50 Maxims, One Masterclass in Strategic Thinking?

50 Maxims, One Masterclass in Strategic Thinking?
Reviewing Platias and Koliopoulos’s The Art of Strategy
Kelly C. Jordan, PhD
Professor of Military and National Security Studies
American Military University

Athanasios Platias and Constantinos Koliopoulos, The Art of Strategy: 50 Maxims for War, Politics, Business and Everyday Life (London: Hurst & Company, 2026), 424 pp.

Athanasios Platias and Constantinos Koliopoulos’s The Art of Strategy: 50 Maxims for War, Politics, Business and Everyday Life is an ambitious effort to identify what is common to strategic behavior across widely different forms of human competition. The authors begin from a broad conception of strategy centered on the relationship between means and ends under conditions of actual or potential conflict. Although war and international politics provide many of their examples, their strategic universe extends considerably further, encompassing domestic politics, business, professional sports, games, and everyday life. Their purpose is correspondingly ambitious: the fifty maxims are intended not merely as individual pieces of strategic advice but, considered collectively, as the basis for a general theory of strategy.

I. Overview of the Book

The book is organized into four principal parts. The first addresses the general characteristics of strategy, beginning with the propositions that strategy is universal, that it can make the difference between victory and defeat, that there are no universally applicable formulas, that time matters at every level of strategy, and that strategy itself has limits. The second shifts the focus to the strategic actor operating within a competitive environment, examining preparation, power, organizational performance, leadership, strengths and weaknesses, geography, society and ideology, technology, intelligence, and efforts to shape the environment.

The third and largest part introduces the dynamic aspect of strategy that transforms it from a static calculation into an interactive actor-centered challenge. Questions concerning objectives and capabilities lead to Maxim 20, “The opponent has a strategy, too,” and Maxim 21, “Strategy must predict and adjust.” From there the treatment extends through crisis management, alliances, perception, prudence, war termination, third parties, rationality, and other dimensions of strategic interaction.

The final part turns principally to the execution of strategy, encompassing concentration, unity of command, friction, risk, different forms of conflict, battle, alternative strategies, the relationship between tactical success and strategic victory, deception, surprise, morale, logistics, exploitation, and strategic resilience. Its progression culminates in Maxim 50, which emphasizes the ability of strategic actors to sustain long-term competition.

Individual maxims receive substantive discussion rather than standing alone as aphorisms. Platias and Koliopoulos develop them through examples drawn from different historical periods and competitive activities, and important maxims frequently connect with others elsewhere in the work. Maxim 42, for example, explicitly develops ideas found in Maxims 3 and 21, while Maxim 50 connects resilience to preceding considerations including time, intelligence, adaptation, unity, and risk.

This interconnectedness is important because the authors do not expect the fifty propositions to operate independently. They acknowledge the possibility of overlap and tension among them and call for their critical, flexible, and combined application. Their approach should not, then, be reduced to fifty rules for winning. The Art of Strategy is intended to provide a framework through which readers may understand strategy, think strategically, and act strategically.

Taken on its own terms, the book therefore must be judged not merely as a collection of strategic maxims, but as a theory of strategy. That is a considerably more demanding claim.

Key Maxims: The review focuses primarily on the following maxims, which carry most of the theoretical weight of the authors' argument and provide the basis for the analysis that follows.

1 – Strategy is immutable and universal.
3 – There are no one-size-fits-all recipes in strategy.
5 – Strategy has limits: Some strategic problems are insoluble.
9 – Leadership is a force multiplier—but also a force divider.
20 – The opponent has a strategy, too.
21 – Strategy must predict and adjust.
38 – Nothing will happen as planned.
42 – There is one strategy, but many strategies.
43 – Successive tactical wins may or may not lead to strategic victory.
50 – The marathon runner defeats the sprinter.

II. An Old Form for a Persistent Problem

The authors’ use of the maxim places their project within a much older tradition of military and strategic thought. For centuries, writers on war have confronted a recurring problem: how can experience acquired under historically particular circumstances be converted into more generalized knowledge useful to actors facing different ones?

