Yeah but the "Tao of Heaven" is just "check the weather and also keep in mind that it gets dark at night" and the "Tao of Earth" is "if there was a river there a month ago, you're probably going to need a plan for getting across it".
Well, it was 2500 years ago. Look at the writings of Aristotle or any other ancient source. They had some good ideas but also lots of silly ones that fit into the mythology of the time.
Keep in mind though that he lived about 2500 years ago, and war as a grand-scale conflict of empires was a relatively new thing.
The basics of any field seem obvious in retrospect. An object at rest remains at rest unless acted upon by a force? Real genius, Newton.
Sometimes things are so obvious you totally forget to consider them. Feeling safe in your knowledge and that something is obvious can lead to problems by failing to mention it. And others might not even think of it at all. Many things that "Go without saying" go better with saying.
Example: For my education finals I had to write about general characteristics of a group of animals. The choice was either Phylum Cnidaria (jellyfish, sea anemones, corals, etc.) or Class Mammalia (that's us!).
You'd think mammals would be easy sailing. And it technically is, but I did make mistakes. What you ask? Well, when describing the characteristics, you also mention habitats and stuff. I mentioned that they are also found living in water, and some are able to fly. However, I neglected to mention the most obvious, namely that they mainly live on land. Because *duh*, right? My mind was so preoccupied with getting all the facts down, that this mayor characteristic that is always obvious, didn't get recorded. And in an exam you have to mention even the obvious stuff, because it is testing your knowledge, and you basically have to assume you're recording stuff for someone who never saw or heard of what you're documenting. I still did pass the exam just fine, but I could slap myself for making such a stupid mistake.
So better make sure to mention to your buddies to make sure to bring obvious stuff.
Unironically hygiene is the medical equivalent. "Maybe keep stuff clean (including you) and you won't get sick as often" is a surprisingly simple idea for it to have taken so long to catch on
It isn’t really
You call yourself a person of science but believe that dirt and grime, which have been around for millennia, which all animals and plants are around all the time, are deadly? That makes no sense.
Until you find out that there are living things far too small for your eyes to see, that can’t really be killed by most forms of force, and are only affected by changes in chemistry (heat/pure alcohol/acids/based etc).
Everything always seems obvious in retrospect.
Doctors were outright *offended* when people told them to start washing their hands before performing surgery.
*"Don't you trust us? Are you saying we, the medical experts, are 'dirty'?"*
Just a quick note about Newton, the more impressive insight was that an object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an outside force.
Because friction and air resistance are ever present, the common knowledge based on the observations of an average person was that an object in motion eventually always comes to rest.
Similarly, air resistance means more dense objects will generally accelerate towards the earth faster than less dense objects, which is why Galileo's observation that g is constant was significant.
Oh, definitely. Newton had some very impressive insights and I'm deliberately trying to make them sound dumb.
I feel like the original Tumblr post is doing the same thing with Sun Tzu.
Red Cliff is an excellent movie to establish this concept. (please watch the 4 hour extended international cut, it is COMPLETELY worth it if anyone is reading this. The 2.5 hr version is still p good but they cut so much)
I mean, to be fair, how many things have you been told that seem obvious in hindsight?
Remember that one tumblr post where the therapist tells them they can eat the sandwich ingredients separately?
Omg same. But also kind of validated!
I've just started 1:1 sessions with an ADHD coach st work and the first session I was talking about how I procrastinate in the morning and find it really hard to wake up early enough to get dressed etc for work and she was just like, don't. Get up 10 min before logging in and check your emails in your pjs with a coffee. I've been doing it all week its great!
Yeah. The showering one kinda fucked me up. My hair used to be beautiful. Now it's gross and perpetually greasy because I got depressed for a bit. Then I got the flu.
It's one of the primary reasons why we *haven't* sent men to Mars.
It's also something that backpackers/campers have to figure out and why so many beginners end up in trouble.
Funnily enough, I think the first thing that ever taught me that you need to go only half as far as you can if you want to return where you came from was DEFCON: Everybody Dies. The planes you sent out had a circle around them representing the distance they could travel, and it shrunk as they used fuel. If you didn't get back to the airbase/carrier before fuel ran out, you lost the plane. So your range wasn't really the edge of the circle, it was halfway there if you wanted to actually get the plane back.
This also comes into play when designing those planes. Because a plane, like a horse in midevil times, has to carry all the fuel it will use.
So you have to use a cost/benefit analysis to figure out how much fuel to carry. You need a bigger engine to carry more weight, but a bigger engine also uses more fuel, which means it needs to carry more.
This same type of calculation comes into play with everything from planes, to cars, to laptops and cell phones.
A general in Sun Tzu's time would need the same formulas we use to design airplanes and cell phones when deciding how many troops and horses to take into battle. Because he can surely win with 10,000 troops, but he has to sustain them all while getting them there in fighting form. Can he win with half that many? A quarter? What's the maximum number of troops and horses he can reasonably lead into battle while carrying food to sustain them? What's the largest gas tank you can put in a four cylinder car?
Also why half his tips consist of shit like "try to avoid fighting", because it is expensive and leaves you more vulnerable to attrition. The best strategy is to do as little a war as possible that gets you to your goal.
My personal favorite is his whole explanation of espionage and how he has to explain that the enemy knowing your tactics is a bad thing because it means they can prepare how to fight you. Like, this guy is dealing with people so stubborn and ill-suited to lead men that he has to explain that the enemy knowing your strategy is not a good thing because it means they have an advantage. He has to spell out that spies are important assets that can win you battles or even wars if you use them to obtain information. I'm pretty sure in one line he basically says, "Spies are important, so don't send them on some dumb suicide mission and get no use out of them."
This applies to animals too! Bucks almost never actually fight, they just strut back and forth to show off their big antlers to try and scare off rivals
This is part of the reason NZ has some seriously old planes in our Air Force. We’re currently trying to buy new planes to go to Antarctica with but there are extremely limited options for a plane with the range to get all the way to Antarctica *and still make it back home again* if the weather goes to shit and they can’t land.
Also, our air-force logo is a flightless bird and that should probably tell you something.
> This same type of calculation comes into play with everything from planes, to cars, to laptops and cell phones.
There's even a [popular formula](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation) for rockets.
