Lecture Series Episode 07

Today we're going back... WAY back... to cover a book that was written over 4,000 years ago. And then re-written in English by Jaime Wolf, which is the version we'll be talking about.

Honestly, there isn't much about the original book I can tell you about that you won't find elsewhere. But maybe I can answer whether you should pick up the Jaime Wolf version? It does have a very snazzy cover... 

Transcript

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Welcome to Battletech Legends and Mechs, a short story podcast telling tales from around the inner sphere and beyond. Greetings everyone, please sit down. I have a splitting headache, and I suspect that it's going to get much, much worse before it gets better. As always, my name is Marks, and this is tutorial section one for the professor's History of the Inner Sphere Lecture Series. I say that because I see a few new faces in the class, and a bunch of remote logins I don't recognize. So welcome, you're six weeks behind in everything already, and we'll probably fail. But that's out of my hands, and you're welcome to try anyways. Grades don't mean spit, and anyone who tells you otherwise is working for the Academic Industrial Complex. Yes, that is a thing. And it's tragic. Moving on. Before we get started today, I wanted to mention that the Dean of History has been notified by some students that we aren't being inclusive enough about your idiotic house allegiances, and that the professors who they care about, and the tutorial lecturers like me, who are caught in fragmentation, should be more inclusive of your stupid beliefs. So, as a result, I will do my best to be equally dismissive and insulting towards all the great houses, clans, and periphery states equally, since they all suck in different, unique ways. Like a sparkling snowflake made out of crap. Let it never be said that I'm not all about equality. This week we're going to be covering a very, very old text. A book so old that we're not exactly sure when it was originally written. I speak of the Art of War. Originally written by Sun Tzu, which translates to Master Sun, a general and politician from sometime between 770 and 480 BCE. The book, which comprises 13 chapters in total, spends a lot of time talking about military tactics, but also about running a state, politics, espionage, and logistics. It's been translated thousands of times, but the version we'll be discussing today was specifically translated by Jamie Wolfe, sometime around 3060 or so. Did everyone bring your copies to class? Ah, I see a few of you have failed to purchase the course package and therefore do not have the actual official version. No matter. Allow me to describe the physical object to everyone logging in remotely, and so that those of you who decided that a half-C-bill photocopy of the book was an acceptable replacement, and you can therefore feel both frugal and a little silly. The book is a slim, sleek little number wrapped in brown leather-like cover with gold embossing on the front and the title in Chinese again on the back, which, since the Chinese used to bind and read their books from right to left, would actually be the front cover of the book if it was entirely in Chinese. It's a nice touch. It is a modest 120 pages, including a couple blank pages at the back for notes. It would fit nicely in the back pocket of a pair of jeans. I read my copy over a couple of lunch breaks, since each chapter does a pretty good job of being isolated from the previous ones, and the entire work can be consumed in a couple of hours total. It is not a big book, and it is an important one, nonetheless. For the sake of historical accuracy, I will point out that Sun Tzu may or may not have been a real person. At a quick glance, there is no academic consensus on whether Sun Tzu existed. Although there may have been a general named Sun Wu, but that might have been a nickname for an exiled warrior, and it was actually Sun Bin, a descendant of whoever may have been Sun Tzu, who wrote the book as a euphemism. Sorry, a euphemism, much like Odysseus and other characters from the Iliad, may or may not have been real, but were probably mythological exaggerations of possibly real events. Euphemorism is the thing where you deify legendary heroes into gods. You are tense bill word of the day, that one. Use it at your next social gathering. But regardless, somebody wrote it. And then 3,500 and some odd years later, Jamie Wolf of Wolf Dragoons translated it and added some commentary and annotations, and now here we are. I'm not going to do a blow-by-blow of the book. So if you're hoping for that, I'm afraid you will be disappointed. But again, the whole thing is like 10,000 words, if that. My lecture notes are longer than half the book. Whoever wrote it was not paid by the pictograph. The book is written in useful