"The Art of War" by Sun Tzu: Summary and Review

The most famous book about war says that the best war is the one you never have to fight. The Art of War is a short Chinese text of thirteen chapters, written more than two thousand years ago. It contains almost no battles and no heroes. Instead, it gives a general a list of questions to ask before he moves a single soldier. For this reason it is read today by people who will never command an army. Coaches, managers, lawyers and diplomats use it to think about competition.

This review quotes the free English translation by Lionel Giles from 1910. Chapter and verse numbers follow his edition, so “III.18” means chapter 3, verse 18. At the end, the review recommends a modern translation for reading the whole book.

Who wrote it, and when?

Tradition names the author as Sun Tzu, which means “Master Sun”. His personal name was Sun Wu. The Chinese historian Sima Qian, writing around 100 BCE, tells a famous story about him. Sun Wu offered his thirteen chapters to King Helü of Wu, a state in eastern China. The king asked him to prove his method by training 180 women from the palace. When the women laughed at his orders, Sun Wu had the two leaders executed, and after that the drill went perfectly. If this story is true, Sun Wu lived around 500 BCE.

Most modern scholars doubt it. The text describes large armies and a kind of warfare from a later time. They belong to the Warring States period (475 to 221 BCE), when seven large states fought for control of China. Victor Mair, who translated the book for Columbia University Press, argues that Sun Wu probably never existed. In his view, the text grew over about 75 years, from the middle of the fourth century to the early third century BCE. Other scholars think a real general wrote a core that his followers later expanded.

One fact is firm. In 1972, archaeologists in Shandong province found parts of the text written on bamboo strips in a tomb from the second century BCE. So the book existed in roughly its present form by then. The honest summary is this. We do not know who wrote The Art of War. It is probably the work of several hands, and the name Sun Tzu is best read as a label for a school of thought.

War is a matter of life and death, so calculate first

The book opens with its central claim. War is “of vital importance to the State”, Sun Tzu says in I.1, a road “either to safety or to ruin”. Because the state can survive or fall, a ruler must study war carefully before he starts one.

Chapter 1 then gives a checklist of five factors. Giles calls them the Moral Law, Heaven, Earth, the Commander, and Method and discipline. In plain words, they are these:

1. Do the people support the ruler?
2. What are the weather and the season?
3. What are the distances and the terrain?
4. Is the general wise, trustworthy, humane, brave and strict?
5. Are the army’s organization and supplies in order?

The side that scores better on these questions will win. In I.26, Sun Tzu says that the winning general “makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought”. “Ere” is old English for “before”. The point is that the battle is mostly decided before it begins. A later chapter adds the moral side of this. No ruler should start a war out of anger, Sun Tzu writes in XII.18, and no general should fight a battle because he feels insulted.

All warfare is based on deception

Right after the checklist comes the most quoted line of the book (I.18). War depends on deceiving the enemy. Sun Tzu explains this with pairs of opposites. When you are able to attack, seem unable. When you are near, make the enemy believe you are far away. Offer him bait. If he is easily angered, make him angry.

This idea follows from the first one. If the battle is decided by calculation, then the enemy is calculating too. So you try to make his numbers wrong. You hide your strength, show false weakness and choose the moment when his picture of you is most mistaken.

This does not mean that tricks replace an army. Deception only works for a side that is already well prepared. A weak army that pretends to be strong is still weak when the fighting starts.

Long wars ruin the state

Chapter 2 is about money, and it is one of the most modern parts of the book. An army of a hundred thousand men costs “a thousand ounces of silver” a day. If the war drags on, weapons grow dull, soldiers lose their spirit and the state’s treasury empties. Neighboring rulers then see their chance and attack.

Sun Tzu’s conclusion is blunt. “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare” (II.6). He would rather see a war that is quick and a little clumsy than one that is clever and slow. He also gives practical advice. An army should feed itself from the enemy’s land. One cartload of the enemy’s food, he says in II.15, is worth twenty of your own, because so much is used up on the way from home.

This chapter explains why the book is so careful about starting wars at all. War is not a contest of honor. It is a very expensive project, and a long one can destroy the state even if it ends in victory.

The best victory needs no battle

Chapter 3 contains the book’s most important idea. Winning every battle is not the best result. Real excellence is breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting (III.2).

Sun Tzu ranks the options in III.3 and III.4. The best is to defeat the enemy’s plans. The next best is to stop his alliances. Third comes attacking his army in the field. The worst of all is besieging walled cities, which costs months of work and many lives.

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

The chapter ends with the famous line about knowledge (III.18). If you know the enemy and yourself, you need not fear a hundred battles. If you know only yourself, you will win and lose in equal measure. If you know neither, you will lose every time. Note the condition here. The line does not promise victory. It says that knowledge removes the reason to fear the result, because you will only fight when the numbers favor you.

First make yourself impossible to defeat

Chapter 4 adds a simple but deep idea. The good fighters of old, Sun Tzu says in IV.1, first made themselves impossible to defeat. Then they waited for a chance to defeat the enemy.

The reason is given in the next verse. Not being defeated depends on you. Your defenses, your supplies and your discipline are in your hands. But the chance to win is given to you by the enemy, when he makes a mistake. So a general cannot force a victory. He can only prepare well and be ready when the moment comes.

Many readers know this idea from other places. A chess player first secures the king. An investor first avoids large losses. The book says it more than two thousand years earlier, and with unusual clarity.

