Six Timeless Lessons from Sun Tzu on the Art of War

25 years ago I created a marketing plan for a new product rollout in which I borrowed practical wisdom from Sun Tzu's The Art of War. It was fun, creative and (best of all) successful. 

This week I've been revisiting the book for the first time in a while. This time around I've been noticing something. So much of the advice Sun Tzu gives has been utterly ignored in so many of the conflicts that have taken place during my lifetime.

Here are a handful of statements from Sun Tzu's masterwork, with examples of how they were carried out or disregarded. My comments are in blue.

"Victory is the main object in war. If this is long delayed, weapons are blunted and morale depressed."
The Vietnam War illustrates this vividly. Not only was morale depressed amongst the troops, the entire country seemed to become weary with these years of conflict. The Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan suffered a similar fate, a lesson the U.S. evidently failed to pay attention to as we proceeded to later make the same mistake there.

"Generally in war the best policy is to take a state intact; to ruin it is inferior to this."
Apparently Vladimir Putin missed this passage in Sun Tzu's manual. Our carpet bombing of North Vietnam likewise reveals our own generals' ignorance in these matters. 

"To win one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill."
If you were to study the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, you'd see how much of Sun Tzu's wisdom Napoleon took to heart. He once said, "Read and meditate upon the wars of the great captains. This is the only means of learning the art of war." This passage can be illustrated in several of Napoleon's remarkable victories, battles that were won without ever firing a shot.

"Treat your captives well and care for them."
Our shameful behavior at Abu Grahib illustrates once more how far we've veered from being moral leaders of the free world, though this hardly compares to many past regimes in history. Genghis Khan's brutality in the 13th century was legendary. The Spanish Conquistadors route of the Aztec and Inca empires was likewise cruel and brutal.

"He whose generals are able and not interfered with by the sovereign will be  victorious."
The Granada invasion is a perfect example of this principle, or rather, what happens when this principle is violated. Norman Schwarzkopf, in his memoir, describes the rapid success their surprise invasion achieved with no loss of a single American life. Unfortunately, there was a phone call from the White House requesting that the troops check on the students at a university in another part of the island. The unplanned additional mission led to a helicopter collision that took the lives of 24 GIs. When Schwarzkopf was asked to take the lead in Desert Storm, he replied, "Yes, under one condition." That condition was that he would be in charge and there would be no phone calls from the White House asking for favors or telling him what to do. Lesson learned.

"There are occasions when the commands of the sovereign need not be obeyed."

It was General Grant who masterminded the Vicksburg Campaign that broke the back of the Confederacy during the Civil War. After crossing the Mississippi below Vicksburg, he broke his army off from Union supply lines and led a zigzag encirclement of the city from behind. His commanding officer, General Halleck, had sent orders to Grant to turn back, but it took 30 days to find Grant because his army was forraging while fighting a number of other battles to get in position for a siege. When Grant saw Halleck's orders, he sent back a reply: "If you knew where we were and what was happening here, you would not have sent these orders." Halleck's orders were not obeyed, which made Halleck furious. If I remember correctly, Halleck tried to court-martial Grant, but President Lincoln would have none of it. Rather, Lincoln was thrilled to find a general who was bold and would do whatever it took to get the job done, selecting Grant to head the Union armies and press the war to its conclusion.

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Yes, the Soviet Union Was an Evil Empire, Though We Have Our Issues As Well

I'd like to share two articles from the December 2021 Reason magazine. I would have shared this last night except I was distracted by the Tuesday election results along with the climax of the World Series. (Congratulations, Braves fans.)

Reason routinely produces excellent journalism that fails to get the recognition it deserves. The first article is from their December issue marking the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, she brings an insider's view to this in depth story that has contemporary applications.

The second article ought to keep us from gloating. To fight for freedom means we have to be humble, vigilant and aware. 

Yes, It Was An "Evil Empire"

It was the summer of 1983, and I, a Soviet émigré and an American in the making, was chatting with the pleasant middle-aged woman sitting next to me on a bus from Asbury Park, New Jersey, to Cherry Hill. Eventually our conversation got to the fact that I was from the Soviet Union, having arrived in the U.S. with my family three years earlier at age 17. "Oh, really?" said my seatmate. "You must have been pretty offended when our president called the Soviet Union an 'evil empire'! Wasn't that ridiculous?" But her merriment at the supposed absurdity of President Ronald Reagan's recent speech was cut short when I somewhat sheepishly informed her that I thought he was entirely on point.

