Sunzi, Clausewitz, and Net Assessment

The sixty-five-year-old Helmuth von Moltke rose the ranks of Prussia's army without ever fighting a battle. That is until July 3, 1866. On that day, Moltke's maiden battle was forced on him by Otto von Bismarck, who had engineered a war with Austria. When the fog of war rolled in with its accompanying hail of lead, the hefty 6-foot-2 Bismarck began to doubt his chances against Austria's numerically superior forces. He squealed, "Moltke, Moltke, we are losing the battle!" Remaining calm, Moltke reassured the king, "Your Majesty will win today not only the battle but the campaign."[1]

Moltke was right. The Prussians would win the battle, the war, and German hegemony. His hunch was not forged through blood and sweat, but through poetry and music. A cosmopolitan fluent in seven languages, Moltke studied at the War Academy, which was shaped by Clausewitz, and went on to lead a new Prussian institution called the Great General Staff. As the head of the General Staff, Moltke exercised no formal command of the army. Instead, his tenure was more akin to running a summer camp. The General Staff took field trips to historic battlefields and played tabletop wargames, all to develop future-facing war plans. Moltke's musings in the General Staff led him to invest in projects that, at the time, had no obvious connection to military power. He dumped his personal savings into Prussia's railways, which later proved vital for supplying the Prussian army at war. His decades of unorthodox war studies eventually led to the plans he used to fight the Austrians and to his confidence that Prussia would win.[2]

Seventy years and four thousand miles away from the Battle of Königgrätz, Mao Zedong found himself in Yan'an. While the Nationalists were busy fighting off the Japanese, from 1936 to 1945, Mao devoted his energy to gaining control of his Communist Party and developing an ideological understanding of war. Just as Moltke was no Bismark, Mao was no Chiang Kaishek. Mao received no formal military training in his youth and instead read voraciously, finding inspiration in mythical Chinese emperors, Napoleon, and George Washington.[3] After a brief stint as a librarian, Mao became a professional revolutionary, and as he waited for war with the Nationalists in Yan'an, he read Sunzi to help him organize his Red Army. As he was writing On Protracted War, Mao also made a close study of his Chinese translation of Clausewitz's On War.[4] When he wasn't reading, Mao spent his days practicing the flute and writing poetry in the mountains.[5]

Like Moltke, China's unlikely military commander was convinced that the odds were in his favor. In 1936, the Communists commanded fewer than a hundred thousand troops, while the Nationalist army boasted nearly two million men and received weapons from the Soviets and Americans. Yet, that year, Mao's Yan'an poetry remained confident:

This land so rich in beauty

Has made countless heroes bow in homage.

But alas! [Emperors] Chin Shih-huang and Han Wu-ti

Were lacking in literary grace,

And [Emperors] Tang Tai-tsung and Sung Tai-tsu

Had little poetry in their souls;

[...]

All are past and gone!

For truly great men

Look to this age alone.[6]

Despite his forces' technological and numerical inferiority, Mao thought that by luring the Nationalists deep into the countryside, he could defeat them through asymmetric warfare. Miraculously, his theory held, and he went on to gain control of China in 1949. Following his victory in the Civil War, his confidence in his strategic superiority only grew more brazen. In 1957, he told the Finnish ambassador, "Our country has a population of 600 million and an area of 9,600,000 square kilometres. The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs."[7] Mao refused to be coerced by nukes, which he called "paper tigers," believing that while damaging, strategic nuclear weapons were ineffective against protracted warfare.

Mao and Moltke, poets and musicians, laid the foundations for two of modern history's greatest military ascensions. ██████ ████████ ██████ ███ ████████ ████ ██████ ██████████ ████ ██████ ████████ ███ ████ ██████ ███████ ██ ████ ██████████ ██████ ██████ ████ ██████ ████████ ███ ████████ ██████ ███████ ████ ████ ██████ ████████ ███ ████████ ██████ ███ [Section redacted due to political sensitivities.] Their expertise lay in net assessment. Although the term did not exist at the time, net assessment now describes the holistic, comparative analysis of military forces. It not only compares two countries' order of battle – what weapons each side has – but also compares education, doctrine, strategy, technology, culture, and everything that goes into winning a war.[9] If Moltke had not weighed the logistical advantage inferred by Prussian railways and Mao had not considered the strategic advantage of guerrilla warfare, their forces' numerical inferiority would have led them both to fatalism.

