Tactics

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(Redirected from Tactical)

Tactics is the collective name for methods of winning a small-scale conflict, performing an optimization, etc. This applies specifically to warfare, but also to economics, trade, games and a host of other fields such as negotiation. Tactics and strategy are often confused.

Tactics are the actual means used to gain a goal.
Strategy is the overall plan.

An example of the difference:

The overall goal is to win a war against another country.
The strategy is to undermine the other nation's ability to wage war by annihilating their military.
The tactics (told to the combatants) are to do very specific things in a specific place.

Michel de Certeau writes of the differences in The Practice of Everyday Life. Like strategy, tactics operate in space. However, unlike a strategy which creates its own autonomous space, “a tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. … The space of a tactic is the space of the other” (ibid., 36-37). A tactic is deployed “on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power.” One who deploys a tactic “must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them” (ibid. 37). Tactics, then, are isolated actions or events that take advantage of opportunities offered by the gaps within a given strategic system yet the tactician never holds onto these advantages. Tactics cut across a strategic field, exploiting gaps in it to generate novel and inventive outcomes.

There is also an anime by the name of Tactics.