* * *

The woman on the bus in 1983 did not surprise me. By then, I had already met many Americans for whom "anti-Soviet" was almost as much of a pejorative as it had been in the pages of Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party. My favorite was a man in the café at the Rutgers Student Center who shrugged off the victims of the gulag camps by pointing out that capitalism kills people too—with cigarettes, for example. When I recovered from shock, I told him that smoking was far more ubiquitous in the Soviet Union, and anti-smoking campaigns far less developed. That momentarily stumped him.

You can read the full story here. Cathy Young's account is loaded with insights.

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The second story is a reprint from 2013. It's a must read because it shows the extent to which the U.S. is involved in illegal domestic surveillance. 

Thank You, Edward Snowden

"The NSA has turned the internet into a giant surveillance platform."

Last week the Cato Institute put on a terrific conference about unconstitutional domestic spying. The Cato conference took place after a summer of alarming revelations of just how deep and extensive the feds' secret surveillance of our everyday communications had become. The conference, held at the institute's downtown D.C. headquarters, brought some of the most knowledgeable Internet luminaries together with some of the fiercest fighters for Americans' Fourth Amendment rights.

Watchdog organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had sought for years to expose the extent and depth of federal surveillance, but their efforts were largely stymied by the very walls of secrecy they were trying to breach...

The walls of surveillance secrecy were finally cracked by the June revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden. Snowden's files conclusively show that the federal government has been operating a vast spying program that violates the Fourth Amendment rights of tens of millions of ordinary Americans.

This one, written by Ronald Bailey, is another good read:
Thank You, Edward Snowden

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Related Links

Solzhenitsyn on World Communism

George Orwell: Insight from a Man Who Saw It All

Midnight In Chernobyl: Adam Higginbotham's Explosive Story About What Really Happened

There's nothing quite like the exhilaration of a good read. The last time I couldn't put a book down was in the late 60s when I stayed up all night reading Mario Puzo's The Godfather. Friday night I was sorely tempted to stay up all night once more because of a book I almost couldn't put down, Adam Higginbotham's Midnight In Chernobyl.

It's a remarkable account of the Chernobyl disaster. It's quite apparent that a lot of work went into researching this story. The author, drawing from new sources, gives what is surely the most complete account of what really happened. What's compelling is the writing itself. These are real people who were in the middle of a real situation.

The incident took place in the spring of 1986, April 26 to be precise, just days before the May 1 celebrations designed to show off the Soviet Union's mighty power.

The book opens by setting the story within a context, that context being the Soviet Union after decades of communist party leadership.

"Behind all the catastrophic failures of the USSR during the Era of Stagnation —beneath the kleptocratic bungling, the nepotism, the surly inefficiencies, and the ruinous waste of the planned economy – lay the monolithic power of the communist party."  (page 13)

"Advancement in many political, economic, and scientific careers was granted only to those who repressed their personal opinions, avoided conflict, and displayed unquestioning obedience to those above them. By the mid-70s this blind conformism had smothered individual decision making at all levels of the state and party machine, infecting not just the bureaucracy but technical and economic disciplines, too. Lies and deception were endemic to the system, trafficked in both directions along with chain of management: those lower down passed up reports to their superiors packed with falsified statistics and inflated estimates, of unmet goals triumphantly reached, unfulfilled quarters heroically exceeded. To protect its own position at every stage, each manager relayed the lies upward or compounded them." (page 15)

In other words it was a system that rewarded Yes-men, a system that rewarded those who played the game, not those who told the truth.

Gorbachev came to power in March 1985, a younger more astute politicians that "the long succession of the zombie apparatchiks whose declining health, drunkenness, and senility had been concealed from the public by squadrons of increasingly desperate minders."

The man responsible for building the Chernobyl complex--four nuclear reactors in operation and two more in the works-- was Victor Brukhanov. The entire city of Pripyat where the workers and their families lived, was similarly a showcase achievement.  But Brukhanov was a product of his culture, as Higginbotham details here:

"In the 16 years that he’d spent building four nuclear reactors and an entire city on an isolated stretch of marshland, Victor Brukhanov had received a long education in the realities of the system. Hammered on the anvil of the party, made pliant by the privileges of rank, the well-informed and opinionated young specialist had been transformed into an obedient tool of the nomenklatura. Like all successful Soviet managers, to do so Brukhanov had learned how to be expedient and bend limited resources to meet the endless list of unrealistic goals. He had to cut corners, cook the books, and fudge regulations."  (Italics mine)

For all his achievements Brukhanov would be rewarded. And in the spring of 1986 because of the success of Chernobyl would be honored at the May One holiday with a decree of the presidium of the supreme Soviet.

