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The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise that is attributed to Sun Tzu (also referred to as "Sunzi" and "Sun Wu"), a high ranking military general and strategist of the Kingdom of Wu who was active in the late-sixth century BC, during the late Spring and Autumn period. (Some scholars believe that the Art of War was not completed until the subsequent Warring States period) Composed of 13 chapters, each of which is devoted to one aspect of warfare, it is said to be the definitive work on military strategies and tactics of its time, and is still read for its military insights.

The Art of War is one of the oldest and most successful books on military strategy in the world. It has been the most famous and influential of China's Seven Military Classics: "for the last two thousand years it remained the most important military treatise in Asia, where even the common people knew it by name." It has had an influence on Eastern military thinking, business tactics, and beyond.
Sun Tzu emphasized the importance of positioning in military strategy, and that the decision to position an army must be based on both objective conditions in the physical environment and the subjective beliefs of other, competitive actors in that environment. He thought that strategy was not planning in the sense of working through an established list, but rather that it requires quick and appropriate responses to changing conditions. Planning works in a controlled environment, but in a changing environment, competing plans collide, creating unexpected situations.

The book was first translated into the French language in 1772 by French Jesuit Jean Joseph Marie Amiot, and into English by British officer Everard Ferguson Calthrop in 1905. Leaders as diverse as Mao Zedong, General Vo Nguyen Giap, Baron Antoine-Henri Jomini, General Douglas MacArthur, Napoleon, and certain members of the Nazi High Command have claimed to have drawn inspiration from the work. The Art of War has also been applied to business and managerial strategies.




The 13 chapters.

The Art of War is divided into 13 chapters (or Piān), and the collection is referred to as being one Chuán ("whole" or alternatively "chronicle"). As different translations have used differing titles for each chapter, a selection appears below.

Chapter summary
1. Laying Plans/The Calculations explores the five fundamental factors (the Way, seasons, terrain, leadership, and management) and seven elements that determine the outcomes of military engagements. By thinking, assessing and comparing these points, a commander can calculate his chances of victory. Habitual deviation from these calculations will ensure failure via improper action. The text stresses that war is a very grave matter for the state, and must not be commenced without due consideration.

2. Waging War/The Challenge explains how to understand the economy of warfare, and how success requires winning decisive engagements quickly. This section advises that successful military campaigns require limiting the cost of competition and conflict.

3. Attack by Stratagem/The Plan of Attack defines the source of strength as unity, not size, and discusses the five factors that are needed to succeed in any war. In order of importance, these critical factors are: Attack, Strategy, Alliances, Army, and Cities.

4. Tactical Dispositions/Positioning explains the importance of defending existing positions until a commander is capable of advancing from those positions in safety. It teaches commanders the importance of recognizing strategic opportunities, and teaches not to create opportunities for the enemy.

5. Energy/Directing explains the use of creativity and timing in building an army's momentum.

6. Weak Points & Strong/Illusion and Reality explains how an army's opportunities come from the openings in the environment caused by the relative weakness of the enemy in a given area.

7. Maneuvering/Engaging The Force explains the dangers of direct conflict and how to win those confrontations when they are forced upon the commander.

8. Variation in Tactics/The Nine Variations focuses on the need for flexibility in an army's responses. It explains how to respond to shifting circumstances successfully.

9. The Army on the March/Moving The Force describes the different situations in which an army finds itself as it moves through new enemy territories, and how to respond to these situations. Much of this section focuses on evaluating the intentions of others.

10. Terrain/Situational Positioning looks at the three general areas of resistance (distance, dangers, and barriers) and the six types of ground positions that arise from them. Each of these six field positions offer certain advantages and disadvantages.

11. The Nine Situations/Nine Terrains describes the nine common situations (or stages) in a campaign, from scattering to deadly, and the specific focus that a commander will need in order to successfully navigate them.

12. The Attack by Fire/Fiery Attack explains the general use of weapons and the specific use of the environment as a weapon. This section examines the five targets for attack, the five types of environmental attack, and the appropriate responses to such attacks.

13. The Use of Spies/The Use of Intelligence focuses on the importance of developing good information sources, and specifies the five types of intelligence sources and how to best manage each of them.




Authenticity

Traditionalist Viewpoint
Traditionalist scholars attribute this book to the historical Sun Wu, who is recorded in both the Shiji and the Spring and Autumn Annals as having been active in Wu around the end of the sixth century BC, beginning in 512 BC. The traditional interpretation concludes that the text should therefore date from this period, and should directly reflect the tactics and strategies used and created by Sun Wu. The traditionalist approach assumes that only very minor revision may have occurred shortly after Sunzi's death, in the early fifth century BC, as the body of his writings may have needed to be compiled in order to form the complete, modern text.
The textual support for the traditionalist view is that several of the oldest of the Seven Military Classics share a focus on specific literary concepts (such as terrain classifications) which traditionalist scholars assume were created by Sunzi. The Art of War also shares several entire phrases in common with the other Military Classics, implying that other texts borrowed from the Art of War, and/or that the Art of War borrowed from other texts. According to traditionalist scholars, the fact that the Art of War was the most widely reproduced and circulated military text of the Warring States period indicates that any textual borrowing between military texts must have been exclusively from the Art of War to other texts, and not vice versa. (The classical texts which most similarly reflect Sunzi's terms and phraseology are the Wei Liaozi and Sun Bin's Art of War.