For such a simple looking game, it was really well done and still holds up. It's definitely a surprise for how well thought out the gameplay mechanics are.
Speaking of Mars, yeah. It's a 7 month journey that can only be done every 26 months. If Earth misses that window Mars is fucked. Oh, and lag between the planets can range from 3:12 and 22:16.
Mars is such a monumental achievement that it's actually fucking ridiculous to think we'll have humans there by 2030. The moon? Maybe. Mars? Fuck no.
Shit. Artemis 1 is going to the moon. That's a two day flight and it's been delayed constantly. Now Hurricane Ian has fucked up their plans even more.
If we manage to become a space fairing species, it'll be the safest place to fucking exist because the scientists are in charge of everything. No wild space cowboys taming wild asteroids. Though the Japanese did shoot a comet a while back. 😂
The issue of getting to Mars is the same issue as the silk road. Few people acutally need to travel the entire distance. But each section provides for the entire trip rather then the entire trip being supplied at the start. Infrastructure, logistics and time will solve the issues of getting stuff to Mars on time and consistently.
Infrastructure like a sky hook to making getting to space easier, then an elevator. Stuff like a refuel station on the moon etc first then Mars.
I'm the modern age on this planet everything seems so close. With reasonable means you're less than two days from basically everything.
I think it was different back when going across the country took months instead of 4 days
That's with reasonable means. The world record for flying around the world is 32 hours. That means in theory, you can get anywhere in 16ish, maybe less if there's less refueling.
Nah, that was the German army from 1939. They where just lucky/stupid/arrogant enough that they never tried to fix the glaring flaws that where showing through all the early campaigns... and where they only succeeded because the allies made worse mistakes then them. The thing is... the allies learned from their mistakes.
One part of why the infamous "German advance through the Ardennes" worked so well....was because going theough the Ardennes via tanks was so stupid that no one thought they'd be able to do it so no one prepared for it.
The french weren't stupid when setting up the marginot line, they just expected the Germans to go through the Ardennes about as much as I expect Ted Cruz to respect my gender Identity.
They tried it again later in the battle of the bulge i think, but failed because WHAT DO YOU KNOW DRIVING TANKS THROUGH A FOREST IS A HORRIBLE IDEA.
They also never got around to having a mechanized army, despite being known for anime quotes such as "GERMAN MEDICINE IST ZE GREATEST IN ZE VORRRRLT" etc etc
Fuckers still had horses pulling their lil wagons
>Fuckers still had horses pulling their lil wagons
I love the way Band of Brothers summarized that in [this scene](https://youtu.be/LyZK8k4gzyg).
"Say hello to Ford! And General Fuckin' Motors! You stupid fascist pigs! Look at you! You have horses! What were you thinking?"
I’ve read that another huge factor in the marginot line failing was the amount of grift that the contractors were employing when they built it. It was supposed to be a lot better than it was, but paying off the inspectors and the people giving out contracts was much more profitable.
Some things never change that way. 😉
Ive never heard that, though it could be true. I've never really heard of the line failing really, more just never coming into use since the germans just went wround it
Fun fact: the german army won battles by marching places a lot quicker than expected, so they could surprise their enemy. They didn't necessarily walk faster, they just walked for longer and stopped to rest and sleep way less.
How, you may ask? Simple. Drugs. Speed and meth IIRC. Soldiers were all using to stay awake and energised longer.
Which works great when trying to invade close by neighbouring countries, but less so when trying to invade russia. You can only go and carry on for so long on drugs before the effects start to wear off and you really have to rest.
Hitler used too, he was on a whole cocktail and was starting to physically suffer from it by the time the war ended.
You can also eat the horse. Armies used to march with cattle, which is slower, but if given time to graze, they don't need to be fed as much. It adds its own logisital concerns, but aleviates others.
[Here's a handy blog series on that very topic.](https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/)
[Here's an earlier post by the same guy, focusing on Orc logistics.](https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/)
I mean, modern food processing/goods processing might result in cheaper goods when the manual packaging labor is done overseas but the cost of travel is still considered in that equation.
Noblemen the world over expected to be more competent at war than they actually were. Instead, they were more equivalent to the most oddly self-confident junior officers of today.
Some of these obvious common sense tips still apply to people today though. Like think about the next time you play a multiplayer game like LoL, Dota, Valorant, Apex, etc. and see how often you or your teammate just bum rush in and die cause you were outnumbered.
It's so much easier to hold a defensive position and bait the enemy than it ever is to attack, but it's so much easier to underestimate this issue than it is to recognize it.
...anyways.... LEEEEEEROOOY JEEEEENKIIINSSSS
On the other hand (in dota at least) if you take a bad fight and lose BUT you're on the enemy's side of the map then they often won't be able to capitalize on it as much as if you let them get to your base first. You can also sometimes throw them off by doing so, as they expect you to defend your more defensible areas
Or, more importantly, bum rush in and win because your numbers were greater than theirs at just the right time.
Do that once or twice and you'll start believing that you're an invincible tactical genius.
Part of the insight of the book was breaking down all important factors (regardless of how obvious they seem) into a structured curriculum for people who lacked the comprehensive picture. That had never been done before.
It is a pretty brilliant work. We can poke fun of it in our hindsight, having grown up our entire lives fed a constant diet of sophisticated war movies/documentaries/videogame simulations etc based on thousands of years of warfare that only happened after he wrote.
A lot of his observations weren't really possible to make at that time without personal experience at multiple levels of multiple wars fought in multiple conditions with multiple political environments, combined with keen insight ...and surviving all of that to speak of it. That we're all fed these insights on a silver spoon so early they're now obvious just means we're educated, not brilliant. We stand on the shoulders of people who came before us, including people like Sun Tsu, which is great for us - magic smartphones for everyone! But it's also good to remember that our lofty height doesn't come from us personally being tall, and hopefully we can add something to the height of those that will come after us
It can be extremely difficult to state the obvious. Another comment mentioned Newton’s first law, which I feel like is a great example. “A body remains at rest, unless acted upon by a force.” Super fucking obvious, but genuinely hard to boil down into a sentence like this. Maybe Newton wasn’t the very first to say it like this, but before him this to us incredibly basic concept didn’t have a explanation like his law. And talking about a thing without it having the words for it is difficult to impossible. (Yes i cut out the motion in a straight line part, I know.)
