Comparing: Knowledge for Advance and Defense

The Art of War 6:2:1-8

This article continues our project explaining each line of Sun Tzu’s work. The English and Chinese are from my award-winning translation, The Art of War and The Ancient Chinese Revealed. Start here for the book’s opening lines.

The ending lines of the second Section of Chapter 6 of The Art of War apply the lessons of emptiness and fullness to advancing and defending. This chapter is about “weakness” and “strength,” which Sun Tzu describes as “emptiness” and “fullness.” These lines specifically address advancing our positions and defending them using knowledge and secrecy. They focus on keeping information about our moves secret, a recurring theme in Sun Tzu’s work.

We use knowledge to find the places where there are imbalances of weakness and strength, emptiness and fullness. We advance into emptiness. We defend with fullness. Strategy is the science of advancing and defending our strategic positions. As these articles always point out, our positions exist primarily in people’s minds, that is, in their knowledge of us. Our abilities to advance our positions come from our specific knowledge of an opening that is denied to our competitors. Our ability to defend comes from keeping our weaknesses secret.

Advancing

• (In the quotations below, we summarize each Chinese character as a single English word shown in < > brackets. A sentence from my English translation follows.)

<Make> <good> <attack> <is>
Be skilled in attacking.

This is a simple setup line, but it says something that is obvious which can be overlooked. We must choose the ways to advance that are the most likely to succeed. Strategy is not a theoretical skill. It is based on evidence. We get evidence by examining the results of our efforts. Our actions test our methods. Our methods test our theories.

This begs the larger question: why do we have to attack, that is, advance our positions at all? Can we improve our existing positions so that they do not grow stagnant without moving to a new position? This puts the idea of movement into only one dimension. But we can move in many ways, not all of them in to new competitive spaces. Every improvement in our position is moving to a new position, even when we stay on the ground we control. For example, we can invest in internal methods for lowering product prices. This is an advance in the dimension of efficiency. Like all advances, we do not know if our investments will work until we implement them. The same is true for every way we can improve our existing positions.

All improvements, even on the ground we control, are experiments, which are explorations of new territory. The closer we stay to our current positions, the less risky these experiments are, but we still cannot know their external effects in advance.

The Role of Knowledge

<Enemy> <no> <knowledge> <this> <place> <defend>
Give the enemy no idea where to defend.

What quality of our competitors allows us to move without resistance? Their ignorance (emptiness) about how we are moving. Our moves can be nullified by competitors blocking them or copying them, but only if they know about them. As discussed in this earlier article about Chapter 4, a good advance is one that takes advantage of an opening. Ignorance is an opening. The opportunity we pursue shouldn’t be common knowledge. Ideally, these opportunities are secret, and they must be kept secret.

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