* * * *

Photo by Javier García on Unsplash

One of the features of the story is the great pains the author has made to understand and explain the science behind nuclear power. This is from a a section about the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

"At 8:16 AM on August 6, 1945 a fission weapon containing 64 kg of uranium detonated 580 meters above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and Einstein‘s equation proved mercilessly accurate. The bomb itself was extremely inefficient: just 1 kg of the uranium underwent fission, only 700 mg of mass—the weight of a butterfly – was converted into energy but it was enough to obliterate an entire city in a fraction of a second. Some 78,000 people died instantly, or immediately afterward – vaporized, crushed, or incinerated in the fire storm followed the blast wave. By the end of the year, another 25,000 men, women and children were also sick and died from their exposure to the radiation liberated by the world’s first Atom bomb attack."

The explosion that destroyed this Japanese city came from unleashing the power within a remarkable small amount of material, about the weight of a butterfly. By way of contrast, this is how energy is created in a nuclear power plant.

"Unlike a nuclear weapon, in which a vast number of uranium atoms fission in a fraction of a second, releasing all their energy in and annihilating flash of heat and light, and a reactor the process must be regulated and delicately sustained for weeks, months or even years. This requires three components: a moderator, control rods and a coolant."

"To generate power steadily inside a nuclear reactor, the behavior of the neutrons must be artificially controlled, to ensure that the chain reaction stays constant and the heat of fission can be harnessed to create electricity. Ideally every single fission reaction should trigger just one more fission in the neighboring atom, so that each successive generation of neutrons contains exactly the same number as the one before, and the reactor remains in the same critical state."

"Should each fission fail to create as many neutrons as the one before the reactor becomes subcritical, the chain reaction slows and eventually ceases, and the reactor shuts down. But if each generation produces more than one fission, the chain reaction could begin to grow too quickly toward potentially uncontrollable supercriticality in a sudden massive release of energy similar to that in a nuclear weapon. To maintain a steady state between these two extremes is a delicate task. The first nuclear engineers had to develop tools to master forces perilously close to the limits of man’s ability to control."

* * * *

Midnight In Chernobyl is divided into two parts. Part One is called The Birth of a City. It describes the life of those who lived in this advanced and growing community of 50,000 people. It was envisioned that Pripyat would grow to be a city of 200,000 once the full nuclear energy complex was rolled out. The disaster interfered with this vision. How the Soviet leadership responded is the rest of the story, Part Two, is titled The Death of an Empire.

The book is important on many levels. Was the Chernobyl disaster a warning about nuclear power? Or was this more a lesson about what happens when you create a culture built on a lack of transparency? This became the first real test of Gorbachev's idealistic aim to create a new, open society. Ideals, however, are easier to proclaim than to put into practice.

Adam Higginbotham has produced an important book. More to come.

Related Links
Three Mile Island and Two Personal Anecdotes
Throwback: Anniversary of the Three Mile Island Incident

Local Art Seen: Tweed Spotlights the Art of Russia

Earlier this fall the The Museum of Russian Art (TMORA) donated an exhibition of 34 paintings, sculptures, posters and decorative works to the Tweed Museum of Art here on the campus of UMD.  The show is titled Art In Conflict, featuring works from the last decades of the Soviet Union.

The "conflict" is philosophical in the sense that some of the art is state sanctioned realism and other works are non-conformist. The show was curated by Dr. Maria (Masha) Zavialova for the TMORA.  "Arranged as a dialogue of state-sanctioned and oppositional models of artistic production, Art in Conflict invites a creative interpretation of what it was to be an artist living in the Soviet era."

Having been a serious art student in the early 70s, it was especially interesting to see the contrast between what was taking place behind the Iron Curtain and in our own turbulent, but unrestricted, times. The art here was created from the time of the death of Stalin in 1953 through the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Detail from the "approved" style of painting.

It's interesting to consider how the arts began to flourish post-Stalin. That Khrushchev permitted Solzhenitsyn to publish A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a remarkable testament to the liberalization that was taking place across the board. It's apparent from this show that a sea change was underway.

During the Khrushchev and Brezhnev era (1960s to 1980s), "the unofficial, or nonconformist, art movement was unmatched in its inexhaustible scope of creativity, courage, and variety. Nonconformists claimed the right to explore topics outlawed by the Soviet ideological apparatus." According to the information accompanying the show, "Their chief concern was not purely artistic. Rather, unofficial art responded to, protested against, and commented on the rigid doctrines of official Soviet art."

By way of contrast, "Mafiya" by Alexander Zakharov, 1990

Honoring 25th anniversary of Yari Gagarin's 1961 flight. 1986
Poster by Vladimir Fekliaev

These statements led me to consider the ways in which American artists were "at war" with conventions. What made art good or significant in the U.S.? Andy Warhol's work took its own unflinching look at popular culture and put it right out there: "What is and isn't art?" And "who decides?"

