The Meaning of the Terms Strategy, Tactics and Stratagems in the Pre-modern World

According to one of the greatest theorists on warfare of modern times, Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1830), the conduct of war consists of the planning and organisation of fighting in a greater or lesser number of single acts, each complete in itself, identified by the term ‘engagements’. We thus arrive at the distinction between ‘the use of armed forces in the engagement’, identified as tactics, and ‘the use of engagements for the object of war’, defined as strategy. In 1814, the Archduke Charles (1771–1847), the Habsburg commander in the wars against Napoleon, defined strategy as the ‘science of war: it designs the plan, circumscribes and determines the development of military operations; it is the particular science of the military commander’. He defined tactics, however, as ‘the art of war’: ‘It teaches the way in which strategic designs are to be executed; it is the necessary skill of each leader of troops.’ Therefore, strategy ends and tactics begin where opposing forces clash – on the battlefield. Although this distinction between the two meanings of the conduct of war may seem reasonable to a modern expert, as ‘it is now almost universal’, most authors before the French Revolution wrote about neither strategy nor tactics but about military matters in the tradition of the Roman author Flavius Vegetius Renatus (writing c. AD 400), or about the ‘art of war’ like Machiavelli did eleven centuries later.

The term strategy (στρατηγϵία or στρατηγική) had a different meaning in ancient Greece. It derives from the noun strategos (στρατηγός) and meant the office or the skills of a general in command of an army during the war.