Sun Tzu's Art of War is widely regarded as the most influential military & strategic classic of all time. Through 'reverse engineering' of the text structured around 14 Sun Tzu 'themes,' this rigorous analysis furnishes a thorough picture of what the text actually says, drawing on Chinese-language analyses, historical, philological, & archaeological sources, traditional commentaries, computational ideas, and strategic & logistics perspectives. Building on this anchoring, the book provides a unique roadmap of Sun Tzu's military and intelligence insights and their applications to strategic competitions in many times and places worldwide, from Warring States China to contemporary US/China strategic competition and other 21st century competitions involving cyber warfare, computing, other hi-tech conflict, espionage, and more. Simultaneously, the analysis offers a window into Sun Tzu's limitations and blind spots relevant to managing 21st century strategic competitions with Sun-Tzu-inspired adversaries or rivals.

Introduction; 1. Background: historical and textual; Preliminaries; 2. Strategist should be calculating; strategist should be cheap; 3. Strategist should find advantage; 4. Strategist should enact stratagems & formlessness; 5. Strategist should make a situation's natural dynamics work for her; 6. Strategist should have an accurate grasp of the significant information; 7. Strategist should manage the interfaces; Conclusion: demystifying Sun Tzu and future directions. Indices.