Colorado Injury Lawyer & Attorney : Mac Hester : Personal Injury, Auto Accident, Medical Malpractice : Serving Denver, Colorado Springs, Aurora

Carl von Clausewitz' On War, published posthumously in 1832, is THE seminal Western exegesis of war and military strategy and was the basis for Western military teaching and the conduct of war from its publication up until at least 1989, when the U.S. Marines adopted an official doctrine of warfighting largely based upon the priniciples of Sun Tzu's Art of War and U.S. Air Force Colonel Boyd's "OODA Loop." The crux of On War is attrition warfare as compared to the maneuver warfare of Art of War (but this is, of course, grossly oversimplified).

The U.S. invasion of Iraq is an interesting application (misapplicaiton) of the principles of the Art of War and an ignorant rejection of core principles of both On War and the Art of War. Defense secretary Rumsfeld planned for, and achieved, a quick military victory, but did not plan for, and did not achieve, stability and political victory. General Shinsheki's call for hundreds of thousands of troops, classic attrition warfare of Clausewitz' time, also was not the correct strategy. Had Clausewitz and Sun Tzu been consulted, both would have counseled President Bush to not invade Iraq. But the Iraq war is an article for another day.

The 10 principles that I have gleaned from On War are presented below.

• Print
• Comments (2)
• Trackbacks

John Minford's translation of the Art of War, Penguin Books 2002 (ISBN 0-670-03156-9(hc.); ISBN 0 14 04.3919 6 (pbk.)) is my favorite translation. Minford says that the Art of War is "beautiful and chilling." The same can be said of his translation, a portion of which (Chapter 5) is presented below. However, in order to save space, the excerpt is regrettably not presented in Minford's poetic structure. It is still beautiful and chilling nonetheless.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Some historians debate whether a man named Sun Tzu ever existed, much less wrote The Art of War (500 B.C.). Some say that the works of several generals over several decades (or longer) were compiled into one volume and attributed to Sun Tzu, who may be an invention. The debate seems to be about as meaningful as the debate as to whether Shakespeare wrote the great plays attributed to him (My favorite line in the Shakespeare debate is one scholar's answer: "If Shakespeare did not write Hamlet, then someone else of the same name did." So, I take Sun Tzu as a single entity (a man) who wrote The Art of War sometime around 500 B.C.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks