, strategic judgment can be scientific to the extent that it is orderly, rational, objective, inclusive, discriminatory, and perceptive.”

Wylie’s book was published in 1967 and we haven’t really advanced all that much in the study of strategy or strategic judgment.

If we did, what would it look like?

To my mind, there are three ways to get around our current limitations in the study of strategy. First, we would aim for verisimilitude, to get “inside” a scenario, to include but also get past the facts and into the personalities and people involved. To replicate real life we have to breathe real life into scenarios for study. Second, we should construct scenarios with stakes. In this case emerging forms of virtual reality may be clever outlets for practice. Only when we feel the pressure of potential pain will we “get” the stakes involved. Third, and finally, real-life presents us with opportunities to practice at varying levels. Moving, marriage, work, pets, finance, children, athletics—all are fields of friendly strife where we can flex the strategic muscle and see how strong or weak it really is.

Strategy-making is about performance, and any strategic education that does not force you to perform is substandard and insufficient. I’m confident J.C. would agree.