Combine the expected and the unexpected, and flow like water

Chapters 5 and 6 explain how an army should move. Sun Tzu uses two Chinese terms that Giles translates as the “direct” and the “indirect” method. The direct force is the expected move, for example a frontal attack that holds the enemy in place. The indirect force is the surprise, such as an attack from the side or from behind. In V.5 Sun Tzu says that the direct method can start a battle, but the indirect method wins it. The two can be combined in endless ways, like the five musical notes that make countless melodies.

Chapter 6 adds the image the book is most loved for. Military tactics are like water, Sun Tzu writes in VI.29 and VI.30. Water flows away from high places and runs downward. In the same way, an army should avoid the enemy’s strong points and strike at his weak ones.

Water also has no fixed shape. It takes the shape of its container. A good army has no fixed plan either. It changes its form according to the enemy.

This is an analogy, and it has a limit. Water does not think, and the enemy does. So the comparison works for the principle, avoid strength and attack weakness, but not for the details of how you find a weakness.

The general needs freedom, and soldiers need clear situations

Chapters 7 to 12 are the most technical part of the book. They cover marches, rivers, mountains, nine kinds of terrain and attacks with fire. Many details concern chariots and ancient roads and have little use today. But two ideas stand out.

The first is the general’s independence. In VIII.3 Sun Tzu lists things a general must refuse. There are roads he must not follow, cities he must not attack and “commands of the sovereign which must not be obeyed”. The ruler is far away. The general sees the situation. If the ruler gives orders from the palace, the army suffers.

In VIII.12 Sun Tzu also names five dangerous faults of a general. Two of them are recklessness and cowardice, and another is a quick temper.

The second idea is about the minds of soldiers. In chapter 11 Sun Tzu describes “desperate ground”, a place with no escape. There, he says in XI.23, soldiers will fight to the death because they have no other choice. A general can use this on purpose by placing his army where retreat is impossible. Modern readers find this cold, and it is. But the observation behind it is sound. People behave differently when they believe they have a way out.

Knowledge of the enemy comes from people

The last chapter returns to the theme of the first. A war costs a fortune every day. So it is foolish, Sun Tzu argues in XIII.2, to save a little money on spies and stay ignorant of the enemy.

He is clear about where knowledge comes from. In XIII.5 and XIII.6 he says that it cannot be obtained from spirits and cannot be worked out from earlier cases. It must come from people who know the enemy’s situation. He then names five kinds of spies, for example local people, officials of the enemy and double agents. When all five are at work, he says, nobody can discover how the system runs.

This chapter is the book’s most practical lesson for today. Sun Tzu would have understood market research, intelligence services and competitive analysis at once. He treats good information as the cheapest weapon a ruler can buy.

How it differs from other classics of strategy

The obvious neighbor is Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, written in the early nineteenth century by a Prussian officer. Clausewitz is long, philosophical and focused on the decisive battle. He sees war as a continuation of politics and writes much about chance and friction. Sun Tzu is short, practical and focused on avoiding battle. Reading both shows two very different ideas of what a good general does.

A second neighbor is Machiavelli’s The Prince. Both books are cool and unsentimental about power, and both separate success from good intentions. But Machiavelli writes about a ruler keeping control of a state, while Sun Tzu writes about a state surviving its neighbors.

A third comparison is with the Tao Te Ching, the Taoist classic from roughly the same period. Both books praise softness, water and indirect action. Giles notes that Sun Tzu’s “Moral Law” is close to the Tao in its moral sense. The Art of War is not a Taoist book. Still, it shares the Taoist preference for winning by yielding rather than by force.

What makes Sun Tzu different from all three is the form. He gives principles, almost never examples. This makes the book easy to apply to new situations, and also easy to misuse.

Where it falls short

The book has three weaknesses. The first is the lack of examples. Sun Tzu almost never shows a principle at work in a real campaign. The traditional Chinese commentators added examples later, and much of what readers remember comes from them. Without the commentary, many lines are so general that they can support almost any decision.

The second weakness is the way the book is used today. Business books often turn it into slogans. “All warfare is based on deception” becomes permission to lie to customers or colleagues. But Sun Tzu writes about enemies in a war of survival. A company does not have that relationship with its customers or staff. The reader has to ask each time whether the situation is really a war.

The third weakness is the cold view of people. Soldiers appear as tools, to be kept uninformed and placed where they cannot run. The book has nothing to say about whether a war is just. It asks only whether it is wise. That is a strength for clear thinking and a gap for anyone looking for an ethics of conflict.

Which translation to choose

The translation matters a great deal, because the Chinese text is very short and many lines can be read in more than one way.

• Lionel Giles (1910) is free on Project Gutenberg and is the one quoted in this review. It is accurate, but its English is old-fashioned, and the free edition mixes long notes into the text.
• John Minford (Penguin Classics) is the one this review recommends and the one the book buttons on this page lead to. It prints the plain text first, which you can read in an evening. Then it prints the text again with the traditional Chinese commentaries, where the examples are.
• Samuel B. Griffith (Oxford University Press) is a classic version with a strong introduction for readers interested in military history.
• Victor H. Mair (Columbia University Press) is the best choice if you want to understand the dating and authorship debate in detail.

Read it in print or as an ebook, slowly, and go back to chapters 1, 3 and 4 more than once. As an audiobook it works only for a first impression, because each short verse needs a moment of thought. The book separates what you control from what you do not. For the Stoic version of that idea, read “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius: Summary and Review.