Some opponents don't have a capital city.
Alexander the Great ran into this in what is now Iran, fighting the Scythians — a tribe nobody could figure out how to defeat. There was no fortress to take, no supply depot to burn, no king whose capture would end it. They were horsemen, and they fought in a fluid, almost chaotic style, and they were simply always somewhere else.1
Greene's account of what Alexander worked out is short and the whole idea is in it:
Alexander the Great saw the center of gravity as their complete mobility on horseback and their fluid, almost chaotic style of fighting.1
The thing holding the Scythians up was not a thing. It was a capability.
Having identified it, Alexander did not try to become faster, or to build more cavalry, or to chase them.
He simply plotted to neutralize the source of this power by luring them on to enclosed ground in which they could not use their cavalry and pell-mell tactics. He defeated them with ease.1
Nothing was taken away from the Scythians. They still had the horses, the riders, the skill and the doctrine. Every asset was intact and none of it could be used.
That is the whole technique: you do not remove the capability, you remove the conditions it requires.
Greene generalises it directly:
Your enemy's center of gravity can be something abstract, like a quality, concept, or aptitude on which he depends: his reputation, his capacity to deceive, his unpredictability. But such strengths become critical vulnerabilities if you can make them unattractive or unusable.1
That last sentence is the hinge, and it contains two separate methods. Unusable is Alexander's — change the terrain. Unattractive is different, and it's the one the chapter demonstrates on a person.
Muhammad Ali's campaign against Joe Frazier is the second case, and it works on the other half of the sentence.
Frazier's power was not merely physical. It was a particular kind of composure — the relentless, unbothered pressure of a fighter who did not get drawn.
Ali went at it before every fight, calling him an Uncle Tom and a tool of the white man's media, and kept taunting him inside the ring itself.1
Frazier became obsessed with Ali, could not think about him without bursting with anger.1
Frazier's composure was still there in principle. It had simply been made expensive to hold, because holding it in the face of a public accusation about his standing as a Black man meant appearing to accept the accusation. Every route was costly.
Greene's summary:
Controlling Frazier's mind was the key to controlling his body.1
Why aim at conditions rather than at the capability itself? Because capabilities are usually the hardest thing an opponent has, and conditions are usually the softest.
The Scythian cavalry could not be beaten. The ground could be chosen.
And the psychological return is disproportionate. Greene states it as the chapter's strongest claim:
You can create no greater sense of panic in your enemies than that of being unable to use their strengths.1
An opponent who has lost a resource can adapt — they know what they've lost and can plan around the hole. An opponent whose strength is intact and inoperative has nothing to adapt to. They keep reaching for the thing that has always worked and it keeps not working, and the failure is unattributable.
The catch is that abstract centres are much harder to see than physical ones, and for a specific reason: a capability doesn't look like a dependency.
A city on a map is obviously a thing that can be lost. Mobility, unpredictability, reputation, the ability to deceive — these read as properties of the opponent rather than as arrangements requiring maintenance. Nobody thinks of their own reputation as a supply line.
Which produces the practical test. Ask of any strength: what does this need in order to work?
Mobility needs open ground. Unpredictability needs an audience that hasn't seen the pattern. A reputation needs an unchallenged story. A capacity to deceive needs a target who is not already suspicious. Each of those is a condition, and conditions are attackable when the underlying strength is not.
Someone is beating you with a quality rather than a resource. They're faster. They're better liked. They're unreadable. They have a reputation that arrives before they do.
Stop trying to match it. That's the reflex and it is the trap — it commits you to competing on the axis they were selected for.
Instead, take the strength and ask what it needs. Do it literally, in writing, and be specific:
Then choose the ground rather than the moment. Alexander did not fight the Scythians better; he fought them somewhere else. Ask which venue, format, timescale or audience makes their advantage inoperative — and get the contest moved there before you engage.
And watch for the tell that it's working. You are not looking for them to be weaker. You are looking for them to keep doing the thing that has always worked, harder, with less effect — reaching for the tool and finding it inert. That is the panic Greene names, and it is also the point at which they are most likely to do something rash.
