As both a former army officer as well as someone who appreciates historical Chinese, it pains me to say that I found it underwhelming. I’m not saying that any one on here is like this, but in my experience it def attracts a certain type who, among other things, have a zero sum, “business is war” mindset that’s a tad creepy. Unlike everyone I know who has actually served .
Sun Tzu's work was aimed at nobled who had zero experience and knowledge in warfare; a lot of it is low-hanging fruit, but you have to build up the basis for these things like "make sure your soldiers have food" and "don't tell your opponent what you're up to" in these people.
It's why I don't understand why in the US, the president is also the top military commander. I'm sure they have good advisors and the good ones have done their homework, but it's not their profession in the end.
> It's why I don't understand why in the US, the president is also the top military commander.
Somebody has to be in charge of the military. If that person is just someone promoted from within, you're never more than one person's decision from a coup d'etat, "A republic, if you can keep it". So, an elected leader it is.
Of the three branches of the US government, only one is intended to provide an executive function, to decide, in an instant where necessary, without deliberation and compromise. The President. So that's the right person for the job of ultimate military commander, and it's one of the few things about that job which the voters seem to actually have some idea about.
Both the US and UK systems are under-staffed. The UK shares the job of executive leader and legislative leader (very different skill sets) under one role "Prime Minister" - while the US shares the job of executive leader and head of state (a figurehead) which also require totally different skill sets under the role of "President". This would make sense with a very small population, but it's crazy to imagine these huge countries couldn't find two people to do these very different jobs even a little better than one man (and in the US it has always been a man somehow) can do both.
According to the wiki, it's the chancellor in wartime (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundeswehr). Either way, it's a civilian position that's temporarily filled by the ruling government which was democratically elected.
What counts as "war" though? Technically every President since Roosevelt has used military force without a formal declaration of war by Congress. And modern Germany is not a military power projecting hegemon. I can't imagine a civilian defense minister (who in a coalition government maybe isn't even the party of the chancellor) is ordering politically important drone strikes like the US President. If Germany was in similar role the system would quickly evolve that the Chancellor would order the military.
It's traditionally the head of state, so King makes sense. In Bulgaria the president is mostly a figurehead with very limited power (basically easily repeatable veto, appoint ambassadors and temporary cabinets when there's no active government pending elections), but is still the commander in chief of the armed forces.
The UK - as usual - is a patchwork of conflicting traditions.
There is no Royal Army. But all members of the armed forces, police, and certain prominent political appointments, swear an Oath of Allegiance to the monarch.
Note this is not to the country. And certainly not to the people. Not even to the Crown, which is a kind of abstract superclass of British monarchs in general.
The Royal Navy does not have to swear this oath. It exists by direct Royal Prerogative which means it's assumed to be loyal, pretty much by definition.
Indeed, my understanding is that the British Army was created by and legally answerable to Parliament, unlike the other armed forces. As you mentioned, a remain of mistrust after the monarch was restored to the throne after the civil war (though the navy did remain under the monarch's control). Also, there are royal units within the Army, but the whole of the army is not regimented in this way.
> It's why I don't understand why in the US, the president is also the top military commander. I'm sure they have good advisors and the good ones have done their homework, but it's not their profession in the end.
War is ultimately a political endeavor; the goal of a war is to compel, by use of military force, some sort of political objective. It only makes sense then that the person in charge of directing when and where that military force is used is also the person who is empowered to carry out the political policy of the entire country.
For people who rise to the top of the military from within, every political problem becomes a nail in want of the military hammer for a solution, and thus the default answer to every crisis tends to become war. The Cuban Missile Crisis was defused without a war because both Kennedy and Khrushchev couldn't bring themselves to push the button marked nuclear war, while virtually the entire military establishment was convinced, and forcefully arguing, that the only way out of the situation was to be the first to push that button.
I’m not sure about the “military hammer for a solution”. At least not these days. Sure there are some- Wesley Clark’s push into Kosovo seemed suspect to me at the time. But there are many of the Colin Powell types who resist these unnecessary entanglements.
I wouldn’t be surprised if back in the Grenada/Panama era of the 80’s that there may have been many chomping at the bit. These days, I’m guessing not so much.
Not sure why you are using Colin Powell as an example. He’s one of the worst stooges, helping both covering up the My Lai massacre and presenting false evidence for the UN regarding the Iraqi WMDs.
I’ve never heard about Powell and My Lai. Feel free to point me in the right direction.
As to Iraq and WMDs, you could prob call him a “stooge” if you wanted to. But the little I know from a distance, that was something that racked his conscience for the rest of his life.
A relative told me in the 70's that I never had to worry about WW III until Yugoslavia disintegrates after Tito dies. He said all the realistic war plans revolved around that, which is why all the NATO cadres were all hysterical in the 90s.
Grenada, they never had time to think about it - it took three days for the most mighty military in the world to secure one of the tiniest nations in the world.
After 9/11, Rumsfeld asked the Army for their plans. They gave him a stack of plans on occupying Afghanistan and requirement for 600K troops (per doctrine) - they had no intention of volunteering. He was furious to be sidelined when the CIA guy convinced W it could all be done with small teams and airpower.
For Iraq, Rumsfeld agreed to all their plans and they saluted happily when he said to not make any occupation plans...
> the president is also the top military commander
It's also true in quite some other countries, and it is to ensure that the military remains subordinated to the civil government, after the many examples of military coups in History.
They can, but you have over a million members of the military who have all sworn an oath that they will "obey the orders of the President of the United States." If they had all sworn an oath that they will "obey the orders of General McEvilFace," it would be a lot easier to maneuver all your coup pawns into place even over the protestations of the president, even without those soldiers needing to fully realize that a coup was being set up.
Americans disagree about a lot, including how to interpret the Constitution and which parts of it are more or less important. But I would really hope that myself and any other random American can at least agree that our Constitution is the rule book that we must all live by and that it is ultimately what binds us as a nation.
It's interesting that this shared allegiance to the Constitution was still strained to the breaking point 160+ years ago. I wonder how U.S. military leaders must have felt when huge swaths of the military (and military leaders) decided that bond was no longer strong enough for them to maintain their loyalty to it.
I agree that's what Americans should agree on, but did you miss the part where certain very prominent Americans have been vocal about how inconvenient the Constitution is and that any provision of it which they disagree with should be 'terminated'? I'm afraid we're not all on the same page wrt the Constitution.
> did you miss the part where certain very prominent Americans have been vocal about how inconvenient the Constitution is and that any provision of it which they disagree with should be 'terminated'
Those prominent Americans include the original authors of said constitution: they always knew it would be a living document to be modified via amendments. Constitutional "originalists" who believe we should be totally beholden to a 240-year-old document with no changes are the ones who are not following either the spirit or the letter of the constitution.
I'm not talking about originalists, and I'm not talking about amending the Constitution through legitimate political process. I'm talking about people who feel that parts of the Constitution that they do not like they simply don't have to follow. That's about as unAmerican as it gets.
They can, of course, but it's harder for coup-ing superior officers to make dozen of thousands of 20y.o. Grunty McGruntFace follow them to overthrow the government when the very oath they swore was to that government, and that this oath explicitly states they don't have to follow General von Teufel orders in this case.
> It's why I don't understand why in the US, the president is also the top military commander.
Simple: the founders of the US thought it would protect our democracy to ensure that a elected civilian was in charge of the military. It's mostly worked.
Isn't there an even simpler answer? Back then most countries had their king ad their top military commander and the president of the US had a very similar role to a king.
Nope. There's a lot of writing about this issue from various founding fathers. There was great desire to avoid the President appearing to be a king or turning into one.
But it was still the model they were working from, the way of organizing state power that they understood and were familiar with. The three branches gov is in a lot of ways a secular and formalized form of the constraints religious and aristocratic political influence had on european monarchy in the era just preceding the revolution.