Under Nixon, Andrew Marshall created the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) in 1973. Resembling Moltke's Great General Staff, ONA was separated from the military's chain of command. It also organized wargames and commissioned studies on topics with no direct connection to the military, such as the Soviet education system. ████████ ██████ ███ ████ ████████ ██████ ████ ██████ ██████████ ████ ██████ ████████ ██████ ████ ██████ ███████ ██ ████ ██████████ ██████ ██████ ████ ██████ ████████ ███ ████████ ██████ ████████ ████ ██████████ ██████ ███ [Section redacted due to political sensitivities.] Drawing on Sunzi and Clausewitz, this essay aims to determine the scope, importance, and feasibility of net assessment.

Is net assessment possible? A literal reading of Sunzi says absolutely. The Art of War begins with listing off five factors of military might. Samuel Griffith translates these factors as moral influence, weather, terrain, command, and doctrine. Sunzi goes on to say these alone factors can decisively predict the outcome of any war: "There is no general who has not heard of these five matters. Those who master them win; those who do not are defeated."[11] Throughout his work, Sunzi suggests that these factors can be measured and analyzed: "The elements of the art of war are first, measurement of space; second, estimation of quantities; third, calculations; fourth, comparisons; and fifth, chances of victory."[12] According to this reading, net assessment is obtainable through a system of scientific measurement.

A literal reading of Sunzi is common in English-language scholarship on Sunzi. However, it reflects the translator's opinion as much as it does the author's. Professor Boorman defends taking Sunzi's work at face value on the grounds that we do not know who Sunzi was, if he existed, and what cultural background he was writing from.[13] Boorman's literal reading of Sunzi leads him to conclude, "The Sun Tzu text shows a marked tendency for definitive affirmations of conclusions or advice, apparently amounting to a radical denial of the Clausewitzian dictum that war is the province of chance."[14] In other words, Sunzi left little to luck; the fortune cookie was no match for the abacus.

A cultural reading of Sunzi complicates this picture. Research suggests that luck did not exist as a stand-alone concept in ancient China.[15] Instead, luck was baked into concepts of heaven, fate, and divination. One of Sunzi's factors of victory, tian, which Griffith and Boorman translate as "weather," can also be translated as "heavens" or "nature." Although we don't know whether Sunzi was a Confucian, a Daoist, a Mohist, or something else, most schools of thought in ancient China used broad definitions for terms like tian. The great Confucian Mengzi portrayed tian as external circumstance: "That which is done through nobody's doing is the work of tian."[16] In classical Daoist style, Zhuangzi conveyed the same message, I think, more cryptically: "That cows and horses have four legs: this is tian."[17] The same analysis can be applied to all of Sunzi's five inputs for net assessment. Perhaps the most nebulous condition is dao, which can be translated as "moral influence" or "the way." In the Daoist tradition, dao evades measurement by definition. The Daoist sage Laozi claimed, "The dao that can be spoken, is not the constant dao."[18]

The true beliefs of Sunzi, if such a man existed, will never be known. What is known is how Chinese readers read his writing today. Professor Suwei, with whom I had the privilege of reading The Art of War, is a well-educated and well-respected author in China. He saw Daoism everywhere in Sunzi. Like Laozi, Sunzi extols the virtues of water and emphasizes formlessness, wuxing: "Subtle and insubstantial, the master has no form [...] Thus he is the master of his enemy's fate."[19] Sunzi also claims the best generals do not fight at all: "To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill."[20] These arguments closely mirror the Daoists' belief in non-action or wuwei. This cultural reading of Sunzi acknowledges that while Sunzi believes in the power of calculation and planning, he also makes room for luck and moral forces. While heavy on the scale of war, these forces cannot be weighed. Instead, they are to be wrangled by spiritual, or even religious, sensibilities.

Though Sunzi's calculation for net assessment might be murkier than an initial reading suggests, properly gauging the balance of power remains crucial to winning a war. Perhaps Sunzi's most famous suggestion – "know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril" – should be read literally.[21] Sunzi's general-sage only fights wars he knows he will win, but can only be sure of victory through a thorough examination of the balance of power. If net assessment suggests the adversary has the upper hand, the general should not fight. He can achieve invincibility only because he "conquers enemies already defeated."[22] In these battles, he will defeat their enemy as if they were "a hundredweight balance against a grain."[23]

Clausewitz wrote more than a page for every sentence attributed to Sunzi. Despite his more exhaustive study, Clausewitz reached even fewer certainties on net assessment. Clausewitz explicitly condemns positive theories that claim they can predict the outcome of war through mathematical calculations.[24] The existence of war itself proves that an accurate assessment of balance of power is not clearly obtainable: "If war were what pure theory postulates, a war between states of markedly unequal strength would be absurd, and so impossible."[25] One reason net assessment is evasive, he argues, is that man is not good at it: "Men are always more inclined to pitch their estimate of the enemy's strength too high."[26] Clausewitz also asserts that the measurable factors of war are useless in predicting the future. For instance, he claims superior numbers likely contribute very little to the outcome of a war.[27] Further, Clausewitz believes military intelligence – the data necessary for positive calculations of net assessment – is "unreliable and transient." Clausewitz warns the reader that if he relies on intelligence, it will "collapse and bury [him] in its ruins."[28]

Instead, for Clausewitz, the outcome of war is largely bound up in immeasurables. While he recognizes the objective nature of war, he treats its subjective nature with just as much seriousness. The morale and virtue of soldiers and the resolve of leaders are elusive but vital. Perhaps Clausewitz's most crucial known unknown is chance. Clausewitz says of war, "No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance."[29] Even if fortune and moral forces could be calculated, the fog of war makes calculation nearly impossible. In the fog that hangs over battle, "the light of reason is refracted in a manner quite different from that which is normal in academic speculation."[30]

While difficult, Clausewitz does seem to think net assessment is possible. Clausewitz evaluates Napoleon's eventual failure in 1812 as a mistake, above all else, in calculation:

Still less can it be said that the campaign of 1812 ought to have succeeded like the others, and that its failure was due to something extraneous: There was nothing extraneous about Alexander's steadfastness. What can be more natural than to say that in 1805, 1807, and 1809, Bonaparte had gauged his enemy correctly, while in 1812 he did not? In the earlier instances, he was right, and in the latter, he was wrong.[31]

While Tsar Alexander's "steadfastness" falls under war's subjective nature, Napoleon still should have considered it in his net assessment. Clausewitz refuses to accept certainty in war, but his judgment of Napoleon reveals that one can "gauge" the enemy. A successful assessment, however, requires a wide lens.

So, net assessment is possible. But how? Sunzi and Clausewitz agree: genius. Though Sunzi never explicitly uses the term, his repeated descriptions of the master of war and his army (shanzhanzhe or shanyongbingzhe) outline the traits of military genius. In chapter five, Sunzi suggests that the master of war is an artist. As the painter mixes the primary colors, the chef combines tastes, and the musician interlays notes to create infinite possibilities, the general must deploy his means in a creative act: "In battle there are only the normal and extraordinary forces, but their combinations are limitless; none can comprehend them all."[32] The general's tools of "normal" (zheng) and "extraordinary" (qi) forces closely parallel Clausewitz's dichotomy of war as both objective and subjective.

The military genius should tailor the strategies deployed to match his assessment of the enemy. Sunzi uses the metaphor of water: "Now an army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strength and strikes weakness."[33] To be like water, the general must have an innate understanding of his enemy's topography. Sunzi spends three chapters discussing words that can be translated as form, shape, ground, terrain, topography, condition, energy, or momentum (shi, xing, di).[34] The concepts oscillate between the literal and the symbolic. In tactics, the general must know how to march uphill; in strategy, he must know how to fight an uphill battle. To reflexively map out the immeasurable requires genius.

