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Sun Tzu's Art of War is widely regarded as the most influential military & strategic classic of all time. Through 'reverse engineering' of the text structured around 14 Sun Tzu 'themes,' this rigorous analysis furnishes a thorough picture of what the text actually says, drawing on Chinese-language analyses, historical, philological, & archaeological sources, traditional commentaries, computational ideas, and strategic & logistics perspectives. Building on this anchoring, the book provides a unique roadmap of Sun Tzu's military and intelligence insights and their applications to strategic competitions in many times and places worldwide, from Warring States China to contemporary US/China strategic competition and other 21st century competitions involving cyber warfare, computing, other hi-tech conflict, espionage, and more. Simultaneously, the analysis offers a window into Sun Tzu's limitations and blind spots relevant to managing 21st century strategic competitions with Sun-Tzu-inspired adversaries or rivals.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Background: historical and textual; Preliminaries; 2. Strategist should be calculating; strategist should be cheap; 3. Strategist should find advantage; 4. Strategist should enact stratagems & formlessness; 5. Strategist should make a situation's natural dynamics work for her; 6. Strategist should have an accurate grasp of the significant information; 7. Strategist should manage the interfaces; Conclusion: demystifying Sun Tzu and future directions. Indices.
About the author
Scott Boorman is Professor of Sociology at Yale University.
Summary
This book analyzes the three faces of Sun Tzu's Art of War: one anchored in Warring States China, a second in world military history, and a third in 21st century contexts like cyber warfare. The author identifies Sun Tzu's limitations and blind spots relevant to managing strategic competitions with Sun-Tzu-inspired adversaries.