Plus what they say they wanted to achieve is not necessarily what they did achieve. That's not to say they failed and the president is a king, but the president is not entirely un-king-like either.
"Commander", yes, but they command very little. During World War II, President Roosevelt gave exactly two direct commands to the military - that they had to divert 50 long-range bombers to help protect Atlantic convoys, and that North Africa be invaded in 1942. In a four-year-long war, he gave two commands. Contrast that with Hitler, who micromanaged his military, and did them no good by doing so.
So, yes, he does have final command (subject to "legal orders" and similar restrictions). But he's not commanding in the normal sense of a military commander.
It's why I don't understand why in the US, the president is also the top military commander. I'm sure they have good advisors and the good ones have done their homework, but it's not their profession in the end.
Because technocracy is an awful form of government. In s democracy the buck has to stop with a politician, otherwise its tyranny.
They're not, really. The way that you advise the president on military issues is you give them prepackaged "decisions" that are limited variations on the same choice. The president's authority over the military is a legal fiction much like many other legal fictions that keep the system going.
> The president's authority over the military is a legal fiction
No, its not; and its kind of odd to say that during the era when not omly does the President fully exercise that power, they have for all practical purposes had it augmented by delegation (substantively on paper, and even more broadly in practice) of Congress’ power to declare war.
It’s true that most Presidents don’t micromanage the military, but they very much do command it, and a power generally used with some discretion and reserve is not the same as a legal fiction.
But the important thing about the President’s Commander-in-Chief role is not that it is a power (though it is), but that it is a constraint on the Congressional power to orgabize and set rules for the military.
I can guarantee you that there have been times where the top military brass walked into a meeting with the president with 3 options and left with an order to come up with something better. I have no insider knowledge but at the end of the day the president has the final say. Now I don't know how frequently the president overrides his military advisers but it must happen.
Not only that, but it's not like the head of state is alone with the military brass in such meetings. There will be people there both from the permanent civilian bureaucracy as well as advisors of some type from the party in power.
Ultimately, military grand strategy is a domain of politics as much as it is about how to wage war. The agendas and objectives are ultimately continuations of political goals of whoever is in power. During a war, the fighting must be coordinated with diplomacy, economy/trade/manufacturing and public relations/propaganda, all of which generals tend to know little about.
And even if the President is not the one making the micro decisions, he/she definitely is responsible for making sure the war is waged in a way that is aligned with the general objectives of the administration.
This means defining objectives, access to resources as well as defining the rules of engagement. And equally importantly, listen to the military and determine when the time is right to actually provide additional resources or permissions, despite political costs.
Perhaps. But it does prevent Latin America (and elsewhere) style military rule.
Instead we get military generals who act more like politicians the more senior they get (proven by study). And it seems that often politicians with little to lose and a lot to prove are often more hawkish than the military around them (Hilary Clinton, Wolfowitz, et al).
That's true in practice. So in theory, if the president wants things badly enough, he can keep push harder and also keep firing and hiring people until he gets what he wants.
Of course, that style is a lot harder, and thus consumes a lot more limited attention.
Most HNers, and sadly I include myself in this, couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag. We read Sun Tzu because it is recommended reading in the intelligentsia's mindset. It seems cool to learn battle technique from an ancient Chinese text. If I wanted to learn how to really fight a battle I'd go to Sandhurst or West Point.
Origins according to a many-times-over gilded comment on reddit (I forget which sub) went something like this -
subservient office culture in Japan where the big boss was reading it, so it spread to the entire organisation from where it spread to other organisations. It got to a point where no one knew why they were reading it, just that they had to. Around the same time it caught imagination of the Americans because of the Japanese (who were actually pretty efficient at their jobs).
Will look for the comment and post if it takes me less than 15 mins.
Edit: forgot how bad reddit search was. While I did not find what I was looking for, this [0] is one high quality answer you may be interested in. Only top comments are heavily moderated on that sub.
Modern militaries don't seem to enjoy the freedom to act and maneuver that a classic general enjoyed in the field (for good reasons). Modern requirements for transparency and democracy, and the interest of the military industrial complex don't help when you try to "appear weak when you are strong" or to "disguise a plan". For a mid-level army officer these things are probably even less applicable.
I still think there is huge potential for an overarching, creative strategy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the difficulties of Soviet/US forces in Afghanistan were not an accident, but sun-tzu'd in some way.
On the other hand, Russians employed „appear strong when you're weak“ very well leading up to Ukraine war. Everybody believed the myth of the 2nd army of the world. However, they ate their own propaganda...
> Modern militaries don't seem to enjoy the freedom to act and maneuver that a classic general enjoyed in the field (for good reasons). Modern requirements for transparency and democracy
I think modern democracies do a much better job of separating military and civilian leadership than dictatorships do. Putin seems to be too personally involved in micromanaging his war, insisting on conquests that are simply not possible (like Bakhmut and some other places). Hitler similarly interfered with his generals and hampered his war effort that way.
Zelensky is of course involved with the war, but he listens to his generals.
> "appear weak when you are strong"
That only seems useful if you want to lure the enemy into an attack in order to ambush him, but with our modern day sensibilities about the value of life, we prefer to have no attack at all. More applicable to us is "appear strong when you are weak", although such secrets never last long, so we prefer to appear strong when strong, in order to discourage any attack.
Also, Russia appeared strong while weak, and that didn't exactly work out well when Putin called his own bluff. Turns out he incorrectly believed the strong appearance of his own army. And he believed the West to be weak (or at least divided and disorganised), so he attacked.
It's not that these concerns are irrelevant, but they're a lot more complex than Sun Tzu makes them out to be, and it's possible to fall for your own disguise. Or maybe the civilian leadership can fall for the military's disguise.
That only seems useful if you want to lure the enemy into an attack in order to ambush him"
No, it is also good (necessary) for preparing a good offensive. If the enemy thinks you are weak in some area, he does not expect a push from that direction.
Ukraine did just that last fall very succesfull. Show off force and big noisy preparation of a offensive south and starting it loud. And then push hard, fast and unexpected in the north, after the enemy already moved more troops further south.
And then confusion and panic among the enemy, so a relativly small force could conquer vast lands.
> And he believed the West to be weak (or at least divided and disorganised), so he attacked.
That makes it sound as if Putin attacked because an opportunity presented itself.
I don't think that's why he attacked. I think he attacked because he felt he had no choice. Not because NATO was crowding into his borderlands, which is Putin's story; but because following the collapse of Soviet communism and the USSR, the rump Russia was clearly a state dependent mainly on resource-extraction, which desn't promise a great independent future. Especially with Europe's increasing development of non-fossil energy, earnings from fossil fuel exports could be expected to diminish rapidly.
But why Ukraine? Well, setting aside his deranged opinions about the historic unity of Ukraine and Russia, and the historic destiny of the "Rus", Ukraine was rapidly becoming closer to Europe, and Ukrainians were clearly happy with that prospect. Having a successful, happy fragment of the USSR on his border threatened his control over his own population.
> Turns out he incorrectly believed the strong appearance of his own army.
Agreed! In fact everyone overestimated the strength of his army.
> Not because NATO was crowding into his borderlands, which is Putin's story; but because following the collapse of Soviet communism and the USSR, the rump Russia was clearly a state dependent mainly on resource-extraction, which desn't promise a great independent future. Especially with Europe's increasing development of non-fossil energy, earnings from fossil fuel exports could be expected to diminish rapidly.
"Rapidly" but still on a decades scale, which Putin is unlikely to live to. Meanwhile he has forced Europe to look elsewhere for energy and drastically accelerated their plans.
