Strategic Priorities in the Chinese Military Classics
In the third chapter of The Art of Warfare, Sun Tzu establishes an order of preference among the courses of action available in war. The best, he writes, is to attack the adversary’s strategies; the second is to attack his alliances; the third is to attack his soldiers; the worst is to assault his walled cities. These are a few lines, and they are perhaps the most frequently cited in the whole of strategic literature. They appear in military manuals and in management courses, in geopolitical analysis and in negotiation handbooks, almost always to the same end: to demonstrate that intelligence counts for more than force, or that direct confrontation is best avoided. Used in this way the passage becomes a maxim, and a maxim does not explain: it records a preference without saying where the preference comes from.
The questions the text raises are different, and more demanding. The first concerns the criterion: what arranges the four grades in this sequence rather than another? This is not an idle question, because a hierarchy without an ordering principle is merely a list, and a list can be reshuffled at will. The second concerns a juxtaposition that is surprising at first sight: why do an adversary’s plans and his alliances both stand above his armies? A strategic design and a system of alliances appear to be quite different things, and it is not obvious why they should share the summit of the scale while armed forces — what common intuition takes to decide wars — remain in third place. The third question is the most consequential: are the four grades options equally available to anyone in command, to be selected according to circumstance, or do they presuppose something in whoever employs them, and are therefore not accessible to all in the same measure?
Answering requires two operations that the standard citations omit. The first is to restore the passage to the chapter that contains it: in the text it does not open the argument but follows from a principle stated a few lines earlier, and it is that principle which makes it intelligible. The second is to connect it to a definition the text had already supplied two chapters before, where the qualities required of a commander are set out. The link between the two is not declared by the author, but it emerges as soon as they are read together — and it is, as will be seen, the point at which the hierarchy ceases to be a tactical recommendation and becomes something more interesting.