Sarai, the web page you are looking for is:
http://www.sonshi.com/library.html and contains not only Sun Tzu but the foremost military thinker of modern times Karl von Clausewitz. Basically to answer your question, it goes to the point of what Clausewitz would have phrased “the political ends, through military means” as the purpose of war and neither form of warfare is stronger in every circumstance. By that I mean that the argument comes down to the age old discussion of which form of war is more powerful, the offensive or defensive. Tao Te Ching obviously endorses the defensive method but allows for the classical purpose of the defense, which is to conserve strength or wear the enemy down until you can return to the offense. The defense has advantages as follows:
- defender occupies familiar terrain
- defender ha shorter supply lines
- defender can prepare fortifications
- defender is able to react to the attacker (not always a good thing)
The attacker has one primary advantage that is of the greatest importance, and that is that he has the initiative and can choose the time and place of the battle (see Sun Tzu Ch 6for this).
Tao Te Ching is also subtly referring to two powers that are near equal strength, in this case it would be wise to defend as well. General consensus is that a attacker needs a 3 to one strength advantage for an attack to be successful. This can be over a general front or if one side is weaker, can be in a localized area to gain the strength advantage. The bottom line to all this is that if one is to achieve their political ends using military means, then at some point they must go on the offense. One cannot gain victory by a purely defensive stance.
As far as cases; at the strategic level, Mr Sensitive may be somewhat correct as far as fighting a two front war from the German perspective. But it really doesn’t apply to the Operational level where the Germans clearly rolled over and around the defenses of the Poles and French through the use of maneuver warfare (Blitzkrieg). In fact, if the Germans had attacked sooner (yielded) during Operation Citadel and not allowed the Soviets to build up defenses, then they certainly could have put an end to the threat on the Russian front and turned their attention to the West. To use Tao Te Ching’s statement for this example is too much of an oversimplification.
As far as the Vietnam example, it does not apply. The US never lost a force on force battle during the entire conflict. In fact, the US never really even went on the offensive (invasion of N Vietnam) so perhaps a case could be made to the opposite of yielding and Tao Te Ching is incorrect in this case. The US lost this war on the homefront due to the political unrest of the nation and no clear endstate. We lost due to a lack of national will, simple as that. This applies in many case references to Clausewitz and Sun Tzu on several levels but that is another entirely lengthy discussion.
Bottom line is that it depends on the situation a power finds itself in. Historically you can look at the successful attackers who did not yield such as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Rome or those that show the theory to be sound: American Revolution, Korean War.
And yet...Sun Tzu also said that to defeat your enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence. This is an act that occurs nearly everyday in many tangible and intangible forms; the media and forces that use the media to their advantage as examples. One of the principles that Ho Chih Minh used to defeat the US was to turn the internal struggles of the US against itself while simply using economy of forces in battle.
[This message was edited by Kwll on 08-19-02 at 04:19 PM.]
