Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
the usefulness of Sun-Tzu very much depends on your understanding of what Bing-Fa actually means ("Soldiers Methods" or "Strategy". - Certainly not War)
Well, yes, my point exactly. The interesting part about Chinese strategy is that they often try to bundle the strategy and the propaganda - including sometimes the philosophy about how a country should be run - all up into one. By studying the strategy, you can get a more subtle sense of the logic behind the propaganda. The propaganda is important when you're thinking about questions like "would China sabotage its own financial interests to harm the US?" For any country to do such a thing, propaganda would have to be the central feature of the operation.

(BTW, Bing Fa doesn't mean "strategy." "Soldiers' methods" is a good literal translation. I believe originally it was just called Sun Zi, after the author, until somebody decided it needed a real name.)

If you've read Clausewitz, you can drop "Unrestricted Warfare" in the bin. I actually gave my copy away, as it took up valuable space on the shelf. The .pdf is good enough.
You read something like this as a primary document - in terms of what's missing, not just what's present. Whether or not it's useful for other situations as well is secondary. For instance, there's no mention of 'soft power' at all in Unrestricted Warfare, even though that would fit squarely into its logic of non-technology based power. One would guess, based on its track record and popularity, that UW has the ear of Chinese strategists, so you can make conclusions from there.