"Recent US Political and Military History and the War on Terror"

By Dan Melson at Searchlight Crusade:

.... But if you've forgotten (or don't apply) Sun Tzu's lessons, then you are doomed.

It's kind of like forgetting that 2+2=4 when you're doing calculus. Forget the building blocks that enable you to compute the correct answer, and the problem falls apart, disastrously.

The single most important lesson of this work, the earliest basic text on which all military science is based, is the lesson of effective warfare. In the original work, if you're not careful you will read past this very short passage without noticing that it is even important, much less how important it is. "Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."

This has been expanded greatly in the 2500 years since. Judging by the entire long, sorry history of warfare, the one sentence that I can come up with that best distills this point is that "A war or a battle is lost when the will to fight it is broken." Not until. No matter how hopeless it looks, so long as the will to fight is there, there is hope.

Lose it, and your cause is dead....

(Thanks, neo-neocon.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 12/06/05 07:21:31 AM
Categorized as More Than Blogworthy.