The Art of War

Few books have as long a shelf life as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War written in the fifth century BC.

It is recommended reading at West Point and Sandhurst as well as being dipped into by officers in the KGB. (Although you may recall that SPECTRE assassin, Red Grant, preferred The Old Reliable by PG Wodehouse in From Russia with Love.) In many respects a timeless textbook still relevant after 2,500 years.

” I always keep a copy of The Art of War on my desk.” (General Douglas MacArthur)

” I have read The Art of War by Sun Tzu. He continues to influence both soldiers and politicians.” (General Colin Powell)

The principles of war have changed little until now. The change is psychological. A nuclear bomb can be launched from a bunker in the Pentagon or the Kremlin and on a smaller scale a drone can be controlled from a base on a different continent. War has become desensitised with its perpetrators remote from the effect of their actions. Milgram explored this in an experiment at Yale in the 1960s. He was mainly concerned with his subjects’ obedience to taking orders but he also found there was a greater degree of compliance the further removed the subject was from his (all the participants were male, aged 20 – 50) “victim”.

My conclusion, I regret, is that there are circumstances in which a leader can prosecute a war without relying on an army, navy and air force. The old structure of interaction between politicians, military commanders and their armed forces can be dismantled by a determined dictator rendering Sun Tzu’s aphorisms irrelevant; a development more important in warfare than gunpowder. World leaders today bear more responsibility than at any time in history.