Over the years I've come across various pompous terms occultists have been using to describe themselves either as qualities, or in some cases as unofficial titles. Besides proclaiming oneself a scholar or academic or expert or whatnot, I've also come across terms such as "strategic" to describe someone else's or their own magical thingy. A closer inspection of their work revealed that term to be incorrectly used, revealing the lack of knowledge of the individuals in question, and thus possibly making it yet another pompous term people use to describe themselves for marketing purposes.
The reason I state the above is that people often confuse strategy and tactics. Strategy is the plan constructed to set goals while tactics are the actions taken in order for those plans to succeed. Both strategy and tactics depend on quite a few factors, ranging from one's own resources and assets in general to various chronological, social and geographical ones and so on. Both strategy and tactics are multilayered, from the topmost perspective over the situation to the individual smaller perspectives on the ground, so to speak. What I mean is, from the large campaign map in the war room to the individual soldier in the trenches.
The first example of strategy is Germany's invasion of Russia in WW2 where the strategy behind "Operation Barbarossa" called for a three pronged attack performed by three individual army groups that would conquer important industrial, agricultural and administrative regions and towns. A second example would be the Russian offensive at the battle of Stalingrad where the strategy behind "Operation Uranus" called for a massive pincer movement around the German army occupying most of the city and its outskirts. And a third example would be the American concept of "island hopping" in the Pacific war, where American commanders decided to capture only those islands that are most important and not waste men and equipment fighting through each and every small island occupied by Japanese troops.
In each of these examples the tactics were left to the individual commanders of the army, division, regiment and so on that took part of the operation, as they had to attack enemy positions in certain ways based on actual circumstances on the battlefield. Some of them opted for encircling actions, others for frontal assaults, etc.
Here's another way to look at these two apparently similar yet different concepts. In early 1942 the Japanese were heading towards Australia. Then the battle of the Coral Sea took place between the Imperial Navy and the US Navy. While the Japanese won a tactical victory by sinking more (important) ships, the Americans won the strategic victory by stopping the Japanese advance, the latter resorting instead to fighting in the jungles of New Guinea where they were stopped by the Australians. Thus, their strategy to reach Australia failed although their tactics brought them success (at least in the aforementioned sea battle).
Going back in history, we have king Pyrrhus of Epirus who managed to become somewhat of a superstar in the third century B.C.E. The guy managed to defeat the Roman republic in several battles, but his victories came at such a high cost he couldn't capitalize on them by dealing a crushing blow to the Romans. Therefore, he might've been a tactical genius, but he was lacking as a strategist because he failed to see the Romans' ever growing power and their relentless persistence. As a result of this failure, he was unable to plan his fight with the Romans in the long run.
I can come up with more examples although I think that's enough to prove how making use of military terms for occult marketing purposes is silly to say the least. I'm saying this because besides making use of at least a decent ritual pattern at a decent time, with the right spirits for the job and using the proper intent to command those spirits, one must also have at least a general idea of their goal. Moreover, performing rituals in advance can prevent someone from experiencing periods of crisis so it's best to be proactive rather than reactive.
But let's say there comes a time someone encounters a crisis for some reason. These things are often do to transits and, although the person can make use of Magick Pills for Hard Transits to prevent such things from happening, they often only have so much time on their hands on any given day to perform one ritual, let alone two or more. Additionally, other needs might require their attention and magical interference and along with the fact many occultists are oblivious to astrology and thus don't consider transits, they would do no such work in that area. Whichever the case, a crisis would arise at some point.
Whenever that happens the strategy would often be to come out of the crisis with the least amount of loss and maybe even gain a bit more afterwards. One would also have to be prepared for things to be dragging on and not expect the crisis to pass that easily. I'm saying this because I've often come across people who experienced bad luck and thought it would pass quickly when it was merely the vanguard of a greater amount of hardships they would experience.
Anyway, the tactics would then consist on figuring out which forces to use to deal with the crisis and in what particular way. It's one thing to ask the spirits to "remove bad luck" and another thing to ask them to take care of particular aspects that make up that bad luck. So besides breaking down the problem into individual parts that would be targeted by individual rituals, using the proper statement of intent in each of those rituals is important and I've talked about this in Magic Words.
