The Art of War, Book II is an observation by Jack Rusher, published here Monday, October 04, 2004. It is part of Objet Trouvé.
Some old wisdom for the new empire.
Waging War
The second book of Sun-Tzu’s classic text, The Art of War, concerns itself with Waging War. The first six principles enumerated in the text are:
- Consider the costs of keeping troops on the road.
- When engaged in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.
- Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.
- Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.
- Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.
- There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.
The Art of War was written 2,500 years ago.