85873 - Transcription: Podcast With US #149: Tactics vs Strategy

N. Lygeros

Ιt’s very important to understand the difference between tactics and strategy. And this importance is not only at the theoretical level, it’s also at the practical level. We can characterize tactics with the visible and the local. Because we have a visible and a local target, we have in fact sources which are also visible, everything is defined in a local way and we can see everything. So we can imagine when we do in chess a mat because we can see the position, we can see everything of our forces and also the ones of the opponent but it’s totally different from the notion of operation firstly but secondly from the notion of strategy. In strategy we are working in an invisible field and we don’t know really the target and we can have in fact many targets in one strategy. So the idea is that we are in a global situation. So to define the difference we have tactics with local and visible things and we have strategy with invisible and global things. If we imagine already this difference we can see that we have a much more complex situation with strategy because we have also to imagine what the behavior of the opponent will be. Because in tactics, as we can see everything, we have all the information but in strategy we don’t have this luxury and the idea is to imagine in a very efficient way what this behavior will be. We are not always in the framework of the game theory because all the players are not necessarily rational.  The idea is to imagine more complex situations and to have of course a backup and to use this to make a surprise. We can use also for deception. We can find something which is like a serendipity and imagine that we can do something to do something else. We can have a real target and a virtual target and this is impossible at the level of tactics. We can see now that strategy is richer and we have to think much more when we start a strategy than in tactics. Because it’s more complex, we have many more parameters and we have to think of everything before because it’s very difficult to correct a strategy.