> But why Ukraine? Well, setting aside his deranged opinions about the historic unity of Ukraine and Russia, and the historic destiny of the "Rus", Ukraine was rapidly becoming closer to Europe, and Ukrainians were clearly happy with that prospect. Having a successful, happy fragment of the USSR on his border threatened his control over his own population.
Poland and the Baltics are already on his border, and most of the former Warsaw Pact is already in the EU and happily progressing, with quality of life drastically better than in Russia. I really don't think this excuse works.
I guess you're right, it doesn't. I don't know what I'm talking about; I'm just someone who enjoys strategy games.
I'm also extremely interested in trying to figure out what Putin was thinking when he attacked, and why he didn't just pull back when his initial blitzkrieg failed.
I happen to think his own utterances and writings are a largely-accurate presentation of what he really believes about geo-politics; but they don't answer the "Why now?" question. I think you can understand his thinking by listening to what he says. I think he really believes "there's no such thing as Ukraine".
And regarding the Baltic states: they weren't in NATO, and individually they have short borders with Russia. Ukraine has a very long border with Russia.
> And regarding the Baltic states: they weren't in NATO
They have been in NATO since 2004. Narva in Estonia is <3 hours drive from St Petersburg, the second largest city in Russia. Poland also has a large border with Belarus which is for most intents and purposes a Russian client state. And the border with NATO argument falls even further apart when you consider that Russia occupying Ukraine will gain them hundreds of km of borders with NATO member states Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania.
> I'm also extremely interested in trying to figure out what Putin was thinking when he attacked, and why he didn't just pull back when his initial blitzkrieg failed.
> I think you can understand his thinking by listening to what he says. I think he really believes "there's no such thing as Ukraine".
I guess we'll never really know about his actual reasons, but as to why he didn't pull back - he's a strongman dictator, his whole persona is a tough guy. If he gets his nose bloodied and loses massive amounts of troops, that will be a huge blow to his reputation in Russia, which he can't really afford, lest someone near him things they can do a better job.
It appears he's psychologically unable to back down. He must double down on every stupid idea, a problem more strongman dictators seem to have. Maybe he believes he cannot lose and will ultimately win if he perseveres. Or maybe he thinks he can't afford to lose because it would ruin his image and lose his power.
My mistake, you're right. But not Finland. And I wasn't counting Poland, which was a former European imperial power; I don't think of Poland and Sweden as being Baltic states, even though their coastlines are Baltic coastlines. In the same way (roughly), I don't think of Greece as a Balkan state.
> I think he attacked because he felt he had no choice.
The feeling of having no choice tends to be influenced by incentives, though. Had NATO mobilized 5 million soldiers in eastern Poland in late 2021, with the clear message that they would send those forces into Ukraine if Putin attacked, he would probably feel differently.
Personally, I think he may have felt "it's now or never". It appears he started preparing directly after the 2020 election, and he may have misjudged Biden, thinking him too weak to respond.
> That makes it sound as if Putin attacked because an opportunity presented itself.
The west still appeared to be disrupted by COVID. The US and allies sent mixed signals on Ukraine which were interpreted as the US and West will let nature take it's course. The opportunity was there for Putin, and he took it. Putin wasn't wrong. Evidence: Biden tried to evacuate Zelenskyy leading to the famous quote, "I don't need a ride, I need ammo." The surprise to everyone was Ukraine fighting back ferociously. Now, Putin needs to realize the window has closed, and it is time to stop the madness.
Of course he has a choice. "Not having a choice" is just his own excuse for the choice he made. He could have continued trading with the EU while investing in the development of Russia, but that takes actual work and isn't glamorous. (Not to mention that much of that investment would probably be eaten by corruption.)
I think he saw a rapidly closing window of opportunity. A successful Ukraine would be a threat to his own rule over Russia, because there are a lot of ties between Russians and Ukrainians, and Russians would notice if a more EU-aligned Ukraine is more prosperous than Putin-ruled Russia, and that would undermine Putin's story of saving Russia's economy (which he did, between 2000 and 2008).
With increasingly closer ties between Ukraine and NATO, and Ukraine possibly even joining at some point, he has to take advantage of the fact that Ukraine wasn't in NATO yet. And NATO didn't respond to him taking land from Georgia in 2008, and the Crimea in 2014, so he figured they wouldn't do anything this time either. Besides, he'd invested a lot of effort into dividing the EU and NATO: funding extreme-right-wing parties all over Europe, supporting Trump, supporting Brexit, all things that seemed to make the EU and NATO weaker. But he vastly overestimated our weakness and his own strength.
That wasn't possible, and as far as I'm aware it remains impossible for now. I believe it is a prerequisite for joining NATO, that you should be in control of your internationally-recognized borders. Otherwise, at the moment of joining, the whole of NATO would instantly be at war with Russia, because NATO's supposedly a mutual defence treaty organisation.
Same goes for Georgia, as far as I can see; Georgia's internationally-recognized borders place South Ossettia inside Georgia. But South Ossettia remains occupied by Russia.
[Edit] FWIW, I don't think NATO is in shape to go to war in Eastern Europe. Western countries took advantage of the end of the Cold War and the "peace dividend" to hollow-out their armed forces and ammunition reserves. As a Brit, I'm particularly ashamed of Britain's conduct, which has involved committing huge amounts of money to two spiffy aircraft carriers, which still don't carry a full complement of F35s, and which can't operate without a fleet of destroyers and frigates, not to mention supply ships. And a new generation of strategic nuclear missile submarines. Having a stockpile of 122mm artillery shells would be massively cheaper, and a better use of money.
> I believe it is a prerequisite for joining NATO, that you should be in control of your internationally-recognized borders.
It’s not a formal prerequisite, but its probably a practical one.
> Otherwise, at the moment of joining, the whole of NATO would instantly be at war with Russia
There’s no theoretical reason the Accession Protocol for Ukraine couldn’t specify particular territories as excluded from the coverage of Article 6 until some specified future determination.
It is, and that's at least part of the reason why when Ukraine asked to join NATO, they were rejected. But NATO won't rule it out entirely, and Putin took that as a reason (a necessity, he claims) to invade Ukraine.
> Western countries took advantage of the end of the Cold War and the "peace dividend" to hollow-out their armed forces and ammunition reserves.
Even with those cuts, though, NATO has a far, far larger army than Russia. And far better. Though ammo shortages are definitely a big problem.
While you are correct that these sort of books can be taken too far (i.e. they are not an answer to everything) there is much value in studying these sorts of books (Chinese/Japanese/Indian etc.) since they are a repository of various stratagems/techniques/aphorisms/quotes which can be adapted to context (not necessarily explicit Warfare) to derive value. Human Nature has not changed much over the years though its external manifestations have. I also do not believe that you have to have served in the defense forces (which mainly focus on the mechanisms of Warfare) to understand them since they deal with general ideas/concepts/stratagems which are independent of a specific domain.
As an example, the quote Cast a Brick to Attract Jade from The 36 stratagems of War (https://changingminds.org/disciplines/warfare/36_strategems/...) is eminently usable in design/development/product plan meetings i.e. you present a simple and concrete idea as a starting point and then leave it to the attendees to build/modify/change it and come up with a best and final solution.
My interest in ancient cultures is how those people coped with life. Gilgamesh, torah, Aesop's fables, 1001 Arabian nights are interesting to me for how each culture dealt with and documented the human condition and social interactions.
To me Sun Tzu writings and all the ancient writings are about preparing one's "mind" for an attitude that can be used to cope. The commonality of story to a culture strengthens the social structure. The commonality is used to apply old wisdom to seemingly new and complex events. These writings become the common thread.
>the ancient writings are about preparing one's "mind" for an attitude that can be used to cope [with whatever Life may throw at you]
This is exactly it!
One of my interests is the study of "Worldly Wisdom"(have a bunch of books from different cultures in my collection) categorized into;
1) "Idealistic"(Ethical/Moral) - Lots of Philosophies/Holy Books/etc. deal with this.
