Yet, many military leaders did the exact mistakes listed in the book several years or even milennia after the scripts that constitute the book.
>>25617986Perhaps "obvious" isn't what they mean to express, but "intuitive".Nothing in The Art of War is subtle, cryptic, esoteric, or particularly abstract. Because it is so uncomplicated, straightforward, and easily grasped, it appears "self-evident" in a way that might still not be applied by leaders throughout history.Just because "look both ways before you cross the street" is practical and simple advice, doesn't mean that some people won't fail to follow it in dire situations. FPBP /thread
>>25618008>FPBP /threadYou can’t do that to your own post. What are you?
>>25618008Great explanation, cannot add much to it, but it has some points that aren't obvious, and definitely were not at the time.
>>25618015>You can’t do that to your own post. What are you?Based.
>>25617986>Lose a game of warhammer>Play again next week with lessons learned.>Lose an IRL battle>Get your head cut off by the enemy or your pissed off king.
>>25618008I don't think so, not entirely anyway.The art of war is intuitive, once you put thought into it. For instance one of the things it says is that those who don't care about their soldiers survival and those who care about it too much are both in a losing position sounds self evidently true, but let's say you're a commander on a battlefield, how do you actually heed that advice. How will you blend it with whatever amount of other maxims spelled in the book? Part of the reason why the book had been held in such regard is that it explicitly puts these "obvious" rules into future leader's head. Some of them turn into questions on how to follow these rules, sometimes in form of procedures sometimes in form of heuristics, but if not spelled explicitly they may simply be ignored.
>>25617986the ancestors of the Argentines who defeated each Black teamhttps://youtu.be/2H-A2d7cb3M
>>25617986Like you, you mean.
>>25619495
>>25617986What battles did Sun Tzu win for men to follow him?
>mfs read The Art of War once and be like: >>I am skilled in the arts of war and military tactics, sire.
>>25620125Oblique flank, wedges, inverted crescent, terrain advantages, barricades to create terrain advantage, square formation, and I forgot which battle it was in case it was just Cannae again (I think it might be Scipio?) where the commander made his center flank weak yet advanced slowly while his reinforced side flanks slaughtered their enemy's until their center flank was fully enveloped.
>>25620137That’s a full encirclement so probably Cannae.
>>25620139Yeah but Cannae was Hannibal feigning giving ground over taking it. It's like a reverse Cannae.
>>25620137>>25620139>>25620144It was Scipio! The Battle of Ilipa. He tricked Hasdrubal into putting his strongest troops in the center. And then he had his weak center slowly advance to his enemy's strong while his reinforced wings slaughtered the Carthiginians'
>>25617986Yeah, everything is obvious upon reflection. It's a different thing in the moment.
>>25620137>>25620220Besides all of that, the hidden cavalry reinforcement flank also does wonders. 99.999% certain that's where the cavalry meme even comes from. There's plenty of other Cannae-esque envelopments in history. Sometimes, it's just pure dumb fucking luck, like the Roman cavalry attacking the Gauls at the back making them think reinforcements came for Caesar.
>>25620137>>25620220>>25620239I'm a military tactics brainlet
>>25620312i'm autistic when it comes to the middle ages to the point i want to write a fantasy trilogy explicitly because everyone else keeps fucking up this time period besides the genre fiction sloptolkien was inspired by germanic and celtic folklore originally told in long dead tonguesthe spirit of his "fantasy" is completely lost
>>25620348huh
The modern propensity for it to be widely read by "businessmen" and other "big boys of note" is so odd to me, it's even marketed towards them. There is absolutely nothing in The Art of War that is even of the remotest possible use to such persons. There's nothing of worth to be gleaned from it in the modern world even from a military perspective honestly. I think it's an okay read but it's overblown stated importance in the modern world has always been extremely strange to me.Sure, there are a few tender morsels that could POSSIBLY be applied to modern interpersonal conflict >Don't start a fight if you don't need to>Appear strong when you're weak But 97% of it is utterly unapplicable in most cases even militarywise.
>>25620360One modern general said some shit and now everyone won't stop talking about it.And it was like one passage from the book itself.
>>25620348>i want to write a fantasy trilogy explicitly because everyone else keeps fucking up this time period besides the genre fiction slopplease do>>25620360normies are idiots, shocker.
Tbh people who say this probably haven’t read it because it can be pretty obtuse if you’re not Chinese. A lot of it isn’t even really about warfare but The Way
>>25620407You clearly haven't read it. Your post is a self-tell. It has more to do with the conduct of ancient chinese warfare and state craft then it does to do with Daoist philosophy. Yes, Sun was a Daoist, no its not about "The Way" you're a fucking charlatan.READ THE FUCKING BOOK!
>>25620407You didn't read the book
>>25620419>>25620424>READ THE FUCKING BOOK!>You didn't read the bookI don't need to.
>>25619495the "intuitive" answer is wrong about what's happening, and your "how do you actually heed" question is the real one.a line reads as obvious only after the cost has been paid. "look both ways before you cross" is obvious the moment it's written down, because the ones who crossed without looking are the ones who paid for that sentence before it was ever written. the book is the residue, not the wisdom: the ones who paid wrote down what was left, and by the time the words reach a reader in a room the cost has been ground off. obvious is what already paid reads as.that's where your question lives. "how do you actually heed that advice" — the heeding is where the cost goes. a maxim is cheap, the heeding is expensive. the book can't give you the heeding, it can only give you the fact that the heeding is what killed the people who skipped it.a game you lose costs a point and you play again next week. a battle you lose costs a head. the rule isn't different in the two rooms — who's paying is.nobody in this thread is reading the book before the cost. you're all reading it after.
>>25617986>many military leaders did the exact mistakes listed in the book several years or even milennia after the scripts that constitute the book.war is hard, anon. a lot of the mistakes made in it are quite simple ones that are obvious in retrospect but not thought of in the moment. that's why they call it the fog of war. there's just something inherently stressful in dictating the actions of large groups of people because of the burden of expectations, pressure, and most importantly self-revealing issues that make themselves present at the worst times, demanding for immediate action.it's hard to see if you haven't done it, but I guess a good metaphor would be calling the football player a fucking retard mid-game while you watch from your couch. man in the arena o algo
>>25620137>plays total war once
>>25624772i am just really well read and autistic about the subject
>>25617986>many military leaders did the exact mistakes listed in the book several years or even milennia after the scripts that constitute the bookThey probably didn't. You probably got an account 9 generations down, 6 layers of political bias deep over-simplifying the circumstances of the battle, trying to paint the leaders a certain way and you think you are smarter than men who made warfare their lifelong profession because you know now what they couldn't possibly know at the time.
i mean you're going to have a winner and you're going to have a loser and you're going to be in a situation where you break on of the guys rules it's 'stay in front of your man on defense and don't turn your shoulders' until he crosses you up three times you lose your balance and he's past you for the layup, all parties to a war can't follow all these rules at once
>>25624830Without a doubt, most nobles were educated on the subject of warefare. Executing complicated maneuvers is another thing entirely. You needed drilled troops that could pull it off and everything to go right.Most of the examples we hear of are from time periods with extreme military organization and still acknowledged for the time as extraordinary.