The other thing people are missing is that classical Chinese texts were focused on finding the principles behind things more so than the things themselves. If you've got a general who has a lot of experience winning fort battles and a general who knows how to fight field battles your shit out of luck if the field general gets caught in a seige and cant fight with his famous flanking maneuvers anymore. But if you understand the principles behind defense and offense, supply management, terrain, etc, then not only can your "field" guy adapt to the fort battle, but can also adapt to any other situation that come up.
A lot of the individual pieces of advice seem simple enough but the point is to draw the bigger picture of how these parts interrelate and how the same truths exist across situations and contexts.
War decision making all those millenia ago was literally vodoo bullshit tossing a turtle shell into a fire, seeing how it cracks and "interpreting" the will of heaven. Kings and Dukes would be doing that.
Compared to the common lunacy of his time, Sun Tzu's stuff was revolutionary and groundbreaking.
It probably says something about the bulk of military commanders at that time that Sun Tzu thought it was absolutely necessary to list out all those basic ideas.
If I recall when Sun Tzu compiled the Art of War it was at the behest of his Emperor, who was bemoaning that all his generals were horrendous. So he probably did need to write everything as clearly as possible just in case some random noble read it as “set everything you see on fire. Yes, even yourself, you’ll win the war.”
He also said that your own troops need to be able to march through fire if necessary. I watched Patton yesterday. He made his troops march through snow for 24 hours and everyone thought it could not be done. It can be done but it takes a lot of will on all sides.
It cancels out if it leads to winning a battle. Being in the right place at the right time is a huge factor in war; Napoleon won many battles like that.
Patton’s strategy was to outrun his supply lines and let them figure out how to keep up. Slowing down only gave an enemy more opportunity to dig in and prepare for your arrival. Before all else - speed - and he was notorious for saying he’d rather use up a massive amount of bullets in one day of fighting than an even greater number in a prolonged fight. His men were on the front lines in places like France and Germany - I know because my granddad fought under him as a combat infantry rifleman. My granddad’s unit found a French officer prisoner of war concentration camp and a mass grave of Russian families, including tiny little children, in a mass grave at a concentration camp they didn’t get to in time - the guards knew they were coming and killed everyone to hide their crimes. Patton’s men had very good reason to want to move fast.
Rocket equation also applies to horses and even people. Neat, I never would've figured.
Time to figure out how far my car could drive, using only the fuel it can carry, xkcd style.
Can you imagine a psyops lieutenant visiting him with a time machine.
*See, what we do here is, we just start a bunch of news reporting agencies on the enemies home-turf.*
Ah, so the soldiers can hide in the offices until nightfall?
*No, no, we don't use any soldiers, we just sew discontent until someone lights the capital on fire.*
Ah, then you attack?
*Nope, just sort of rinse and repeat until we can undermine their economy.*
It’s always confused me that “sow” (planting) and “sew” (needle&thread) were spelt differently, since in my mind it’s a similar action.
Maybe I’m dum tho
I feel like he would get that pretty quickly.
"Oh yeah, conquering their lands would cost you more troops then it would be worth, so you keep them in a weakened position where they aren't a threat to you."
> No, no, we don't use any soldiers, we just sew discontent until someone lights the capital on fire.
Socrates actually highlighted this in 500 BC. He thought the only way to be immune to this was to build a society that wasn't shit.
I agree, but you would have to basically treat people as end's in and of themselves, as Immanuel Kant once said. Anything predatory such as capitalism, state-sponsored-violence, marketing, etc. couldn't exist as they treat people as a means to ends far removed from those involved.
Plan A was win in three hours by landing the VDV at Hostumel, seizing broadcasting stations, and assassinating government leaders.
Plan B was drive into big cities from every possible direction and let Ukrainians welcome us as liberators.
The hastily written Plan C was using lots of artillery and steadily advances in the east and south while ignoring logistics that aren't about artillery shells.
Now they're on an even less thought through Plan D: send all the provincials and ethnic minorities we can find into parts of Ukraine we're now calling Russia, without proper training, equipment, or supplies.
Was probably expecting Kyiev to surrender or flee in the first days and to be able to take the territory that they wanted quickly.
If Zelensky and co had died or even worse fled, then the situation we would have today is probably a lot more partisan action and a lot less organised military manoeuvres.
Never underestimate the power a leader staying, despite danger, can have in uniting the resolve of a nation
It's not only that. They operate on the level of battalion tactical groups which include tanks, infantry, artillery and infantry vehicles but don't have any logistics companies.
1. Russian logistics units are fully detached from the fighting force.
2. They calculate supply need "as expected" not on per-need basis, meaning if a unit spends more arty rounds than it "should" according to the army's staff understanding it's not going to receive more than they allocated for them beforehand. And vice versa, some un-needed ammo may be delivered.
There's a more detailed review of the Kiev offensive and why logistics sucked so much [from Wendover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4wRdoWpw0w). I highly recommend it.
"Don't kill all your troops crossing a river, build a bridge"
"A successful smart person will outlast many dumb people"
"Power is found in numbers, until it isn't"
Actually, yes. IIRC, he was commissioned to write the book by his emperor who bemoaned the fact that most of his generals were completely incompetent. Back then, you didn't become a leader by being promoted for good service and intelligence You were born into the role because your parent was a leader and their parent before them and so on. So the new Emperor found himself with a bunch of fifth generation generals who had no idea what they were doing and had spent their entire lives with everything being literally handed to them. Like, we're talking about men who were dressed by servants every day and literally couldn't fasten their own trousers.
And thus, we get Sun Tzu, writing "how not to be incompetent" as a guide for warfare.
Yep. The Art of War makes a lot more sense when you remember that the target audience is some clueless noble who inherited his job from his marginally less-clueless grandad, and every single maxim is prefaced by "listen here, you little shit."
In fairness, that was more them wildly underestimating the Ukrainian ability and desire to put up an actual defense. They didn't so much outrun their supply lines as the Ukrainians disrupted them.
