When Strategic Frameworks Misrecognize the Game

Great-power competition today operates according to fundamentally different strategic logics.  Some contests reward decisive action and culminate in identifiable outcomes.  Others favor cumulative positioning, constraint, and time -- all producing advantage but without resolution.  American strategy has historically been oriented toward the first logic.  Increasingly, it finds itself confronting the second.

Yet in today’s strategic environment—particularly in long-term competition with China—those expectations increasingly fail. There is no decisive battlefield, no culminating engagement, no terminal political moment that resolves the contest. The struggle unfolds instead through influence, access, standards, institutions, and time itself.

This mismatch is not primarily a failure of resources or resolve. It is a failure of strategic recognition—of seeing what kind of contest is being played. Few observers diagnosed this problem earlier, or more clearly, than Scott Boorman.

Boorman, though, did not crudely maintain there is a direct causal lineage between Maoist practice and the game of Go.  Rather, he saw in Go an analytic model that clarifies a strategic logic that Maoist practice already exhibited.  Maoist strategy treated conflict as a continuous process of shaping conditions rather than a sequence of discrete engagements, each of which is aimed at decisive victory.  Military action served political positioning within a broader logic of gradual encirclement.  Time was viewed as an asset, not as a constraint.  Space was not seized outright, but gradually enclosed.  Victory emerged when the opponent’s options slowly disappeared, not when their forces were destroyed.  Boorman's insight was not tactical but, in a way, more grammatical -- this was a different grammar of strategy.

Western analysts invariably treated this initial work of Boorman's as a historical curiosity.  Perhaps useful for understanding insurgency, but not generalizable to nation-state competition.  That dismissal missed the deeper point.  What Boorman identified was a diagnostic error in how Western strategic frameworks conceptualized conflict: the assumption that all rational competitors ultimately seek decisive resolution, even when pursued indirectly. Maoist strategy did not.

More than fifty years later, Boorman returned to this theme in The Three Faces of Sun Tzu (2024), this time distilling recurring elements found in the canonical author of Eastern strategic thought -- formlessness, interface management, the economy of effort -- into a general analytic framework. Once again, Boorman's analysis did not prescribe imitation, but sought to clarify how different strategic systems organize meaning.

Boorman was not offering an alternative doctrine for the United States to adopt.  He was diagnosing why Western strategic frameworks generate systematic misinterpretation when applied to adversaries operating under different strategic grammars.

The Persistent American Blind Spot

The relevance of Boorman’s diagnosis is clearer today than at any point since the Cold War.  For U.S. military professionals, particularly those involved in planning, force design, and professional military education, the danger is not insufficient action, but misaligned expectation.  When competition is framed as something to be resolved rather than managed, then success metrics only distort, patience erodes, and positional losses accumulate unnoticed.

Competition with China does not hinge on territorial conquest or force-on-force battle. We are increasingly aware it unfolds across supply chains, technology standards, legal regimes, narratives, and institutions.  Gains are cumulative.  Losses are often invisible until they are irreversible.  The contest has no obvious endpoint.

But American strategy still tends to search for decisive levers:  deterrence thresholds, "red lines", kinetic dominance, or singular moments of choice.  When those fail to materialize, the response is more often conceptual confusion than strategic adaptation.

This confusion has produced a familiar pattern.  Faced with an adversary operating positionally, American strategists reach for a language of hybridity exemplified in familiar phrases like:

These formulations already acknowledge -- implicitly -- that the old grammar is insufficient.  Yet they still stop short of explaining why.

Boorman helps illuminate this problem.  Hybrid language does not necessarily reflect a successful synthesis of strategic logics.  It seems to reflect compensatory behavior -- an attempt to reconcile incompatible grammars without recognizing their structural differences.  In practice, this misrecognition surfaces most clearly in planning horizons and in assessment frameworks.  Campaign design, deterrence signaling, and force posture decisions become routinely evaluated against near-term thresholds and discrete milestones, even when the underlying competition rewards cumulative positioning and delayed effect.

Why “Hybrid Strategy” Keeps Reappearing

American strategy is institutionally oriented toward closure:  clear objectives, measurable outcomes, identifiable victories.  But positional strategies deny closure.  They replace resolution with "persistence" and substitution with "accumulation".  When U.S. institutions oriented toward linear resolution confront positional adversaries, three recurring patterns emerge.

