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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, July 05 2013 @ 08:56 PM EDT |
1. Raising a host of a hundred thousand men and marching them great
distances entails heavy loss on the people and
a drain on the resources of the
state. The daily expenditure will amount to a thousand ounces of silver. There
will be commotion at
home and abroad, and men will drop exhausted on the
highways. as many as seven hundred thousand families will be impeded in
their
labour.
2. Hostile armies may face each other for years, striving for the
victory which is achieved in a single day. This being so, to
remain in
ignorance of the enemy's condition simply because one grudges the outlay of a
hundred ounces of silver in honours and
emoluments, is the height of
inhumanity.
3. One who acts thus is no leader of men, no present help to his
sovereign, no master of victory.
4. Thus, what enables the wise sovereign
and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach
of
ordinary men, is foreknowledge.
5. Now this foreknowledge cannot be
elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by
any
deductive calculation.
6. Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can
only be obtained from other men.
Sun Tzu on the Art of
War, Ch.13, ~500 B.C.
He then goes on to describe the different types of
spies required for different work, how to use them and reward them. One might
argue that technology has now taken much of the drudge work away, but it will
still require people to analyze the information and
make decisions based on
that. So long as some people regard other people as enemy Sun Tzu's
instruction is valid.
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