The defensive version is one question, and it's worth asking about yourself: what does my main strength require in order to function, and who could take that away without ever touching me?
The Scythian campaign is thinly sourced in Greene — a two-sentence account with no dates, no location beyond "modern-day Iran," and no detail of how the luring was accomplished. It functions in the chapter as an illustration rather than a case, and should be read that way. The Ali–Frazier material is well documented. [POPULAR SOURCE]
The two cases demonstrate different mechanisms and Greene runs them together. Alexander changed the physical environment so a capability could not operate. Ali changed a man's emotional state so a capability was not available to him. Both are "making a strength unusable," but one is terrain selection and the other is provocation, and they require entirely different access to the opponent — you can choose ground without their consent, and you cannot get inside someone's head without their attention.
And the Ali case has a cost the chapter doesn't record. The taunts were not generic trash talk. Calling Frazier an Uncle Tom and a tool of the white man's media was a public racial attack on a Black fighter, in a period when that carried real weight, and Frazier carried the wound for decades afterward — long past any competitive purpose it served. Greene presents it as an elegant identification of a centre of gravity. It was also a man's standing used as a target because it was the softest thing available, which is precisely what the chapter recommends.
Against Strategy 16, this is the parent chapter's most transferable idea and its least developed — it gets one paragraph among five categories of centre. It deserves more weight than the physical ones, because in most non-military conflict there is no capital to take, and the hub is almost always a capability.
Against Strategy 15: Forcing Strategies the overlap is substantial. "Shift the battlefield" and "lure them onto enclosed ground" are the same move, and Greene teaches them in consecutive chapters without connecting them. The distinction available: Strategy 15 shifts terrain to somewhere you are strong; this shifts terrain to somewhere they are inoperative. Those often coincide and are not the same target, and the difference shows up when you have no strength to play to — Alexander did not beat the Scythians on enclosed ground because he was good at enclosed ground.
Against Strategy 10: Deterrence Strategies there is a clean inversion. Strategy 10 teaches you to build a fearsome reputation as a strength. This page notes that reputation is an abstract centre of gravity and can be made unusable. The book supplies the weapon and the counter and never puts them together — a reputation that has been made specific rather than general stops deterring, because deterrence runs on unexamined implication.
Business → Attacking the Conditions of a Moat. The commercial analogue is precise. Competitors rarely lose their advantages; they lose the conditions those advantages require. A distribution advantage needs the channel to remain the channel. A data advantage needs the data to remain proprietary. A brand advantage needs the category to remain one where brand is how people choose.
The insight the pairing produces: the most effective competitive attacks change what the market is buying rather than trying to out-supply what it currently buys. An incumbent with an unmatched sales force does not lose to a better sales force; it loses when purchasing moves online and a sales force becomes an expense. This is why incumbents so often report that they were never out-competed on the merits — they weren't. Their strength was intact and stopped being relevant, and the failure was unattributable from inside, which is exactly the disorientation Greene names as the panic of being unable to use your strengths.
Psychology → Why a Capability Doesn't Feel Like a Dependency. People experience their competencies as properties of themselves — I am fast, I am persuasive, I read people well — rather than as performances that require particular conditions. That framing is comfortable and it is also a blind spot.
The insight neither field gives alone: this is why competent people are more fragile to a change of context than they expect, and why the fragility is invisible in advance. The skill really is theirs; the conditions never registered as part of the arrangement, so nothing gets monitored. A great in-person negotiator moved to written negotiation does not perceive a missing condition — they perceive themselves failing, which is far more destabilising and far harder to correct, because the diagnosis points at the self rather than the room. The practical consequence runs both ways: it's the mechanism you exploit in an opponent, and the audit you owe yourself. Every strength you'd name is a conditional, and knowing the conditions is the difference between being moved and being dismantled.
You almost never have to take a capability away — you have to take away what it runs on. The Scythians kept every horse and every rider and lost anyway, because Alexander picked the ground. Which makes the useful question about any formidable opponent not how do I match this but what does this require in order to work, and the answer is usually softer, cheaper and closer than the strength itself.