Strategic war books6/25/2023 So Sun Zi’s book is generally published as The Art of War in English. Now all your students are raptly attentive, ready to hear how it is you’re going to beat the opponent without even having a battle.īy Sun Zi (also written in English as Sun Tzu) Read There’s also just the hook aspect of it, to get the attention of your audience so you can lay out what you really mean. So hyperbole of that type would not have been uncommon. You were mindful of the competition, and you tried to be the most attractive candidate. So you had to come across as the best strategist, one who could beat anyone else. Just like any artist or builder, you had to market yourself as a strategist in order to be put on someone’s payroll. Of course, when Sun Zi was writing you had to have a patron. “The nature of politics works against the nature of strategy, in some ways” Other scholars say, ‘No, we have some evidence there was indeed an individual by the name of Sun Zi.’ There may have been a Sun Zi long ago but, over time, other sayings and aphorisms were added to his works, so that what we have today is an expanded version, a collection of ancient Chinese wisdom, if you will, about waging war. There are lots of theories as to whether or not there was an individual called Sun Zi we can point to, or whether it was a collection of writings by several Chinese masters. Yes, but there’s a bit of a deliberate hyperbole in that saying. Usually what you get at the end of it all depends on how successful that drubbing was, if it came to that so, the terms of peace can go up or down depending on the magnitude of the victory or the defeat that occurs in the field or at sea, or, nowadays, in the air, or, one day, in space.Īnd isn’t it an important part of military strategy, quoting one of the authors you’ve chosen, that you don’t go to war at all? According to Sun Zi, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Maybe you want to give them enough of a drubbing that they’ll leave you alone, maybe you want to deter them from attempting to harm you in the first place, or maybe you want something more than that. You then use your strengths against their weaknesses as best you can in order to achieve whatever it is you want. It requires understanding your opponents-not just what their material capabilities might be, but also their psychology, their habits, what they might be inclined to do or not to do, and what they might want from you.įrom all that information, you construct an idea of their strengths and weaknesses with respect to your own. I would define military strategy as finding the strengths and weaknesses of your opponent and using them to your best advantage in order to get what you want. Afterwards, many definitions appeared throughout history until we get to a point where the art of strategy is almost synonymous with the art of war. It’s the purview of the general, if you will. Yes, there are a couple of variations of what military strategy is some say it is the business of the general, or the art of the general, the concern of the general, the things the general needs to be expert at, and so forth. What is it? I picked up that ‘strategos’ is the ancient Greek word for ‘general.’
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