Tag: Ralph D Sawyer

I think that I read this chapter at least five times. One, it is very short at two pages and two, I was really trying to get the significance of this chapter. I have to say that I very well may need to reach as whatever was conveyed was very subtle. I feel like this chapter is grabbing at things already mentioned.

The list below are the key things that I took out of this chapter.

• first make yourself unconquerable, then you can conquer.
• If you can defend yourself then you can be victorious.
• first measurement, second estimation, third calculation, fourth weighing, fifth victory.

At first read, I thought the last bullet was the significant one. It is intended to be a progression. Measure what you can, then estimate the totality from the measurement, then calculate what that means in terms of strength, weigh your odds against your estimation and then you will be victorious. I was thinking about how I would write about this and the significance and I decided to read again.

I think bullets one and two are variations on each other. With more thought, I think that this is the significant message of the chapter. I am going to explain what I mean using an analogy that is not military related.

There is a lot of things that I am not. I am not a military man and I am also not a football man. That being said, I have watched the game for most of my life. So, while I don’t have first hand knowledge, I have heard many times how coaches hate the procedural penalties. Those would be offsides, false start, improper lineup and those sorts of things.

To the layman, it would seem like five yards is no big deal most of the the time. You don’t lose the down and it is half of the more severe penalties like 10 yards for holding. I feel that way anyway. But these are what the announcers always pronounce as adding up to beating yourself. Using Sun Tsu’s philosophy, you are much more likely to win if you don’t beat yourself.

I could be wrong, but I believe that Sun Tsu speaks in generalities. He has to be because using football again some teams still consistently win despite having too many penalties. The fact remains that when you look at the perennial champions they often rank in the lowest tiers for penalties. So, while it is not a guarantee that you will lose, the data says that it is statistically more likely. I have to believe that the same is true with war.

End Your Programming Routine: Whether it is playing football or investing for retirement, we cannot expect to consistently do well if we continue to beat ourselves. It may seem like common sense, at least it does to me but that may not have been the case 3000 years ago. We are fortunate to have most of the tools and information readily available so there really is no excuse to beat yourself in what you are pursuing.

I am just guessing that part of the continuity of the book is lost in translation. This chapter is kind of disjointed as a collection tidbits about strategy. I am not saying that it is not valuable, it is just hard to get in the flow of things when it is just a collection of facts. I have taken the luxury of summarizing all of what I consider the important things below.

The following are the things that I gleaned from this chapter.

• It is better to save the capitol. Saving the army is better than destroying the army. Subjugation is the superior strategy.
• The order of strategy should be as the following. Attack the plans, then the allies, then the army, then finally the fortifications.
• Recommendations for troop strength.
  • 10x surround them
  • 5x attack them
  • 2X split your army
  • 1x hold the line.
• Leadership principles
  • Those who know when to fight will win.
  • Those who know how to employ appropriate sized forces will win.
  • Leaders who have aligned their ranks will win
  • The prepared will be victorious
  • Leaders that are not interfered with by politicians will win.

I have never been a general nor even in the army. So, what I read seems reasonable. It also seems to be colloquial wisdom: if your troops are aligned, if you know when to attack, if you are prepared, it goes on and on as you can read then your chances of winning are better.

How is this helpful to something other than military operations? Or said another way, how can we use this as wisdom for business or life? If I use the thinnest of attempts to make this relevant to something other than the context I could probably come up with some similar allegories. Something like storm/norm/perform.

I think that successful sports teams align up and down the divisions. I observe that the most consistent high school teams have funnels up to their programs. They run the similar play books so that they are already into the system by the time that they get there. This is an example of aligning up and down the ranks.

That isn’t exactly the best storming example. In those cases you are either agreeing to the terms or you are not participating. But, the fact remains that the coaches are getting players to buy into the system or executing a principle of Sun Tsu. They are vertically integrating the entire age range of a sport to be the most successful at the highest level.

