Chapter 7 Maneuvering- Advantage and Disadvantage

“6. If you set a fully equipped army in march in order to snatch an advantage, the chances are that you will be too late. On the other hand, to detach a flying column for the purpose involves the sacrifice of its baggage and stores.
7. Thus, if you order your men to roll up their buff-coats, and make forced marches without halting day or night, covering double the usual distance at a stretch, doing a hundred LI in order to wrest an advantage, the leaders of all your three divisions will fall into the hands of the enemy.
8. The stronger men will be in front, the jaded ones will fall behind, and on this plan only one-tenth of your army will reach its destination.
9. If you march fifty LI in order to outmaneuver the enemy, you will lose the leader of your first division, and only half your force will reach the goal.
10. If you march thirty LI with the same object, two-thirds of your army will arrive.
11. We may take it then that an army without its baggage-train is lost; without provisions it is lost; without bases of supply it is lost.”
Sun Tzu, Master Sun
Art of War
Quoted in The Art of War, Translated by Lionel Giles, Offered by The Project Gutenberg eBook

an old man sleeping

Changing what is already set
You will regret

Sacrificing for a moment’s advantage
Is actually a disadvantage

6 Comments

  1. Posted October 17, 2007 at 7:35 pm | Permalink

    Suggestion: your images are distorted, you should insert the correct size of the image…

    Cheers!
    S*

  2. Posted October 18, 2007 at 11:48 am | Permalink

    Love what you are doing here. I’m a huge fan of Sun Tzu.

  3. Posted October 18, 2007 at 2:51 pm | Permalink

    Silvia- The original image size is too big so I resized it to fit the post. Does it look that bad!?

    Bryan- Thanks Bryan!

  4. Posted October 20, 2007 at 10:51 pm | Permalink

    yea the images need fixing, you should learn a little image editing, it’s not so hard…I could teach you ^_^

  5. Posted October 20, 2007 at 11:29 pm | Permalink

    I resized the picture to make it smaller so it wouldn’t overwhelm the post. Should I make it a bit bigger so it wouldn’t be distorted?

  6. Posted October 21, 2007 at 5:50 pm | Permalink

    you need to resize it in a image editting program that will make it smaller without loosing the quality

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