Sun tzu what is war

It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer defeat.

If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Whether you are creating a business strategy or devising steps to pursue a personal goal, these quotes from The Art of War may offer some valuable insights and guidance.

It was to facilitate such understanding at all levels, in fact, that I published, and distributed to the entire chain of command, counterinsurgency guidance for both Iraq and Afghanistan when I led the coalitions there, a practice that has typically been continued. Sun Tzu had unusual insight into the potential of combining action by regular and irregular troops and also the conduct of regular and irregular warfare - what he described as unorthodox or strange tactics.

So if you are good at irregular warfare you will be as inexhaustible as the sky and the earth. All those who have been engaged in the wars of the past sixteen years have had to confront irregular warfare - and, to varying degrees, to conduct it as well. In particular, our forces have blended and integrated various types of special operations forces with general purpose forces in ways seldom seen before.

It is thus very timely to have this new edition published now, in the midst of what likely will be a generational struggle against extremism. They are as hard to know as shadows.

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