In the Soviet Union official art conformed to realist principles and conveyed its messages that aligned with the proletariat vision. The unofficial underground art explored non-realist modern approaches.

According to the accompanying literature:
Official art was atheist, whereas unofficial art tackled the themes of religion, spirituality, and metaphysics with relish. Most official art was gravely serious, which unofficial art was often not, playfully subverting and mocking ideological clichés.

"The Mail Carrier" by Isaak Shifman.  Painting in the "approved" style.

There was one point in common though: both art movements were politicized. Government sanctioned Soviet art was an instrument at the service of the political apparatus and thus, profoundly, ideological. Nonconformist art stepped forward to oppose artistic non-freedom, and inevitably entered the political arena. Conflict was a deliberate stance: non-official artists of the late Soviet era had to dismantle the insidious visual language of the Soviet establishment to discover their own idiom and voice.

The Soviet art scene had its grey zone: the art that chose not to take sides, but rather pursue purely artistic concerns and timeless subjects. But, in the highly politicized atmosphere of a totalitarian state, wasn’t the choice to be apolitical also a political decision?

Here are several more pieces showing that some interesting work was taking place outside the official propaganda norm.

"Pilgrims" by Aleksandr Gazhur

* * * *

"Pilgrims" (Detail)

* * * * 

"Mikhal Sergeich and Boris Nikolaich" by Dmitri Kantorow, 1991

* * * *

"Composition with Cards IIII" by Vladimir Memukhin  (1982)

* * * * 

Yuri Gagarin one more time.

What kind of art were you making from 1970 to 1990? 

And whose rules were you following as you created your work?

Related Links
The Death of Stalin
Remembering Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: A Profile in Courage
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

The Cold War

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." ~H.G. Wells

I remember a statement by C.S. Lewis that said in effect that he did not read newspapers because the things that are really happening in the world won't be written about till six months from now. To some extent he is right, and often it is much later still than six months. Some truths only come to light after decades of being kept under wraps, and for this reason we do not always fully understand the very times we live in.

This week I just finished reading Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis' The Cold War, a fascinating read because so much of it formed a backdrop for all who grew up as part of the baby boom generation of which I have been a part. It was a strange kind of war. For the first time in history, two superpowers had weapons that they were afraid to use.

Gaddis has written a half dozen books on this topic beginning with his 1972 volume on the origins of the Cold War. It's a compelling read with inside stories about things I'd only half understood.

His coverage of the Sixties was especially captivating for me, as I think many of us are still trying to understand the experience we went through while coming of age in that tumultuous time. I remember when Nixon resumed bombing of Cambodia in the early Seventies when I was at Ohio U and the protests it generated. I specifically remember when Harry Reasoner came and spoke to a packed house in the M.I.A., an auditorium on the college green. He had to use veiled language to tell us there was much to be concerned about things going on in the then-current Nixon administration. It seemed like he had so much he wanted to say but could not.

Gaddis does say it. Two months after taking office, in his very first year, Nixon began the illegal bombing of Cambodia, a neutral country in Southeast Asia. But Nixon did not tell the truth about this activity. Instead, when the N.Y. Times stated that we were bombing a neutral country, he told the people it was not true. The Cambodians knew we were bombing. The North Vietnamese knew were were bombing. China and the Soviet Union knew we were bombing. But American citizens were being kept in the dark. Why?

The result was an ever widening credibility gap between the American people and their leaders.

The Cold War is not only about the American experience, and this is its greatest strength. We also meet each of the Soviet dictators with their strengths and flaws, from Stalin to Gorbachev. How the Berlin Wall came to be erected, how the Soviet Union maintained control of the Eastern Bloc, how Mao came to power and how China evolved to the power it is today, and how the Wall came down.... it's all discussed in a vivid manner that bring new gems to light.

There were many insights I had not heard before. How Nixon and Kissinger were able to open up trade relations with Mao's China was fascinating. Mao made an interesting comment that he liked (American) conservatives because even though he did not agree with them, they said what they meant, whereas our liberals said one thing and did another.

What was especially interesting is how the dictators of many smaller powers used the Cold War to their own advantage by playing one power off against the other. "Help me or I will join their side." In this manner many dictators were able to consolidate their power within a defined sphere.

The development of thermonuclear weapons brought the world into a pretty scary place. To think that mutual assured destruction could be a legitimate peace-keeping strategy seems almost insane, yet it worked. It's hard to say what our future holds since many of these weapons remain, but the rules have changed. Let's hope and pray that wisdom prevails.