Strategy: The Indirect Approach

The argument

The book was written by a casualty. Liddell Hart went into the Somme as a young infantry officer in 1916 and came out wounded and gassed, and he spent the rest of his life prosecuting the school of thought that had planned such offensives: the doctrine of mass, of the decisive frontal battle, of victory through the direct application of superior force against the enemy’s prepared strength. His method of prosecution was history. He read the record of Western warfare from the Greek city-states forward, campaign by campaign, and asked one question of each: when a result was actually decisive, when it ended the matter rather than feeding it, how had the winning army approached? The answer he reports is close to uniform. Decisive results follow the indirect approach; the direct approach produces at best expensive wins and at worst the Western Front. However the counting is audited, and it should be audited, the pattern he assembled is the book.

The mechanism is dislocation. An army, like any organized system, is held together by an equilibrium: supply lines, communications, a coherent front, and, binding all of it, the commander’s mental picture of the situation. The indirect approach attacks the equilibrium instead of the strength it supports. Physical dislocation severs the supply line, threatens the rear, forces a sudden change of front; psychological dislocation is what follows in the opposing commander’s mind, the sense of being trapped, of events no longer answering to his picture. A dislocated army is beaten before the engagement, and the engagement, if one occurs, merely collects the result. Hence the book’s inversion of the war-college ranking: battle is not the payoff but the receipt. Strike a balanced enemy and his strength works at full value; dislocate him first and his strength becomes baggage.

The demonstrations are chosen from every era, and four carry most of the weight. Scipio declines to duel Hannibal in Italy, strikes instead at Spain and then at Africa, the base and the alliance behind the war, and thereby pulls Hannibal out of Italy to a battlefield of Rome’s choosing. Belisarius wins repeatedly with small forces by operating on the enemy’s expectations, accepting battle only where the opponent’s cohesion had already been undermined. Sherman marches past the entrenchments, lives off the country, cuts the rail lines, and advances on a line that threatens several objectives at once, so no defense knows what it is defending; the Confederacy’s collapse behind the front is psychological dislocation performed at the scale of a society. Allenby’s 1918 campaign in Palestine opens with a deception that fixes Turkish attention inland, breaks through on the coast where no one is looking, and passes cavalry into the rear so that armies dissolve with hardly a set-piece battle fought. Napoleon appears on both sides of the ledger: the early campaigns of maneuver against the enemy’s rear illustrate the law, and the later mass battles that bled him white illustrate its violation.

From the pattern come the maxims, six positive and two negative, offered as compressed experience. Adjust your end to your means; keep the object always in mind; choose the line of least expectation; exploit the line of least resistance; take a line of operations that offers alternative objectives; keep the plan flexible enough to fit circumstance. And negatively: do not throw your weight into a blow while the enemy is on guard, and do not renew an attack along the same line once it has failed. The two lines are the doctrine’s heart, and Liddell Hart is careful about their relation: the line of least expectation is chosen in the enemy’s psychology, the line of least resistance on the ground, and each is the other’s test, since a route that is physically easy but expected is neither.

Above strategy the book sets grand strategy, and here the wounded infantryman speaks most plainly. The object of war is not victory but a better state of peace, judged from the victor’s side; military victory is an intermediate product, and a war that exhausts the victor’s economy, brutalizes the settlement, or manufactures the next enemy has failed at grand strategy no matter what the communiqués said. His quarrel with Clausewitz, or rather with the Clausewitzian church, sits here: he accepts entirely that war serves policy, and charges the disciples with worshiping the battle and forgetting the peace. The last extension is the strategy of limited aim: where overthrow of the enemy is beyond your means, dislocate, drain, and wait, letting time and cost work as weapons. The book ends where it began, with economy: force is finite, and the approach that spends the least of it to change the enemy’s mind is the whole art.

Working notes

Read On War and this book together and they correct each other’s failure modes. Clausewitz supplies what Liddell Hart lacks: friction, the fog, the honest admission that maneuvers degrade and that the clever line on the map is walked by tired men in the rain. Liddell Hart supplies what the Clausewitzian tradition lost: direction, the reminder that where you apply force decides how much of it you need. One book is about the medium, the other about the vector. Most strategic failure is a vector error executed with perfect attention to the medium, or a beautiful vector that never priced the medium at all.

The kinship with Sun Tzu is open and acknowledged; Liddell Hart later introduced a standard English translation of the older text, and the indirect approach is recognizably the doctrine of emptiness and fullness run through the Western archive. What the Englishman adds is the case law: the Chinese text asserts, this book cites. For a working reader that matters, because the failure cases, Napoleon after the maneuvers stopped, the Western Front, give the doctrine edges and costs that aphorism conceals.