2) "Realistic/Pragmatic"(the World as it is and not how you would like it to be) - These are the common books of Wisdom/Aphorisms/Quotes/etc. from Culture/Daily Life.
3) "Crooked/Cynical"(how to further self-interest/getting-back on wrongs) - These are books on Strategy/Kingship/etc.
I find it quite transformational studying this subject since it teaches one all aspects of dealing with/making sense of Life. With the ascendancy of Scientific thought and decline of traditional Religions it has become even more necessary for each of us to chart our own ways with whatever advice (adapted to Modern Science/Times) we can glean from these ancient texts.
I have a good collection of books on the topic of "Worldly Wisdom". Most books will span the categories and you have to tease their teachings into the above three buckets. When reading these books always remember that they were written in a specific Context/Time and hence would need reinterpretation in your specific context before application. Also as much as possible go to the original sources/authoritative translations instead of "popular" accounts of the same which are almost always dumbed down and virtually useless. The essence is in understanding the nuances and not the obvious "sound bite".
Here is a partial list in no specific order (lookup their reviews on Amazon/elsewhere on the web for details);
1) The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence by Baltasar Gracian translated by Jeremy Robbins. This book is also available as "The Art of Worldly Wisdom" translated by many others. Of these the one by Christopher Maurer is noteworthy.
2) A Pocket Mirror for Heroes by Baltasar Gracian translated by Christopher Maurer.
3) The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. Of the many translations, the one by Peter Bondanella in Oxford World's Classics is noteworthy.
4) Maxims and Reflections (Ricordi) by Francesco Guicciardini translated by Mario Domandi.
5) The First Great Political Realist: Kautilya and His Arthashastra by Roger Boesche - A very nice summary of the magnum opus "Arthashastra" from Ancient India.
6) King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kautilya's Arthasastra translated and annotated by Patrick Olivelle - A very good and modern translation of a large text.
7) The Essence of Politics (Sanskrit: Nitisara) by Kamandaki translated by Jesse Ross Knutson - A shorter Ancient Indian text in the vein of Arthashastra.
8) The Pancatantra: The Book of India's Folk Wisdom translated by Patrick Olivelle.
9) Tirukkuṟaḷ by Tiruvalluvar (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kural for details) - For a good English translation see the one translated by P.S.Sundaram and published in Penguin Classics.
10) The Art of War by Sun Tzu translated by Ralph D. Sawyer.
11) The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China translated by Ralph D. Sawyer.
12) [The Complete] Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi translated by Kenji Tokitsu.
I have left out the obvious works by Epictetus/Seneca/Cicero/Marcus Aurelius/etc. since they are all well known.
The above is a good representative of the three categories drawn from different cultures and should get you started.
> but in my experience it def attracts a certain type who, among other things, have a zero sum, “business is war” mindset that’s a tad creepy
Now, I haven't come across people quoting Sun Tzu in my career, but I know the type of person you're talking about.
They are the type to either stick around short-term as execs, just a couple years, or to escape with a golden parachute when things start to turn. Un-surprisingly, their accomplishments are often enough detrimental to the customers, the business or both. They are aggressive, but don't really have much skin in the game.
I feel like this is the Seinfeld is Unfunny effect, where something that's been woven into the very fabric of a certain field is then found to be underwhelming or cliche, because it's been copied and iterated upon so many times. But 3000 years ago The Art of War was absolutely groundbreaking.
Furthermore, as someone who like you has served in the armed forces, I agree amongst those who serve we do not think of "war is business", those in charge do absolutely think of "war as business".
I have no military background, but I like Sun Tzu's Art of War for some ideas about one's stance when engaging in "battle": I know it is more of a poetic liking than actual military advice.
As with all advice, context matters. It is good to know the rules, the best practices, the proven strategies. But it is also good to understand the context of those strategies to understand when the context has changed.
SQL is clearly the right way to store large quantities of data (some would say the only way.) Until some folk realised their context was different, and NoSql was born.
Strategy is hard because it plays out in the long term. Two roads diverge in a wood,and you have to pick one. But the consequences if that decision may be felt 20 years later, or next week, or never.
Advice from those who went before is valuable. But care must be taken to understand the context of that advice.
This reminds me of people complaining about how terrible Agile is, because Scrum is terrible. Not that Agile is immune to criticism any more than Sun Tzu is, but complaining that a philosophy built around deep understanding of a problem and flowing like water around it is bad because this sword isn't sharp is basically a category error. Sun Tzu has specific examples but it is not his examples that have kept his work alive for thousands of years. The examples became useless centuries ago. It is the principles that have kept it alive. It is not Sun Tzu's fault if a commander pays so much attention to a specific manifestation that he loses track of the underlying principles.
Around the time NoSQL took off, the default choice for any kind of data storage scenario was a traditional relational database. Choosing anything else would have raised eyebrows. But once the concept of NoSQL spread, it became an acceptable alternative and no longer a big deal.
And sure, while the basic concept of NoSQL for data storage is not new, the core concepts were not widely known until the 2010s.
Finally. I remember reading Sun Tzu and thinking "hmm all this stuff is either very specific to ancient China, or unsubstantiated". As in, everyone sounded like distilled wisdom, but it smelled. The thing that was missing I think was that normally when you read a text about something that's trying to make a general point, it cites a whole bunch of historical precedents. "Always drive deep into enemy territory, like X, Y, and Z times where they won decisively" would work better than just a bunch of "do this, do that".
Well, it's a fairly brief text. I've got a copy of Art of War here, but most of it is commentary by others. Sun Tzu's own text is not a lot. He throws out some principles without explanation or examples, and that's limiting it's practical applicability quite a bit.
I suspect much of his more questionable advice is stuff that happened to work once for him in specific circumstances, and it'd be great if he told a bit more about those circumstances. But it won't necessarily work in other circumstances.
For example, his advice to live off the enemy's supplies instead of bringing your own (which would be very expensive and cause economic problems that he surprisingly addresses). This is good advice in many cases, and has been done throughout history, but it can also go very wrong. Consider Napoleon's invasion of Russia where Russia just burned down everything in the path of the French army in order to deny them supplies, then harassed French supply lines, and defeated the French army without a single fight. Also very Sun Tzu, incidentally.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, depending on circumstances. Which Sun Tzu rarely goes into.
> For example, his advice to live off the enemy's supplies instead of bringing your own (which would be very expensive and cause economic problems that he surprisingly addresses). This is good advice in many cases, and has been done throughout history, but it can also go very wrong. Consider Napoleon's invasion of Russia where Russia just burned down everything in the path of the French army in order to deny them supplies
It's not "good advice in many cases", it was (prior to the availability of first railroads and then trucks, and with the very notable exception of all-cavalry armies operating on grass steppe) an extremely basic fact on how an army works. Bringing your own supplies was, over long distances, not just bad advice, nor just hard to do, it was logistically impossible. Napoleon did not (yet) have the choice to do it any other way, the alternative was not to invade Russia, or to do it piecemeal while consolidating and developing conquered parts before moving on, which would have taken decades.
This is not true at all. Supply lines have existed as long as organised armies have existed. Many major military campaigns have made use of supply depots, supply ports, supply trains (on pulled wagons, long before what we now call trains existed), etc. Napoleon also made use of them. Only, it's very expensive, and it's a lot cheaper to live off the land. Only living off the land also takes time, so if you want to move fast, arranging your supplies up front allows your army to move faster. But long supply lines deep into enemy territory are incredibly expensive, as well as vulnerable to raids. Which means you need to protect them, which makes them even more expensive.
It was not logistically impossible, it was incredibly expensive. And more so the deeper into enemy territory you get. But plenty of armies throughout history did bring their own supplies.
