Comparing: Defending Weakness
The Art of War 9:6.1-7: Your enemy first acts violently and then is afraid of your larger force.
This post continues our project explaining each stanza of Sun Tzu’s work. The English translation and Chinese transliterations are from my award-winning book, The Art of War and The Ancient Chinese Revealed.
This article discusses Section Six of Chapter 9 of The Art of War. This chapter is entitled Armed March. Its general topic is making competitive moves that advance our positions. It is one of the longest and most detailed chapters in the book, but Section Six is one of its shortest sections. These seven lines describe what we do when we do not have the resources needed to advance in a new territory. The few number lines in this section reflect the central problem: we have few options.
The weakness discussed here can have a variety of causes, but they boil down to not understanding the territory before committing ourselves to move into it. We cannot go back in time, so the question is: what do we do when we face superior strength?
In the lines below, we summarize each Chinese character with a single English word shown in < > brackets in their original order. This transliteration of the Chinese is followed by an English sentence translation.
Weak War
These two lines begin the first stanza.
<War> <weak> <augment> <many>
If you are too weak to fight, you must find more men.<However> <without> <troops> <advance>
In this situation, you must not act aggressively.
Many competitors are too weak to control the larger territory in which they find themselves. The major cause of tactical weakness is having too few resources: too few people, too little equipment, a lack of skill, and so on. This weakness identified by a comparison with the others with whom we compete. Competition is comparison.
In modern military competition, it has been understood that in direct battles, a head-to-head comparison, competitors must be of similar strength. Moving against competitors with established positions requires having much more strength than they have.
I recently watched a documentary about the Invasion of Normandy during World War II. Though I have read about the battle many times, the books mostly focused on the Allies work on deceiving the Germans about where they planned to attack. The effect of those efforts was a huge imbalance of forces in Normandy in the early days of the invasion.
Though there were, supposedly, 850,000 German troops awaiting the invasion across the channel, only 85,000 of them were in Normandy itself. The Germans thought that they could move their forces quickly enough to rescue the German troops wherever the invasion landed. They were wrong because the Allies landed paratroopers several places in France to interfere with German movements. They also thought their defensive structures all along the coast could hold up against Allied bombardment. They were wrong about that as well because the combine bombardment by battleships and bombers dwarfed anything for which they had prepared.
The Germans had the advantage of being on defense, but war is always a competition of relative strength. When moving into a territory controlled by others, the general rule is that the attacker needs five times more resources than the defender. The allies initially had only twice the manpower, but they had ten times the firepower of the Germans. World War II demonstrated the importance of having a fully functioning economy to supply positions. After years of war, only the United States economy was strong enough to supply a steady stream of guns, ammunition, vehicles, and so on.
If we don’t have the numerical advantage, Sun Tzu’s advice is always that we shouldn’t attack a larger territory and a stronger opponent, no matter how clever our strategy or tactics. The best we can do is find a defensible niche. From that niche, we cannot advance or even show signs of aggression.
Defensive Position
The first stanza of Section 6 ends with these three lines.
<Sufficient> <by> <means> <of> <side-by-side> <power>
You must unite your forces.<Expect> <enemy>
Prepare for the enemy.<Obtain> <men> <and> <yet> <stop>
Recruit men and stay where you are.
Before we can move from a niche to a larger territory, we need superior forces, but we can defend our position as long as our resources are equal to that of the opposition. However, our men must be united. Sun Tzu always teaches that unity is strength. Unity is more of a challenge when we are adding new people and new allies. We can help create unity among different groups by mixing our new people with our old ones and having them work together.
We tell our supporters to expect an attack. People become united when they face a common enemy. Sun Tzu explains this later in Chapter Eleven using the analogy of sharing the same boat.
We mustn’t forget our main priority is attracting more supporters, growing our forces. We recruit these people from around our current position, but we don’t use them to advance. We use these people to build up our defensive position in our niche, even when the niche itself cannot support them.
Make No Plans
How do we get in these situations, holding only a niche when we targeted a larger position? We misjudged the opponent. While we cannot go back in time to fix past mistakes, we can address them by advancing our knowledge. We must learn more about our opponents and their condition.
<Husband> <only> <without> <strategize> <and> <yet> <change> <enemy> <is>
You must be cautious about making plans and adjust to the enemy.<Must> <catch> <at> <men>
You must gather more men.
When we our outnumbered in the larger territory, we must delay making any further advances, but we must also delay retreating from our niche. As we build up our positions, those opposing us will adapt to us. Earlier in this chapter Sun Tzu has us studying the reactions of an opponent and interpreting their meaning (see articles Comparing: Enemy Events, Front-line Events, Confusing Events.) Where before we didn’t even correctly determine the size of the opposing force, our nearby niche position allows us to observe their actions and, from those, determine their condition and their intentions.
Meanwhile, by not making a move, our opponents can learn very little about our situation or our future intentions. Since our focus is on growing our forces, we can even try to lure away some of the opposing men or their allies. We may discover another niche that we can expand into without facing their superior forces.