Its hard to rationalize a military concept in a non-military setting. For instance, playing a potentially deadly maneuvers, attacking strategy rather than risking life and limb seems like a better way to run an army. Only risk physical injury when it is necessary. That being said, we do have examples sometimes you do have to fight to win.

Going back to the US Civil War, the Army of the Potomac went through general after general. McClellan, Burnside, Hooker and Meade were all not prepared to engage in battle preferring to march and posture. The Confederate generals were not only successful but also employing Sun Tsu’s tactics of cutting off supply lines and knowing when to fight.

End Your Programming Routine: Getting back in the swing of things, much of this was written weeks ago. I may have lost a little bit of luster as a result, but I don’t want to write ten pages on something that is only three pages long, especially when my work is not really militarily oriented. I think that we can leave it where it is. Do the right tactical things and it will increase your likelihood of winning.

If you are reading along with me, by now you probably see why this book is held in high regard. There is so much wisdom packed in each chapter that we probably have heard but didn’t know the source. I am finding that myself.

While this chapter is titled Waging War, I found it to be more about logistics and overall objective rather than super secret tactics. Our politicians may be clever, but they are definitely not students of Sun Tsu. As a result, most recent conflicts have ground into failure (by my judgement).

Sun Tsu says that what motivates people to fight is anger, but what keeps them going is the spoils of war. We probably have heard ‘Gung Ho’ stories. In the days post 9/11 there were lots of them. Does Rusty Tillman ring a bell? Tillman was a young NFL safety that felt the call to his country immediately after 9/11. He gave up the money, the glamor as well as likely his childhood dream to be killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan.

My own grandfather told me that he volunteered for the Army in 1941 because he wanted to kill Germans. Granted most Americans were more mad at the Japanese, I suspect that his first generation French motivation had to be with the takeover of his family homeland. Anger is what drove enlistment.

Spoils are more complicated today than standard practice during Sun Tsu’s era. Even as late as Korea, GIs were sent home with their service weapons. Not just that, but they also brought home anything that was collected during the tour of duty. This was not just firearms but swords, jewelry, flags, uniform pieces and pretty much anything that could be carried. While I don’t think those things were a motivation to keep fighting, it was certainly a nod to military, victory tradition.

There are all kinds of variables here but a soldier wasn’t a soldier wasn’t a soldier. The lowest group were conscripts or militia members. They were called into service on an as needed basis. The leaders tended to be the rich folk of society. They certainly took advantage of war to enrich themselves. If there was a regular army, they tended to be a hodgepodge of things like criminals and misfits. In that case, being a soldier sure beat the alternatives.

The key of this chapter is not what motivates but if you will win. “No army will win a prolonged conflict.” This is the principle that proves our politicians have not read The Art of War. Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq sum up the last sixty years of US military action. These are all conflicts greater than ten years in duration and all losses in my opinion.

If you remember the mid-2000s, the question was asked, and asked and asked ‘What is the exit strategy’? Silence. We got into this war because of anger and we killed a lot of ’em. But good news for the Taliban, we left a lot of good weapons and equipment for them. So much so, they have donated some to Hamas to use in Gaza.

I go back to the self-realization in my podcast earlier this week. We act like we are surprised that militant Islam hates us. After we have spent the last sixty years meddling somewhere that we don’t belong or understand, we created generational hatred. We duped them into the petro dollar and keep getting involved in something that is not our concern every chance it warrants. We are the problem here, period. I digress from the Art of War.

If we evaluate the other side in what we call conflicts, it is pretty easy to see the perspective difference. It wasn’t a war to the Vietnamese (or take your pick), it was life. The fighting will end when I am dead or they are gone. Until such a time, this is how I live. There is no option to withdraw or leave. Long wars require long supply chains and tricks for morale since there is no opportunity to enrich the soldiers. Anger toward the enemy fades fast when you cant leave your post. It soon becomes anger at the controller rather than the ‘enemy’.

End Your Programming Routine: I love the idea of my country but I hate what it has become. Freedom takes maturity and that is in short supply when you can take at every opportunity. This is the reason we don’t have short wars. It doesn’t benefit the oligarchical pocketbook. That would be the ones that own the politicians and by proxy the politics.

