The Warrior Class Blog

Sun Tzu’s classical strategy teaches that it is much easier to change people’s subjective view of a position than the physical position itself, and that, by changing people’s subjective views, you can leverage real physical changes very easily. This seems like magic, but let us use high oil prices as an example. Despite what the politicians says, they could bring down oil prices dramatically right away if they leveraged people’s expectations about the future. Much of the high price of oil is driven by speculation about the future: people are bidding up and holding oil future because they expect oil to be more in demand and less plentiful in the future. Because they expect prices to go up in the future, there is no incentive for producers to bring oil out of the ground now. If the politicians offered a ten year tax holiday for all oil production from new sources brought into the market for the next five years and at the same time permitted companies to drill in an ecologically sound way where the oil was, what would happen to people’s expectations about the future prices of oil? Speculators would expect the prices to fall in the foreseeable future, which would drive down oil futures. Seeing future prices fall, existing producers would have an immediate incentive to get as much oil on the market now, before prices fall more from new production. What politicians are doing now, threatening oil producers and oil investors with punishment and extra taxes, has the opposite effect, raising their expectations of a more difficult and costly market in the future, raising the cost of oil. We are all paying a high price for the politicians’ desire to “fight” an enemy instead of understanding the situation and leveraging people’s expectations.

Classical strategy teaches that you attack the weak points not the strong points of your opponent. Politicians (and business people) make this mistake constantly, but military people usually know better. Wesley’s Clark’s recent criticism of McCain’s military service demonstrates that he is more of a politician than a strategist. What can be gain by attacking McCain on the basis of his resume? Such attacks only draw attention to Obama’s much weaker resume, especially in regards to being commander-in-chief of the military. It is not like McCain doesn’t have plenty of weak points that are open to attack: his unclear philosophy, the climate of the times, and his poorly run campaign are where Obama supporters should be aiming their blows. Republicans, on the other hand, should be attacking Obama at his weak points: character and his historical distance from the ground in the West, South, and rural areas everywhere else. When you aim at weaknesses, people understand your attacks. When you aim at strengths, you can only damage yourself. As Sancho Panza said in Don Quixote, “It doesn’t matter if the jug hits the rock or the rock hits the jug, in the end, it is going to be bad for the jug.”

We have just created a new site, called the Business War College, where we bring together a number of our materials under a little different label. Of the years of working in the book store market, I became shy about marketing “war” especially since Sun Tzu teaches winning while avoiding conflict. However, since the business world really is increasingly the focus of the world’s competitive between ideas, which is a very good thing, it seems appropriate to acknowledge the fact, especially since business people are our main customers. I am curious about what readers think of it. If you visit the site at www.BizWarCollege.com, please let me know either through the comments here or by emailing me at garyg (at) scienceofstrategy.com.

Sun Tzu teaches the our perceptions must always different from reality. For example, what is your perception of the increasing happiness of people all over the world? If you follow news media, you would think that people are suffering from record levels of unhappiness. However, the opposite is actually true. The best subjective measure of improving positions is not our perceptions of others, but their perception of themselves. When people are asked about their own happiness, the results are surprising. While the media gives us the impression that the word is going downhill fast, the latest research shows that happiness is rising dramatically all over the world over the world, including in the US, which is one of the happiest places on earth (17th). Also surprising, the report shows that freedom and democracy are more important to happiness than economic wealth (though the later clearly follows the former). What leads to freedom and democracy? War and competition in one form or another. Tyrants don’t give up power (as Mugabe recently proved). Control is pried from tyrants’ hands solely by war be it hot, cold, or economic. While some people seem to think that the U.S. is making the world a worse place by challenging tyrants, the opposite is actually true. As far as our negative impressions of the world we get through the filter of the mainstream media, perhaps they are just describing the condition of their own industry and their unhappiness about it.

