posted
A lot of Sun Tzu doesn't seem that profound, unless you compare it to actual military history and see how little most of his seemingly common sense dictims were followed.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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Um, right. Such as "supreme excellence in war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." Well, yes, I see the point. The problem is that, gosh a'mighty, the enemy (dirty dog that he is) has plans of his own. To subdue him, you're damn well going to have to fight.
As for the particular slogan, you'll note that it is completely reactive : You're letting the enemy dictate what you do. That's no way to win a war.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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You've got admit though, what Mao did to beat the Nationalists was pretty sneaky and kinda follows those ideas.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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To be fair, I think Sun Tzu is thinking of war as a continuation of politics, Clausewitz-style, and thus 'subduing the enemy without fighting' could refer to diplomatic annexations like the Union of Crowns in Britain, or the dissolution of Norway's union with Sweden, though that was admittedly taken to the very brink of war.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Sun-tzu is brilliant; Machiavelli isn't that helpful in war theory, his strength is in political maneuvering.
What Mao was expressing was the strategy of an army with inferior numbers and-or munitions, but with superior knowledge of the land and cooperation from the citizenry. Guerrilla war, in other words. And the principles, while they may seem obvious, in fact require great boldness and relentlessness - something lacking in most bad commanders. It's too easy to stay safely away, watching and doing nothing because "we can't win." Without having read Mao, Mormons used the same strategy to harass Johnston's Army when it was on the way to invade Utah in 1857. (I think that was the year.) With the further stricture that they had to do their harassment without taking any human lives. Even more restrictive rules of engagement than our soldiers face in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Subdue the enemy without fighting - it WASN'T McClellan's strategy in practice, because he didn't subdue the enemy. McClellan was hobbled by fear and bad intelligence about the enemy's strength. He was a timid commander. It was LEE who "subdued the enemy without fighting." He avoided direct engagement except where he had locally superior forces or impregnable positions, and when inadvertent combat broke out, he took action to concentrate his forces far more quickly than McClellan, who was incapable of bold action.
McClellan's strategy, in practice, consisted of avoiding fighting PERIOD because he feared the consequences to him and to his men of defeat. Lee's strategy was to avoid fighting until the conditions were heavily in his favor, at which point he subdued the enemy on particular battlefields.
The result was a complete demonstration of Sun-Tzu's seemingly obvious dictum ...
Take the movie Kingdom of Heaven: the Christian hot-heads, despite warnings, go off into the desert with inadequate supplies to defeat an enemy by trusting in God to help reward them for their murders. You'll notice that Sun-Tzu never advocates trusting in God to bring victory.... Saladin wins because the enemy was stupid. But the point is that if Saladin had also been stupid, he could have been just as badly prepared.
In war after war, the side with the stupidest leaders loses....
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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You know, OSC, I can't help feeling that your judgement of McClellan has always been more than a little harsh. It always sounds personal.Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Tom, it seems to be fairly accepted in Civil War circles. At least it's pretty much how he's described in the several books I've read on the subject, almost word-for-word.
Check out "Leadership Lessons of the Civil War" for example. People are harsh about McClellan.
So if it's personal, it's personal to a lot of Civil War buffs.
posted
"Tom, it seems to be fairly accepted in Civil War circles. At least it's pretty much how he's described in the several books I've read on the subject, almost word-for-word."
I've done a bit of reading on the subject myself, and it seems almost as if people who are pro-Lincoln assume that, by default, they have to say McClellan was an incompetent. I think a lot of this stems from a personal sense of betrayal; when he ran against Lincoln as a Democrat, the party platform at the time called for surrender. (McClellan himself argued against that plank of the platform, mind you, but I think the mere fact that he allowed himself to represent the Democrats given their platform is a stain on his memory.)
From what I've seen, McClellan was actually a talented engineer and trencher, an excellent organizer, an innovative skirmisher, a well-liked leader, and a solid tactician whose major flaw -- besides allowing himself to play politics with people who had access to newspapers -- was in failing to fully trust the information of his subordinates (probably due to his considerable ego). In other words, he absolutely refused to believe that he had Lee in a compromised position; he just didn't think Lee would have permitted that possibility. And so he abandoned a significant advantage -- repeatedly -- because he was convinced Lee had something up his sleeve and would find a way to overcome what McClellan feared just appeared to be insurmountable odds.
It's an odd failing -- and a critical one -- in a general, but I'm not sure that it makes him deserving of the hostility directed at him by some historians.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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I don't know - as I said, I've only read several books. It came up enough, with a startling consistency of language, that it appeared to be a pretty common opinion.
Not that I think such consistency in and of itself makes that view correct, although the case seems pretty strong just looking at the Peninsula Campaign and Antietam, but it's common enough that I wouldn't call it personal to anyone who espouses it.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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"It came up enough, with a startling consistency of language, that it appeared to be a pretty common opinion."
Oh, I don't disagree that it's common. But the mere fact that it's as common as it is, with as much consistency of language and passion, makes me wonder whether it's become dogma.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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I'm currently reading a book about Mao and his life and excuse me pseudo language but that period of history was &^%*ed up (1919-1930(?)) at first the KMT and Communists were allies trying to set up a national revolutionuntil Chiang Kai Sheks massacers of the Shangai workers which pretty created the break between the Communists and Nationalists forces. Mao's strategy as Military/Political Officer in the Red army was brilliant he constantly out maneuved the slower moving KMT forces in the early compaigns of encirclements and annaliation. In fact it was said that the Koumantang "groped in the dark" while the Communists "walked in bright sunlight" this is in a way true seeing as how the Red Army completely trashed an army more then twice its size when other portions of that army were only a few miles away.
Now whether or not Mao could've held off defeat and won while in the Kiangsi Soviet Republic against Von Falkenhasuer's block house strategy of slowing strangling the KSR is still debatable since Mao was stripped of pretty much all of his political and military influence by then and only regained it during the Long March.
Mao's brilliance in my honest opinion not only came from his own imagination but also from the classics he read as a boy such as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin and Sun Tzu.
Now I have yet to finish the book, so back to my reading when time permits.
Posts: 1567 | Registered: Oct 2004
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Personally I like Frederick the Great's maxims:
"Those battles are the best into which we force the enemey for it is an established maxim to oblige him to do that which he has no sort of inclination, and as your interests and his are diametrically opposite, it cannot be supposed that you are both wishing for the same event."
In more of a western prose but insightful nontheless.
Posts: 163 | Registered: Nov 2004
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Frederick is an interesting and very brilliant General though you have to wonder some times. He ran away from a battle he thought hopeless but his forces won it anyways, I must say that he lost some of my respect for him in this instance but regained it though good government.
Posts: 1567 | Registered: Oct 2004
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