> Rather than reinvent the wheel here, I’ll note that K. Chase (op. cit.) ran these numbers assuming two-horse 1400lb wagons and found that assuming the army acquired no local food (but could get grass for the horses), for a group of thirty infantryman the first wagon doubles their range from 120 to 240 miles (less really, horses cannot be worked so many days consecutively). Doubling again to around 400 (accounting for horse rest time) requires not two but six wagons for thirty men. To double the range again would require more wagons than men.
By around 3 months of campaign, you need more wagons than men to provide a supply train that doesn't require local forage for your army (but require it for your animals). Supply trains in pre-modern times are less "let's provide all the food for our army on campaign" and more "provide the mobile granary to store everything we're looting for a few days before it's eaten." In premodern times, absent the possibility of naval supply, not foraging the local land for your food is logistically impossible.
I never said it's a good idea for all situations, but for some. It was most definitely done, so the claim that it was impossible is clearly nonsense. It was impossible in some circumstances, but possible in others. And of course it's a good idea to use local resources when they're available, but there's a big difference between that and relying entirely on local resources.
Armies used supply lines over land during the 100 Years War[0], Romans maintained a network of supply depots[1]. It happened during most time periods.
Just like there's a limit to how much food you can move how far, there's also a limit to how large an army can live off the land. Beyond a certain size, you simply need to bring your own supplies. In fact, one of Napoleon's innovations was that he organised his armies in a way that allowed larger armies than before to live off the land. But larger armies did exist before; they just had to bring supplies.
And of course you're not going to supply a large army over a distance of hundreds of miles using just carts. They used ships where possible, they used supply depots, and organised the most efficient routes by which to maintain those. But you bet lots of land travel was involved as well.
It's absolutely true, and the only thing I missed and you are not wrong about is that supplying armies via ship was possible, if they only operated near ports. That's exactly why the Roman empire conquered lands around the Mediterranean but never advanced deeply into central Europe or the middle East.
But no, neither depots nor wagon trains can supply a large army over long distances. It's not too expensive, it's impossible, because the animals that draw the wagons (and build the depots) themselves eventually consume more supplies than they can draw.
A force of 2000 men over 100 miles? Yeah, that may be in "doable, but expensive" territory. 50,000 men over 500 miles? Forget it.
They did conquer the entirety of Gaul, which is not just coast. And France isn't small. Romans built roads, supply depots, carried supplies on pack animals.
And if you think you can move 50,000 soldiers 500 miles deep into enemy territory without supply lines, you can forget about that too. Napoleon did use supply lines from Poland into Russia. Remember: we're talking about Sun Tzu's advice not to bring your own food but take it all from the enemy land, and I'm saying that doesn't work in all circumstances. I'm not saying it never works. But there are very good reasons why historically, large armies did rely on supply lines.
The importance of logistics for large armies is widely underestimated.
If you abandon your supply base, and try to live of the (enemy's) land, you have to advance continuously and quickly, like Sherman's successful campaign in Georgia and the Carolinas. If you rest for even a day or so, you deplete the available "forage" (i.e. the resources of the civilian population).
If you stick with your supply base, then a large part of your force has to be devoted to defending the supply lines; and those supply lines have to be manned, and consume supplies themselves. In the time before internal combustion engines, it was hard to maintain supply lines for armies larger than about 80,000 men, because the fodder required for horses began to exceed the supplies needed by the soldiers. Putin ran into logistics problems almost immediately; Russia depends internally on railways very heavily, but his army had to de-train at the border and switch to trucks, on narrow roads, lined with forests.
It was a primer aimed at first-time commanders (e.g. coddled nobility with zero experience), not an in-depth thing. That would take a more formal education.
Of course, 2500 years later it can be a bit difficult to put these things into context. But isn't Sun Tzu actually frequently referring to other events in the Spring&Autumn period to illustrate his points?
Philosophy often goes through cycles of distillation, where authors try to extract and condense the main points of a field, and then commentaries where seasoned practicioners of the field expound on texts that have become canonical, and contibute their own experience and points of view. For example, Cao Cao (the most powerful warlord in the Three Kingdoms period) has written extensive war journals where he also commented on Sun Tzu's works.
I’m not sure how Sun Tzu is complete garbage when his strategies were vague and often not specific, so you can adapt them according to the situation
To me the problem is that the study of war, like the study of economics or any other social study; isn’t a real science. There is no repeatable theoretical model, including The Art of War. There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations.
> like the study of economics [...] There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations
I've got great news for you! There are universal economic laws that always hold true in all situations.
For example, "man acts". You can't deny that, because denying it would be an act in itself, leading to a (performative) contradiction. From this law, and just a few others of a similar kind, you can build a whole structure of logically provable theorems that have profound implications for economics and the social sciences in general.
Is this satire? I'm sorry, I legitimately cannot tell anymore.
Anyway, if it isn't -- no, there are no universal economic laws, for the very simple reason that "humans are not always rational" and economics is fundamentally about human behavior, in groups, no less.
Predictable only insofar as it has to follow some simple rules. For example, if you own a good G, that you could use to satisfy either a desire D1, or a competing desire D2, you will choose to use G to satisfy the greater one of these two desires at that point in time.
Repeatable is even untrue, unless I misunderstand your meaning. First of all, the ranking of your goals or desires is not assumed to be constant over time. Also, it is not assumed that your world model is constant. Quite the opposite, it is often explicitly emphasized that humans have the ability to change their mind about things, for example by learning.
The law of diminishing marginal utility for example can be logically proven using this method. Alas, knowing it won't make you rich, the world is not that simple.
> the more of something you have, the less of it you want. This phenomenon is referred to as diminishing marginal utility by economists.
Okay, but I have a counter-example. Money. The people who have the most sometimes still act like penny-pinchers, and lust after even more, and haggle over the smallest things. Therefore the "law of diminishing marginal utility" is more a rule of thumb than a law.
Um, there's not a whole lot of economic laws that are less controversial than the law of diminishing marginal utility. I'll give you a rough outline.
If you own a good G, that you could use to satisfy either a desire D1, or a competing desire D2, you will logically choose to use G to satisfy the greater one of these two desires - the one with the greater subjective utility to you. Let's assume that is D1.
Now, if instead of 1 you have 2 of G, you can satisfy both D1 and D2. As we have already established that the utility you have derived from consuming the first G to achieve D1 must be greater than the utility derived from consuming the second G to achieve D2, the utility of the additional unit of G is diminished when compared to the previous one.
Your counterexample isn't one. It's a made-up, incoherent mess, that doesn't show in any way what you claim it does. That starts with the incomplete definition of the law itself, which is part of a single sentence that you pasted off a multi-page Wikipedia article on the topic, which isn't exactly the best source in the first place. Why don't you just try to think through the simple explanatory outline I gave you?
Agree with sibling comment that this is more "heuristic" than "law". There are many things that have basically 0 utility up until some threshold, there are things that become more marginally useful the more of them you have (users for your social media app)
You take 1000 economists and ask them for opinions on a certain problems, you will get hundreds if not thousand different solutions. If you do math say a million mathematicians/physicists, you will almost always get a few if not 1 solution to the problem. By the way, Nobel for economics isnt even part of original Nobel. It basically force fed into it and tag with Nobel label. Economics is essentially just common sense applicable at the specific time...at other times it will fail.
Since OP didn't provide any, I looked up some sources for the "man acts" economic axiom.
I found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology, which is used by the so called Austrian Economic school.
Actually the axiom is "man acts purposefully". There is also quite some criticism on it, which can be found on the wiki page as well.
> There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations.
There are some. An army marches on its stomach. For war, you need three things: money, money and money. Except in a guerilla war maybe. Maybe you're right after all.
As long as you've got some bootstrap weapons, you can always steal more from whatever force it is you're fighting against. In WW2 the US proposed sending resistance fighters a million single-shot handguns [1], allowing them to kill occupation forces and take their weapons.
