What is grand strategy?

>>63989939 (OP)
What you want, who do you kill to get there and how are you stopping others from killing you.

>>63929821

>>63989939 (OP)
Strategies too big to be called "petit" or "moyenne".

>>63989939 (OP)
The process of suffering innumerable small defeats, but telling the politicians that it's all part of a larger plan so that you aren't held accountable for these tactical failures. By the time anyone figures out that it was bullshit, you'll be long in the grave ,and future generations will ascribe the failure of your nation to broader sociopolitical forces.

A genre of video games

>>63989939 (OP)
Fuck off back to /his/. Fuck off! To /his/

>>63989939 (OP)
Grand Strategy is the term applied to the way in which a state uses all the levers of power to achieve its specific aims at the highest levels of planning. Think about the US cabinet positions. Dept of Defense, of Commerce, of the Interior, of Energy, ect... Each of those basically corresponds to some sector of state power that can be directed to achieve some goal for the state.

An example form pic rel would be Japan in the 1880s. They saw China get absolutely crushed because it refused to westernize, and thus set about rapidly becoming western. Their grand strategy saw the Chinese as declining, and they feared Russia would aggressively fill the power vacuum and be a credible threat to them in a way China couldn't. Their grand strategy then was to reinvent their educational and industrial sectors, so that they could produce the needed war materials, to invade Korea and displace the failing Chinese puppet government there, and prevent the Russians from completing their trans-Siberian rail line as planned, which would have allowed them to ship troops to the Korean border. They also used their diplomatic corps to distribute 'war reports' written in European languages to own the narrative and win points for being the 'reasonable and modern asians'. It worked.

Unfortunately, grand strategy is messy when politicians do it. Because the Korean invasion and Chinese humiliation went so well, the public in Japan clamored for a full on conquest of China and after the Russo-Japanese war, Japan went full empire-building, which put them on a collision course with a western power, precisely what they wanted to avoid by originally only fighting short, limited objective wars that didn't directly impact any Europeans besides Russia (and most of Europe hated them anyway).

>>63990301
>Unfortunately, grand strategy is messy when politicians do it.
It wasn't messy because of the politicians, it was messy because Yamagata Aritomo fought so hard (and won) to establish a politically independent Army and Navy. A non-issue during the era of Genro governance, but it made the government entirely dysfunctional once the Meiji generation passed and their individual proteges took the reins of power, since they didn't have the bonds of revolution to unify them and instead looked after their own department. It made the calculated grand strategy of the 80s impossible. Long story short it was the army that was retarded, not the politicians.

>>63989939 (OP)
What is the Byzantine Empire?

>>63990301
I'd be slightly wary of Paine as I found her to be slightly dogmatic in her application of the whole "continental" vs "maritime" power analysis in her 2017 book. Her laughable on her conclusion that Imperial Japan's failure was their switch from maritime to continental under said dogma instead of the mirraid of actual tangible reasons for their failure which she examined in detail in said book. She also failed to either clarify or notice that under the CvM dogma that the US itself would count as a continental power that then leveraged that impressive might to simultaneously become a maritime power. Still her 2017 book that i have read were overall good but YMMV when it comes to some of her interpretations which i expect apply to her body of work. That CvM dogma is too rigid and specific to historical circumstances to be really applicable in useful analysis beyond its purview (see another example in Andrews Lamberts attempt to apply CvM analysis in his terrible Seapower states book and the resulting amputation of the civilisations he is trying to squeeze that would make any Antiquity historian explode, instead of honestly assessing do any of them match his analytical framework).

Map painting

>>63990985
They're romans

>>63990985
It is what the Eastern Roman Empire post fall of the Western Empire has been called by historians for the last couple of centuries. They never referred to themselves as 'Byzantine', but always as Romans. Even other sources from their time refer to them as Romans.

>>63990075
Sorry we are not shitting up the board with yet another guntuber shill, bugman implessive, Slav or Levant squabbles threads. Shut up and let it be, fag.

>>63991766
>back when anatolia was great
It hurts boys

>>63991792
Most of western Europe is going that way now and we are actually white so i would say we have much greater concerns than land lost by brown Gayreeks to some other flavour of subhumans more than 6 centruies ago.

>>63992119
>We are actually white
lol

>>63989939 (OP)
Its 4x rather than rts. Usually turn based or ar least able to be paused for issuing orders/setting up queues.

>>63990301
I met her once when I was wandering around Dulles Air Museum. I said "Excuse me, are you Dr Paine?" And she said yes, and I shook her hand and said I enjoyed watching her lectures online. She seemed pleased, we chatted a bit about the Cherry Blossom manned bomb that was on display there. It was a pleasant interaction.

>>63989939 (OP)
Whatever strategy they had couldn't had been too great if they got beaten by the Turks.

>>63989939 (OP)
>spend all your money on meme shit that you instantly lose anyway the second you turn around
>death war with your mortal enemy for the 100th time this century
>outcome: nothing changes (again) except for ruining all the provinces (again) and a bajillion people dying (again)
>out of nowhere lose half the empire to some desert camel riders
>proceed to explode into civil war over a couple meaningless
>narrowly lose 1(one) battle to the turks, instantly give up and start more civil wars as they settle in
>get fucked over by crusaders that you invited
>get fucked over by turks that you transported over the straits
I don't think they had any strategy, especially not a grand one.

>>63993348
Are you forgetting someone

>>63990001

>>63990973
Fair enough. The Army also had the guys that kept assassinating anyone in the civilian government that wanted to hit the brakes on empire. I wonder if it occurred to anyone in Tokyo why exactly the nobility was so heavily surveilled by the emperor for all those years...

>>63991385
She also suffers a bit from come up in and working for 'the winning team' so far in history. It's easy to see the post-WW2 and post-cold war sea-trade-based empire (and global ocean cops, but don't say it out loud) as the logical outcome of history when the counter factual still hasn't materialized. I think you hit it on the head when you mentioned the historical circumstances where CvM seems to fit. Trying to apply that frame to something like golden age Athens or Polynesian islanders just doesn't work. I think it also starts to break down once missile forces and air power come into their own, since you no longer need to land your continental army to do horrific damage to your maritime enemy.

I wonder if there's an update to the frame that brings it into the modern age a bit better. Maybe starting at 1946 the new meta becomes the 'strategic power' that leverages the ability to wage nuclear war into a seat at the big-boy table in diplomacy, into providing security umbrellas, and being able to stalemate other stragetic power states. You could then say the next phase would be the "orbital power". States that developed their orbital lift capacity to start placing not only ISR satellites into space, but to technologically and commercially dominate orbit. Powers that go from making perfect semiconductor components in space to starting mass construction projects in orbit. If you want to get really crazy, maybe such a state just announces one day that it secretly completed something like Brilliant Pebbles and that its starting on a space elevator if anyone wants to help.

>>63993340
Neat.