The Art of War

"to learn that the act of killing fellow humans can be raised to an art."

"Its strategic principles and insights into conflict resolution align with Lex Fridman's interest in decision-making under pressure and the dynamics of complex systems, themes often explored on his podcast."

"Sun Tzu is completely outside the whole Western way of looking at politics and at states. For him, war was an art and an art being practised by generals, by individual commanders. In a way it was a game and he describes how apparently weak players can outsmart strong players, how strong players can apparently misuse their strength to be baffled by weak players, how war is really determined by the mental calibre of the actual generals fighting it. In one way it was a very much more limited way of looking at war, but in another it was very much more ingenious and imaginative. Oh, you’ll have to read him. It’s not very long. The thing is, he regards war as a sort of chess , one which could be played by all kinds of players against one another. He powerfully influenced Mao Zedong and developed a way of looking at war, which was then use by Mao Zedong first against the Japanese and then against his rivals. He was basically a rebel, building up from the status of a rebel commander in a tiny outpost in the provinces until he expelled the Japanese, the nationalists and the Americans and was ruling the whole of China by the use of totally different kinds of tricks which took Western armies completely by surprise. Those ideas have been inherited by rebels and partisans throughout the whole of the last three or four decades and Sun Tzu is regarded as being a valuable guide to irregular or partisan warfare. The main thing he said was that if you are weak you must give the appearance of being strong and if you are strong you must give the appearance of being weak. You persuade people you are weak and are going to be a pushover so that the adversary attacks. Well, let me give you an example. In the Second World War when we, the British, were very, very weak in dealing with the Germans, we used deception in order to give the impression that we and the Americans had built up an enormous army, so that when we actually landed in Normandy and were very vulnerable there, the Germans did not use their entire force to destroy us because they believed we were going to land in the Pas-de-Calais with a very much stronger force at any moment. In fact we didn’t have such a force, but the Germans held back a lot of their force, which made it possible for us to establish ourselves in Normandy as we did. That was an excellent example of Sun Tzu’s type of strategy, although we’d never heard of him then. I was not personally involved in that particular bit. I was down in Italy at the time. I could talk about that for a very, very long time. I was a very junior infantry officer. I landed at Salerno and we found ourselves confronted with very steep mountains, and with very, very great difficulty we slogged our way up until we reached Austria and then we stopped. Well, it took from September 1943 to August 1945 and it seemed a very long time, I must tell you."

