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Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

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Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#101

Post by pseudostem »

abdulhaq wrote: post #79
runlaszlorun wrote: post #28

As both a former army officer as well as someone who appreciates historical Chinese, it pains me to say that I found it underwhelming. I’m not saying that any one on here is like this, but in my experience it def attracts a certain type who, among other things, have a zero sum, “business is war” mindset that’s a tad creepy. Unlike everyone I know who has actually served .

Most HNers, and sadly I include myself in this, couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag. We read Sun Tzu because it is recommended reading in the intelligentsia's mindset. It seems cool to learn battle technique from an ancient Chinese text. If I wanted to learn how to really fight a battle I'd go to Sandhurst or West Point.

Origins according to a many-times-over gilded comment on reddit (I forget which sub) went something like this -

subservient office culture in Japan where the big boss was reading it, so it spread to the entire organisation from where it spread to other organisations. It got to a point where no one knew why they were reading it, just that they had to. Around the same time it caught imagination of the Americans because of the Japanese (who were actually pretty efficient at their jobs).

Will look for the comment and post if it takes me less than 15 mins.

Edit: forgot how bad reddit search was. While I did not find what I was looking for, this [0] is one high quality answer you may be interested in. Only top comments are heavily moderated on that sub.

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j37co/when_...

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#102

Post by runlaszlorun »

mountainb wrote: post #58
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sun Tzu's work was aimed at nobled who had zero experience and knowledge in warfare; a lot of it is low-hanging fruit, but you have to build up the basis for these things like "make sure your soldiers have food" and "don't tell your opponent what you're up to" in these people. It's why I don't understand why in the US, the president is also the top military commander. I'm sure they have good advisors and the good one…

They're not, really. The way that you advise the president on military issues is you give them prepackaged "decisions" that are limited variations on the same choice. The president's authority over the military is a legal fiction much like many other legal fictions that keep the system going.

Perhaps. But it does prevent Latin America (and elsewhere) style military rule.

Instead we get military generals who act more like politicians the more senior they get (proven by study). And it seems that often politicians with little to lose and a lot to prove are often more hawkish than the military around them (Hilary Clinton, Wolfowitz, et al).

But, you know, tradeoffs…

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#103

Post by snapcaster »

_0ffh wrote: post #74
chaostheory wrote: post #43

I’m not sure how Sun Tzu is complete garbage when his strategies were vague and often not specific, so you can adapt them according to the situation To me the problem is that the study of war, like the study of economics or any other social study; isn’t a real science. There is no repeatable theoretical model, including The Art of War. There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations.

> like the study of economics [...] There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations I've got great news for you! There are universal economic laws that always hold true in all situations. For example, "man acts". You can't deny that, because denying it would be an act in itself, leading to a (performative) contradiction. From this law, and just a few others of a similar kind, you can build a whole…

Like what? can you name one? If this is true, how come the people that study this aren't rich?

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#104

Post by sofixa »

denton-scratch wrote: post #99
mcv wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Modern militaries don't seem to enjoy the freedom to act and maneuver that a classic general enjoyed in the field (for good reasons). Modern requirements for transparency and democracy I think modern democracies do a much better job of separating military and civilian leadership than dictatorships do. Putin seems to be too personally involved in micromanaging his war, insisting on conquests that are simply not poss…

> And he believed the West to be weak (or at least divided and disorganised), so he attacked. That makes it sound as if Putin attacked because an opportunity presented itself. I don't think that's why he attacked. I think he attacked because he felt he had no choice. Not because NATO was crowding into his borderlands, which is Putin's story; but because following the collapse of Soviet communism and the USSR, the rum…

> Not because NATO was crowding into his borderlands, which is Putin's story; but because following the collapse of Soviet communism and the USSR, the rump Russia was clearly a state dependent mainly on resource-extraction, which desn't promise a great independent future. Especially with Europe's increasing development of non-fossil energy, earnings from fossil fuel exports could be expected to diminish rapidly.

"Rapidly" but still on a decades scale, which Putin is unlikely to live to. Meanwhile he has forced Europe to look elsewhere for energy and drastically accelerated their plans.

> But why Ukraine? Well, setting aside his deranged opinions about the historic unity of Ukraine and Russia, and the historic destiny of the "Rus", Ukraine was rapidly becoming closer to Europe, and Ukrainians were clearly happy with that prospect. Having a successful, happy fragment of the USSR on his border threatened his control over his own population.

Poland and the Baltics are already on his border, and most of the former Warsaw Pact is already in the EU and happily progressing, with quality of life drastically better than in Russia. I really don't think this excuse works.

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#105

Post by AnimalMuppet »

_0ffh wrote: post #74
chaostheory wrote: post #43

I’m not sure how Sun Tzu is complete garbage when his strategies were vague and often not specific, so you can adapt them according to the situation To me the problem is that the study of war, like the study of economics or any other social study; isn’t a real science. There is no repeatable theoretical model, including The Art of War. There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations.

> like the study of economics [...] There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations I've got great news for you! There are universal economic laws that always hold true in all situations. For example, "man acts". You can't deny that, because denying it would be an act in itself, leading to a (performative) contradiction. From this law, and just a few others of a similar kind, you can build a whole…

Got a list of these laws, and the logically proven theorems that come from them?

