Grand strategy as national survival

Grand strategy can be distilled into the art of keeping a nation going. It protects the country in wartime, preserves it in peacetime, and sustains it through the conditions between those extremes. Success need not mean conquest or another ambitious achievement; survival itself can be the strategic end. Assets and infrastructure should be judged across their intended lives rather than rejected because they do not repay their cost within five years. A practical test for strategic thinking is to ask how long a national capability must last and when its benefits should reasonably appear.