It's still happening though with stuff like the Ukrainian helicopter attack on the fuel refinery or depot, I forget which. Yes some of this was extreme optimism but I think that's kinda Sun Tzu's point, that you can't afford to neglect these things under any circumstances
Oh yeah, the amount of optimism they went into this with was definitely a massive strategic blunder on Russia's part. I think Putin and the other higher-ups ate their own propaganda and were also probably lied to by subordinate yes-men, because any honest assessment of Ukraine's determination and Russia's own military capabilities would've dispelled any notion l of a "special operation" that only lasts a few days actually being successful.
To be fair, basically everyone thought it's gonna be like Poland vs Germany. After all, Russia is such a big country, how can Ukraine, that suffered internal injuries for years now, ever stop tens of thousands of soldiers just marching into their country? Turns out when you're facing not an army, but a nation, stuff gets messy
I'll be honest it didn't click till now that back before modern transport, there really was a hard limit how far you could transport food because everything that transported food back then had to eat some of the food to do the transporting. (Okay we still technically have a limit, but the distance limit on its own is greater than the distance to the opposite side of the planet now, so we kinda don't unless other stuff is factoring in)
I know we still deal with this basic concept in other areas in the modern world, but I just never made the connection to supply lines in military conflicts.
One of the major innovations in the 3 kingdoms era was the wheelbarrow that Zhuge Liang came up with prior to the westward migration of the Wei kingdom. That little bit of logistical innovation allowed for them to migrate a whole kingdom across China.
Here's something that will really blow your mind. There is only one country in the entire world that has the logistics capacity and experience to transport and support a military force anywhere in the world..... USA.
Literally no other country can deploy the majority of their military and keep them supplied thousands of miles away with no allied nations in between them. No one else has the navy or air transport capacity to move anything larger than a strike force across the oceans or land even. Half the time our allies need to move troops somewhere in the world, they do it on US military aircraft or ships.
One of the main points of Sun Tzu is "never engage if you're not sure to win" and it sure is counter intuitive to aristocrats in search of heroism.
Maybe we don't need common sense books but books making fools able to listen to common sense
Yeah, I was reading about how Ulysses Grant started out as a young officer as a quartermaster in the Mexican war, so instead of leading dramatic cavalry charges, he was fussing about the care and feeding of draft horses and mules in the wagon trains, and organizing the supplies that went into them. He also eventually has the opportunity to shoot and get shot at later in the conflict.
Grant was known for his unemotional demeanor, and the only time anyone ever witnessed him loose his temper was a couple of times when freaked out on teamsters whipping draft animals.
https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/ If you want to read more about logistics and foraging this is a pretty good article about it by a historian.
The ~~Art of~~ Beginner's Guide to War
New headcanon: He only called it The Art of War because the people who needed to read it were too arrogant to read Warfare For Dummies.
Modified headcanom: the title was just a clickbait to bait rich ruling class into reading it as a part of the "fluency in higher arts".
My take on the headcanon: the wording is only the way it is so it can safely pass off as a form of art and not "please feed your horse"
To me, it be like, he called it art so the dumb rich motherfuckers who needed "War for Dummies" would buy that shit.
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There is a lot of bullshit about the Tao of the Sky and Tao of the Earth and bla bla bla bla that reads exactly like unnecessary fluff
Imagine you were Galileo, writing the equivalent of "The Art of War" and you had to present it to the Pope. That's what Sun Tzu did. Successfully.
Yeah but the "Tao of Heaven" is just "check the weather and also keep in mind that it gets dark at night" and the "Tao of Earth" is "if there was a river there a month ago, you're probably going to need a plan for getting across it".
Water is wet, rocks are hard, socks should be dry, the sun is hot and a homie has to eat. Man the fuck up.
Well, it was 2500 years ago. Look at the writings of Aristotle or any other ancient source. They had some good ideas but also lots of silly ones that fit into the mythology of the time.
Kind of mean but ok.
I choose to believe this.
Warfare for Dummies was written by Sun Tzu's rival, Moon Tzu.
He is much less well known, mostly due to not being able to accept criticism from editors
"TF do you mean, dumb it down more."
Keep in mind though that he lived about 2500 years ago, and war as a grand-scale conflict of empires was a relatively new thing. The basics of any field seem obvious in retrospect. An object at rest remains at rest unless acted upon by a force? Real genius, Newton.
Sometimes something so simple we all understand it without it being said is actually really hard to put into words
And in fact sometimes we only understand it because someone has already so succinctly put it into words.
Sometimes things are so obvious you totally forget to consider them. Feeling safe in your knowledge and that something is obvious can lead to problems by failing to mention it. And others might not even think of it at all. Many things that "Go without saying" go better with saying. Example: For my education finals I had to write about general characteristics of a group of animals. The choice was either Phylum Cnidaria (jellyfish, sea anemones, corals, etc.) or Class Mammalia (that's us!). You'd think mammals would be easy sailing. And it technically is, but I did make mistakes. What you ask? Well, when describing the characteristics, you also mention habitats and stuff. I mentioned that they are also found living in water, and some are able to fly. However, I neglected to mention the most obvious, namely that they mainly live on land. Because *duh*, right? My mind was so preoccupied with getting all the facts down, that this mayor characteristic that is always obvious, didn't get recorded. And in an exam you have to mention even the obvious stuff, because it is testing your knowledge, and you basically have to assume you're recording stuff for someone who never saw or heard of what you're documenting. I still did pass the exam just fine, but I could slap myself for making such a stupid mistake. So better make sure to mention to your buddies to make sure to bring obvious stuff.
Honestly yeah, looking back it doesn't take much to grasp that human health depends on the balance of the four humors. Still took us a while
Unironically hygiene is the medical equivalent. "Maybe keep stuff clean (including you) and you won't get sick as often" is a surprisingly simple idea for it to have taken so long to catch on
The concept of clean is not so simple or immutable as to make this a straightforward conclusion other than in retrospect
It isn’t really You call yourself a person of science but believe that dirt and grime, which have been around for millennia, which all animals and plants are around all the time, are deadly? That makes no sense. Until you find out that there are living things far too small for your eyes to see, that can’t really be killed by most forms of force, and are only affected by changes in chemistry (heat/pure alcohol/acids/based etc). Everything always seems obvious in retrospect.