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#106

Post by hackernewds »

bruce511 wrote: post #11

As with all advice, context matters. It is good to know the rules, the best practices, the proven strategies. But it is also good to understand the context of those strategies to understand when the context has changed. SQL is clearly the right way to store large quantities of data (some would say the only way.) Until some folk realised their context was different, and NoSql was born. Strategy is hard because it play…

I do not understand the NoSQL example. Would you mind please elaborating?

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#107

Post by sofixa »

mcv wrote: post #72
chaostheory wrote: post #43

I’m not sure how Sun Tzu is complete garbage when his strategies were vague and often not specific, so you can adapt them according to the situation To me the problem is that the study of war, like the study of economics or any other social study; isn’t a real science. There is no repeatable theoretical model, including The Art of War. There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations.

> There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations. There are some. An army marches on its stomach. For war, you need three things: money, money and money. Except in a guerilla war maybe. Maybe you're right after all.

> For war, you need three things: money, money and money. Except in a guerilla war maybe. Maybe you're right after all.

This seems to imply that money will win you wars, which is not the case. You don't need "money" to get foreign military aid, nor to manufacture small arms in your own factories, especially if you use slaves for that (like the Nazis did).

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#108

Post by denton-scratch »

brazzy wrote: post #93
mcv wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's a fairly brief text. I've got a copy of Art of War here, but most of it is commentary by others. Sun Tzu's own text is not a lot. He throws out some principles without explanation or examples, and that's limiting it's practical applicability quite a bit. I suspect much of his more questionable advice is stuff that happened to work once for him in specific circumstances, and it'd be great if he told a bit m…

> For example, his advice to live off the enemy's supplies instead of bringing your own (which would be very expensive and cause economic problems that he surprisingly addresses). This is good advice in many cases, and has been done throughout history, but it can also go very wrong. Consider Napoleon's invasion of Russia where Russia just burned down everything in the path of the French army in order to deny them sup…

> it was logistically impossible.

The importance of logistics for large armies is widely underestimated.

If you abandon your supply base, and try to live of the (enemy's) land, you have to advance continuously and quickly, like Sherman's successful campaign in Georgia and the Carolinas. If you rest for even a day or so, you deplete the available "forage" (i.e. the resources of the civilian population).

If you stick with your supply base, then a large part of your force has to be devoted to defending the supply lines; and those supply lines have to be manned, and consume supplies themselves. In the time before internal combustion engines, it was hard to maintain supply lines for armies larger than about 80,000 men, because the fodder required for horses began to exceed the supplies needed by the soldiers. Putin ran into logistics problems almost immediately; Russia depends internally on railways very heavily, but his army had to de-train at the border and switch to trucks, on narrow roads, lined with forests.

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#109

Post by jcranmer »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #48
runlaszlorun wrote: post #28

As both a former army officer as well as someone who appreciates historical Chinese, it pains me to say that I found it underwhelming. I’m not saying that any one on here is like this, but in my experience it def attracts a certain type who, among other things, have a zero sum, “business is war” mindset that’s a tad creepy. Unlike everyone I know who has actually served .

Sun Tzu's work was aimed at nobled who had zero experience and knowledge in warfare; a lot of it is low-hanging fruit, but you have to build up the basis for these things like "make sure your soldiers have food" and "don't tell your opponent what you're up to" in these people. It's why I don't understand why in the US, the president is also the top military commander. I'm sure they have good advisors and the good one…

> It's why I don't understand why in the US, the president is also the top military commander. I'm sure they have good advisors and the good ones have done their homework, but it's not their profession in the end.

War is ultimately a political endeavor; the goal of a war is to compel, by use of military force, some sort of political objective. It only makes sense then that the person in charge of directing when and where that military force is used is also the person who is empowered to carry out the political policy of the entire country.

For people who rise to the top of the military from within, every political problem becomes a nail in want of the military hammer for a solution, and thus the default answer to every crisis tends to become war. The Cuban Missile Crisis was defused without a war because both Kennedy and Khrushchev couldn't bring themselves to push the button marked nuclear war, while virtually the entire military establishment was convinced, and forcefully arguing, that the only way out of the situation was to be the first to push that button.

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#110

Post by _8j50 »

labster wrote: post #7
_8j50 wrote: post #4

From what little I know Sun Tzu has a lot of "good rule od thumb" wisdom but you shouldn't stick to what he says as if he is infallible. For example: > The greatest victory is that which requires no battle He says a lot of stuff like that but this is only true if your aim is peace in the near term and appearances of victory. The carnage of war, the worse it is the more it avoids even more war. If you win without batt…

I think that quote is just a corollary to this one: "War is the continuation of policy with other means." — Carl von Clausewitz A foreign policy that achieves your aims is better than a foreign war; a functional domestic policy is better than a civil war. But sometimes people won’t compromise and the only policy left is war.

And I don't agree with that point in general except when someone starts being violent against you, a peaceful resolution is not desirable for long term peace.

Similar to a school bully or when you get in prison and you start getting picked on. Resolving things peacefully with that bully only lets other bullies come after you later on. But harming that one bully effectively ensures your safety long term.

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