Rumelt’s kernel in Good Strategy Bad Strategy is the indirect approach demilitarized, whether or not the descent is acknowledged: diagnosis is the location of the decisive point, the guiding policy is the chosen line of approach, and coherent action is the concentration that follows. Reading them in sequence, the military book explains why the business book’s advice works: a good diagnosis is precisely the discovery of the adversary’s, or the market’s, point of least resistance.

The concept that transfers furthest is psychological dislocation as the actual product. Markets move when the other side’s picture breaks, not when you push. A forced seller is a dislocated commander: his structure, margin, mandate, or nerve has failed, and price simply collects the result. The corollary is where the discipline bites: pushing against a balanced market is the direct approach, paying list price for every tick, and most of what retail conviction calls persistence is the renewed attack along the failed line that maxim eight forbids.

And the plainest maxim is the deepest. Adjust ends to means is the one everybody skips, because it is the one that forbids dreams; it is also the only maxim whose violation is fatal on its own. The catalogue’s disasters are not failures of cleverness. They are ambitions that outran resources and called the shortfall willpower, morale, or destiny.

Where I push back

The evidence is curated by the advocate. Liddell Hart chose the campaigns, chose what counted as decisive, and chose what counted as indirect, and the choices flatter the thesis. The direct victories of history, Grant grinding south in 1864, the Hundred Days offensive that actually ended the war he was wounded in, Normandy once ashore, are reclassified, minimized, or waved toward some indirect component that can always be found, since no campaign in history is wholly direct. A law proven on a curated sample is an essay, not a law. The honest restatement is weaker and still valuable: against a prepared strength, approach is a force multiplier large enough to decide most campaigns, and it is systematically underpriced by cultures that reward visible boldness.

Second, the definition leaks. Indirect is stretched until it covers whatever succeeded: a flank march, a deception, a technological surprise, a diplomatic stroke. A term that elastic explains everything and forecasts little, and the book’s confidence hides the elasticity. The maxims survive this criticism; the universal history does not quite.

Third, the author practiced his doctrine on his own record. After 1945 Liddell Hart worked to have the German generals credit his interwar writings for the armored breakthroughs, and historians who audited the correspondence found the testimony cultivated. The anatomist of dislocation dislocated the archive in his own favor. It does not void the book, but it instructs the reader: a method built on choosing your ground will be used to choose the ground of its own reputation, and advocacy dressed as history is still advocacy.

Last, the cost the book undercounts: time. Indirection trades blood for time, and time is not always for sale; against an enemy growing stronger, or a window closing, the expensive direct assault can be the cheap option. And in a certain temperament the doctrine curdles into character, cleverness as a permanent alibi for never committing. Some doors must be forced, and the man who has made indirectness his identity will stand outside them, maneuvering, for years.

How it enters the work

At BlockHedge the two lines are entry discipline. Positions are sought where the line of least resistance already exists, forced sellers, broken funding, assets orphaned by mandate rather than by merit, and the crowded consensus trade is treated as the guarded front: fully priced, braced, and expensive to storm. Structures are built to Liddell Hart’s fifth maxim, threatening alternative objectives with one motion: positions designed to win along two paths, carry if nothing happens and convexity if something does, so the market, like Sherman’s defenders, cannot know which objective the position actually needs. The eighth maxim is written into process: no re-entry along an invalidated thesis at worse prices. The renewed attack on the failed line is the most expensive habit in trading, and having it forbidden by a maxim older than the firm makes the forbidding easier to obey.

At Intelliblitz the doctrine governs market entry. Against an entrenched incumbent, the frontal assault, competing for the flagship platform on the incumbent’s terms, consolidates the defense: procurement braces, the vendor discounts, the relationship hardens. The indirect entry is the workload nobody defends: the unglamorous integration, the reporting layer everyone resents, the migration no one wants to own. Enter there, deliver at a standard that changes the client’s picture of what delivery is, and expansion follows without a siege. The dislocation is psychological, exactly as the book says: the incumbent is not defeated, he is made irrelevant to the decision.

And on status, the law needs no translation. Direct claims on standing are attacks on a guarded front; people brace against self-promotion the way defenders brace against an expected assault. The indirect approach is the work exhibited rather than argued, the claim carried by third parties, the reputation that arrives at the objective before anyone saw the approach march. Above all of it sits the grand-strategic test, which I apply to trades, engagements, and disputes alike: what peace does this victory purchase? A win that exhausts the balance sheet, embitters a counterparty I must deal with for a decade, or costs the reputation the next ten deals rest on has failed at grand strategy, whatever the closing statement says. Liddell Hart’s better state of peace is the only definition of winning I have found that survives repetition.