And while men with guns very often get shot, they never starve.
Getting shot is a cost, even if it isn't necessarily 'money'. Resistance fighters do go hungry. The resistance in the Warsaw ghetto had guns; they starved. On the Long March, Mao's men had guns, and they very much faced starvation. And ask the Confederates about the difficulty of feeding a rebel army. The idea that the answer to logistics issues is "moar guns" is comical and more than a little sad.
That puts you at an extreme disadvantage which could be solved with ... money. And of course in history guerillas often have had sources of supply from other countries who are in effect providing the money. All the proxy wars of the Cold War period were like this - the Chinese or Russians or North Koreans supplying guerillas in Africa against non-communist governments or the US or South Africa doing the same for guerillas against "communist" governments.
I'm from Zimbabwe - everything in Rhodesia was about money. Money needed by the government of the time to stop the guerillas and money needed by the guerillas to house them in neighboring countries, feed and arm them.
Now that Zimbabwe is in terrible economic trouble and has obviously rigged elections and much suppression of opposition voters and of course a military coup that everyone denies was a coup, there is no rebellion and there are no guerillas because they would have no support (no money, no safe harbour, no weapons). The Russians, Chinese, South Africans and DPRK have the situation they want and the US etc don't care about it either.
> For war, you need three things: money, money and money. Except in a guerilla war maybe. Maybe you're right after all.
This seems to imply that money will win you wars, which is not the case. You don't need "money" to get foreign military aid, nor to manufacture small arms in your own factories, especially if you use slaves for that (like the Nazis did).
Money on its own won't win you wars, but you need money to even be able to fight. Sure, you may be able to replace some of the money with slave labour, levies/conscription, but you still need enormous amounts of food, materials, supplies and people, and a lot of that does require money, unless you've managed to completely eradicate money from your society.
There's plenty of studies in economics (especially micro-economics) that have statistical laws just like biology does. Similar for psychology. And even for war:
It's hard to run controlled experiments at the largest scales, but there have been plenty of experiments and studies at smaller scales. And some of them yielded statistical 'laws'.
And a touch of chaos theory, turbulence and all the ideas that itself builds upon. He recognized that sufficiently complex dynamic systems are impossible to fully predict due to physical constraints.
"Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics." – Omar Bradley (attributed, but who knows who really said it)
"Get there first with the most men." – Nathan Bedford Forrest.
These have served me well in my career. Business problem? Solve it, placing less of an emphasis on how and more on solving it fast and building a pipeline to iterate on it even faster.
+1: This one has great contributions, including the well-known quote "War is a continuation of politics by other means". Some things that are very relevant and not in Sun Tzu:
- Importance of reserves: troops that enter fight instantly become an order of magnitude more complicated to manoeuver. Thus it's important to keep ~half your forces in reserve. This one was forgotten by French general Gamelin at the beginning of WWII => thus when the German attack through Sedan pierced the French front unexpectedly fast, only weak troops were left to stop them in front of Paris.
- How to use terrain to your advantage: for instance put non-crossable obstacles behind you, or difficult terrains / slopes in front of you so that enemies waste effort and organization in crossing through while your troops are rested waiting for them when they emerge.
- How to place troops in classical battles: why cavalry often goes on the sides.
- Importance of pre and post-battle actions, for instance pursuit after routing the enemy.
Just like in any complex game, there are certain rules of thumb you need to know in order to play well, but the moment you play against anyone good the meta game becomes far more complex than any collection of simple heuristics could convey. It’s still important to know those basic heuristics, though.
I read Sun Tzu ages ago because it was this legendary book by an undefeated general, but I found it underwhelming. It's not that it's wrong; a lot of it is vital core strategic stuff. But a lot is tautological, a lot is obvious, a lot is very circumstantial, and quite a lot is vague nonsense.
I honestly don't see how you can possibly apply just Sun Tzu is battle. Much of it is vague or superficial. And that may be why it endures: the details of with change constantly, with every new technology and every new idea. But you can't fight a war with just basic principles; you've got to understand the weapons, the soldiers and the terrain and other circumstances you're fighting with.
In a sense, Sun Tzu even addresses that: you've got to know yourself and your enemy. So in a sense, the example that the article starts with, where Ma Su got to lead an army based just on his knowledge of Sun Tzu, was completely counter to Sun Tzu's advice: Ma Su may have known Sun Tzu, but he didn't know his own army or that of the enemy. That's what experience is for.
So it's not that Sun Tzu is nonsense; it's that it's not enough. And it's old. It's valuable because it was the first major treatise on strategy and war, but it has been improved upon for thousands of years. It doesn't trump anything that was written later. Later books address the same issues and more, but in a more appropriate context. It's not that Sun Tzu is bad, it's that more recent works are better, more up to date, more relevant, and more applicable.
That said, I recognise a lot of Sun Tzu's principles in the war in Ukraine. A blatant one: all over the summer they were talking about the battle for Kherson, and I thought: is it wise to announce that? That way Russia can prepare for it. And Russia did. And then Ukraine took a large swathe of land east of Kharkiv, on the complete opposite end of the frontline. "When you are going to attack nearby, make it look as if you are going to go a long way; when you are going to attack far away, make it look as if you are going just a short distance."
Later they did take Kherson, but only after Russia had withdrawn from it, because Ukraine had made it impossible for Russia to continue defending it. "Attack where there is no defense." Of course to accomplish that, they used long-range artillery that Sun Tzu couldn't even dream of.
This reads less like a critique of Sun Tzu and more a critique of people who read Sun Tzu.
One thing that hasn't changed about human nature, everyone is looking for a quick solution that's guaranteed to work. If you can market yourself as an authority many people will listen to you whether you actually are an authority or not. Engaging with reality directly is difficult, painful, uncertain, and often unfulfilling, so people demand proxies to do it for them. In many cases these proxies are necessary, the world is too complex for everyone to know everything in perfect detail. But if you're going to devote 40 hours/week or more to something, it's probably best that you minimize your proxies for that thing.
Using Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, or any strategic work as an all-encompassing ground truth is to deny reality for the sake of comfort. Denying reality for the sake of comfort is not a competitive trait.
> Xunzi suggests that adherence to the military counsel of Sun Tzu is so detrimental to one’s own self-interest, that it would be equivalent to “using one’s finger to stir a boiling pot.”
This had me laughing out loud. Very visual and effective image. It almost hurts.
This is a weirdly specific complaint that imho makes far too much of the 'death ground' thing. Sun Tzu certainly talks about this on several occasions, but he doesn't present it as an ideal; it's for when you don't have other good tactical or strategic choices and you have to go all in. The western equivalent is 'burning you boats' to emphasize (to your own and perhaps to opposing forces) that you are fully committed.
The first chapter of AoW is about estimates; of your capabilities, of your situation, of the terrain. Of course you're supposed to pick the good terrain if you arrive there first. There's a story in the Samuel Griffith translation (imho by far the best), about Sun Pin, a descendant of Sun Tzu. Pursued by Pang Chüan, a rival general with a superior army and a long-standing grudge, Sun Pin arrived in a forested valley late in the day and ordered a large tree chopped down to block the road. To this, he affixed a scroll reading 'Pang Chuan dies here'. Pang Chuan arrived with his vanguard a few hours after the sun had set and found the road blocked. On being informed that there was a scroll, Pang Chüan ordered a torch lit so he could read it. Moments later his army was hit by arrows from all sides, aiming at the bright light. Realizing that Sun Pin had successfully baited him, Pang Chüan killed himself with his own sword in rage, leaving his army in disarray.
