This reticence about embarking on war is characteristic of much of traditional Chinese military thinking and is inseparable from traditional farming civilization as practiced in the Chinese lands. War should never be undertaken on the basis of temporary indignation or the passion of the moment. Human beings are indeed creatures of passion but when emotion is the major factor in any decision, that decision could have disastrous consequences. The example from the Three Kingdoms, period when Liu Bei mobilized a national campaign to avenge the killing of his sworn blood brother, Guan Yu, is a revealing one. It was a decision motivated by passion and grief and it proved a disastrous one because adequate preparation was hopelessly neglected. The end result was the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Wu soldiers. These were lessons which had already been taught centuries earlier by Sun Tzu but they had not been learned by Liu Bei and his leadership proved catastrophic for his kingdom.
In the years after his final defeat at Waterloo, it is reported that the great French general and politician Napoleon Bonaparte got his hands on a French-version of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. When he read the passage “No ruler should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no general should fight a battle simply out of pique,” he is said to have closed the book and heaved a deep sign, “If I could have read this book 20 years ago, all of history may have turned out differently,” the exiled former emperor remarked.
This cautiousness about going to war is absolutely central to the ideas and worldview of Sun Tzu. “A kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life.” Thus the enlightened ruler is heedful, and the good general cautious so that unnecessary loss of life and resources may be avoided. In the passage, Attack by Stratagem, Sun observed that the highest form of generalship is to trump the enemy’s plans; next best is to prevent the coordination of the enemy’s forces; the next best is to attack the enemy’s army in the field; worst of all is to besiege walled cities. Thus TheArt of War is not a glorification of the battlefield and the blood that is spilt on it; on the contrary it declares the supreme military achievement to reside in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting at all. The battle may be won by one’s wits and wisdom as much as it may be by sword and shield and indeed the former is to be much preferred.
Even though Sun Tzu is rightly recognized as an outstanding militarist, it is thus not oxymoronic to describe him also as an idealistic pacifist. War may be essential to the well-being of a state Sun taught us, but it should be avoided if at all possible.
During the blood-soaked 20th century, over 130 wars took place, during which some 120 million people lost their lives, a total that is reckoned to surpass the total number of deaths in all wars in history before 1900. Perhaps this is another reason why so many state leaders, militarists and scholars have turned to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Perhaps it reflected a general conviction that in the face of the bloodiest and cruelest century in history, another way needed to be found. The eminent Britain military historian and strategist, Liddell Hart put forward an “Indirect Route Stratagem” which he openly admitted had been inspired by Sun Tzu’s imperatives to “break the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”
American tactics during the Second Gulf War offer another illustration of the influence of the idea of “breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” As Sun Tzu explained, “A whole army may be robbed of its spirit; a commander-in-chief may be robbed of his presence of mind.”Sun may never have dreamed of an army of such technological and military might as that put into the field by the Americans but he would have well recognized the thrust of their tactics. Their so called “Precision strikes,” and the “media war” that was waged every day gradually sapped the will of the enemy and as resistance steadily crumbled, the war ended quickly with none of the bloody sieges that wad been direly forecast beforehand.