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Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)
- smitty1e 4y agoSun Tzu's chief virtue, and weakness, is brevity. Compared to Clausweitz, Sun Tzu would have been a Twitter guru, inviting the question: So, what?
- deafpolygon 4y agoI can see it now: Sun Tzu's The Tweets of War
- wolpoli 4y agoAnd if Sun Tzu is alive today, he would be offering paid access to exclusive podcasts, videos, and more.
- lostlogin 4y ago<verified> <state affiliated>
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zigman1 4y agoWar is inevitable but I see 99% of generals doing it wrong. Here is 10 tips how to win in every battle
- kjs3 4y agoThis one weird trick with fool your enemy every time!
- abudabi123 4y agoYou mean to see: Sun Tzu's The T_eets of War [new management is whitewashing the W in the logo/banner name of T_itter]
- FredPret 4y agoClausewitz would be a podcaster who never shuts up compared to Sun Tzu’s Tweets
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- eimrine 4y agoFor me Sun Tzu is the first man who told something atheistic. He told that no god can predict or help in the combat. Very impressive as for 500 b.c.
- soulofmischief 4y agoAnd 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.
- zakki 4y agoI think he meant god with lowercase G not God with uppercase G.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoThat doesn't refute the comment you're replying to though.
- melagonster 4y agoold china have their God with uppercase G. the ruler of Zhou dynasty is the kid of heaven in text.
- TheBigSalad 4y agoWhat do you mean?
- layer8 4y agoAtheistic thinking also came up in India and Europe 500-600 BC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_atheism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_atheism
- _8j50 4y agoFrom 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.
- labster 4y agoI 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.
- PostOnce 4y agoThere 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. My favorite reading of The Art of War, because Baldermort has an awesome voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDlW3WqXisM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDlW3WqXisM
- rippercushions 4y agoThe 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.
- PostOnce 4y agoI 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.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> 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. Spoken like someone with absolutely no idea how mandatory reading is chosen.
- PostOnce 4y agoOkay 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.
- ChancyChance 4y agoI find the type of person that is into Sun Tzu is a fairly narrow demographic. I don't know why that it is.
- cjbgkagh 4y agoGenetics
- bruce511 4y agoAs 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.
- HopenHeyHi 4y agoSo: "Sun Tzu, Mayhaps dude had a point, ymmv ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
- hackernewds 4y agoI do not understand the NoSQL example. Would you mind please elaborating?
- knodi123 4y agoAround 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. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=nosql&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=n...
- jerf 4y agoThis 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.
- lordnacho 4y agoFinally. 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".
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoIt 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. It's like the popular science blogs of its age.
- Ekaros 4y agoAlso, in that context does it exist in vacuum. Or is there a teacher that could explain the things and attach suitable context.
- hzay 4y agoThis is a modern way of thinking. Ancient wisdom never comes with citations. But I'm happy to be proved wrong.
- samus 4y agoPhilosophy 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.
- est 4y ago> Ancient wisdom never comes with citations Because writing in the past is really expensive and a heavy-duty work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bamboo_book_-_binding_-_UCR.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bamboo_book_-_binding_-_U...
- tianqi 4y agoAs a descendant of Sun Tzu, I'm surprised to see a discussion about him at HN:)
- ARandomerDude 4y agoAs a descendant of somebody other than Sun Tzu, I’m not surprised to see it here. HN is pretty eclectic.
- anigbrowl 4y agoI would certainly like to hear more about your inheritance of the family tradition and how discussions about it read to you.
- tianqi 4y agoI 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.
- runlaszlorun 4y agoAs 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 .
- UweSchmidt 4y agoModern 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.
- mantas 4y agoOn 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...
- baybal2 4y ago[dead]
- mcv 4y ago> 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.
- anigbrowl 4y agoThis 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.
- chaostheory 4y agoI’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.
- eru 4y ago> There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations. You could still apply statistics. That's what people who breed animals or plants do. Every organism is different and individual, too.
- chaostheory 4y agoI was referring to social studies. Biology on the other hand is a real science. A science has laws.
- eru 4y agoNot sure I buy that. 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'.
- mcv 4y ago> 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.
- t43562 4y agoGuerillas need money too. Weapons are not free and guerillas need to eat too.
- bambax 4y ago> 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.
- mcv 4y agoI 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.
- lelanthran 4y agoI much prefer General Tacticus' quotes. After all, even the word "tactics" came fro his name[1]. https://wiki.lspace.org/Callus_Tacticus https://wiki.lspace.org/Callus_Tacticus [1] Please don't believe this; read the Discworld books instead; Jingo is the one with General Tacticus quotes.
- cubefox 4y agoPeople who are interested in famous historic works on warfare strategy may be better served with "On War" by Clausewitz, a Prussian general.
- aubanel 4y ago+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.
- profeaturo 4y agoJust 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.
- Reimersholme 4y ago[dead]
- jrm4 4y agoSeems like all of this is just "heuristics are not hard-and-fast bulletproof rules?"
- owenmarshall 4y ago"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.
- scottLobster 4y agoThis 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.
- Slava_Propanei 4y ago[dead]
- jamesgill 4y agoThis 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).
- steve76 4y ago[dead]