little snippets, which are highly quotable, even if not always applicable. All warfare is based on deception, from the chapter title to planning, paragraph 17. If you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. From strategies, paragraph eighteen. Or what enables the able commander to strike and conquer and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men is foreknowledge. From intelligence, paragraph four. Wolf himself mentions that anyone who has ever been a member of a military organization has read The Art of War and picks one or two choice passages as maxims for their life. He then lists several for himself. I spent decades believing the clever commander imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him. I even came to understand one may know how to conquer without being able to do it. End quote. I mean the runner. Dashing around. Hideous sight, really. I saw some active duty, but even then it was piracy on the periphery, where a Locust 5T is often considered a dire threat. That's a 20-tonner armed with six machine guns in some very harsh language. All this to say that I am not a strategy man. I don't think like a general or a colonel or a lieutenant. I think like bloody flippin infantry that happens to be equipped with excellent lines of sight because my chair is 20 meters in the air and wrapped in ferrofire's armor. And all that is to say that I didn't find the book particularly useful. Interesting, yes. Fun golly gee, but I had fun reading the passages one by one. And Jamie's little interjections and asides, drawing neat lines between warfare 4,000 years ago and the modern era, were insightful and occasionally very funny. He even quotes the Adam Steiner line. You know the one. Oh, Adam Steiner and the Somerset Strikers. I look forward to covering that bit of air quotes history. Some recent work has simultaneously made it both more canonical and yet still not made it canon. But I digress. See, this is the problem with a work like The Art of War. What can I possibly say that hasn't been said by somebody smarter who spent years pouring over the same text? I know a little ancient Chinese enough to say woohueshua Jongwa, you if anyone asks or tries to explain my pronunciation is Taibu Hao. Oh, I'm very useful to have around in an authentic dim sum restaurant. But that's as far as I've managed to get. It's a shockingly complicated language, both written and verbal. And Jamie Wolfe went back to first principles and translated the whole thing. I should mention that the book claims it was translated by Wolf, but I have my suspicions that it wasn't. On the one hand, it doesn't really matter because almost nobody is going to bother comparing the Wolf translation to that of Dr. Michael Nylon. For the sake of academic honesty and transparency, it should be mentioned that translation work is absolutely critical for pieces like this on a fundamental understanding level. Let's take a really simple example, one that I am actually aware of and capable of speaking on semi-coherently. The Chinese word for China is Zhonggua. Zhong is the word badly pronounced, sorry, for middle, and gua is the word for nation, kingdom, country, or state. Middle kingdom, that which is located between the heavens and hells, China, Zhonggua. But the written character for Zhonggua includes the character for middle, a box being sliced exactly in half. Nice, clear iconography there. And the character for state, which is a box with little roads, houses, and a palace inside it. I'm not joking, the pictograph is an adorable little fortified city. So, once again we have Zhanggua, Middle Kingdom, China. But that's the modern interpretation of the word. A few thousand years ago, maybe when Sun Tzu was writing about kingdoms, he didn't mean state in the way we think of the state, but rather he meant an individual city, or a fortification, or a province, or all of them at once, or none of them specifically. So when Sun Tzu says in chapter 7, quote, in war, the commander receives his order from the sovereign, end quote, does he mean the king, emperor, queen? Does he mean the local representative of that government? Does he mean the mayor, the local lord, or the highest civilian authority on hand? The translation Wolf presents leaves little uncertainty, but since I don't know what the original Chinese character is, nor would I understand it even if I did see that character, then a lot of uncertainty creeps into the work. Let's use Wolf's own experience with the Dracona's Combine, which would have happened a minimum of 30 years before this translation was published. Takashi Karita, the coordinator at the time, gave orders to Warlord Samsonov to retain the dragoons in House Karita. Samsonov interpreted those orders to mean that the dragoons should be absorbed into the combine and put under his own command. The result