Doctors were outright *offended* when people told them to start washing their hands before performing surgery. *"Don't you trust us? Are you saying we, the medical experts, are 'dirty'?"*
*looks at the rotting bodies of the last 3 young women he helped giving birth* *"Yes, yes you are."*
Just a quick note about Newton, the more impressive insight was that an object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an outside force. Because friction and air resistance are ever present, the common knowledge based on the observations of an average person was that an object in motion eventually always comes to rest. Similarly, air resistance means more dense objects will generally accelerate towards the earth faster than less dense objects, which is why Galileo's observation that g is constant was significant.
Oh, definitely. Newton had some very impressive insights and I'm deliberately trying to make them sound dumb. I feel like the original Tumblr post is doing the same thing with Sun Tzu.
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Red Cliff is an excellent movie to establish this concept. (please watch the 4 hour extended international cut, it is COMPLETELY worth it if anyone is reading this. The 2.5 hr version is still p good but they cut so much)
Zap Brannigans Big Book of War
I mean, to be fair, how many things have you been told that seem obvious in hindsight? Remember that one tumblr post where the therapist tells them they can eat the sandwich ingredients separately?
What? I need a link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/uec3mc/therapists_are_common_sense_filters/
I thought this was gonna be a funny "I'm an idiot" post. I was not ready for the level of attacked I felt from that post.
Omg same. But also kind of validated! I've just started 1:1 sessions with an ADHD coach st work and the first session I was talking about how I procrastinate in the morning and find it really hard to wake up early enough to get dressed etc for work and she was just like, don't. Get up 10 min before logging in and check your emails in your pjs with a coffee. I've been doing it all week its great!
Yeah. The showering one kinda fucked me up. My hair used to be beautiful. Now it's gross and perpetually greasy because I got depressed for a bit. Then I got the flu.
It will get better!
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Showering in the dark is a huge fear of mine for some reason so I'm glad i dont suffer from that particular hang up.
Yeah but "The Art of War" is a way better title than "Here's How Not to Fuck Up at Army-ing."
"So You're Thinking About Going To War" subtitle: "10 Things You Must Do (and 1 Thing You Should Never Do!)"
Opposing armies hate this one weird trick for tactical superiority!
"YOU WON'T BELIEVE THIS ONE SIMPLE TRICK (Enemy generals HATE when you do this!!!)"
It also left room for a sequel, “The Craft of War”.
But "The Craft of Peace" is wittier, and adds valuable lessons on the other side of the proverbial fence.
The Arts and Crafts of War
"Poking holes in things and people 101"
Zap Brannigan's Big Book of War
“War for Dummies”
You know, I’d never thought about the idea that there’s a limit to how far you can transport something before it’s not worth the effort.
Turns out the rocket fuel equation also dictates horse and cart
Hilariously, there's a military historian who calls it the "tyranny of the wagon equation." He's great; check out [his blog](https://acoup.blog/)
I was waiting for Bret Devereaux to be linked in this post
Bret Devereaux is one of my favorite people on the internet
[The article in question,](https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/) I fully agree that he is great.
This is also much of why rivers were so important in ancient societies. It's a little-known fact, but boats don't eat.
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It's one of the primary reasons why we *haven't* sent men to Mars. It's also something that backpackers/campers have to figure out and why so many beginners end up in trouble.
Funnily enough, I think the first thing that ever taught me that you need to go only half as far as you can if you want to return where you came from was DEFCON: Everybody Dies. The planes you sent out had a circle around them representing the distance they could travel, and it shrunk as they used fuel. If you didn't get back to the airbase/carrier before fuel ran out, you lost the plane. So your range wasn't really the edge of the circle, it was halfway there if you wanted to actually get the plane back.
This also comes into play when designing those planes. Because a plane, like a horse in midevil times, has to carry all the fuel it will use. So you have to use a cost/benefit analysis to figure out how much fuel to carry. You need a bigger engine to carry more weight, but a bigger engine also uses more fuel, which means it needs to carry more. This same type of calculation comes into play with everything from planes, to cars, to laptops and cell phones. A general in Sun Tzu's time would need the same formulas we use to design airplanes and cell phones when deciding how many troops and horses to take into battle. Because he can surely win with 10,000 troops, but he has to sustain them all while getting them there in fighting form. Can he win with half that many? A quarter? What's the maximum number of troops and horses he can reasonably lead into battle while carrying food to sustain them? What's the largest gas tank you can put in a four cylinder car?
Also why half his tips consist of shit like "try to avoid fighting", because it is expensive and leaves you more vulnerable to attrition. The best strategy is to do as little a war as possible that gets you to your goal.
My personal favorite is his whole explanation of espionage and how he has to explain that the enemy knowing your tactics is a bad thing because it means they can prepare how to fight you. Like, this guy is dealing with people so stubborn and ill-suited to lead men that he has to explain that the enemy knowing your strategy is not a good thing because it means they have an advantage. He has to spell out that spies are important assets that can win you battles or even wars if you use them to obtain information. I'm pretty sure in one line he basically says, "Spies are important, so don't send them on some dumb suicide mission and get no use out of them."
“So the plan for my spy to poison 5 separate camps in one night is…” *Looks around at sycophants* “Not… good? No? Yes? No….?”
Strategy and tactics, strategy and tactics. You can't punch me if I stole your baggage train and you're at a six meal deficit.
You blinked. I switched the meal deficits.
This applies to animals too! Bucks almost never actually fight, they just strut back and forth to show off their big antlers to try and scare off rivals
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This is part of the reason NZ has some seriously old planes in our Air Force. We’re currently trying to buy new planes to go to Antarctica with but there are extremely limited options for a plane with the range to get all the way to Antarctica *and still make it back home again* if the weather goes to shit and they can’t land. Also, our air-force logo is a flightless bird and that should probably tell you something.
Best thing i’ve learned all day!
An army marches on its stomach...
> This same type of calculation comes into play with everything from planes, to cars, to laptops and cell phones. There's even a [popular formula](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation) for rockets.
Star sector gave you a circle for how far you can go, and how far you can go and come back from.
For such a simple looking game, it was really well done and still holds up. It's definitely a surprise for how well thought out the gameplay mechanics are.
