tactics

Military thinking pairs it with strategy and keeps the two apart. Strategy decides what a campaign is for, and tactics decides how each engagement serves that purpose. As a discipline it does not take a number: you study tactics and write a manual on tactics, but you never count them. For the arrangement of troops in a particular fight, see the battlefield arrangement.

Here the word is simply countable: one tactic, several tactics, each a separate maneuver aimed at some end. In games, a tactic can even be a sequence of moves that wins material. The same spelling also names the military science, which is uncountable. A quick test tells them apart: if a number fits in front (three tactics), you have the plural; if it does not, you have the discipline.

Outside warfare, the word carries battlefield vocabulary into everyday life: any planned way of getting something done. It sits most naturally after a noun that names the method or the aim, as in scare tactics or hiring tactics. In that position it still keeps a trace of the military sense, a calculated campaign rather than mere habit.

Where the military science is the subject taught, this is the thing done: the actual placing and moving of units in one engagement. That is why it so often comes with a possessive or a describing word, as in the general's tactics or defensive tactics. It is also why these tactics can be judged sound or reckless after the battle is over.