Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!att!cbnews!military
From: myers@math.arizona.edu (Donald Myers)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: reference to Sun Tzu
Message-ID: <11766@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 28 Nov 89 04:34:56 GMT
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From: "Donald Myers" <myers@math.arizona.edu>
As far as I remember it, Sun Tzu was a chinese stratege of ancient China, before
Christ who wrote a treaty of the war.
But you could also quote Machiaveli: he never heard of Sun Tzu, but there is a
chapter in "The Prince" where he basically says the same thing, that the art of 
war is of primordial importance for a prince:
"The Art of War is the only one a Prince must care about; for it not only rises
 a private citizen to the condition of a Prince but for some princes that chose
 to neglect it for other pleasures from rulers went down to the condition of
 ordinary men."
			-Machieveli,
	most probably the best reference you could ever quote rather than some 
 exotic (and sometimes esoteric) prehistoric chinese.

Machieveli gave the exemple of the Sforza:
the first Sforza was a farmer who became a condottieri.
He enrolled his troops to the service of the Visconti, the ruling family of Milan
but overthrust the duke Visconti and self-proclaimed him as the new duke.
Later, his descendents who did not like the art of war from dukes went down to 
ordinary peoples.
It's very instructing.


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