Water Cooler War Strategies

Mark Steyn looks at the military images in business books and the more subdued language of the real generals and is perplexed:

That's the curious feature of this militarized language: we're willing to apply strategies from "the bloody battles of history" to "the subtle social game of everyday life," but the one area where we're not supposed to apply them is bloody battles. Reading through Robert Greene's recommendations -- "The Death-Ground Strategy," "The Blitzkrieg Strategy," "The Annihilation Strategy" -- you can't help feeling they'd be rather exhausting applied to seeing off your rival at the hair salon, but might come in handy with, say, the Janjaweed militia in Sudan. Yet that's not the way the hyperpower wages war in the 21st century: he goes in with one hand tied behind his back; if the bad guys hole up in a mosque, whoa, don't blow out the windows, it's culturally insensitive. Many of America's problems in Iraq these last three years derive from an unwillingness to kill enough of the enemy in March and April 2003. Or as a British colonel summed up the strategy: "We don't want to go in and rattle all their tea cups."

Oddly enough there's no "Unrattled Tea Cup Strategy" in Robert Greene's 33 Strategies of War. Thus, the bizarre situation in which we find ourselves: the "Death-Ground Strategy" is useful advice for your next tea party, but the tea cup strategy is supposed to deal with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Maybe it's time to switch manuals.

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