Who was the better strategist, Sun Tzu or Clausewitz?
Leading Clausewitz scholars such as Christopher Bassford and Michael Handel refuse to pick one. Sun Tzu, traditionally dated around 500 BC, teaches how to win before the battle through deception and intelligence; Clausewitz, who fought Napoleon, explains why war is politics by other means and why plans meet friction. They read the two as complementary, though Mark McNeilly leans toward Sun Tzu.1
Two books dominate the study of strategy. One is a set of thirteen short chapters attributed to a Chinese general who served King Helü of Wu around 500 BC; the other is a vast, unfinished treatise by a Prussian staff officer who fought Napoleon. Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz are often set against each other as the strategist of winning without battle and the strategist of decisive battle. The people who have studied both most closely say that contrast is too simple.2
Head to head
| Sun Tzu | Carl von Clausewitz | |
|---|---|---|
| Lived | Traditionally about 500 BC, in the service of King Helü of Wu, who reigned 514 to 496 BC; whether he existed has been doubted since the Song dynasty3 | 1780 to 16 November 1831; born at Burg near Magdeburg, died of cholera in Breslau4 |
| Role | General and adviser to a king, in the traditional story5 | Prussian staff officer, later major general and director of the war school in Berlin from 18186 |
| Wars seen | No campaign of his can be checked: the chronicle Zuo Zhuan does not mention him7 | Taken prisoner in 1806 after Jena and Auerstedt; fought at Borodino in 1812 in Russian service; chief of staff of the Prussian III Corps at Ligny and Wavre in 18158 |
| Counting rule | Battles at which the man is documented as present | Same rule |
| Battles on record | None securely documented9 | Auerstedt 1806; Vitebsk, Smolensk and Borodino 1812; the Göhrde 1813; Ligny and Wavre 181510 |
| The book | The Art of War, 13 chapters, from Laying Plans to The Use of Spies11 | On War (Vom Kriege), 8 books, unfinished; published by his widow Marie from 183212 |
| When written | Often dated to the Warring States period (453 to 221 BC), later than the traditional date; the bamboo copy from Yinqueshan has led some to argue for the 5th century BC13 | Drafted in the 1820s, left unrevised at his death14 |
| Core claim | “All warfare is based on deception”15 | “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means”16 |
| First in English | E. F. Calthrop, 1905; Lionel Giles, 191017 | J. J. Graham, 187318 |
Key points
- Sun Tzu is the older thinker by more than two thousand years, but the man himself is uncertain; Clausewitz is a fully documented nineteenth century officer.
- Both put war under politics: the ruler or the state decides what the war is for, the general decides how to fight it.
- Sun Tzu prizes deception, intelligence and winning before the battle; Clausewitz stresses friction, chance and the destruction of the enemy's forces.
- Leading scholars read the two as complementary, not opposed.
Who lived first, Sun Tzu or Clausewitz?
Sun Tzu, by a very wide margin. Tradition places him around 500 BC at the court of King Helü of Wu, who reigned from 514 to 496 BC. Clausewitz was born in 1780 and died on 16 November 1831, so the two are separated by more than two thousand years. They never met, and nothing shows that Clausewitz ever read Sun Tzu.19
Both dates come with caveats. Sun Tzu's existence has been questioned since the Song dynasty, when the scholar Ye Shi pointed out that the Zuo Zhuan, the main chronicle of the age, never mentions him, and the text is often dated later, to the Warring States period, although World History Encyclopedia notes that the bamboo copy found at Yinqueshan pushed the likely date back to the 5th century BC. Clausewitz's birthday is usually printed as 1 June 1780, the date he believed himself, but the Burg birth register gives 1 July.20
Did Clausewitz read Sun Tzu?
