While we are all familiar with Sun Tzu, the Chinese general, military strategist, and philosopher, who penned the incomparable Art of War, less known is the Strategikon, the Byzantium equivalent on warfare.
Sixth century Byzantium really needed a manual, threatened as it was from the east, successively by Sassanid Persia, Arabs and Turks, and from the north, by waves of steppe invaders, Huns, Avars, Bulgars, semi-nomadic Turkic Pechenegs and Magyars.
Byzantium could not prevail just by following the classic pattern of Roman Empire raw power - they simply didn't have the means for it.
So military force needed to be subordinate to diplomacy, a less costly means of avoiding or resolving conflict. And here we can make a fascinating connection with today's Russia, led by President Vladimir Putin and his diplomacy chief Sergei Lavrov.
But when military means became necessary for Byzantium - as in Russia's Operation Z - it was preferable to use weaponry to contain or punish adversaries, instead of attacking with full force.
Strategic primacy, for Byzantium, more than diplomatic or military, was a psychological affair. The word Strategia itself is derived from the Greek strategos - which does not mean "General" in military terms, as the west believes, but historically corresponds to a managerial politico-military function.
It all starts with si vis pacem para bellum: "If you want peace prepare for war." Confrontation must develop simultaneously on multiple levels: grand strategy, military strategy, operative, tactical.
But brilliant tactics, excellent operative intel and even massive victories in a larger war theater cannot compensate for a lethal mistake in terms of grand strategy. Just look at the Nazis in WWII.
Those who built up an empire such as the Romans, or maintained one for centuries like the Byzantines, never succeeded without following this logic.
Those clueless Pentagon and CIA 'experts'
On Operation Z, the Russians revel in total strategic ambiguity, which has the collective west completely discombobulated. The Pentagon does not have the necessary intellectual firepower to out-smart the Russian General Staff. Only a few outliers understand that this is not a war - since the Ukraine Armed Forces have been irretrievably routed - but actually what Russian military and naval expert Andrei Martyanov calls a "combined arms police operation," a work-in-progress on demilitarization and denazification.
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