Military strategy is irrevocably linked to the phenomenon of war, such that to advance an account of the concept of strategy can be said to presuppose a conceptualization of war. In other words, to rigorously formulate the notion of strategy, one must concomitantly attempt to rigorously grasp the essence of war. However, what makes this apparently lucid causal sequence essentially complicated is the ostensible fact that war itself demarcates an entire heterogeneous phenomenon. Authors such as Betts have seized on such a heterogeneity of war to denote the impossibility of strategy: the field of concern that strategy attempts to circumscribe inevitably finds its frontiers transgressed. However, perhaps this is not an indictment of strategy, but rather the call for an account of strategy that is as heterogeneous as its object. It is precisely when such a heterogeneity is not extended to strategy itself, that not only does strategy become impossible in a theoretical sense, but that poor strategies are enacted on a practical level. With an incorporation of theoretical literature and historical case studies, the following essay shall argue for a heterogeneous account of strategy that is determined by a concept of war that is defined by an equal heterogeneity, that is, by phenomena such as randomness, contingency and unpredictability.

As Manabrata Guha observes in his magisterial 2010 study, Reimagining War in the 21cent century: from Clausewitz to Network-centric Warfare, “The etymological roots of the word “war” – said to have evolved from Old English (c. 1050) words wyrre and were; from the Frankish word *werra; from the Proto-Germanic word, *werso (cf. O.S. werran, O.H.G. werran, Ger. Verwirren) – convey a sense of confusion, strife, discord, struggle, and violence.” For Guha, the etymology of war is not merely a dry philological exercise, but indices the very problematic of conceptualizing war, insofar as “in its modern sense, the word “war” appears to perform both a descriptive function and a conceptual one.” Accordingly, “war” can be descriptively applied to the disarray of a conflict as a designator of a particularly violent chaos following such etymologies; at the same time, the conceptualization of war marks a radical turn in the approach to this phenomenon, as the very act of conceptualization demarcates an attempt to define, delineate, and order a phenomenon that is, in its very essence, chaotic. As Guha summarizes this problem, “How, when, and for what reasons did a phenomenon – marked by violence, strife, discord, belligerence, and defiance – become a concept?” What makes this gesture paradoxical is that it attempts to homogenize that which is apparently heterogeneous; however, such an attempt in itself serves an apparent teleological objective. That is, one must formalize and conceptualize war to control this very homogeneous phenomenon, namely, to calculate its movements and its probability. But this is not a calculating analogous to a form of scientific and distanced mapping, but rather a fully immanent calculation, one that is embedded within the very reality of war as a political reality. Guha suggests that “war, as a concept, became inextricably associated – in a primarily subservient role – with the State”, which means that war “gradually came to be circumscribed within the purview of Reason, thereby allowing for it to be, in the first instance, rationalized, controlled, and regulated.” In this reading, the classical Clausewitzian definition of “war as policy by other means” holds true, as war becomes a phenomenon controlled by policy: however, this policy, as a policy of war, is defined by the aforementioned “confusion, strife, discord, struggle.” Such a form of what Guha terms “control” can thus be equated with the basic essence of strategy: an attempt to understand and rein in the heterogeneity of war.