My Life As A Historian: Sabaton History Talks "The Art of War"

If it's Thursday, it's time for Sabaton History and today the boys are talking about Sun Tzu.

I presume that most of you that are regular readers here have read this book, but if not you need to heed Joakim's words and read it. It's as he says: quick and easy to read; the big think is from digesting what you read, not from parsing the words themselves (i.e. in applying them). Sure, every wargame ever will be ruined for you thereafter (because Sun Tzu is all about intelligence and logistics, something few wargames bother with at all and those that do so do poorly), but this is good stuff and as Indy says it's generally applicable to non-military pursuits where you're running a group- like a household.

Here is the Project Gutenberg link they mentioned. If you'd rather have it in print, Amazon has it in paperback for less than $5 and free in Kindle.

There is one big caveat to the book. Sun Tzu presumes that your opponent can be reasoned with, and that the lives and property of the enemy are worth preserving. This is not universally true, and there are times when it is right and necessary to annihilate the enemy. This is because Sun Tzu wrote under the presumption that wars are between states ruled by competing elites, essentially doing very expensive high-stakes dominance displays ("war as an extention of politics"), and not between parties in an existential conflict where one side must be destroyed for the other to survive ("war as survival from predatory threat").

It is a caveat he would agree with, were he asked; "evil cults" and so on would be sufficiently fanatical to be existential threats and dealt with accordingly.

Today we use zombies and killer robots to get this point across. The reality is that it's still evil cults producing fanatic predators. They just got better at doing the intelligence game, but the dynamic remains the same: they are a predatory existential threat, and they must be destroyed before they wipe us out or we're done.