As I mentioned last week, I am teaching a Winter Study course on Sun Tzu.  One of today’s readings, suggested by one of my students, is a great example of how ancient thought can still have something to contribute to contemporary questions.

    The article is by David Kilcullen, who was profiled in the New Yorker  here, on which I commented here.   The piece, from the May-June 2006 issue of Military Review (Warning PDF!), is entitled, "Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency."  It is thoroughly infused with Sun Tzu’s thinking.

     Take Kilcullen’s first point: "Know your turf."  This suggests one of Sun Tzu’s primary concerns of getting to know the ground or terrain.  For Sun Tzu, this means a direct and detailed understanding of the physical surroundings and how they relate to the enemy’s capabilities and deployment.  It also has implications for a broader geo-strategic understanding: how the potential battleground might relate to the possibility of crafting alliances to strengthen a strategic advantage.  Kilcullen moves even further, but in ways still consistent with Sun Tzu, when he includes the social and cultural facets of terrain:

Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion, and culture. Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader, and ancient grievance. Your task is to become the world expert on your district. If you don’t know precisely where you will be operating, study the general area. Read the map like a book: Study it every night before sleep and redraw it from memory every morning until you understand its patterns intuitively

     This is obviously the kind of attention to preparation and knowing the enemy that Sun Tzu emphasizes.

     There are many other resonances with Sun Tzu.  Here are two of the more evident.

Start easy. If you were trained in maneuver warfare you know about surfaces and gaps. This applies to counterinsurgency as much as any other form of maneuver. Don’t try to crack the hardest nut first—don’t go straight for the main insurgent stronghold, try to provoke a decisive showdown, or focus efforts on villages that support the insurgents. Instead, start from secure areas and work gradually outwards.

     Or, as Sun Tzu says, "attack a place the enemy does not protect," and "do not attack his elite troops."

    And, as a last example, this point of Kilcullen comes directly from chapter 3 of Sun Tzu:

Fight the enemy’s strategy, not his forces. At this stage, if things are proceeding well, the insurgents will go over to the offensive. Yes, the offensive, because you have created a situation so dangerous to the insurgents (by threatening to displace them from the environment) that they have to attack you and the population to get back into the game.

     Seems pretty clear to me that Sun Tzu can inform modern counterinsurgency.  Too bad the US did not think in these terms four years ago.