33 Strategies of War — Notes
3 min readDec 23, 2020
- Sense of urgency multiplies strength and builds momentum.
- Necessity is the mother of all inventions.
- The way of the samurai is in desperateness. Common sense will not accomplish great things. Simply become insane and desperate. — Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, Yamamoto Tsunetomo
- The world is ruled by necessity. Capitalists rule by maintaining them.
- Anger and hatred stimulates your reflexes and pushes adrenaline.
- Never come in direct contact with desperate people. They have nothing to lose and will risk everything in a fight, but you have something to lose.
- Conversely, attacking enemies when their morale is low gives you advantage. Find a way to lower their spirits further.
- Always try to lower the sense of urgency of the other side. Make your enemies think they have all the time in the world. When you are sharpening your fighting spirit, always do what you can to blunt theirs.
- In war, it’s not men, but the man, that counts. — Napolean Bonaparte
- For what the leaders are, that, as a rule, will the men below them be — Xenophon
- It’s hard to exercise control through traditional chain of command. The solution is to operate through remote control, indirectly.
- Madness is the exception in individuals, but the rule in groups. — Nietzsche
- Divided leadership is a recipe for disaster.
- People in groups are political. They say and do things that they think will help their image within the group. They aim to please others, to promote themselves, rather than to see things dispassionately.
- An individual can be bold and risk-taking, whereas a group is afraid of risk. The need to find a compromise among all the different egos kills creativity. The group has a mind of it’s own, and that is cautious, slow, and irrational.
- Always preserve unity of command. Never relinquish it.
- Better one bad general than two good ones. — Napolean
- Never take a role with shared command. On the contrary, destroy committees having shared command.
- Decentralizing army (segmenting into small units) mobilizes it. You gain more by mobility than by complete control.
- Separate to live, unite to fight. — Napolean
- The essence of strategy for success, power and wealth is having more options than your enemy.
- The way to manage people is to keep them in suspense. First bond with them, then distance yourself and give unexpected promotions and punishments, even for minor events.
- Once people know what pleases you and what angers you, they turn into trained poodles. Keep them in suspense, make them think constantly about you and want to please you but never know how to.
- Reversal: If morale is contagious, so is opposite, fear and discontent spreads through troops like wildfire. Only way to deal is to cut them off before it turns into panic and rebellion.
- In 58 BC, Caesar was up against Ariovastus, and he had rumour mongers arrested.
- People who spread panic and mutiny experience a kind of madness in which they lose contact of reality. Appeal to their pride and dignity, make them feel ashamed of their moment of weakness and madness. Remind them what they accomplished in the past, and show them how they are falling short of ideal. This social shaming will wake them up and reverse the dynamic.
- To fight in a defensive manner is not a weakness, it’s the height of strategic wisdom.
- Let opponents destroy with their own moves. Deceive opponent into thinking you are weaker.
- In war-time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. WINSTON CHURCHILL
- Your task as a strategist is to know your enemies well, then use your knowledge to contrive a strategy that goes outside their experience. What they might have read or heard about matters less than their personal experience, which dominates their emotional lives and determines their responses.
- Propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, deception, and political means of waging war have all become active ingredients in any unconventional strategy.
- Make a false move, not to pass it for a genuine one but to transform it into a genuine one after the enemy has been convinced of its falsity.
- the ordinary and the extraordinary are effective only if they play off each other in a constant spiraling manner.
- to gain attention with some cultural product, you have to create something new, but something with no reference to ordinary life is not in fact unconventional, but merely strange. What is truly shocking and extraordinary unfolds out of the ordinary. The intertwining of the ordinary and extraordinary is the very definition of surrealism.
- Randomness is thoroughly disturbing to humans
- Chaos-where brilliant dreams are born.
