Sun Tsu

544-496 BC
The Art of War (481-221 BC)
Earliest copies date to the latter part of the Warring States period
"Every Battle is Won before it is fought" -> the importance of preparation

• There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.
• If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
• Here are five dangerous faults which may affect a general: Recklessness, which leads to destruction; cowardice, which leads to capture; a hasty temper, which can be provoked by insults; a delicacy of honor which is sensitive to shame; over-solicitude for his men, which exposes him to worry and trouble. These are the five besetting sins of a general, ruinous to the conduct of war.
• According to John Sullivan (2022) of the U.S. Army War College, Sun Tsu might have been an excellent theorist, but he was a poor practitioners
• The Battle of Boju was not won through tactical brilliance but through sheer luck, as Chu's commander intentionally sabotaged his military advisor's shrewd counter-attack plan for petty personal reasons. Moreover, the capture of Ying was far from the final act of the campaign and Wu's good fortune quickly ran out. Wu never had a viable strategy for what it wanted to accomplish beyond the capture of Chu's capital city. Its invading force was too small to effectively control the massive Chu state, it failed to either capture the deposed king or prevent Chu forces from regrouping, and it never gained support from the local population. Most fatally, Wu grossly miscalculated how other neighboring states would react to Chu's defeat. Its inability to anticipate how the powerful state of Qin would respond to a newly established Wu presence on its immediate border remains an inexplicable intelligence failure. Prior to the invasion, Qin relied on Chu as a vital strategic counterweight to its own primary geopolitical rival, the state of Jin. Wu's conquest of chu upset this balance, and Qin's eventual military intervention to restore the Chu king to the throne ensured Wu's quick military collapse in Chu.
• Less than a year after its unexpected victory at Boju, the entire Wu army was rejected from Chu territory by the combined forces of Chu and Qin. As a result Chu's leadership,