Vegetius’s De re militari (c. 383–450 CE), influential in medieval military education, preserved observations and prescriptions concerning military organization, preparation, training, and the employment of force. Niccolò Machiavelli’s Art of War (1521) similarly drew upon historical experience while examining the relationships among war, politics, military organization, technology, and tactics. Both exemplify the enduring effort to make accumulated military experience useful beyond the circumstances that produced it.

The Napoleonic experience made this impulse particularly visible. The nineteenth-century Officer’s Manual: Military Maxims of Napoleon (1831) collected seventy-eight maxims attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, converting exceptional military experience into propositions intended for study by later officers. Antoine-Henri Jomini pursued a related but more systematic enterprise in Précis de l’art de la guerre (The Art of War) (1838), organizing military experience around more general principles of the art of war.

These writers differed enormously in context and purpose, but they expose a persistent tension. The closer a strategic lesson remains to the circumstances that produced it, the less readily it travels; the further it is abstracted into universal principle, the greater the danger that context and contingency disappear. The maxim occupies an intriguing position between these poles, attempting to preserve something durable from experience without necessarily providing a complete prescription for future action.

Platias and Koliopoulos revive this old form for an unusually ambitious purpose. Their closest modern predecessor is Colin S. Gray’s Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy (2007/2009). The Art of Strategy goes beyond Gray’s intention of presenting and explaining meaningful strategic propositions in an accessible manner, seeking instead to build from its maxims a holistic theory of strategy.

Their work thus joins two longstanding ambitions in strategic thought: to preserve experience as portable wisdom and to transform that wisdom into general theory. The first is an ancient undertaking. The second places a much heavier burden on the maxim, leading to an intriguing question: Can the maxim carry the weight of theory?

III. The Enduring and the Contingent

The answer begins with Maxims 1, 3, 5, and 42.

Maxim 1 announces that “Strategy is immutable and universal.” Maxim 3 insists that “There are no one-size-fits-all recipes in strategy.” Read separately, the two propositions appear almost contradictory. If strategy is immutable and universal, why can it not provide universally applicable answers? If strategic solutions must be tailored to particular circumstances, what remains universal?

Maxim 42 provides much of the answer: “There is one strategy, but many strategies.” The authors explicitly connect it to Maxims 3 and 21. Numerous courses of action may be available within a common strategic logic; multiple approaches may serve the same objective; and strategic actors can shift among them as circumstances change. Their illustrations range across grand strategy, military strategy, business, football, and chess.

Read through Maxim 42, Maxims 1 and 3 become complementary rather than contradictory. “Strategy is immutable and universal” describes the underlying phenomenon. “There are no one- size-fits-all recipes” describes its practical application. “There is one strategy, but many strategies” synthesizes the two.

What endures is not a particular course of action but the fundamental relationships within which strategic choices occur. Purposes have to be related to means. Resources confer possibilities while scarcity constrains choice. Human agency shapes choices and outcomes. Time alters circumstances. Opponents act and react. Plans encounter resistance. Actions create intended and unintended consequences. Success at one level may fail to produce success at another.

Strategy, therefore, may possess a universal logic without producing universal prescriptions.

Maxim 5 provides an important qualification to that proposition: “Strategy has limits: Some strategic problems are insoluble.” Platias and Koliopoulos do not suggest that sufficiently sophisticated strategic reasoning can overcome every unfavorable distribution of power or circumstance. Strategy matters, sometimes enormously, without becoming omnipotent.

This also offers an answer to the older problem confronting the maxim tradition. General strategic knowledge need not consist of instructions specifying what an actor must always do. What can be generalized are relationships, questions, constraints, and recurring strategic problems. The particular strategies through which actors negotiate them remain contingent.

That is more sophisticated than merely extracting rules from history. Contingency does not refute general theory if the object of that theory is the structure of strategic problems rather than predetermined solutions to them. The permanence of strategy does not require the permanence of strategies.

IV. Strategy as Interaction

The book’s second part establishes the importance of the actor’s resources and circumstances, and the framework becomes dynamic when Platias and Koliopoulos move from the strategic actor to interaction with an opponent. Maxim 9, “Leadership is a force multiplier—but also a force divider,” is particularly instructive because it prevents the framework from becoming exclusively structural or material. Leadership can increase or diminish what an actor accomplishes with available resources. Human agency therefore operates within, but is not wholly determined by, larger constraints.