"Well, that’s the thing, it has survived, partly because of the way it was written—as aphorisms or pearls of wisdom regarding how to view strategy or to fight wars. That made it easily transferrable from one historical era to another. There might be some ambiguities because of language differences, but usually we can address those. The translators will do their best, and other interpreters will provide their own takes. It may not be a perfect representation of what the original wisdom was, but it is flexible enough to be applied, and people go back to it again and again. It is also seen as something that is diametrically opposed to, or different in character from, Western wisdom about waging war. In fact, there are many similarities, but because it is seen as ‘the other,’ if you will, it is often used as something to balance what the Western way of war is or Western way of strategy might be. It is essential in that sense. It is probably always going to be part of the canon for understanding strategy, doing strategy, or teaching strategy. The one you cited (“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”) is a perfect one to start with, because so much of strategy requires being in the proper position. All that starts well before a battle. You can’t guarantee an outcome per se and there’s always an element of chance. But, in any number of areas—not only your military forces, but your diplomatic leverage, the number of allies or coalition partners you might have, the will of your populace at home and to what extent it supports the conflict—you can be in so strong a position as to have the initiative and every card possible in your favour. So that is probably what is really meant by that expression. The strategist’s job starts well before the battle is ever joined, in other words. You always need to be thinking about how to acquire an advantage, how to achieve leverage over your opponent. That’s a constant struggle because you have to assume your opponent is trying to do the same thing. He or she is moving for positional advantage over you as well, and whoever gets their first has the upper hand. “Whenever young officers are taught how to plan for operations, they are required to have a deception plan” That’s an idea that is still applicable today. We probably don’t do that enough in the West. There are a number of reasons for that. Part of it has to do with the nature of the multilateral institutions, the law of war, what is allowed and what isn’t allowed. There are restraints on NATO, for instance. Article 5 says that NATO should come to the defence of any NATO member that’s attacked. That’s a very defensive posture. It precludes taking offensive action or moving in an aggressive way to achieve positional advantage over your opponent. So with the nature of the agreements that we have, we have forfeited some of the things that earlier strategists would have thought of as natural or essential to the successful prosecution of strategy. But we’ve agreed to have those constraints, in some ways. It fits in with our values as a Western society and for the most part we are OK with that. The military isn’t necessarily happy with it, but it has agreed to accept the risks that come with putting those values first. It really depends on the personality of the head of state. In some cases, strategy is paid a great deal of attention to, in other cases it isn’t. Partly that’s because you have to start thinking about your objectives, the ends you want to achieve, before you even begin to deploy your forces. Ideally, the way we think about strategy in the West is: you first decide what you want to achieve, then you look at the resources you have available to achieve it, and then you develop the ways, the methods you want to use to accomplish what you want. Often, the nature of politics being what it is—a struggle over the distribution of power—makes it difficult to establish what the ends really are. The nature of politics works against the nature of strategy, in some ways. Strategists are always saying, ‘Tell me what you want so I can start planning.’ But it is not always possible for an incumbent administration to articulate what it really wants because, if it were to get leaked to the public before the public has been prepared for it, it might cause a stir that could prove counter-productive. That’s why it is so much more difficult, in some ways, to deal with the nature of politics today because the public can be informed of anything almost instantly, especially with social media. Yes, but Mao also took Clausewitz seriously. He agreed that war is essentially born inside the womb of politics, so whatever the political situation is—the particular struggle for power—is going to shape what war looks like. That’s one of the things Clausewitz was trying to say in his very lengthy tome on war. Mao is on record as having said that he agreed with the main principles Clausewitz advanced. Sun Zi he certainly took seriously, as far as we can tell. He appears to have been an avid reader. He was competing for control of the Communist Party, so he had other rivals within his own party to deal with as well as the Nationalists. Then, the Japanese invaded China in the late 1930s, in the midst of the Chinese civil war. So he had plenty of competitors, plenty of adversaries to deal with, and the fact that he emerged successfully out of all that suggests he knew something about strategy. Again, this is a little bit of hyperbole. It’s the idea that during the Warring States period, which we believe is the era in which Sun Zi wrote, war was just a brutal clash of not very well trained armies—frontal assaults, lots of casualties, many cities razed. So, to avoid that kind of destruction, he tries to introduce a new approach to strategy, which involves using what the opponent wants to believe about you to your advantage. That’s where deception comes in, pretending to be weak, so as to invite attack and take advantage of your opponent’s aggressiveness. We still do deception. It is still considered very important today. If you recall the invasion at D-Day during World War II , Patton was used as a decoy. There was a fictitious army in the south of England to keep the Germans preoccupied with the possibility of an invasion at Calais, which is where they wanted to believe the Allied invasion would happen. Instead, the Allies landed at Normandy. So that was deception on a very large scale. Every campaign plan today is required to have some sort of deception plan built into it. And whenever young officers are taught how to plan for operations, they are required to have a deception plan. It becomes a little bit of a joke amongst them, but it gets the point across that they’ve got to think about upsetting the enemy psychologically. Given communications and what they are today, yes it’s hard to image. For example, Ukrainian civilians can take selfies next to Russian armed vehicles as they’re lined up, warming up their engines, or getting ready to go on a road march, and that tells us instantly the grid coordinates of that column. How in the world can anyone execute a deception plan and keep a straight face about it? Remember the famous expression ‘little green men,’ and the Russians insisted they weren’t really annexing Crimea and trying to take over the Donbass. It was all the work of separatists and irregulars and so forth. But we were able to take that narrative apart piece by piece, and to reconstruct their command structures. We knew which Russian organisations, which special operating teams, were involved and who was in command. Yes, they were leading some militia folks and irregulars, some gangs and what have you, but there was a regular structure at work too. There was a cadre of well-trained officers and NCOs leading it. We were able to uncover all that. “The term ‘strategy’ dates from the Greco-Roman period but then it doesn’t come back into vogue until the 18th century or so” So, how can we—in the age of cyber communications and satellites—execute deception and pull it off? An EMP or electro-magnetic pulse would knock out all communication within a certain radius. You could do that—knock out everything and then make your move. But eventually the lights will come back on. It is an interesting question, and there are various ways to approach it—one involves the strategic communications your party releases. You can set up a narrative about what you want people to believe you’re doing and make it plausible, and then do something that looks very similar to what you said you were going to do but actually it may be “one off” in order to achieve what you want. It is trickier but it can be done."

"Sun Tzu, a Chinese general 26 centuries ago, tells us: “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.” That is the mission of intelligence. We can build all the billion dollar spy satellites we want – and we do – but to know your enemy is to talk to him in his own language. That is the job of spies, and that is what The Art of War teaches. Through intelligence. Intelligence is the art of war without weapons. Well, you need to define what that is. Is it disinformation, lying, cheating or stealing? Black ops can mean all of those things. It can mean propaganda. It can mean putting a spy in the enemy’s camp. It can mean putting a bomb under the hood of the car of an Iranian nuclear scientist. The phrase “black operations” encompasses a multitude of sins. The last one I listed was the work of the Israelis."