The Art of War

The last two chapters cover miscellaneous techniques, including the use of fire and the employment of spies.

Sun Tzu constantly promotes innovation in the field and taking advantage of opportunities. For this, his chief example is the creative use of fire to harass and damage enemy forces. One of the most famous examples of this type of thinking took place at the decisive Battle of Gettysburg during the US Civil War. Faced with a sustained attack by a Confederate detachment advancing on his Union position at Little Round Top hill—and knowing that his men had run out of ammunition—Colonel Joshua Chamberlain made a daring tactical decision: He ordered the troops to fix bayonets and charge, yelling and shouting, downhill at the attackers. The ruse worked: Southern assailants panicked and ran. The hill was saved, and the South was unable to use it to fire down upon Union troops. The next day, Southern forces made a last-ditch assault uphill against Northern riflemen and cannon, but they failed disastrously. Thereafter, the South never again seriously threatened the North. Thus, it can be argued that the fate of nations hung on a single improvised tactic during a single skirmish of a pivotal battle.

(The story of that skirmish is retold in the novel The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg, for which a study guide is available at SuperSummary.com.)

The final chapter discusses spycraft, and the book ends abruptly. Scholars suspect that The Art of War was expanded in the decades following its first published version; the final five chapters repeat some of the advice from earlier sections, and the last two chapters in some ways resemble appendices. The book’s history may thus be encoded in its structure.

Of the lasting value of The Art of War, however, there is no doubt. Its early chapters deliver powerful general principles that are easy to grasp and stunning in their straightforward wisdom, while the later sections expand on and fill out the earlier concepts.