Clausewitz is more explicit with this requirement. He calls genius coup d'oeil or "stroke of the eye." The term describes "the quick recognition of a truth that the mind would ordinarily miss or would perceive only after long study and reflection."[35] Like Sunzi's water, Clausewitz's genius can turn data-rich input into a simple, automatic output. In other words, a genius can perform net assessment quickly and accurately. Since war's inputs are both objective and subjective, analysis requires art and science, creative and scientific mastery.[36] Skill in such art comes not from a life of study but from a study of life: "The art of war deals with living and with moral forces."[37]

While Clausewitz and Sunzi both believe that net assessment is possible and propose genius as the solution, their views of the problem itself differ greatly. Overall, Sunzi is far more optimistic about the feasibility of a comprehensive assessment than Clausewitz because he views the nature of war differently. Sunzi depicts the general's control over the army as unitary and absolute. He also believes the general can attain a complete understanding of the enemy. As a result, with proper strategy, Sunzi's general should be able to defeat the enemy in a single, swift stroke. He discourages prolonged campaigns, claiming, "There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited."[38] Instead, he argues for blitzkrieg: "Speed is the essence of war."[39] To Sunzi, war exists not as campaigns made up of battles, but as a decisive clash. Victory then, is like "the effect of pent-up waters which, suddenly released, plunge into a bottomless abyss."[40] He does not distinguish between tactics, operations, and strategy because they are all one and the same.

To Clausewitz, war is far from simple. It is an organism that takes on a life of its own. "War does not consist of a single short blow," Clausewitz claims.[41] Instead, it "is a pulsation of violence."[42] Every encounter with the enemy creates a new set of circumstances and changes the calculation for the next engagement. Today, the view might be recognized as the butterfly effect:

In war, as in life generally, all parts of the whole are interconnected, and thus the effects produced, however small their cause, must influence all subsequent military operations and modify their final outcome to some degree, however slight. In the same way, every means must influence even the ultimate purpose.[43]

The general's command is not unitary, but contingent on the command of his subordinate officers. Strategies are contingent on operations, and operations are contingent on tactics. When plans go awry, which they do, all other levels of planning must adjust. Net assessment is impossible without net re-assessment. While Napoleon correctly gauged his enemies in 1805, 1807, and 1809, each victory changed the calculus for the next campaign.

While Clausewitz's view is more applicable to modern warfare, it is not necessarily because Clausewitz was wiser than Sunzi. Both thinkers responded to war as it existed in their time. For Sunzi, battles were limited to mass infantry clashes between small states.[44] In contrast, Clausewitz witnessed one of history's longest campaigns firsthand, traveling to Russia to fight Napoleon after losing to him in Prussia.

The thinkers' disagreement on the nature of war explains their divergent treatment of military intelligence, surprise, deception, and espionage. Sunzi believes mastery of these skills is critical. He claims "all warfare is based on deception" and devotes an entire chapter to the importance of building a spy corps.[45] In contrast, Clausewitz dismisses military intelligence, does not bother mentioning espionage, and claims, "[craft, cleverness, and cunning] do not figure prominently in the history of war."[46] Similarly, he believes surprise becomes less useful with scale: "In strategy, surprise becomes more feasible the closer it occurs to the tactical realm, and more difficult, the more it approaches to the higher levels of policy."[47] We cannot say that Clausewitz is right and Sunzi is wrong. Whether these factors should play a role in genius and net assessment depends on the nature of warfare, which is influenced by time, technology, and culture.

The thinkers' different visions of war – Sunzi's unitary command and Clausewitz's system of interacting parts – will prove crucial to net assessment for future wars. The first half of the twentieth century largely confirmed Clausewitz's vision of war. The World Wars were thick with complexity and the fog of war. However, the Cold War brought forth developments in surveillance and reconnaissance that rendered Clausewitz's dismissive attitude of intelligence anachronistic. Like Sunzi's depiction of war, today's battles are rich with high-fidelity data. While we have learned a lot about collecting data, we have learned less about using it. And, as Clausewitz would have it, the complex interplay between tactics, operations, and strategy still makes a formulaic approach to assessment impossible.

What if we learned how to use data perfectly? What if we could use it to predict how each skirmish would affect each campaign? Might Sunzi's model become more appealing? The next century, I imagine, will produce technologies that will be able to do just that. Currently, Palantir is working with the military to consolidate and analyze massive datasets through AI. If every weapons system's data were integrated into a single, intelligent algorithm, it could generate a complete topography of war. Of course, moral forces will persist, and there will always be a demand for genius and artistry. But the objective nature of war might once again be relegated to a unitary decision maker, as Sunzi imagines. The appeal of deception and surprise might also make a comeback. Feeding false data and planting hidden bugs might become the only human defense against algorithmic net assessment.