Thread by @ThyConsigliori

John Minford, #SunTzu 2:14 "So a wise general feeds his army off the enemy. One peck of enemy provisions is worth twenty carried from home; on picul of enemy fodder is worth twenty carried from home."

Finally! Enough with the doom and gloom, Master Sun. I can tell you, I was getting depressed with all these distant wars, carried on for decades and depleting the treasury and impoverishing the people. Don't give me a problem, give me a solution, please!

Okay, yes, I'm grateful for the clarity of the work on the problem. I am. But I really am happy to turn from problem to solution. Still, it has to be emphasized, there are only 21 verses in this chapter, and 13, which is more than half, were spent on the problem.

And the solution is? OPM, Baby. Other People's Money. Do NOT pay the tab at restaurant. Get your enemy to pay the tab. And you have NO idea how much this shift is worth. None. Master Sun does, and he tells us, straight up. But you won't believe him. Twenty-to-one.

See? I told you you wouldn't believe him. One evening's steak and fixings, and it's worth $20 for every dollar you'd have spent if you paid? You splurge. It's a $350 meal and you didn't even get the expensive wine. You trick your buddy into paying, and walk out $2,000 up?

Yep. That's what 20-to-1 means. Master Sun is doing more than teaching us the fundamental principles of capitalism, here. He's laying out the basic logic of war itself. If you're going to fight, you must win, and winning means...

Twenty-to-one. Plunder. Spend 1, get 20.

20 what? It's fun.

A peck is an imperial and United States customary unit of dry volume, equivalent to 2 dry gallons or 8 dry quarts or 16 dry pints. Four pecks make a bushel.

A picul is a traditional Asian unit of weight, defined as "a shoulder-load, as much as a man can carry on a shoulder-pole".

Can you see it? How much weight can you carry on your shoulders? With a little help setting up, could you carry your own body weight?

Who loves Tennessee Earnie Ford? 16 tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. He had to earn his own money. If he'd been a successful warrior, he'd have taken it from his enemy.

No point messing about. War is theft. If you're not ready to steal from your enemy, you're going to spend your own money fighting. What possible kind of sense would that make? It's actually the definition of an enemy, someone you want to steal from.

Ready to be shocked? That's precisely why our founding fathers frowned upon expeditionary wars. They're too expensive and they inspire thievery. If you don't steal, you're down by a factor of 20X. So, you end up stealing from someone, that's for sure.

That 20-to-1 ratio explains how we won the Revolutionary War as well. The Red Coats had to steal their provisions, and we were just defending what was ours from the get go. We had a 20-to-1 advantage, economically, not to mention morally.

Don't get me wrong, I don't believe Master Sun has gone moralistic on us. If you have a dedicated enemy, morality demands you must steal from him. Take him for all he's worth. The return is...you know the ratio, right?

It's a subtle cue, though. Master Sun drops it on us in this verse, and then, boom, he's off and running to other topics. You'll see. But, to NOT be coy, he tells it to us twice in this verse. 20/1. 20/1. It's the thieving, economic definition of proper warfighting.

Alas. In America we are so moral, if not to say moralistic, that we take bushel baskets of cash with us everywhere and pay money to some of our enemies to betray others of our enemies. Can't you see Master Sun sitting up in his grave and laughing great, heaving belly laughs?

Clearly, paying enemies is merely a form of corruption. It's not a good war plan. Twenty-to-one. If you give a dollar, you're giving twenty. So just stop that. Or...

If you're going to fight a war, do it profitably. And if you can't do it profitably, don't fight a war.

Simple.

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