First, American strategists selectively borrow techniques -- cyber operations, "lawfare", standards-setting -- without fully internalizing the logic that governs them.  These tools are treated more as supplements to decisive strategy rather than as expressions of a different strategic grammar.

Second, the doctrinal language expands.  New concepts proliferate, not because strategy has been resolved into a now coherent whole, but because strategy has become harder to articulate using existing categories.  At the level of professional practice, this instability is visible in how strategy documents and planning guidance oscillate between demands for patience and expectations of decision advantage.  Staff processes are tasked with producing clarity, timelines, and end-states -- even as the competitive environment resists such closure.

Third, tension is misread as synthesis.  The coexistence of "patience and decisiveness", "encirclement and thrust", "influence and dominance" is characterized as a “hybrid approach,” when in fact it represents an oscillation between incompatible modes of reasoning.

Boorman’s value, then, is diagnostic.  He shows that what appears as hybridity in U.S. strategic conceptualization is often instability.  It is a system struggling to reconcile different logics without a conceptual framework for understanding their limits.

Why the Problem Cannot Be Solved by Integration

It is tempting to conclude that the solution lies in a better balance: more finely calibrating Eastern patience with Western decisiveness, or positional play with operational dominance.  Much contemporary commentary points in this direction.

But Boorman’s work suggests caution.  Eastern positional strategy is not modular.  It is not a set of tools that can be bolted onto a Western framework.  It rests on different assumptions about time, agency, legitimacy, and success.  It tolerates ambiguity in ways that Western political and military institutions often cannot.  In long-term competitions defined by persistence rather than resolution, that asymmetry becomes strategically consequential.  This does not mean the United States cannot adapt.  But it does mean that current approaches to adaptation are likely to remain partial, episodic, and unstable.

What often appears as a “hybrid” American strategy should be better understood not as a coherent synthesis, but as an unresolved alternation between strategic grammars -- each effective in certain conditions, but neither fully assimilable to the other.

Recognizing this matters.  It explains why American strategy often appears tactically active yet strategically dissatisfied. It explains why gains feel temporary and why rivals seem perpetually ahead of the curve.

Contemporary Implications Without Prescription

Viewed diagnostically, Boorman’s insights clarify several contemporary challenges.

For military professionals the challenge is not unfamiliar domains, but misaligned expectations about what competition should look like and how progress should register.  Planning, assessment, and reporting processes often assume that competition will produce decisive moments, visible milestones, or movement toward resolution.  In contests structured to deny these elements, those expectations distort how success, patience, and risk are judged, thereby creating pressure for clarity and closure where the logic of the competition denies both.

For example, in the Indo-Pacific the proliferation of overlapping partnerships and informal networks reflects an intuitive grasp of positional competition.  Yet these arrangements remain rhetorically framed as "deterrence mechanisms" rather than as long-term structures of constraint.

Similarly, in the context of Taiwan, debates oscillate between calls for decisive clarity and strategic ambiguity.  But both are just attempts to impose a linear resolution on a positional problem.

And in cyber and information domains, the emphasis on retaliation and defense persists despite evidence that, again, cumulative positioning -- not decisive response -- determines outcomes.

Boorman does not tell us what doctrine to adopt.  He shows us why our existing categories fail to capture what is happening.

Conclusion: Seeing the Board Clearly

The United States does not lack power.  It lacks a sufficiently refined grammar for recognizing contests that do not end.

Scott Boorman’s enduring contribution is not a strategy to imitate, but a lens that exposes strategic misrecognition.  He helps to explain why American strategic practice repeatedly searches for decisive moments in competitions structured to deny them.  He also suggests why hybrid language proliferates when synthesis proves elusive.

This essay does not propose a new doctrine.  But with Boorman's help, it does propose a clearer diagnosis:  American strategy is operating across multiple strategic grammars without an awareness of their intrinsic incompatibilities.  Until that awareness is made systemically explicit, U.S. adaptation will remain partial, frustration recurrent, and success difficult to define.

Strategic failure does not begin with the wrong answer.  It begins with asking the wrong question -- and in playing the wrong game.

Lawrence J Kaiser, Ph.D. is a geopolitical analyst and writer focused on strategic competition, alliance dynamics, and the evolution of strategic thought.