And we are off. The Art of War is a short book. Mine is 77 pages and that is broken up into 13 chapters. Each week, it should be pretty easy to read the chapter and have some time to digest the meaning. I didn’t just read three pages however, my version has 162 pages of foreword, history and scene setting. Like Dante’s Italy, I had no idea about the history and politics of 500 BC (or the politically correct BCE) China. Truth be told, when any book starts adding a ton of foreign names, I kind of get lost.

It can be the Bible or a fantasy novel it is all the same, if the text is full of unfamiliar names I start to gloss over. So, I didn’t get a lot out of the pretext but a few things. Sun Tsu could be a pen name. He was likely an advisor to one of the Chinese emperors. This book is one of seven classic tactical texts albeit the best known.

The translator Ralph Sawyer relates the thirteen principles to several battles that Sun Tsu allegedly orchestrated. I suppose that this is an attempt to justify the validity of the principles based on the outcome of the battle. But, I am going to save you all of that anguish and we will assume that this is valuable wisdom that we can apply in today’s battles. Whatever those are.

This is my own principle. Never get involved in conflict with someone that has nothing to lose. What does that mean? It means that I have more important things to do than fight. I won’t use any names here but there is a person in my life that is chronically underemployed. This is also a very difficult person to get along with in the best of times. I suspect that the two things are related.

This person has been in the ‘system’ for many years and really nothing better to do, I don’t have the experience, desire or resources to get involved in a legal battle or other such things. I am not saying it is right but a better option is to pay some ransom than waste a bunch of time or resources fighting. The only loser in this scenario is me.

My philosophy is an homage to another Sun Tsu idea. Only fight battles that you are going to win. How do you know that you are going to win? It comes down to the initial estimation. There are five parameters that Sun Tsu says general need to know. They would be Tao, Heaven, Earth, generals and military organization. These are slightly abstract metrics to me anyway, especially when you read the definitions.

• Tao is the affinity of the soldiers to the ruler
• Heaven is the Yin/Yang
• Earth is the terrain
• Generals are generally the skill and ability
• Military organization includes things like troop strength and logistical support.

I don’t really want to get into analysis of each of these points but the thing that I notice is that this is really a holistic evaluation. Most people would probably only consider the last three elements in the evaluation and not necessarily the intangibles like ‘We have been on a real lucky streak, is this likely to continue?’ I think the thing to really take away from this is that an evaluation should be performed with a set of values that make sense for the situation.

Having never been a soldier, I cannot speak to that in particular. However, I have seen where weak initial estimations have come back to haunt time and time again. In the software business, I have seen underselling or underestimation of the scope and complexity cause virtual losses in battle. The poor generals lead troops that don’t have respect for the leaders. Logistical support is absent and the terrain is unknown. On top of that the Yin/Yang is not balanced because the plan is to make up the poor bidding with change orders or code in an attrition environment. Grind out the new workers who haven’t paid their dues.

How often do construction projects go double or triple the budget? Way too often because estimation is often more difficult than actually doing the work. Estimation is an interdisciplinary skill that requires knowledge of what needs to be done as well as a little bit of of poker. You have to know where the problem spots are likely and places where the project is likely to give and take.

Too often, this job is left to a polished smooth talker rather than a subject matter expert that has transitioned to a sales role. Also companies dig holes too deep by leveraging artificial advantages like off-shore workers (low rates) or currency conversions (converting a stronger dollar to weaker currencies for margins). This tricks might work to get out of a jamb but often put the short term profits over strategic partnerships or a happy workforce.

End Your Programming Routine: No, I have not confused business with war. Only one do I know anything about but I definitely concur that initial estimations are critical if you want to win the battle. Maybe Sun Tsu’s five parameters are adequate for war? What I can say is that parameters critical for success should be defined for the endeavor you are engaged in. They should be evaluated and refined with feedback. When this skill is mastered, then you will be prepared to determine whether or not to engage.