Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)
This is a weirdly specific complaint that imho makes far too much of the &#x27;death ground&#x27; thing. Sun Tzu certainly talks about this on several occasions, but he doesn&#x27;t present it as an ideal; it&#x27;s for when you don&#x27;t have other good tactical or strategic choices and you have to go all in. The western equivalent is &#x27;burning you boats&#x27; to emphasize (to your own and perhaps to opposing forces) that you are fully committed.<p>The first chapter of AoW is about estimates; of your capabilities, of your situation, of the terrain. <i>Of course</i> you&#x27;re supposed to pick the good terrain if you arrive there first. There&#x27;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 &#x27;Pang Chuan dies here&#x27;. 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.<p>There&#x27;s no use of &#x27;death ground&#x27; 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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s command structure, without which the army won&#x27;t function.<p>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). <i>The Art of War</i> 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&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>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.