There's no use of 'death ground' here; the emphasis is on speed and a cultivated ability to recognize favorable terrain and understand how to exploit it, and to strike at the opposing force's command structure rather than engaging in a wasteful battle of attrition. I like Clausewitz, but his line about the destruction of the opposing force being the ideal outcome has been taken far too literally in many conflicts. Clausewitz's military experience was in the Napoleonic wars and while he has much wisdom to share on strategy - choosing the time, place, and general shape of battle - his view of battle itself basically a slugfest in which size of force x intensity of violence gives you the answer. This was distilled some decades later into Lanchester's laws, a set of differential equations that provide surprisingly good insight into how a conflict of attrition will go. But Clausewitz and Lanchester are (imho) not great at addressing how to get an opponent to play themselves. Sun Tzu is very much about defeating the opponent's command structure, without which the army won't function.
Sun Tzu is hard to read because of the flowery language and the epigrammatic style, vs the more popular military style of discursive and specific examples (in both Asian and western military traditions). The Art of War at first feels like a collection of super-obvious truisms and annoyingly vague aphorisms with some specific instructions here and there, causing many readers to fixate on the latter. If you read it this way you'll certainly end up like the arrogant and unfortunate Ma Su. But the book is not an argument, it is a drill. You have to go through it over and over. The boring and shallow-seeming parts are foundational and they don't give up their value straight away. The way Ive got value out of it is to read some new stuff or writings about a specific conflict or aspect of conflict, then go back and read Sun Tzu again. Read more, read Sun Tzu again. Problems tying things together? Read Liddell Hart again, then read Sun Tzu again. Instead of pulling it apart looking for hidden meanings or some better translation from classical Chinese, let it function like a framework for organizing military knowledge.
Incidentally, my (outsider) experience of a lot of essays like this is that they are only partly about their nominal subject, and really about philosophical arguments within the defense establishment to shape doctrine, procurement, and long-term strategies. There are factions of strategic thought within the military bureaucracy that are constantly maneuvering for position, such that the peacetime defense establishment could be said to be engaged in the conduct of internal warfare by other means.
> Clausewitz's military experience was in the Napoleonic wars and while he has much wisdom to share on strategy - choosing the time, place, and general shape of battle - his view of battle itself basically a slugfest in which size of force x intensity of violence gives you the answer.
Many of Napoleon's most famous victories were won with a significant numerical disadvantage. If you had tried to determine the outcome of a battle at the time by simply comparing the number of men on each side, you would have failed often.
That's why intensity matters as well. Napoleon was keenly aware of this, writing that the moral factor was equivalent to about 3x the physical. But he also organized his armies to move faster and lighter, using cover and concealment to find ways to flank his enemy or attack in the rear rather than seeking an open plain for a head-on clash. Later in his career, when he developed a taste for pure mass over maneuver and position, he suffered several defeats similar to those he had inflicted on others.
What I meant in my comment above, though, is not that Napoleon didn't care about such topics, but that Clausewitz doesn't always do a good job of writing about them on the tactical level. I absolutely think he's worth reading, but he's the opposite of Sun Tzu - a mass of dense, heavy, and often abstract text. There are multiple poor or incomplete translations of his famous On War which don't help. His smaller works like Principles of War and Tactics are much better starting points.
From what little I know Sun Tzu has a lot of "good rule od thumb" wisdom but you shouldn't stick to what he says as if he is infallible.
For example:
> The greatest victory is that which requires no battle
He says a lot of stuff like that but this is only true if your aim is peace in the near term and appearances of victory. The carnage of war, the worse it is the more it avoids even more war. If you win without battle then others will keep starting more battles because why not? But if you defear your enemy well and in the most horrific way then it becomes unthinkable to willingly start a battle or war with you. Even in the middle of war, a great and terrible victory demoralizes the enemy but a victory with no bloodshed only delays when the next battle will happen since you only won a battle and not the whole war.
I could pick many examples from WW2 and the ensuing peace we enjoy to this day (relative to before that time). Or how the US sabotages and enables regime changes all over without actual (at least acknowledged) conflict but time and time again it only delayed and worsened the threat.
My philosophy is that you should never start a war except as retaliation of an actual attack or immediate and impending attack (NK firing missiles not Iraq is about to get missiles). But if you start a war it is your duty to finish it fast and without witholding your aggression so long as that aggression contributes to preventing even more aggression from your enemies and resentment from your people (US and country building/preserving in a time of war in vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq comes to mind).
Happy to be corrected and educated on this. My point is that if you are not careful you can interpret that one teaching of his to mean you should avoid battle as much as possible. And a few others I have thought about are also like this. Surprising your enemy or deceiving them is not always the best idea either, what is more terrible to your enemy than telling them you will cause enormous damage at a specific date and time and doing exactly that despite their desperate attempts to counteract that, it crush their spirits and allow you to decieve them later on more effectively.
The main point of that quote is that a battle is a negative-sum game. Reaching the same ultimate outcome without a battle is better than fighting for it, because both sides will suffer losses in the battle.
Trying to achieve a lasting peace through a decisive victory rarely works, because people don't work like that. In a more likely outcome, you are simultaneously not aggressive enough to prevent future conflicts and too aggressive, creating enemies motivated by revenge. Revenge is a dangerous motive, because it can turn battles into positive-sum games. Any enemy losses – both combatant and civilian – become victories, while your losses only matter by reducing your ability to kill more enemies.
Agreed, and to add, I never understood that the old "war texts" were supposed to be detailed workflows for war and more just stating in plain language from people who've fought wars knew for the general public to understand. I've not read the old war texts since I was forced to in High School, but my takeaway from books like Art of War and The Prince was the authors trying to shatter the concept of Romantic wars with the boring reality of everything that comes with war.
That is, I understood that the point of the books was more to get governments and people to engage with understanding the practical elements of war, like:
- Wars are very very very expensive
- They're expensive even when you're not at war
- Your troops probably don't want to be fighting cause it means they probably will get hurt or die
- No one likes being conquered, so don't assume that the war is done once you've killed enough soldiers
- It's really expensive to supply an army
- Seriously, do you know how much a horse eats? How about a thousand horses?
My takeaway from the books was first teenage disappointment that the books weren't super deep or evil like I had been led to believe, and second that the books really seemed to try to deglamorize war by talking about all the stuff involved with it besides the killing/conquering, and showing how expensive and exhausting it really is.
Yes, those are the main points. Sun Tsu realized that war is a terrible thing, especially the human suffering. He wrote "Art of War" to admonish rulers to understand and avoid war.
All of that depends on your goals and priorities. And keep in mind, not everyone fights a battle for defensive reasons. Peace isn't always the desired outcome of war.
He also implies that diplomacy and posturing is actually part of battle which isn't the case but I am sure diplomats and politicians consider themselves warriors.
Often wars are started to avenge a wrong, significant losses in your side were accepted when you declared war. If you win a battle without accomplishing your objectives then what was the point?
But I think I do agree with you on his intent and that is sort if my point, his wisdom is neither absolute nor infallible. I would consider it a guidance to help you decide not hard set commandments to follow.
I think that quote is just a corollary to this one:
"War is the continuation of policy with other means." — Carl von Clausewitz
A foreign policy that achieves your aims is better than a foreign war; a functional domestic policy is better than a civil war. But sometimes people won’t compromise and the only policy left is war.
And I don't agree with that point in general except when someone starts being violent against you, a peaceful resolution is not desirable for long term peace.
Similar to a school bully or when you get in prison and you start getting picked on. Resolving things peacefully with that bully only lets other bullies come after you later on. But harming that one bully effectively ensures your safety long term.
You can disagree with it but Clausewitz is central to modern military doctrine. Analogizing interstate anarchy to bullies is fine but a bit limited; you’re never going to capture IR neorealism that way.
For every truism from Sun Tzu, there is a data point providing a counter argument.