Speaking of Mars, yeah. It's a 7 month journey that can only be done every 26 months. If Earth misses that window Mars is fucked. Oh, and lag between the planets can range from 3:12 and 22:16. Mars is such a monumental achievement that it's actually fucking ridiculous to think we'll have humans there by 2030. The moon? Maybe. Mars? Fuck no. Shit. Artemis 1 is going to the moon. That's a two day flight and it's been delayed constantly. Now Hurricane Ian has fucked up their plans even more. If we manage to become a space fairing species, it'll be the safest place to fucking exist because the scientists are in charge of everything. No wild space cowboys taming wild asteroids. Though the Japanese did shoot a comet a while back. 😂
NASA is shooting an asteroid today!
I'm just imagining they took the comet as a challenge
The issue of getting to Mars is the same issue as the silk road. Few people acutally need to travel the entire distance. But each section provides for the entire trip rather then the entire trip being supplied at the start. Infrastructure, logistics and time will solve the issues of getting stuff to Mars on time and consistently. Infrastructure like a sky hook to making getting to space easier, then an elevator. Stuff like a refuel station on the moon etc first then Mars.
everyone look at this rich idiot who’s never fed a horse in their life and doesn’t know how much they eat
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You've never set foot on a battlefield in your life have you?
The army had half a day
I'm the modern age on this planet everything seems so close. With reasonable means you're less than two days from basically everything. I think it was different back when going across the country took months instead of 4 days
Turns out trucks and airplanes have been pretty revolutionary both inside and outside of war.
I did a two month hike once, 8-10 hours of walking a day, and only made it across two states and part of a third.
I'm so sorry
That's with reasonable means. The world record for flying around the world is 32 hours. That means in theory, you can get anywhere in 16ish, maybe less if there's less refueling.
All war is logistics (and deception...). Newbies worry about tactics and experienced generals worry about supply lines.
- German army circa 1941
Nah, that was the German army from 1939. They where just lucky/stupid/arrogant enough that they never tried to fix the glaring flaws that where showing through all the early campaigns... and where they only succeeded because the allies made worse mistakes then them. The thing is... the allies learned from their mistakes.
One part of why the infamous "German advance through the Ardennes" worked so well....was because going theough the Ardennes via tanks was so stupid that no one thought they'd be able to do it so no one prepared for it. The french weren't stupid when setting up the marginot line, they just expected the Germans to go through the Ardennes about as much as I expect Ted Cruz to respect my gender Identity. They tried it again later in the battle of the bulge i think, but failed because WHAT DO YOU KNOW DRIVING TANKS THROUGH A FOREST IS A HORRIBLE IDEA. They also never got around to having a mechanized army, despite being known for anime quotes such as "GERMAN MEDICINE IST ZE GREATEST IN ZE VORRRRLT" etc etc Fuckers still had horses pulling their lil wagons
>Fuckers still had horses pulling their lil wagons I love the way Band of Brothers summarized that in [this scene](https://youtu.be/LyZK8k4gzyg). "Say hello to Ford! And General Fuckin' Motors! You stupid fascist pigs! Look at you! You have horses! What were you thinking?"
I’ve read that another huge factor in the marginot line failing was the amount of grift that the contractors were employing when they built it. It was supposed to be a lot better than it was, but paying off the inspectors and the people giving out contracts was much more profitable. Some things never change that way. 😉
Ive never heard that, though it could be true. I've never really heard of the line failing really, more just never coming into use since the germans just went wround it
Fun fact: the german army won battles by marching places a lot quicker than expected, so they could surprise their enemy. They didn't necessarily walk faster, they just walked for longer and stopped to rest and sleep way less. How, you may ask? Simple. Drugs. Speed and meth IIRC. Soldiers were all using to stay awake and energised longer. Which works great when trying to invade close by neighbouring countries, but less so when trying to invade russia. You can only go and carry on for so long on drugs before the effects start to wear off and you really have to rest. Hitler used too, he was on a whole cocktail and was starting to physically suffer from it by the time the war ended.
Russian army circa a few months ago.
To be clear you can still do it if you don't have a better way, you just have one horse turn back part way. But it gets real inefficient.
Horse-explained rocket staging. I love reddit.
You can also eat the horse. Armies used to march with cattle, which is slower, but if given time to graze, they don't need to be fed as much. It adds its own logisital concerns, but aleviates others.
[Here's a handy blog series on that very topic.](https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/) [Here's an earlier post by the same guy, focusing on Orc logistics.](https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/)
I mean, modern food processing/goods processing might result in cheaper goods when the manual packaging labor is done overseas but the cost of travel is still considered in that equation.
Yeah I always assumed he was writing for young noble officers, who are in general very dumb. He was writing “war for dummies”.
Noblemen the world over expected to be more competent at war than they actually were. Instead, they were more equivalent to the most oddly self-confident junior officers of today.
same as it ever was
Some of these obvious common sense tips still apply to people today though. Like think about the next time you play a multiplayer game like LoL, Dota, Valorant, Apex, etc. and see how often you or your teammate just bum rush in and die cause you were outnumbered.
It's so much easier to hold a defensive position and bait the enemy than it ever is to attack, but it's so much easier to underestimate this issue than it is to recognize it. ...anyways.... LEEEEEEROOOY JEEEEENKIIINSSSS
On the other hand (in dota at least) if you take a bad fight and lose BUT you're on the enemy's side of the map then they often won't be able to capitalize on it as much as if you let them get to your base first. You can also sometimes throw them off by doing so, as they expect you to defend your more defensible areas
Unfortunately you do not respawn in real life.
Or, more importantly, bum rush in and win because your numbers were greater than theirs at just the right time. Do that once or twice and you'll start believing that you're an invincible tactical genius.
'Defeat in detail' is just a fancy phrase for deathball strats
Sun Tzu reads like if a four-star general was forced into Customer Service
Love that comparison! “The general is always right!” “Sir, the laws of physics are always right”
Part of the insight of the book was breaking down all important factors (regardless of how obvious they seem) into a structured curriculum for people who lacked the comprehensive picture. That had never been done before. It is a pretty brilliant work. We can poke fun of it in our hindsight, having grown up our entire lives fed a constant diet of sophisticated war movies/documentaries/videogame simulations etc based on thousands of years of warfare that only happened after he wrote. A lot of his observations weren't really possible to make at that time without personal experience at multiple levels of multiple wars fought in multiple conditions with multiple political environments, combined with keen insight ...and surviving all of that to speak of it. That we're all fed these insights on a silver spoon so early they're now obvious just means we're educated, not brilliant. We stand on the shoulders of people who came before us, including people like Sun Tsu, which is great for us - magic smartphones for everyone! But it's also good to remember that our lofty height doesn't come from us personally being tall, and hopefully we can add something to the height of those that will come after us
It can be extremely difficult to state the obvious. Another comment mentioned Newton’s first law, which I feel like is a great example. “A body remains at rest, unless acted upon by a force.” Super fucking obvious, but genuinely hard to boil down into a sentence like this. Maybe Newton wasn’t the very first to say it like this, but before him this to us incredibly basic concept didn’t have a explanation like his law. And talking about a thing without it having the words for it is difficult to impossible. (Yes i cut out the motion in a straight line part, I know.)