Climate is the strategic factor that Sun Tzu associates with change, but change itself can change, for example, technology has rapidly increased the pace of change over the last few decades. This increase in the pace of change is one of the key reasons why people need to better understand the principles of Sun Tzu so they can make better decisions faster. Businesses who want to leverage the increasing pace of change against their opponents should be promoting Sun Tzu’s ideas about adaptability to their customers. This increase in the pace of change also creates a political opportunity for the Republicans despite a climate that is generally against them. They can leverage Obama’s “change” philosophy by contrasting it with the Democrats’ real position of continuing the government history of prohibitions, regulations, and restrictions that are increasingly instantly outdated by technological advances. For example, clean nuclear, ecologically-safe drilling, clean coal , and flex-fuel technology have solved most of the problems the created the restrictions that the Democrats want to maintain on energy production and consumption. While the Republicans badly damaged their brand by growing government dramatically and its big business patronage during the Bush years, McCain and like-minded Republicans can admit that this was a disastrous policy in an era where the pace of change requires less government and the adaptability of newer, smaller business in the free market.

Science defines nature as a near balance of opposing forces. The interesting stuff occurs as the boundaries. In classical strategy, we called these forces complementary opposites. One way to leverage those forces is to sit at the pivot point between them. However, by leveraging this point to much in one direction, you tip the balance, destroying the power of your position. A good example of this idea is the current position of Justice Kennedy as the pivot point of the Supreme Court. In its recent decision on the habeas corpus rights of prisoners of war, the Supreme Court declared itself as the truly supreme power in the country, superior and independent of Congressional will, the President powers, and, most tellingly all previous Supreme Court decisions. The last is the most telling because respect for past judicial precedent is what separates the rule of law from the rule of men. However, if he continues to tilt left, Kennedy is endangering his own fragile power. For this reason, I suspect he will tilt right in the upcoming decision on D.C. gun control so that he can maintain his power.
UPDATE: Apparently, I was right. Kennedy switched to the right in gun control to maintain his position.

We cannot control what changes in the environment, but we do control where (ground) and how (methods) we choose to battle. Those decisions are the key our success or failure. During the election race, I will offer analysis on the choice made in this regard by the presidential candidates. For example, in this article, Dick Morris, one of the two political strategists (the other is Rove) that seems to have a natural grasp of the range of issues involved in good strategy, claims that Obama wants to focus on his character rather than his mission and goals. This makes sense, especially since Obama is behind in the character aspect of the race.

Like most classical scientists, Sun Tzu sought to understand nature. Though he studied was human competition, he saw competition natural not a human artifact. Though human institutions are artificial because we create them, we do not create and cannot change the nature of competition itself. Whether we applaud it or hate it, one of the things that cannot stop is change. In watching this very entertaining video by Drew Carey ON Free Trade and
Technology. I found myself thinking about the gas stations in Oregon. As gas stations everywhere were turning to automated self-serve pumps, the politicians in Oregon required all gas to be pumped by employees not customer thus preserving forever the invaluable job of gas station attendant jobs. Bureaucrats in China for a long time actually banned farm machinery to keep people on the farm for the same reason, While the state can stop progress in this way in their own little section of the world, time marches on all around them. Keeping people in the most menial, non-productive jobs may “protect” them from change, but it also keeps them poor.

One of the main benefits of learning Sun Tzu’s system is that it forces you to think about the natural balance of reality. From Sun Tzu’s perspective, nothing is good or bad in itself. Every development can be leveraged if you understand it. You can sail into the wind if you know how to tack. For example, the mainstream media has redefined its role in modern society as that of “Chicken Little,” constantly running around claiming that the sky is falling. This article from the increasingly infamous AP is a brilliant example because it uses the every chicken little panic as proof that the sky really must be falling:

Is everything spinning out of control?
Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

From the Sun Tzu perspective, every one of these “disasters” has its positive side. The busting of levees should call attention to how we have neglected our real infrastructure to “work” on meaningless causes such as the “threat” to polar bears, whose populations are actually burgeoning. If gas prices and air fares go up, it is because people are still buying gas and using air travel, not because they are unaffordable. The increase in college tuition and medical costs illustrate what the futility of pumping more “free” money into a limited system. Increasing the ability to pay for services without increasing the capacity of the system to provide services doesn’t buy more services, it can only increase costs. And wars never end until the underlying philosophical battles are either resolved or moved into a new arena of competition. The war between those who understand the need to adapt to the environment and those who only think in terms of control has been going on for 2,500 years and continues still.

If Sun Tzu’s strategy was a deck of cards (and we are working on that idea, by the way), the wild card in the deck would be a climate card. Certain trends in climate can be foreseen (the winter is cooler than the summer), but events that cannot be predicted can have a dramatic impact on strategic situations. This is why good strategy requires instant reflexes rather than sticking to plans.

