Liddell Hart’s Maxims
Captain Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart one of the most influential military thinkers of the twentieth century distilled the essence of strategy and tactics into eight maxims. His ideas apply not just to the battlefield but to politics business and sex - to any problem or activity that involves a conflict of wills. As expressed in his classic work Strategy (second edition 1967) the eight maxims are listed below.
1. Adjust your end to your means - in effect don’t bite off more than you can chew.
2. Keep your objective always in mind, adapting plans to circumstances, remembering that there are more ways than one of gaining an objective and making sure that attainment of intermediate objectives is worthwhile. “To wander down a side-track is bad but to reach a dead end is worse.”
3. Choose the line (or course) of least expectation i.e. put yourself in your opponent’s shoes and take the line of action that he (or she) is least likely to foresee or forestall.
4. Exploit the line of least resistance - providing of course that it leads toward your ultimate objective.
5. Pursue a line of operation that offers alternate objectives. Your opponent will not be sure which objective to defend most strongly and you will have a better chance of gaining at least one of them - whichever he (or she) guards least - and perhaps of achieving one after the other.
6. Make sure that your plans and dispositions of forces are flexible. Any plan should provide for a next step quickly carried out in case of success or failure or - the more common outcome in war - partial success. (See also Publilius’s Maxims no. 469.)
7. Do not throw your weight into an offensive while your opponent is on guard. Unless the enemy is much inferior in strength, wait until his (or her) power of resistance or evasion is paralysed by disorganisation and demoralisation before making a real attack.
8. Do not renew an attack along the same line or in the same manner after it has once failed. Bringing up reinforcements is not enough since the enemy is likely to do the same and his (or her) success in repulsing you will have strengthened his (or her) morale.
“The essential truth underlying these maxims,” wrote Liddell Hart “is that for success two major problems must be solved - dislocation and exploitation. One precedes and the other follows the actual blow - which in comparison is a simple act. You cannot hit the enemy with effect unless you have first created the opportunity; you cannot make that effect decisive unless you exploit the second opportunity that comes before he can recover.”
On a still more profound level, Liddell Hart was advocating “the strategy of the indirect approach”. Explaining how this strategy applies to other aspects of life, Liddell Hart said:
The direct assault of new ideas provokes a stubborn resistance, thus intensifying the difficulty of producing a change of outlook. Conversion is achieved more easily and rapidly by unsuspected infiltration of a different idea or by an argument that turns the flank of instinctive opposition . . . In commerce, the suggestion that there is a bargain to be secured is far more potent than any direct appeal to buy. And in any sphere it is proverbial that the surest way of gaining a superior’s acceptance of a new idea is to persuade him that it is his idea! As in war, the aim is to weaken resistance before attempting to overcome it; and the effect is best attained by drawing the other party out of his defences.
In the military realm, Liddell Hart’s theories about mechanised warfare, mobility, surprise attack and air warfare developed during the 1920s and 1930s were put into practice in World War II initially, and with great effectiveness, by the Germans with their blitzkrieg (i.e. lightning war) offensives. His enemies acknowledged their debt. General Heinz Guderian, who established the panzer units in the German army, said “I was one of Captain Liddell Hart’s disciples in tank affairs.” And Field Marshal Erwin Rommel opined that “The British would have been able to prevent the greatest part of their defeats if they had paid attention to the modern theories expounded by Liddell Hart before the war.”
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