was a disaster for House Karita. The entire Fourth Secession War fought against the Dragoons along their borders rather than striking at poorly defended and lucrative targets left vulnerable due to Davian's war with Liao. So Wolf, the commander, receives his order from the sovereign, Karita. But those orders are presented through the intermediary of Samsonov, who has his own methods and, more importantly, his own agenda. Perhaps Samsonov saw the elite forces of the Dragoons as sufficient to crush his own enemies on the Davian border. Perhaps he saw them as enough to claim the entire combine, united by either direct force against Karita, or by overwhelming public support for his imagined accomplishments once the mercenary force was under his control. Or perhaps he was a small, petty man who hated that anyone who wasn't reporting to him was capable of doing anything without his say-so. Maybe all of this at the same time. What would Sun Tzu say in the situation? The following line in chapter 7 reads Having collected an army and concentrated his forces, he must blend and harmonize the different elements before taking to the field. Wolf himself comments on the uncertainty of the word harmonize here, and whether it means between the commander and the government or between the various units and armies under the military command. Maybe Sun Tzu meant both. Or neither. Anyway, enough about the translation issues. I want to point out that the book itself has both formalized commentary on the translation by Wolf and then hand-scribled notes that maybe Wolf or maybe an artifact reproduced by the copy of this Art of War that somebody claimed were actually Wolf Notes, added later in his life. Either way, without the possibility to examine the original, we can assume that all the notes are either by Wolf or by somebody pretending to be Wolf since the voice is quite consistent throughout. They're insightful, occasionally humorous, but always interesting. As this is now the only copy of the Art of War I own, I'm keeping it in my personal bookshelf directly next to my copy of The Little Red Book by Mal Tse Tung, a gift of a friend of mine who traveled to Terra many, many years ago. So that just about does it for the Art of War. Should you buy it yourself? Maybe? If you're curious about Jamie Wolfe, then I think it's a good purchase, but if you're hoping to become a better strategist, I honestly doubt it'll be of much use to you. I doubt it was of much use to anyone at any point since the advent of the printing press. Wolf comments in the foreword that it's possible Sun Tzu, whoever they were, was attempting to give nobles and generals an idea of the actual cost of warfare, to remove the abstraction from the idea that war was diplomacy by other means, and to drive home the idea that war is complicated and expensive and almost always a waste of resources. If that was Sun Tzu's goal, he failed miserably. Mankind has been conducting one war or another without interruption for 5,000 years? Sure, there have been more or less peaceful periods in there, but I'd hazard a bet that there are exceptions, not the rule. Okay, enough rambling for this week. Next lecture. You know, I think I might cover the Blazing Aces. Most of you are probably too young to know anything about them, and they were foundational to why I wanted to be a mercenary in the first place, and for my love of garrison duty. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, you can find me during office hours where I will probably be grading papers again. I used to complain when elementals would turn in work written in crayon, but I realized that it's actually a great sign that they've stopped eating the crayons and started writing with them. Failing that, you can send me a low-cost HPG message at marx.battletech at gmail.com. As always, big thank you to Catalyst Game Lab for their generous stewardship of the Battletech IP. You guys are doing great work, and we all appreciate it. A quick thank you to Joel Morelli for all the music, and a reminder that all my lectures are recorded, edited, and posted without any AI content or assistance. I had a student last week try to convince me that I should use AI to market and distribute my lectures because, and I kid you not, he said it was like slave labor, because it was extremely useful and free. Anyone who thinks that an argument for why I should use a technology that is comparable to slave labor, let's just say that's a very bad start, and we will probably never see eye to eye because I'm not a soulless bastard. And if anything I've said today, or before today, upsets you, just a gentle reminder that I am a self-proclaimed idiot, and I'm just here to try and bring a little joy and maybe a little interesting information into people's lives. On that note, here's hoping everyone has a wonderful week. Class dismissed