In the political season, for example, the trends made this clearly a Democratic year. Generically, a Democratic presidential candidate is preferred over a Republican one by about 15 points. However, events quite apart from the candidate’s mistakes (which usually decide these contests) are intruding. Some of these events, such as the improving situation in Iraq, are trends that could have been foreseen, but others, like the decision of the Supreme Court to grant citizen rights to prisoners of war at Guantanamo, are bolts from the blue. Like the earlier decision of the California Supreme court to allow gay marriage (which actually start this week), these changes are object demonstrations of the overreaching of judicial power that are not lost on the public. Americans don’t like the idea that unelected judicial appointees can disregard all past legal precedent, the judgment of elected officials in both legislative and executive branches, and, in the case of the California decision, the direct vote of the people, and create their own rules. Event like these, helps the Republicans who have argued for decades against the lack of judicial restraint.

If McCain had any strategic ability (and there has been little signs of it thus far), he would use this decision as the theme for the rest of his campaign. It plays directly into the REFORM message he needs to set up to silence Obama’s CHANGE mantra. He should tie it directly to the threat of a national defense run by lawyers rather than the military. Running against lawyers and a corrupt Congress with a REFORM message would be a good way to tack against the wind in this anti-Republican climate.

The most well-rounded perspective comes from consciously collecting a variety of viewpoints, but the most common problem in seeing positions is myopia. We are too close to them. This Ramussen poll illustrates the point nicely. All segments see media bias, but the further the distance from media viewpoints, the easier it is to see the outlines of this bias. Of course, the media doesn’t see this bias at all.

Sun Tzu’s classical strategy teaches that groups are stronger than individuals because we can combine our individuals strengths to negate our mutual weaknesses. The stability of a group depends on two factors: 1) a strongly shared mission (goals and values) and 2) a number of strengths in the other four key areas: climate, ground, character, and methods.

This lesson is useful for understand what presidential candidate’s choice of vice-president should and should not do. First, the vice-president must strongly share the presidential candidate’s core values and vision, beyond that Obama can strengthen his position by picking someone that supports his weak points in ground (from the south or west) and character (more blue-collar). This makes someone like Webb a good choice. Similarly, McCain, whose weaknesses are climate, and methods, can improve his climate disadvantage, say by picking someone younger, and methods, for example, a better organizer and fund-raiser. This makes someone like Mitt Romney a good choice.

Once we understand the relative weaknesses of our position, we need to address its weaknesses. In comparing the five dimensions of a position, complete domination in one or two areas is less powerful than a slightly dominant position in three or more areas, and subjective impressions of positions are easier to change that their physical attributes.

For example, McCain is currently losing to Obama despite his overwhelming lead in character and strong advantage in ground because he lags in philosophy, climate, and methods. To win the election he needs to defend in his current areas he holds (not attack) and move forward in the three areas that he lags. To simplify what he needs to do:
1. Philosophy: Clarify his mission and tie every other element to it. He seemed to be sounding a “REFORM” message (as opposed to “change”) last night, but did it so poorly that it was hard to tell. Only rule here is that it has to be a desire that clear and simple that most people share.
2. Climate: You can sail against the winds if you know how. The antipathy to Congress is greater than against the president and Republicans. Run against the government in general as politicians and corruptocrats. Blame politicians for SPECIFIC special interested decisions such as blocking oil drilling resulting in SPECIFIC effects like high gas costs. Voting for farm subsidies creating higher food costs. Use “chickens come home to roost” line. Admit you’ve been wrong in going along with some of this.
3. Methods:
a. Fire entire staff. Any staff that arranges a fiasco such as his speech last night deserves it. It was excellently timed to get coverage but so terribly executed in terms of setting, audience, and speech writing that the coverage actually hurt McCain making Obama look brilliant by comparison.
b. Hire replacement staff from the conservative media, which has done as well as the Republican party has done poorly, (and hire me to help with strategy).
c. Contrast methods with Obama’s. Give ONLY SHORT SPEECHES and SHORT answers to contrast with Obama’s long ones. Use only DIRECT words and contrast with Obama’s evasive ones. Be SPECIFIC and contrast with Obama’s generalities. Look humble, approachable, and SLIGHTLY amused to contrast with Obama’s proud, elegant, and condescendingly demeanor.

