Sort of reminds me of the story of Boudicca, who famously led the Britons against the Romans and slightly less famously kinda ate shit

I believe they lost the first major engagement to the Romans, as in the first one that wasn't like cleaning up a town garrison.

They chased a much smaller roman force around for a while, until the Romans basically nestled themselves up against a swamp and some thick trees so they couldnt really be flanked.

The Britons all ran in headfirst into heavy infantry and hit a crowd crush so hard they couldn't use their short spears, axes, long swords etc, while the Romans just chewed them up with their little swords. There was no ability to flank, they just threw light infantry right up into heavy, in a big funnel. Then when they started to run away they realized they had walled themselves in with their wagon train. The Romans then crushed them against that. They mostly all died and the Romans ruled Britain for a long time after.

Basically this legendary general and leader of the united tribes of Britain could have been consulted by any 15 year old who played some Rome Total War. Just a comically unforced error.

Sounds like Sun Tzu predicted the existence of the Biden Admin and American politics in general.

I have read Sun Tzu and my takeaway is that he wanted to wipe away overconfidence, or the idea that conflict is decided simply by who wants to win more. It's a repeated message of "no, conflict is a risk you're taking and you have to think about it." The entire book is him constantly saying that fighting a war is difficult, you need to take literally every advantage you can get, and you should only fight if you have to or if you vastly outnumber your opponent. Also, run away when you have to and do boring logistics stuff like make sure the horses have water and everyone's getting paid. That's my impression for why business guys like it so much, because their gut instinct is that they're the hottest shit on Earth and don't need to think about how to do anything. They look at Sun Tzu's advice, which is often just "think about doing things before you do it, because you could fail and that would suck" and to them it's a massive revelation because they've never once considered a negative outcome was possible.

If Sun Tzu was such goofy common sense the FBI would not have infiltrated all these orgs or catch hackers with poor opsec. It’s only obvious because I’m reading it while taking a shit in an air conditioned bathroom. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Y'all massively overestimate how much the average person understands about conflict and struggle. Sun Tzu has an important place and doesn't deserve all this scoffing.

People think they're too good for The Art of War and then go on to do shit that The Art of War specifically tells you not to do. And people in general need to read up on how to wage war, whether it's guerilla warfare or counterinsurgency or even just conventional warfare. Like, how can you shout "no war the but class war" without a general understanding of what war actually means? How can you even entertain fantasies of waging revolutionary warfare without even reading a single book on how to wage war?

It's also really easy to look at the advice and consider it obvious when you're sitting at home reading it with plenty of time on your hands. It's less obvious when you're in a stressful real world situation.

The stuff that soldiers get taught in basic training also feels really obvious. "Stay physically fit. Be aware of your surroundings. Only point guns at what you want to kill. Follow orders quickly." None of this should feel surprising to anyone with the most basic knowledge of what a soldier does, but drilling it in until it's what you do automatically in the moment is important.

Clausewitz' On War often frustrates me with how dense and wordy it is, but if nothing else, I think it's made him considerably less likely to be coopted by dipshits than poor Sun Tzu.

Machiavelli gets such a bad rap as an evil man, and I really think it's just people who don't understand politics balking at how cruel and nasty politics is.

Also, "if you build your army mostly from hired mercenaries, don't be surprised when your enemy hires them out from under you".

You cannot stand here slandering my boy Sun Tzu like this. The Art of War is good and explains core concepts around engaging in and managing conflict. It lays out the basics so you have a foundation to build off of. It might seem obvious to you, but most people have absolutely no idea when or why to fight and Sun Tzu explains it.

The funniest one I've seen has to be that one book, what is it "48 Laws of Power" or something? That's just packed with translated old Arabic poetry and ends by praising Mao and calling people who think they can learn leadership from a book dumbasses. IIRC the forward is something like "so yeah this book is mostly based on the bullshit that I've seen the worst people I've ever known do, plus some literature I think is cool," too.

It sounds simple, but look at Fascism. Their ideological framing of the enemy as both everywhere and all powerful, but also week and feeble, makes them incapable of assessing what's really happening.

Or that bit where it says - If you're surrounded, with no way out, you must fight? The liberals are begging anyone to save them from having to fight. They're up against a wall with no where to go except through the enemy, and they're preying to a senile, evil old man to save them.

It all sounds simple on the page, but then you look at how people actually behave.

: how do I get into silver rank?

: throw games until you fall out of gold

It took me almost 20 years to understand that he was explaining why it was called a tzu, or zoo.