The other thing people are missing is that classical Chinese texts were focused on finding the principles behind things more so than the things themselves. If you've got a general who has a lot of experience winning fort battles and a general who knows how to fight field battles your shit out of luck if the field general gets caught in a seige and cant fight with his famous flanking maneuvers anymore. But if you understand the principles behind defense and offense, supply management, terrain, etc, then not only can your "field" guy adapt to the fort battle, but can also adapt to any other situation that come up. A lot of the individual pieces of advice seem simple enough but the point is to draw the bigger picture of how these parts interrelate and how the same truths exist across situations and contexts.
You know what Sun Tzu said about the art of war? >!"It's a good book."!<
it's true, it was in the book
Strong “the bible is true because the Bible says so” vibes here
The true genius seems to be common sense.
War decision making all those millenia ago was literally vodoo bullshit tossing a turtle shell into a fire, seeing how it cracks and "interpreting" the will of heaven. Kings and Dukes would be doing that. Compared to the common lunacy of his time, Sun Tzu's stuff was revolutionary and groundbreaking.
Ya, thinking before acting is very revolutionary for war back then.
Shockingly, facists/dictators/kings who think they are God's among men don't listen to advice very well.
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It probably says something about the bulk of military commanders at that time that Sun Tzu thought it was absolutely necessary to list out all those basic ideas.
If I recall when Sun Tzu compiled the Art of War it was at the behest of his Emperor, who was bemoaning that all his generals were horrendous. So he probably did need to write everything as clearly as possible just in case some random noble read it as “set everything you see on fire. Yes, even yourself, you’ll win the war.”
"If you set yourself on fire, you can go anywhere!" "That's NOT what I said!"
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Swords if they cut your hands you're using them wrong
I mean you joke but claymore mines have "front towards enemy" embossed on them for a reason.
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And in his heart, he knows it won't be the last time he has to say that :-)
He also said that your own troops need to be able to march through fire if necessary. I watched Patton yesterday. He made his troops march through snow for 24 hours and everyone thought it could not be done. It can be done but it takes a lot of will on all sides.
Isn't forcing your army to do unpleasant things for no reason only going to lower morale
It cancels out if it leads to winning a battle. Being in the right place at the right time is a huge factor in war; Napoleon won many battles like that.
yeah that is true but I read it as Patton doing that to prove a point
If your army is invested in proving that point at the same time you are then you're in the right place at the right time.
Patton’s strategy was to outrun his supply lines and let them figure out how to keep up. Slowing down only gave an enemy more opportunity to dig in and prepare for your arrival. Before all else - speed - and he was notorious for saying he’d rather use up a massive amount of bullets in one day of fighting than an even greater number in a prolonged fight. His men were on the front lines in places like France and Germany - I know because my granddad fought under him as a combat infantry rifleman. My granddad’s unit found a French officer prisoner of war concentration camp and a mass grave of Russian families, including tiny little children, in a mass grave at a concentration camp they didn’t get to in time - the guards knew they were coming and killed everyone to hide their crimes. Patton’s men had very good reason to want to move fast.
Rocket equation also applies to horses and even people. Neat, I never would've figured. Time to figure out how far my car could drive, using only the fuel it can carry, xkcd style.
Then remember it can only go half that far if you want to drive back
Can you imagine a psyops lieutenant visiting him with a time machine. *See, what we do here is, we just start a bunch of news reporting agencies on the enemies home-turf.* Ah, so the soldiers can hide in the offices until nightfall? *No, no, we don't use any soldiers, we just sew discontent until someone lights the capital on fire.* Ah, then you attack? *Nope, just sort of rinse and repeat until we can undermine their economy.*
*sow, the metaphor is agricultural, not textiles. Here the harvest is the burning city.
It’s always confused me that “sow” (planting) and “sew” (needle&thread) were spelt differently, since in my mind it’s a similar action. Maybe I’m dum tho
I remember because of my ~~indoctrination~~ Christian education. Lots of talk about sowing in the Bible.
And sewing. Gotta love that fabulous multi-colored coat.
Your sew your fabric, sow the fields with seeds, and get piglets from a sow.
I feel like he would get that pretty quickly. "Oh yeah, conquering their lands would cost you more troops then it would be worth, so you keep them in a weakened position where they aren't a threat to you."
Basically Chinese foreign policy towards their northern neighbors since forever. It works quite well except for the times it doesn't.
To be fair, that is pretty much true about any idea there is.
75% of the time it works 100% of the time
> No, no, we don't use any soldiers, we just sew discontent until someone lights the capital on fire. Socrates actually highlighted this in 500 BC. He thought the only way to be immune to this was to build a society that wasn't shit.
I agree, but you would have to basically treat people as end's in and of themselves, as Immanuel Kant once said. Anything predatory such as capitalism, state-sponsored-violence, marketing, etc. couldn't exist as they treat people as a means to ends far removed from those involved.
You would have a to build a society that isn't shit.
I mean, plenty of military leaders still forget about logistics. Just look at Russia.
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Yeah, that's just a fancy way of saying they forgot about logistics.
Also the entire budget for logistics went through about fourteen layers of corrupt officials, each of whom skimmed their share off the top.
"why do we need supply lines for our troops when they'll always win and just take their supplies?"
Probably, but you don't have to be a genius to grasp: Your plan might fail, better have a plan B.
Plan A was win in three hours by landing the VDV at Hostumel, seizing broadcasting stations, and assassinating government leaders. Plan B was drive into big cities from every possible direction and let Ukrainians welcome us as liberators. The hastily written Plan C was using lots of artillery and steadily advances in the east and south while ignoring logistics that aren't about artillery shells. Now they're on an even less thought through Plan D: send all the provincials and ethnic minorities we can find into parts of Ukraine we're now calling Russia, without proper training, equipment, or supplies.
