vesicles
Colonel
That is exactly my point!! This is the difference between a general who only cares about how to fight a battle and a strategist who think about the whole situation, including politics. Let's not forget that the military is a political tool and is in the frame of any political planning. Any great military strategist would not only think about the military in the pure military terms, but also in the context of the whole political environment because one cannot win a war depending only on pure military. Military can never be considered to be a separate entity away from politics. When was the last time you see the outcome of a war decided purely by military? ALmost never. It's the whole package, like the whole geopolitical environment. what separates a great strategist from a whole bunch of brilliant generals is his ability to consider the whole package and elevate his thinking above the pure military. that is also why we see many great generals who win battles after battles, but eventually lose the whole war. To use an analogy, a war can be like an expedition, a brilliant general is like a great outdoor man who can survive any situation in the wild and beat any beasts. But without a strategist who is like a guide, these generals are simply blind. They can blindly roam in the wild for a long time and go a long distance before they find out that they are actually going the opposite way and away from the treasure.
Let's take an example of Zhuge Liang and Cao Cao in the NOVEL of 3 Kingdom. We now consider them great strategists and in different leagues than generals like Guan Yu, Zhang Liao, or Huang Zhong. These generals are also capable of brilliant military strategies. For instance, Huang Zhong in the campaign of Ding Jun Shan used brilliant strategies to beat Xiaho Yuan. But do we ever think of them as strategists? Absolutely not. We always consider them as generals who fight battles. What makes Zhuge Liang and Cao Cao different is that they elevate their thinking up to the level of politics AND military. Being able to organically integrate politics AND military is a must for any strategist because one MUST think about both in order to win a war. Generals, like Lin Biao and Peng Dehuai, however, only have to think about individual campaigns.
This is why I keep barking about the need to distinguish between a strategist and a general. In Chinese, we have two terms, Zhan Lue (strategy) and Zhan Shu (tactics). A strategist focuses more on Zhan Lue where he looks at the whole situation and make decisions on a grand scale, or like you said, on a higher framwork. A general is a tactician who looks at things on a more detailed scale, such as how many troops should he depoly, what kind of formation should he use, which road should he take... Since we are talking about the greatest strategists, not the greatest generals, we should focus on those whoes decisions have much wider implications and on a grand scale.
BTW, the strategy of "country-side surrounding the cities" is a military strategy in every sense of the word.
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