Late Imperial Chinese Criticism
Skeptics to the traditionalist view within China have abounded since at least the time of the Song dynasty. Some, following Du Fu, accused the Art of War's first commentator, Cao Cao, of butchering the text. The criticisms of Cao Cao were based on a Book of Han bibliographical notation of a work composed of eighty two sections that was attributed to Sunzi. The description of a work of Sunzi composed of eighty-two sections contrasts with the Shiji's description of the Art of War as having thirteen sections (the current number). Others doubted Sunzi's historical existance, and/or claimed that the work must be a later forgery. Much of the Art of War's historical condemnation within China has been due to its realistic approach to warcraft: it advocates utilizing spies and deception. The advocacy of dishonest methods contradicted perceived Confucian values, making it a target of Confucian literati throughout later Chinese history. According to later Confucian scholars, Sun Wu's historical existence was accordingly a late fabrication, unworthy of consideration except by the morally reprehensible.

Modern Archaeological Findings
The discovery in 1972 of a nearly-complete Han dynasty copy of the Art of War from a tomb, which is almost completely identical to modern editions, proves conclusively that the Art of War had achieved its current form by at least the early Han dynasty, and findings of less-complete copies dated earlier support the view that it existed in roughly its current form by at least the time of the mid-late Warring States. Because the archaeological evidence proves that the Art of War existed in its present form by the early Han dynasty, the Han dynasty record of a work of eighty-two sections attributed to Sunzi is assumed by modern historians to be either a mistake, or a lost work combining the existing Art of War with biographical and dialectical material. Some modern scholars suggest that the Art of War must have existed in thirteen sections before Sunzi met the King of Wu, since the king mentions the number thirteen in the Shiji's description of their meeting.

Was the Art of War Created in the Late Warring States?
Without questioning that the Art of War has existed in roughly its current form since at least the late Warring States period, the traditionalist interpretation of the text's history is challenged by modern historians. Even if the possibility of later revisions is disregarded, the traditionalist interpretation that Sunzi created the Art of War ex nihilo, and that all other military scholars must have copied and borrowed from him, disregards the likelihood of any previous formal or literary tradition of tactical studies, despite the historical existence of over 2000 years of Chinese warfare and tactical development before 500 BC. Because it is unlikely that Sunzi effectively created China's entire body of tactical studies, "basic concepts and common passages seem to argue in favor of a comprehensive military tradition and evolving expertise, rather than creation ex nihilo."
One modern alternative to the traditionalist theory states that the Art of War achieved its current form by the mid-to-late Warring States (the fourth-to-third century BC), centuries after the historical Sun Wu's death. This interpretation is based on disparities between the Art of War's tactics and the historical conditions of warfare in the late Spring and Autumn period (the late sixth century BC). Examples of warfare described in the Art of War which did not occur until the Warring States period include: the mobilization of one thousand chariots and 100,000 soldiers for a single battle; protracted sieges (cities were small, weakly fortified, economically and strategically unimportant centers in the Spring and Autumn period); the existence of military officers as a distinct subclass of nobility; deference of rulers' right to command armies to these officers; the advanced and detailed use of spies and unorthodox tactics (never emphasized at all in the Spring and Autumn period); and, the extensive emphasis on infantry speed and mobility, rather than chariot warfare. Because the conditions and tactics advocated in the Art of War are historically anachronistic to the historical Sun Wu's time, it is possible that the Art of War was created in the mid-to-late Warring States period.

Was It an Early Warring States Creation?
A view that mediates between the traditionalist interpretation, that the historical Sun Wu was the only contributor to the Art of War, and the most opposite possible interpretation, that the Art of War was created in the mid-late Warring States period, centuries after the historical Sun Wu's death, is that the core of the text was created by Sun Wu and underwent a period of revision before achieving roughly its current form within a century of Sun Wu's death (in the last half of the fifth-century BC). "It seems likely that the historical figure (of Sun Wu) existed, and that he not only served as a strategist and possibly a general, but also composed the core of the book that bears his name. Thereafter, the essential teachings were probably transmitted within the family or a close-knit school of disciples, being improved and revised with the passing decades while gradually gaining wider dissemination." The view that the Art of War achieved roughly its current form by the late fifth-century BC is supported by the recovery of the oldest existing fragments of the Art of War, and by the analysis of the prose of the Art of War, which is similar to other texts dated more definitively to the late fifth-century BC (i.e. Mozi), but dissimilar either to earlier (i.e. the Analects) or later (i.e. Xunzi) literature from roughly the same period. This theory accounts both for the historical record attributing the Art of War to Sun Wu, and for the description of tactics anachronistic to Sun Wu's time within the Art of War.
Some scholars have raised questions regarding the authenticity of the list of virtues ascribed to the commander in Section I, ss.9. It has been urged that this section was added posthumously to align The Art of War with the five cardinal virtues of Confucianism. This is based on the contention that sincerity stands opposed to the deception in war that the text discusses.[unreliable source?] Because archeological recoveries of the text prove that the text existed in roughly its present form by the early Han dynasty (when Confucianism was first officially adopted as the state philosophy), because archeological recoveries make it very probable that the Art of War existed in roughly its present form by (at the latest) the mid-late Warring States period, and because Confucian scholars in late Chinese history did not recognize the Art of War as promoting Confucian values, it is unlikely that the modern text was directly altered by early Confucian scholars to reflect Confucian values. If the modern text of the Art of War reflects contrasting interpretations of the value in chivalry in warfare, the existence of these differing interpretations within the text supports the theory that the core of the Art of War was created by a figure (i.e. the historical Sun Wu) who existed at a time when chivalry was more highly valued (i.e. the Spring and Autumn period), and that the text was amended by his followers to reflect the realities of warfare in a subsequent, distinctly un-chivalric period (i.e. the Warring States period).

Courtesy of en.wikipedia.org and assetebooks.com