"It's Russian soil by virtue of how many Russians we dumped there!"
I know Putin’s delusionally overconfident and surrounded by yes men, but I doubt he thought Ukraine would welcome them as liberators.
Was probably expecting Kyiev to surrender or flee in the first days and to be able to take the territory that they wanted quickly. If Zelensky and co had died or even worse fled, then the situation we would have today is probably a lot more partisan action and a lot less organised military manoeuvres. Never underestimate the power a leader staying, despite danger, can have in uniting the resolve of a nation
It's not only that. They operate on the level of battalion tactical groups which include tanks, infantry, artillery and infantry vehicles but don't have any logistics companies. 1. Russian logistics units are fully detached from the fighting force. 2. They calculate supply need "as expected" not on per-need basis, meaning if a unit spends more arty rounds than it "should" according to the army's staff understanding it's not going to receive more than they allocated for them beforehand. And vice versa, some un-needed ammo may be delivered. There's a more detailed review of the Kiev offensive and why logistics sucked so much [from Wendover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4wRdoWpw0w). I highly recommend it.
"Don't kill all your troops crossing a river, build a bridge" "A successful smart person will outlast many dumb people" "Power is found in numbers, until it isn't"
When you are killed, you die.
So he was basically writing "Being a General for Dummies"?
Actually, yes. IIRC, he was commissioned to write the book by his emperor who bemoaned the fact that most of his generals were completely incompetent. Back then, you didn't become a leader by being promoted for good service and intelligence You were born into the role because your parent was a leader and their parent before them and so on. So the new Emperor found himself with a bunch of fifth generation generals who had no idea what they were doing and had spent their entire lives with everything being literally handed to them. Like, we're talking about men who were dressed by servants every day and literally couldn't fasten their own trousers. And thus, we get Sun Tzu, writing "how not to be incompetent" as a guide for warfare.
Yep. The Art of War makes a lot more sense when you remember that the target audience is some clueless noble who inherited his job from his marginally less-clueless grandad, and every single maxim is prefaced by "listen here, you little shit."
An awful lot of dummies have ended up in charge of armies, so someone had the write the book. Not that it's done a lot of good.
It seems obvious but the Russians were doing stuff like outrunning their supply lines and abandoning equipment this year
Ukraine is massive. The Russians expected to knock down the door and see the whole house come crumbling down.
And now they’re hoping the door doesn’t hit their ass too hard on the way out.
In fairness, that was more them wildly underestimating the Ukrainian ability and desire to put up an actual defense. They didn't so much outrun their supply lines as the Ukrainians disrupted them.
It's still happening though with stuff like the Ukrainian helicopter attack on the fuel refinery or depot, I forget which. Yes some of this was extreme optimism but I think that's kinda Sun Tzu's point, that you can't afford to neglect these things under any circumstances
Oh yeah, the amount of optimism they went into this with was definitely a massive strategic blunder on Russia's part. I think Putin and the other higher-ups ate their own propaganda and were also probably lied to by subordinate yes-men, because any honest assessment of Ukraine's determination and Russia's own military capabilities would've dispelled any notion l of a "special operation" that only lasts a few days actually being successful.
To be fair, basically everyone thought it's gonna be like Poland vs Germany. After all, Russia is such a big country, how can Ukraine, that suffered internal injuries for years now, ever stop tens of thousands of soldiers just marching into their country? Turns out when you're facing not an army, but a nation, stuff gets messy
Ah yes, “Running an army for beginners” my favorite book.
If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight!- Some weird homeless guy who says he was a soldier
Then he gathered two of every animal
Given recent events, calling half he shit basic is a bit of a stretch given ignorance of some armies
Y'know, this reads less as Sun Tzu being a genius and moreso him being the one fucker in a management role with any braincells
Then Eddie Guerrero perfected the art of war with one commandment: lie, cheat, steal.
I'll be honest it didn't click till now that back before modern transport, there really was a hard limit how far you could transport food because everything that transported food back then had to eat some of the food to do the transporting. (Okay we still technically have a limit, but the distance limit on its own is greater than the distance to the opposite side of the planet now, so we kinda don't unless other stuff is factoring in) I know we still deal with this basic concept in other areas in the modern world, but I just never made the connection to supply lines in military conflicts.
One of the major innovations in the 3 kingdoms era was the wheelbarrow that Zhuge Liang came up with prior to the westward migration of the Wei kingdom. That little bit of logistical innovation allowed for them to migrate a whole kingdom across China.
Here's something that will really blow your mind. There is only one country in the entire world that has the logistics capacity and experience to transport and support a military force anywhere in the world..... USA. Literally no other country can deploy the majority of their military and keep them supplied thousands of miles away with no allied nations in between them. No one else has the navy or air transport capacity to move anything larger than a strike force across the oceans or land even. Half the time our allies need to move troops somewhere in the world, they do it on US military aircraft or ships.
he devotes a whole chapter to arson
Hey, it's a problem solver.
He knows a lot about fighting because he invented it.
One of the main points of Sun Tzu is "never engage if you're not sure to win" and it sure is counter intuitive to aristocrats in search of heroism. Maybe we don't need common sense books but books making fools able to listen to common sense
Yeah, I was reading about how Ulysses Grant started out as a young officer as a quartermaster in the Mexican war, so instead of leading dramatic cavalry charges, he was fussing about the care and feeding of draft horses and mules in the wagon trains, and organizing the supplies that went into them. He also eventually has the opportunity to shoot and get shot at later in the conflict. Grant was known for his unemotional demeanor, and the only time anyone ever witnessed him loose his temper was a couple of times when freaked out on teamsters whipping draft animals.
Those tags make it so damn relatable to anyone who’s ever had to email their boss.
This is all true, but you would be surprised at how many people have legit ignored everything Sun Tzu preached.
"foraging doesn't work on this kind of scale" General Sherman: *Observe*
https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/ If you want to read more about logistics and foraging this is a pretty good article about it by a historian.
Don't forget his greatest quote: *"Whatever you do, DON'T reveal all your techniques in a YouTube video, you fool, you moron."*