Strategy & Tactics

Cases

Case library

A library of decisive cases dissected as structure — from ancient battles to modern rivalries, read on two layers: the surface events and the decision design beneath.

The US Embassy in Saigon seen through street trees, the building intact, soldiers and civilians on the pavement
The Vietnam War
Tet: the verdict was returned off the battlefield

The people who rule on winning are not the people on the field. Mistake who they are and you can win and still lose.

Pattern: a design of the verdict
Tactical allied victory, strategic North Vietnamese victory Read →
American soldiers wading chest-deep towards the beach past the lowered ramp of a landing craft
The Western Front, 1940–45
Normandy: making the real thing look like the fake

Confirm what the enemy already believes, and the real thing will look like the fake. That is the design of deception.

Pattern: a design of deception
Allied landings succeed Read →
Snow-covered sculpture of children dancing in a ring on a fountain, with burnt-out buildings behind
The Eastern Front
Stalingrad — the ring that closed at the seams

What won it was not tenacity in the streets but a design that fixed the enemy's best troops where their advantages did not work and decided the matter at the allied-held flank he was not holding himself.

Pattern: a design of attachment
Decisive Soviet victory (the German Sixth Army surrendered) Read →
The Japanese carrier Hiryū adrift and burning, her flight deck wrecked, photographed from the air on 5 June 1942
The Pacific War
The Battle of Midway (1942)

The battle in which an intelligence advantage was converted into a simple operational fact: the Japanese carriers never got the unbroken time they needed to launch. Why the torpedo squadrons that scored nothing mattered most.

Pattern: a design of time
Decisive American victory Read →
Long thin columns of soldiers standing out across a wide beach towards the water
The Western Front, 1940–45
Dunkirk: they saved the soldiers and left the army

When losing, abandon what can be remade and carry home what cannot. That is a design of what to lose.

Pattern: a design of what to lose
The evacuation succeeded; the campaign was lost Read →
French soldiers climbing out over the lip of a trench and walking towards open white ground
The Western Front, 1914–18
Verdun: what was contested was not ground but the exchange rate

Make consuming the other side the objective and you go into the same machine. A design with no written way to stop eats its designer first.

Pattern: a design of attrition
The German offensive failed of its purpose; France retook most of the lost ground Read →
A large canvas of the battle of Waterloo with Wellington mounted at the centre among staff and wounded
Napoleonic Wars
Waterloo — the battle that was decided the day before

What decided it was not the tactics on the field but which side's second army had fallen back, the day before, in a direction that allowed it to join.

Pattern: a design of convergence
Decisive Anglo-allied and Prussian victory Read →
The Battle of Austerlitz painted by François Gérard
Napoleonic Wars
Austerlitz — the design that made the enemy abandon the centre

The reason the outnumbered Napoleon won was not a brilliant central breakthrough, but a design that made the enemy give up the centre.

Pattern: a design of space
Decisive French victory Read →
Turner's oil painting: a vast hull looming through gunsmoke, with drowning men in the water in the foreground
Napoleonic Wars
Trafalgar — the design that survived losing its signals

The outnumbered British fleet won without losing a ship not because of the two-column charge but because of a design that assumed the chain of command would break, and distributed intent and a default beforehand.

Pattern: a design of command
Decisive British victory (Nelson killed) Read →
A folding screen of the battle of Sekigahara, dense with banner-carrying contingents in combat
Japan's Warring States period
Sekigahara — the battle settled in the correspondence

A design of defection: before the fighting, put part of the enemy's strength into the state of not moving. The number to count was never the headcount.

Pattern: a design of defection
Decisive victory for the Eastern army Read →
The consul Paullus awaiting death as the ring of Carthaginians closes (Trumbull, 1773)
Second Punic War
Cannae — the encirclement that turned numbers into a trap

The reason a Roman army nearly twice the size was annihilated was not the shape of a double envelopment, but a design that flipped Rome's packed mass and momentum into an immobile weakness.

Pattern: absorbing momentum
Decisive Carthaginian (Hannibal) victory Read →
A colour lithograph of infantry storming a parapet under regimental colours while gunboats fire from the river
The American Civil War
Vicksburg — what fell was not a town but a line

A design of supply: replace the town with the line the town is corking as your object, and give up your own supply line for a while to reach it.

Pattern: a design of supply
Decisive Union victory (the Confederate garrison surrendered) Read →
A fifteenth-century illumination of armoured men fighting at close quarters with archers drawing bows
The Hundred Years War
Agincourt — the design that gave numbers no room

What won it was not the penetrating power of the longbow but a design that limited the field to a width in which numbers could not deploy, and made the enemy walk into it.

Pattern: a design of frontage
Decisive English victory Read →