The Eat the Elephant tactic is primarily focused on breaking up a significant and dangerous task into many smaller, seemingly less dangerous, challenges. In a sense you: eat your enemy’s strength. The tactical part is that each participant in one of the smaller tasks does not know how challenging and daunting is the overall strategy.
This tactic is best described as: “forcing or manipulating two of your opponents to fight each other thus weakening them to the point where neither remains a threat to you.”