There is no evidence that he did. The Art of War reached Europe through the Jesuit missionary Joseph-Marie Amiot, whose French translation appeared in Paris in 1772. Christopher Bassford, the editor of The Clausewitz Homepage, suggests there “may be a direct connection of sorts”: Amiot's version was popular with the late Enlightenment writers whose ideas of bloodless war Clausewitz attacked, though the same idea appears in earlier European writers such as Maurice de Saxe. The first English translations came much later, Calthrop's in 1905 and Giles's in 1910, while Graham put On War into English in 1873.22
Strategy: war and politics
On the biggest question the two agree. Clausewitz's best known line, in Graham's translation, is that “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means”. Sun Tzu opens his book by calling war “a matter of life and death” for the state and sets the general inside the ruler's plans. Bassford notes that both subordinate military to political considerations, and Mark McNeilly, author of a book on Sun Tzu and modern warfare, makes the same point, though Bassford notes that Sun Tzu gives the general more independence from the ruler, closer to the later Prussian commander Helmuth von Moltke.23
They part company on what the best result looks like. For Sun Tzu “supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting”, and he warns that “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare”. Clausewitz distrusted that ideal. “Let us not hear of Generals who conquer without bloodshed,” he wrote, and he ranked the destruction of the enemy's armed forces first, a difference McNeilly also draws.24
Tactics: deception against friction
Sun Tzu's general shapes the fight before it starts. “All warfare is based on deception,” he writes, and “the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won”. Speed matters too: “Rapidity is the essence of war”.25
Clausewitz is more doubtful that any plan survives contact. His idea of friction holds that “Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult”, and he calls war “the province of uncertainty”. The famous phrase “fog of war” is not in Graham's translation; Clausewitz writes instead that action is often planned “in a mere twilight”. Bassford sums up the Clausewitzian objection: Sun Tzu “badly exaggerated the control a commander can exert”.26
Logistics and intelligence
Sun Tzu gives a whole chapter to the cost of war and another to spies. What lets a good general “strike and conquer”, he writes, is “foreknowledge”, and it must be obtained from people who know the enemy's situation. Clausewitz was far more skeptical about what intelligence could deliver: “Great part of the information obtained in War is contradictory”, and much of the rest, he adds, is false. Both men, in other words, care about knowledge; they disagree on how much of it a commander can really have.28
Leadership and the commander's genius
Each book has a portrait of the ideal general. Sun Tzu lists wisdom, sincerity, benevolence, courage and strictness among the general's qualities. Clausewitz devotes a chapter to “The Genius for War”, in which courage and an eye for the ground matter, but above all a mind that can act calmly amid uncertainty. McNeilly counts the need for military genius among the ideas they share.29
Key concepts compared
- Center of gravity (Clausewitz): the point against which “the concentrated blow of all the forces must be directed”.30
- Culminating point (Clausewitz): the point beyond which an advancing attack, its superiority spent, can only just hold on, and a counterblow follows.31
- The trinity (Clausewitz): war as “a wonderful trinity” of violent passion, chance and political purpose.32
- Winning first (Sun Tzu): fight only when victory is already secured by preparation and deception.33
- Foreknowledge (Sun Tzu): spies and intelligence as the basis of every move.34
Legacy
Both books outlived the wars that produced them. Mao Zedong drew on Sun Tzu. In the United States, Clausewitz's influence grew after the Vietnam War, helped by Harry Summers's On Strategy (1981 to 1982), which popularized a reading of the trinity as people, army and government. The English translation by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, published by Princeton in 1976, became the standard modern edition. For the man behind the older book, read our profile of Sun Tzu; for the battle that shaped Clausewitz, see Borodino.35
Many lines quoted online as Sun Tzu are not in his book. “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” is not in Giles's translation (it is a line from the film The Godfather Part II), and neither is the saying about waiting by the river for your enemies' bodies to float past.36
Who was the greater strategist, Sun Tzu or Clausewitz?
Neither, say the leading specialists. Christopher Bassford calls them “much more complementary than antithetical”, and Michael Handel concluded they had more in common than usually supposed. Sun Tzu is the better guide to preparation, deception and intelligence; Clausewitz the deeper study of what happens once fighting starts, and why it rarely goes to plan. Mark McNeilly, by contrast, leans toward Sun Tzu for most strategists.37
The deepest difference, Bassford argues, lies in the worlds they wrote for: Sun Tzu's China of rival states fighting until one absorbed the rest, and Clausewitz's Europe, where wars usually ended in a negotiated balance of power. To see how their ideas played out in practice, compare the generals in Napoleon Bonaparte, the commander Clausewitz spent his life studying, and the greatest military commanders in history, or browse our ranking of the greatest commanders by era.38