Positions are the starting and ending point of good decision-making. The five factors provided by the Art of War for defining positions allow us to understand the complete nature of relative positions and this map helps us discover the path between our current position and a better one. Our natural reflex is to look at positions too narrowly. We must retrain our reflexes to see them more broadly.

For example, let us take a non-partisan look at the positions in the current US presidential race now that the two candidates are chosen.

1. Philosophy: Obama has the clearer, simpler message (CHANGE/HOPE) and consistently connects his issues to this message.
2. Climate: The medium-term trends (years) between parties and short-term trends (months) clearly favor Obama after having a Republican president for eight years.
3. Ground: The ground clearly favors McCain since the Democratic party is seriously divided and McCain is well positioned to take advantage of that division.
4. Character: The element of character clearly favors McCain because he is better known, respected, and trusted.
5. Methods: The element of methods clearly favors Obama who is a better speaker, has the support of the media, and a much, much better organization.

At this point, the balance is in Obama’s favor, with philosophy, climate, and methods in his favor.

This article about getting Russia’s help as an “answer” for a nuclear Iran by Sen. Schumer (D-NY) illustrates a number of the classical strategic mistakes commonly made by politicians. Of course, his most consistent mistake is viewing the world to fit his politics rather than fitting his politics to the world. This starts by saying that “most experts” admit that military force is not “likely to succeed,” but Schumer doesn’t define what “succeed” means, but a central tenant of recent Democrat politics is that military action never succeeds so perhaps definition is unnecessary.

We see this tendency again when Schumer describes the “fundamental instability” of the theocratic regime without offering any evidence for this supposed instability. There has been no challenge to that regime for thirty years nor any signs of one forming. Again, we may all want believe that a theocratic regime is fundamentally unstable, but good strategic awareness is built on evidence. Taking a course of action predicated on our hopes when there is no evidence to support those hopes is foolish and dangerous.

Schumer then describes the diverse nature of Iranian society and its taste for Western luxuries. He proposes that we can somehow control the Iranian mullahs by leverage these popular tastes against them. Again, he makes the mistake of thinking that because our government is based on popularity, the Iranian state rests on it as well. The sad fact is that many regimes, including Iran, rule on the basis of their control of the military not their popular support. The people of the Sudan, North Korean, or Myranmar do not willing die to support their government. They die because their government controls the guns.

As much as 70% of the Iranian people don’t like their government but discontent alone does not change a government. Discontent can, as Schumer suggests, foment a rebellion but it requires more than discontent alone. It requires means. Destructive regimes stay in power by controlling the “methods” part of the strategic equation. Since I assume that Schumer is not going to support a program of arming Iranian revolutionaries, his dream of toppling the “unstable” government is nothing more than a dream.

On this shaky basis, Schumer constructs his solution. His suggests that all we need to create enough discontent to move the Iranian government to surrender their nuclear program is to get Russia to agree to supporting economic sanctions. He then suggests that all that we need to do to get Russian cooperation is to agree to dismantle the NATO anti-missile defenses in Eastern Europe and recognizing Russia’s “traditional role” in the Caspian Sea region.

The most obvious problem with this course is that economic pressure has never worked in the region. This idea, again, is a political belief, not one based on the philosophy or history of the region. Middle Eastern ruling groups are quite capable of maintaining their power while their people live under crushing sanctions. We have tried this experiment just recently in Iraq and saw the effect. Amadinejad shows no signs of being more susceptible to such pressures than Saddam was. The strategic error here is the illusion of control. The idea of “sanctions” requires a control over economic transactions that no government has ever had or will ever have.

Just in practical terms, such sanctions would certainly require support beyond Russia. After giving Russia such a generous bribe, what will others, such as China, require? Perhaps surrendering Taiwan? To offer such a generous bribe for a program that cannot work would just encourage more bribes.

While Russia might well agree to get what Schumer offers, how does Schumer suggest we monitor their half of the agreement? As we have seen most recently with the Iraq oil-for-food program, these programs are nothing but opportunities for corruption.

