The Fabian strategy: How to trade space for time

Abstract The Fabian strategy is one of the most famous military strategies. Yet beyond notions of withdrawal and trading “space for time”, there is little clarity in the literature about how it operates. In this article, we develop a framework to explain the strategy based wearing down an adversary over time and then seeking a battlefield decision. We also examine contingent factors in shaping success or failure. In the final section, we explore what the Fabian strategy, famous for its use of time, tells us about acting strategically in the temporal domain.