The more theoretically consequential transition occurs in Maxims 20 and 21.

Maxim 20, “The opponent has a strategy, too,” risks sounding self-evident. Yet its implications are fundamental. The opponent is not another environmental condition or an inert obstacle separating means from objectives. The opponent thinks, chooses, anticipates, reacts, deceives, and pursues independent purposes.

Maxim 20 makes Maxim 21 necessary.

If the opponent possesses a strategy, one actor’s means and objectives cannot be evaluated in isolation. Actions change the opponent’s calculations; reactions alter the original actor’s circumstances; and both sides make subsequent choices within a strategic environment their interaction is simultaneously creating.

Hence Maxim 21: “Strategy must predict and adjust.”

The resulting logic moves from purpose and capability through opponent and interaction to anticipation and adaptation: purpose and capability encounter an opponent; an opponent creates interaction; interaction requires anticipation and adaptation.

Prediction cannot mean perfect foresight. Instead, anticipation and adaptation become complementary requirements. Strategists must attempt to understand likely behavior while remaining capable of recognizing when actual behavior has invalidated prior assumptions.

Maxim 21 is not simply another maxim. It is a consequence of Maxim 20.

That relationship is important to the authors’ theoretical claim. Individually, propositions such as “The opponent has a strategy, too” can sound obvious. In combination, their significance changes. The existence of an independent, purposive opponent creates interaction; interaction produces uncertainty; uncertainty makes anticipation imperfect; imperfect anticipation makes adaptation indispensable.

Here the fifty-maxim structure begins to look less like a collection and more like theory.

V. From Action to Strategic Effect

The most demanding test of strategy occurs when formulation becomes execution. It is one thing to define objectives, assess means, anticipate opponents, and select among possible strategies. It is another to translate action into consequences that actually serve political purposes.

Maxim 38 captures one dimension of the problem: “Nothing will happen as planned.” Plans remain indispensable, but resistance, error, chance, enemy action, and changing circumstances progressively separate the situation encountered from the one anticipated. In this respect, the maxim reinforces the adaptive requirement already contained in Maxim 21.

Maxim 43, “Successive tactical wins may or may not lead to strategic victory,” takes the problem further. Platias and Koliopoulos distinguish between sequential and cumulative strategies. In a sequential strategy, discrete successes become successive steps toward a larger objective. Their discussion uses the Soviet progression from Stalingrad through subsequent victories to Berlin as an illustration. Tactical victories, however, can fail to produce strategic success. Japan’s early victories in the Pacific did not create the conditions necessary for eventual victory, while Trafalgar, despite its tactical significance, did not overturn Napoleonic predominance on the European continent. Cumulative strategies work differently, generating consequences through accumulated pressure rather than necessarily through a recognizable sequence of decisive victories.

The terminology places Platias and Koliopoulos within an important twentieth-century theoretical conversation. J. C. Wylie’s Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (1967) distinguished sequential from cumulative operational patterns as part of his broader theory of strategy and control. Scholarship examining Wylie’s distinction emphasizes its relationship to effect, with sequential and cumulative patterns representing different ways through which operations can acquire strategic significance.

Colin Gray approaches the underlying problem through his concept of “strategic effect.” In The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (2010), he treats strategy as the connection between tactical and operational action and consequences that ultimately matter politically. His formulation of this relationship is especially helpful. Strategy performs the “translation function” between tactical and operational action and strategic consequences ultimately directed toward political effect; its immediate product is strategic effect, registered in an opponent’s willingness or ability to continue the struggle.1

Read in that light, Maxim 43 concerns much more than the familiar warning not to confuse tactical victory with strategic victory. It confronts the central translation problem of strategy.

Wylie provides the patterns. Gray provides the translation. Platias and Koliopoulos confront the problem: how does success in action become success in strategy?

A sequential strategy may translate tactical victories progressively toward the strategic objective. A cumulative strategy can generate strategic effect through the accumulated consequences of numerous actions. But neither tactical proficiency nor the accumulation of activity establishes by itself that useful strategic effect has occurred.

Tactical accomplishment is not strategic effect.

Nor is strategic effect identical to attainment of political purpose.

Strategy must connect them.