A reader asks:

What do you think of McCain’s campaign? Is he fallowing Sun Tzu’s method? Also, last year you stated you were working on a adaptation of Sun Tzu geared to political campaign strategy. Did you finish it? And, is it available?

Answering the second question first, I decided not to do a political adaptation because I am not doing any new books this year and putting my development efforts into our training program and network.

As far as McCain’s campaign, as ex-military and a naval academy graduate, McCain almost certainly had some training in classical strategy in his youth and seems to understand some basics of strategic positioning. As luck would have it, he is extremely well-positioned against his likely opponent Obama. However, he has been a politician for the last thirty-years, so he has lost touch with one of the most basic rules of strategy. Good strategy starts with the understanding that we do not control our environment, so we must adapt to it. Those in high office for a long period inevitably fall victim to thinking in terms of control. Attempts to control rather than adapt to competitive circumstances always fail. McCain is making a series of small strategic mistakes, for example, leaving his right flank open for a possible challenge by Bob Barr and in assuming that he is going to get the same sympathetic media coverage that he was used to as a “maverick” Republican. As is usual, this race will go to the candidate that makes the fewest errors not to the one that identifies and executes the best strategy.

In classical strategy, the goal is always improving your position. A common strategic errors is thinking that, if there is a problem, action is ALWAYS necessary. However, action only makes sense if it makes the situation better. There are many situations that action makes work. For example, Freeman Dyson, one of the world leading mathematicians and physicists, discusses the problem of Global Warming in exactly the context. Reviewing two books on global warming, Dyson, to avoid endless debate, starts by accepting the idea that global warming is “man-made” (an idea becomes more questionable every day by observations of warming on other planets such as Jupiter) and that cost estimates of damage are correct (which again, an ideas that is probably too negative), but even accepting those ideas, analysis shows that the solutions proposed by those such as Al Gore actually make matters much, much worse in terms of the impact on humanity. The political impulse to “do something” no matter how foolish is perhaps the worst of human history, costing us more in terms of death and destruction than any other implulse.

According to Sun Tzu, you cannot advance a position without completing the four-step cycle of listen, aim, move, claim. The most difficult step is often the final one, making a claim. To be successful, a claim has to be limited, make value clear, and get acceptance from others. The last part is the trickiest because it depends so heavily on what the others are looking for.

This bring us to the sad case of Iraq. While Al Qaeda sites publicly admit that they lost the war there, President Bush is either unwilling or able to transform our success on the ground into a successful claim. The problem is that President Bush has never learned how to take his claims to the public and leverage media rejection of those claims to his advantage. There has been a string of successes in Iraq: from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein to the discovery and dismantling of the nuclear proliferation program out of Pakistan to the isolation of Iran to the defeat of Al Qaeda’s attempt to spark civil war to the most recent defeat of sectarian violence but Iraq remains a quagmire because none of these successful moves have been conveyed an accepted in successful claims. While Iraq will remain a troubled country in a troubled region, the idea that there has been no progress there comes from a failure in making claims.

Applying Sun Tzu’s principles, to make a successful claim of victory in Iraq the next president needs to do five things: 1) make each claim of victory specific and limited, 2) make the value of the victory clear despite its limited nature, 3) include in the claim a prediction of its rejection by others, 4) give a clear explanation why others feel the need to reject any claim of success, and 5) insist that the claim is accepted especially by those who reject it by directly and specifically challenging them personally over and over to do so.

The scientific name for training in Sun Tzu’s strategy is “recognition-primed decision making.” As Sun Tzu taught a sense of purpose and motivation is key to making better decisions every day. New cognitive research shows that training people to make decisions people who are simply “primed” with a sense of motivation have better concentration, memory, and are better at doing mental simulations than those who are primed to lack a sense of power and authority.

Strategic cognition requires seeing the environment from the Asian perspective of balancing forces. Most of us are exposed from childhood to the media that trains us, incorrectly, that all changes are bad. Is it bad if housing prices are falling? Not if you are buying your first house. Is it bad if the dollar is falling? Not if you are selling American products abroad because this makes them cheaper. Is it bad that oil prices are rising? Doesn’t high prices discourage consumption and make other forms of energy more competitive? Is that bad? Strategic cognition demand seeing the opportunity in every change. The chicken-little media that we are exposed to since birth, unfortunately, teaches the opposite.