Art of War (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free Page A

Chinese Literature ). Meanwhile readers avidly sought works—this is also characteristic of high culture in Greece and India—that explored what the twentieth-century poet Stephen Spender (in The Making of a Poem ) would call “that human experience so neglected in modern art—the art of ruling, the art of being a prince and being responsible for the use of power.”
    The moral and social content of the ancient Chinese world was thoroughly scrutinized and reflected upon by Sun Tzu. As a result, his was an approach to human frailty so elastic and capacious—and so true not just to the Chinese, but to the human way—that it sits easily with Western and Eastern military establishments, and still can form the basis for hilarious, long-running Korean sitcoms, kung-fu action flicks, sight gags in Hollywood comedies, countless boost-your-aggression-quotient tomes by business-school professors, and cusp-of-religious-enquiry books. It’s been an endless marvel since its first “publication” some 2,500 years ago.
    For writers in the West from Hugo Grotius ( De jure belli et pacis , 1625) to President Theodore Roosevelt ( The Winning of the West , 1889), wars, like the great forest fires of summer, cleanse society of its Darwinian detritus and give backbone to those who survive. John Milton’s Satan distilled it as: “th’ unconquerable will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield / And what is else not to be overcome?” ( Paradise Lost , book 1). If we learn about war from the movies, in which heroes rise from innumerable wounds in seconds flat to fight with nary a shiver of fear, it does seem a clean, albeit loud, exercise, and reading the clipped, clear pronouncements of Sun Tzu would make it seem all the easier. But historically war is synonymous with mud and thorns, with dysentery, typhoid, and famine. The best military minds may disagree on many points, but on one they will always concur: The only way to prevent war is to know how to wage and win it better than your enemy. So, first, let us examine what we think war is, how it is defined, and then proceed to how it is waged.
    West or East, Asia or Europe, war conjures deception as much as destruction. The old High German word for war—the root of the English word—was werre , “to confound.” And wars, as opposed to beer-hall brawls, are not a “blind struggle between mobs of people” but rather an engagement or a series of them between well-organized masses, moving as a team, acting under a single, overarching will, and directed against a definite objective: another country or alliance of countries. This definition (adapted from the Encyclopedia Britannica , eleventh edition) is key.
    The nineteenth-century Prussian scholar Carl von Clausewitz amplifies that description to give us a precise understanding of tactics versus strategy in his monumental work Vom Kriege (On War):
    The conduct of war . . . consists in the planning and conduct of fighting. . . . [Fighting] consists of a greater or lesser number of single acts, each complete in itself, . . . called “engagements.” . . . This gives rise to the completely different activity of planning and executing these engagements themselves, and of coordinating each of them with the others in order to further the object of the war. One has been called tactics, and the other, strategy.
    Wars are political. They derive from the will of one polis , or people, against another, usually in a contest to determine which will exercise sovereignty over land, as in territorial wars, or beliefs, as in religious or ideological wars. Either way, war requires a definite objective and a definite enemy. Terrorism is not war; it is an important tactic of war. The distinction is neither arbitrary nor small. To give some recent examples: Terrorism was used with extraordinary efficiency by the Nazis in World War II (a large invading nation against a weaker one), by the would-be Israelis in their