For the truism you are presenting, to whit:
> The carnage of war, the worse it is the more it avoids even more war. If you win without battle then others will keep starting more battles because why not? But if you defear your enemy well and in the most horrific way then it becomes unthinkable to willingly start a battle or war with you.
The counterpoint is WW2, which was a result of how horrifically Germany was defeated in WW1.
I'd argue not horrifically enough. I mean their defeat eas decisive and the toll on their morale was huge but their idea of greatness through war and appettite for war in general was obviously not resolved.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the other hand swiftly resolved Japan's appetite for violence (not that I neccesarily agree).
WW1 and Germany to me are good examples of how not to finish a war. I ask why Germany was allowed to continue to be a free state? Why not divide up Germany as a foreign territory or colony between victors? Why not make sure no military or hostile government ever rises up again like the US did with Japan (still has no offensive military!).
If you want to see how effective what I am saying is, look at Genghis Khan. Any sign of resistance and your entire town or village was burned and erased out if existance. Many of his enemies surrender long before he ever arrives there.
You cannot take half-measures with an aggressor. Victory can't be partial for it to last.
If you merely wound your enemy he will regain strength and come back at you many times stronger or at least keep coming back until you surrender (Taliban). You must do what it takes to kill off your enemy fully even after victory.
Germany wasn't defeated in WW1 on the Eastern Front, I think; and I believe that Hitler's attack on Europe in WW2 was incidental to his true goal, which was to occupy Poland and Ukraine. He didn't want to start a punch-up with the British Empire, and he initially thought Britain and Germany could be buddies.
Sabotage and propaganda are examples of making war without direct combat. I've always interpreted that as what Sun Tzu was referring to.
I'm also sure that said position is not absolute, but rather just the idea that one should not look into prolonging battles (except when you're consciously participating in a war of attrition, obviously) and to hopefully evade them altogether as they at least reduce morale and exhaust resources.
TL;DR Sun Tzu doesn't mean "Try to win without having a fight", but "Try to win without having a formal 1-on-1 engagement".
"Battle" shouldn't be understood as generic violent conflict, but a specific formal affair in which two armies gather up and clash with each other.
So for rather than reading this as "Try to solve things non-violently", this post suggests the meaning is more like "Try not to be forced into an engagement on even terms. If you can just poison them all, or starve them, that'd be much better".
The counterarguments to the "total war" doctrine are nuclear deterrence and asymmetric warfare. Total war is the correct way to win a symmetric war against an opponent you can actually defeat. But nuclear deterrence creates big incentives to not ever bother. Everybody loses from unrestricted warfare between nuclear powers.
Asymmetric warfare is destined to outlast the will of the attacker to maintain totally war, and to continue long after the attacker has started to become war-weary. IMHO, winning an asymmetric war against a sufficiently motivated opponent is only possible by engaging in genocide and large scale population relocations.
Using nuclear deterrence as an example. Yes, it is effective at avoiding battle but if you get nuked you must effectively wipe the aggressor's country off the map so it can continue to deter future aggressors and MAD can continue to be relevant. You can't hold back because of the enormous civilian casualties. The only thing important is to make sure that will be the last nuclear war and that no one thinks about using nukes against you. This is entirely possible for example with US vs NK or maybe even China (or if they ever achieve effective icbm interception...anyone)
The scary part of nuclear deterrence is indeed whether it is able to continue to prevent nuclear warfare. As you imply, technical innovations can change the picture. And nuclear warfare with limited escalation remains a scary possibility. Especially between countries that don't have MAD capability. Let's be glad that so far cool heads prevailed.
There is a reason people still read Sun Tzu 2500 years later, and it's not because he's been on a press tour promoting his book. The man was a consummate master of his art, if he was indeed one man.
The article notes that Sun Tzu's celebrated victory over the Chu was very short-lived, since the Chu remnants promptly allied with the Qin and the Yue to roll them back within two years, and his Wu clan was entirely exterminated within three decades.
I think this is like applying the "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" logic to war; it's a multifaceted thing, you can do everything right and still lose.
It wouldn't still be mandatory reading at war colleges the world over if it didn't still have merit, or if it had no merit to begin with.
I mean, Clauswidtz is a way better reading, with less vague information, still a bit wrong concerning modern warfare (although Russian seems to use it). And his teaching were applied effectively multiple times, with success, even during ww2. A bit dryer and less applicable for young edgelords. And more than half the St-Cyr (officer school) I knew/talked to fit in this category ten years ago, I doubt it changed much.
"infamous army" by Georgette Heyer (she pretty much invented the bodice-ripper genre which Barbara Cartland drove a long way afterward) was on the reading list at cranwell college. Best description of the battle of waterloo ever, alongside the romance. The lead characters include Harry Smith and his Wife, who are the stars of "the spanish bride" which is about the campaign in Spain, when not about smooching and teenage love affairs. She became Lady Smith.. of Ladysmith (south Africa) fame. Nothing like doing "the crown" before fictionalised fact was on netflix
Sometimes, the reading list is quite varied.
They could have chosen the first 2 chapters of Stendhal's "charterhouse of parma" if you want a vibe from down at the platoon level (for much the same reasons as Heyer's book was chosen for an overall view at Wellington's level)
Cranwell College is the Royal Air Force college (for those like me who didn't know).
But, while Georgette Heyer invented the Regency romance, hers are not "bodice-rippers". They're far better than that.
"An Infamous Army" is kind of a strange book. It's half a romance, and half a war story, and it doesn't quite work as either one, but it works well as itself.
Okay let us suppose there are three probable reasons for such a book to be chosen as mandatory reading: because it is right, because it is wrong, or because it is historically important as a landmark in the history of military thought.
I believe it is the first of those three. Many books have been written since that are now outdated, while The Art of War is not.
> because it is right, because it is wrong, or because it is historically important as a landmark in the history of military thought.
> I believe it is the first of those three.
I believe it's fairly obvious it's the third. It's a landmark because it's the first. It's read for the same reasons people care about Plato and Aristoteles. Not because they were correct about everything, but because that's what everything since then builds upon.
> let us suppose there are three probable reasons for such a book to be chosen as mandatory reading: because it is right, because it is wrong, or because it is historically important as a landmark in the history of military thought.
You might have better luck with some actual reasons. Assuming you're right and then complaining that nobody believes you even though your assumptions plainly show that you're right isn't going to make you sound any more credible.
Instead of just asserting that I'm wrong and that there is some elusive and esoteric reason I am overlooking without actually stating it, you could just state it, and then, theoretically, if you are right, I and all the other readers would be better off...
I'm willing to change my mind, but you're not giving me anything to change it to.
Without being familiar with the details this sounds as if they bit off more than they could chew (or invaded more than they could hold). Holding territory is way, way harder than winning it in the first place.
If your actions led to your own clan's erradication 30 years after the fact then tour actions might not have been the smartest (unless e.g. your clan was going to be erradicated either way and you managed to buy them time).
And the articles notes there were multiple reasons for that, including an invasion by a third party and a coup attempt. Even the best military strategy won't survive first contact with the enemy, especially multiple ones from different directions.
People still read Sun Tzu 2500 years later because its (1) not protected by copyright (2) easy to read and (3) free marketing since it's titled "The Art of War". At the very minimum, 10% of teenage boys of every generation are going to buy this thing. The reality is that most of it has a very "buy low, sell high" quality: generally obvious, but difficult to apply.
This seems more of a critique of the recent pop culture adaptations of the work, rather than the work itself. Sun Tzu didn’t write a business book—he wrote a treatise on waging war (it’s not a manual).
I apologize if this comment isn't as informative as it should be. In fact, since Sun Wu lived as long ago as ~2500 years, we don't have any recognizable family heritage about him now. I did read his book, but I don't consider myself an expert on this topic. So I didn't share more thoughts. Again, I apologize for the uninformative comment.