This is also where the limits of Platias and Koliopoulos’s theoretical accomplishment become clearest. Their maxims identify many of the conditions bearing upon successful strategic translation: appropriate objectives, adequate means, knowledge of the opponent, anticipation, adaptation, alternative strategies, friction, morale, logistics, and resilience.

But mapping the conditions of strategic effect is not quite the same as explaining how strategic effect is produced.

Wylie’s concern with control and Gray’s strategic effect therefore illuminate both an achievement and a limitation of The Art of Strategy. Platias and Koliopoulos map much of the architecture within which strategic translation occurs more successfully than they specify the mechanisms through which particular actions produce particular strategic effects.

That distinction need not invalidate their claim to general theory. It does, however, define its limits. No credible general theory can eliminate an opponent’s agency, friction, contingency, uncertainty, and chance. A theory of strategy cannot guarantee effect. What it can do is identify the recurring relationships through which the production of strategic effect must be understood.

VI. What Kind of Theory?

The book’s final maxim carries the argument through time.

Maxim 50, “The marathon runner defeats the sprinter,” treats strategic resilience as more than endurance. Platias and Koliopoulos identify the direction of changes in relative power and the willingness to sustain long-term competition as central considerations. The issue is not prolongation for its own sake but the capacity to continue when doing so remains strategically worthwhile.

The final maxim also reconnects with numerous propositions encountered earlier in the book. Time, intelligence, adaptation, risk, unity, and other considerations converge in the actor’s ability to continue the contest. Read alongside Gray, this produces a useful symmetry: strategic effect concerns consequences bearing upon an opponent’s willingness or ability to continue the struggle; strategic resilience concerns preserving one’s own capacity and willingness to do so. That comparison is interpretive on the part of the reviewer rather than a formulation explicitly made by Platias and Koliopoulos, but it helps illuminate why resilience appropriately concludes their framework.

How, then, should the authors’ claim to general theory be judged?

The epilogue provides a fitting standard by adopting Gray’s four criteria for useful theory: empirical accuracy, logical consistency, common sense, and practical utility.

Judged on those terms, the theory performs surprisingly well. Its empirical breadth is impressive: propositions are repeatedly illustrated through military history, international politics, business, games, and sport. Historical illustration should not be confused with empirical validation, but for a theory intended to illuminate recurring relationships rather than generate determinate predictions, the breadth of application remains a significant strength.

Its logical consistency is also stronger than the maxim format initially suggests. Maxim 20 establishes strategic interaction and 21 derives the requirement for anticipation and adaptation. Maxims 3 and 21 feed into Maxim 42 and its recognition of strategic plurality. Maxim 43 asks whether action produces strategic consequences, while Maxim 50 reintroduces time, resilience, and numerous preceding considerations. The limitation is adjudication. When maxims point toward competing courses of action, the framework ultimately returns responsibility to strategic judgment.

Common sense is similarly both strength and potential criticism. “The opponent has a strategy, too” and “Nothing will happen as planned” hardly appear revelatory. But their significance resides less in novelty than in connection. An opponent possessing a strategy makes prediction and adjustment necessary. The absence of universal formulas permits multiple strategies. Tactical accomplishment becomes problematic once separated from strategic effect.

Some of the propositions may therefore appear obvious in isolation, but their theoretical significance emerges in combination.

Practical utility may be the theory’s greatest strength. The fifty maxims do not tell strategists what strategy to adopt. Instead, they provide questions through which a strategy can be interrogated. What is the objective? Are sufficient means available? What constrains action? What does the opponent want? How might the opponent respond? What has changed? What alternative approaches remain possible? Are tactical successes generating strategic effect? Can the contest be sustained?

They provide fewer answers than questions, but that may be precisely their theoretical value.

On those terms, Platias and Koliopoulos have done more than assemble a collection of strategic wisdom. They have constructed a recognizable general theory of strategic action.

It is not a predictive theory, nor does it yield universal strategic prescriptions. Its accomplishment is different: it identifies recurring relationships among purpose, means, constraint, agency, opposition, interaction, adaptation, execution, effect, and time.

That is considerably more than fifty sensible maxims.

VII. The Enduring Questions of Strategy

A general theory constructed this way cannot eliminate contextual judgment. Indeed, the authors’ insistence that maxims be applied flexibly and critically implies precisely the opposite. Enduring relationships still have to be interpreted under historically particular circumstances.

