Strategies and Tactics

Abstract

The words strategy and tactic share an etymological and historical origin. While the word strategy is etymologically formed by the Greek stratos (army) and agein (to guide), meaning the art of leading military operations, the word tactic comes from the Greek taktike (tekhne), meaning the art of arrangement. It was the Byzantine emperor Leo VI who around 900 first used the word strategia to express how to move armed forces, and who released the military treatise “Tactica” collecting different issues in the conduct of war, from cavalry and infantry formations to naval operations. In the Western world, though, it took until 1771 when Paul Gedeon Joly de Maizeroy translated the works of Leo VI into French that the term strategie was first coined, stressing the difference between the specific art of how a commander has to successfully move his subordinates and other aspects of a military campaigns such as tactics, logistics or building fortifications (see, e.g., Heuser 2010, p. 3).