And now let's come up with an example of strategy and tactics based on actual medieval history. Many are aware of Vlad Ţepeș (the Impaler), a medieval prince of Valahia that later was bastardized into a Victorian horror story character. During his tumultuous reigns he had plenty of clashes, large and small, with plenty of enemies, both domestic and foreign. His biggest and most notable threat was, in the long run, the Ottoman Empire.
At some point the Ottomans invaded Vlad's country and the prince had to defend himself against an overwhelming force. As such, his strategy was to gradually weaken that force. For this he used scorched earth tactics, thousands of booby traps meant to cripple both physically and psychologically, as well as hit and run, guerilla style skirmishes. On top of that, his tactics also included biological warfare in the form of infested water sources and also sending people infected with the plague in the path of the marching Ottomans. Later on, he resorted to psychological warfare in the form of the now famous forest of the impaled.
When it came to actual combat, Vlad also thought outside the box. Seeing his strategy was only partially working, he changed it and decided to deal a deadly blow right in the heart of the enemy. His new strategy consisted on killing the sultan directly by raiding the Ottoman camp at night. For this he employed infiltration tactics that would cause confusion among enemies and he himself went inside the enemy camp disguised as a turk, seeking the sultan's tent.
The fighting tactics consisted of a pincer movement attack, with Vlad leading half the army and one of his boyars the other half. Although he managed to inflict great damage to the enemy in terms of manpower and supplies, he failed to kill the sultan for reasons that are beyond this article, one of them being the probable betrayal of the guy who was supposed to lead the other half of the army into battle and didn't.
On the other hand, when he dealt with treacherous boyars who were merely seeking their own benefits and were always ready to sell out a prince, he took another approach. He invited all of them along with their families for Easter meal. After the meal the boyars were swiftly impaled and their remaining family members were sent to labor at building fortresses.
The same applies in our occult endeavors based on whatever circumstances we're facing. Let's say some people want to kick your ass badly for some reason. The reason itself is not important, but their intentions are and they're putting you in great danger. I for one would use carpet bombing in this scenario and slam each and everyone of them and as many of their family members I can with as many forces as possible so that they'd be too busy gathering their bones from the ground to even remember you. This is strategy. Tactics would then require you to select the best forces for the curses, know what to ask of them, figure out the best ritual times immediately available and so on.
But if someone is simply talking crap behind your back you can simply hit them with one ritual to turn that crap back against them. I've done this several times and it's a very effective way of working with Mercury, among many other things. Within a few days to no more than a couple of weeks the target ended up being targeted by those to whom they were spreading lies against me or the other people on behalf of whom I've done such rituals.
Now, the strategy here is important because in my opinion it's far more effective to make them stop by turning things against them by giving the spirits a free hand to expose their lies to people after a single ritual than to make them stop by causing meteors to rain down upon their entire family through what, from experience, would require more than one ritual. That is, if you also want it done as fast and as terrible as possible, otherwise a single ritual can potentially do that although it'd have to navigate through more probabilities. Whereas several rituals involving several forces, each covering somewhat different probabilities and thus when acting together they'd cover a wider range of probabilities.
In short, for this surgical strike example the strategy is to make the target stop talking crap. The tactics is to appeal to Mercury and command its spirits to turn whatever crap the target is talking against them.
As you can see, strategy and tactics go hand in hand, both in actual warfare and in occult matters. They also work that way in many other areas, such as economy or politics and so on. While there are examples of people being good strategists but poor tacticians and the other way around, they usually ended up losing because the better you're able to see both the big picture and the small details the more you're likely to succeed.
To conclude, calling oneself a strategist or a tactician alone is silly to say the least, representing clear evidence to me they're admitting they're actually not that good. Getting back to the title of this article, both carpet bombing and surgical strikes are tactics that can be employed based on the overall strategy.
And by the way, my life ruining curses are pretty much carpet bombing using surgical strikes. Talk about strategy and tactics ;)
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