Here The Art of Strategy can be placed productively alongside Francis J. Gavin’s recent Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy (2025) and Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May’s enormously influential Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (1986). Gavin presents historical thinking as a cultivated sensibility useful for understanding the complexity surrounding decision-making, while Neustadt and May focus explicitly upon how decision-makers employ history.

The approaches are complementary. Platias and Koliopoulos move from accumulated strategic experience toward recurring propositions. Historical thinking moves from particular circumstances toward a disciplined understanding of whether, when, and how those propositions apply.

Maxims preserve strategic wisdom; historical thinking disciplines its application.

Seen against the longer history of strategic thought, The Art of Strategy therefore represents both continuity and departure. Like Vegetius, Machiavelli, and the compilers of Napoleon Bonaparte’s military maxims, Platias and Koliopoulos seek insights capable of surviving the circumstances that produced them. Like Jomini, and later Wylie and Gray, they seek something more systematic: relationships sufficiently enduring to support general theory.

Their distinctive contribution lies in attempting both through the same instrument.

Fifty maxims cannot tell a strategist what to do in every circumstance, nor can they abolish friction, uncertainty, contingency, or an opponent’s agency. They need not. What they can do is identify recurring structures within which strategic choices have to be made.

The resulting theory may appear insufficient if one expects it to specify how particular actions will reliably produce particular strategic effects. The maxims likewise cannot adjudicate every tension among competing strategic considerations. Judgment remains irreducible.

But that limitation clarifies rather than negates the authors’ accomplishment. A general theory of strategy need not eliminate contingency. It can identify the enduring relationships within which contingent choices must be made.

This understanding of theory has a distinguished antecedent in Clausewitz, for whom theory was not intended to provide formulas for action but to educate judgment. Theory could illuminate the relationships revealed through experience and prepare the mind for action, but it could not relieve the commander of the responsibility to judge particular circumstances.2

That returns The Art of Strategy to the problem that has followed the maxim tradition for centuries: how can particular experience yield knowledge useful in circumstances that will never repeat themselves precisely?

Platias and Koliopoulos do not answer by arguing that there is a strategy that works always and everywhere.

They identify recurring strategic relationships and constraints within which strategies have to work.

Their fifty maxims therefore provide neither fifty recipes for victory nor fifty shortcuts around the difficulty of strategic thinking. They provide something more valuable: a framework for recognizing the structure of strategic problems while preserving the responsibility of strategists to determine what those problems require.

The theory identifies what endures; judgment determines what to do about it.

That distinction also helps explain the durability of the maxim itself. Circumstances change. Technologies, institutions, actors, and problems change. Yet strategists continue to confront questions of purpose, means, opposition, interaction, adaptation, effect, and time.

The answers of strategy are contingent because the questions of strategy endure.

That may be both the central insight of The Art of Strategy and the strongest argument for taking seriously its larger claim to general strategic theory. Its fifty maxims amount to something more than collected strategic wisdom: taken together, they constitute a masterclass in strategic thinking.

Bibliography
Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Gavin, Francis J. Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2025.

Gray, Colin S. Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007.

Gray, Colin S. The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Jomini, Antoine-Henri de. The Art of War (originally published as Précis de l’art de la guerre, 1838). Translated by George H. Mendell and William P. Craighill. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1862.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. Art of War. Translated, edited, and with a commentary by Christopher Lynch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Napoleon I. The Officer’s Manual: Military Maxims of Napoleon. Edited by M. Burnod. Translated by George Charles D’Aguilar. Dublin: R. Milliken and Son, 1831.

Neustadt, Richard E., and Ernest R. May. Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision- Makers. New York: Free Press, 1986.

Platias, Athanasios, and Constantinos Koliopoulos. The Art of Strategy: 50 Maxims for War, Politics, Business and Everyday Life. London: Hurst & Company, 2026.

Vegetius. Epitome of Military Science (originally known as De re militari, c. 383–450 CE). Translated with notes and introduction by N. P. Milner. 2nd rev. ed. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996.

Wylie, J. C. Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control. 1967. Reprint, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2014.

1 Colin S. Gray, The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 81.
2 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 141–142.