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HAHAHA
Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like "if you think you might lose, avoid doing that", "being outnumbered is bad generally", and "consider lying."
Personally if I was Sun Tzu I'd have put a bunch of bulshit in my book, after all, war is based on telling the truth
milf (myself i’d like to forgive) and dilf (despair i’d like to forget)
"Your defenses are not secure until they contain one capital letter, one number and one symbol"
- Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
Under Sun Pin’s direction the Ch’i armies, which were advancing into Wei, followed the dictum “Be deceptive.”
P’ang Chüan arrogantly believed the men of Ch’i to be cowards who would flee rather than engage mighty Wei in battle. Therefore, Sun Pin daily reduced the number of cooking fires in the encampment to create a facade of every-increasing desertion. He also effected a tactical withdrawal to further entice P’ang Chüan into the favorable terrain at Ma-ling where the Ch’i commander concealed ten thousand crossbowman among the hills.
P’ang Chüan, apparently afraid that he would miss an opportunity to inflict a severe blow on the retreating Ch’i army, abandoned his heavy forces and supply train and rushed forth with only light units. Arriving at night, the combined Wei forces were ambushed as soon as they penetrated the killing zone.
In addition to being decisively defeated by Ch’i’s withering crossbow fire, 100,000 Wei soldiers needlessly perished because of their commander’s character flaws and hasty judgement.
The battle of Ma-ling is apparently the first recorded conflict in which crossbows were employed. The quote is taken from “Evolution of Conflicts and Weapons in China” in The Art of War by Sun Tzu.