Through textually grounded "reverse engineering" of Sun Tzu’s ideas, this study challenges widely held assumptions. Sun Tzu is more straightforward, less "crafty," than often imagined. The concepts are more structural, less aphoristic. The fourteen themes approach provides a way of addressing Sun Tzu’s tendency to speak to multiple, often shifting, audiences at once ("multivocality"). It also sheds light on Sun Tzu’s limitations, including a pervasive zero-sum mentality; focus mostly on conventional warfare; a narrow view of human nature. Sun Tzu’s enduring value is best sought in the text’s extensive attention to warfare’s information aspects, where Sun Tzu made timeless contributions having implications for modern information warfare and especially its human aspects (e.g., algorithm sabotage by subverted insiders). The text points opportunities for small, agile twenty-first-century strategic actors to exploit cover provided by modern equivalents to Sun Tzu’s "complex terrain" (digital systems, social networks, complex organizations, and complex statutes) to run circles around large, sluggish, established institutional actors, reaping great profit from applying Sun Tzu’s insights.

Often regarded as the oldest surviving work on strategy, the Sun Tzu text has influence in many quarters today. This study organizes Sun Tzu’s ideas under fourteen thematic headings. It also clarifies Sun Tzu’s limitations and blind spots. Building on Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, USMC (Ret.)’s translation, this study analyzes Sun Tzu from three standpoints: Sun Tzu (1), Sun Tzu’s ideas in their original Warring States Chinese context; Sun Tzu (2), Sun Tzu’s ideas applied to warfare in a military sense in other times and places; Sun Tzu (3), generalizations of those ideas, including to cyber warfare and other twenty-first-century strategic competitions. Whereas Sun Tzu (1) analysis addresses ways in which the text is a product of its times, intertwined with traditional Chinese cultural milieux, Sun Tzu (2) and (3) analyses, often building on analogical thinking, map universalistic aspects of Sun Tzu’s insights into war and conflict, strategy, logistics, information, intelligence, and espionage. Those analyses also identify ways in which Sun Tzu’s thinking has relevance to gaining strategic advantage in twenty-first-century conflicts.

Starting off substantive engagement with Sun Tzu with a focus on calculation serves a positive purpose. It is a way of emphasizing to contemporary audiences that there is more to Sun Tzu than being tricky or unorthodox – the strands of his way of war that readers, at least Western ones, widely note and often lionize. In present usage, the umbrella term “calculation” is intended to serve as a flexible rubric capable of covering intendedly rational judgments of more than one kind, many intuitive, others more formally structured.

This chapter has two parts. Adopting an accretionist perspective on the Sun Tzu text – regarding it as developing over an extended period with no single author – the first part provides basic background on the Warring States era in which the text took shape. It analyzes an early Chinese battle illustrating Sun Tzu principles, then ends with discussion of logistics aspects of Warring States warfare. Shifting from battlefields to texts, the second part provides comparative overview of different extant copies of the Sun Tzu text, some traditionally transmitted, one archaeologically recovered. Some textual issues aside, the Sun Tzu text is in relatively good shape for a text of its antiquity. The second part ends with overview of a set of eleven traditional commentators on the text; perspective on the sprawling modern Sun Tzu literature; and brief orientation to the Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), one of China’s great pre-modern vernacular novels. Although this novel of Ming dynasty vintage is not properly part of the Sun Tzu tradition, in modern times many Chinese have been exposed to Sun-Tzu-esque thinking through the Sanguo’s vivid, albeit fictionalized, stories.

A core contention woven into the fabric of Sun Tzu’s thinking is that all situations faced by a strategic actor, even those that appear on their face to be losing ones, hold seeds of opportunity that, if grasped correctly, can be parlayed into strategic advantage.1 An illustrative statement starts off Passage #5.1 below.