There Is a Reader of ‘The Art of War’ in Washington

In the midst of the instant information age, the U.S. has been hiding a powerful fleet for 10 days.

“The art of war is the art of deception,” proclaims the book written around the fourth century B.C. by Sun Tzu, the legendary figure whose proverbs on military strategy are cyclically fashionable in the business schools of the West, serious witticism that explains many things. Sun Tzu did not write about the purchase of financial assets or about how to climb the career ladder, and his notion of the free market was probably nonexistent. There may be lyrical interpretations about life as a warlike conflict, love as a battlefield, and the workplace as a theater of operations. Okay, but “The Art of War” is precisely about that: war.

And in war, just as important as what is done is what the enemy thinks the enemy is doing and where he is. There are countless examples throughout history: Gideon, commanding a meager troop of 300 men, attacked at night by making a commotion with horns and torches so that a few thousand Midianites would believe he was at the head of a large army. He won. The Trojans awoke one morning to discover that, after years of siege, the Greeks had decamped. Their fleet was not in sight, and as a gift, they had left a gigantic horse; the Roman Pompey, instead of wooden horses, sometimes left sick and crippled behind, and Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, the Cid, left a solitary and promising tent in front of a fort near Jalon. The trick always worked. Greeks, Romans and Christians were not where their enemies believed. During World War II, the Allies entrusted 9,000 men with the mission of giving life to a gigantic military body composed of thousands of inflatable tanks and trucks, cardboard houses and mannequins – the so-called Ghost Army – to make the Nazis believe that they were preparing to cross the Channel for a certain place. In 1944, they appeared on beaches that were not among the first options. And they came to Berlin.

A powerful U.S. Navy combat group, headed by the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, spent 10 days far from where we all believed it to be, that is to say, facing North Korea. The Carl Vinson has more combat aircraft than most of the world’s air forces, and the ships that escort that aircraft have an arsenal of missiles of which the same can be said. The mere belief that it was going to North Korea escalated the tension. But the fleet was neither there nor even expected. It sailed the Indian Ocean, maneuvering with the Australians, and the deception was only discovered when the Department of Defense made public – surely knowingly – a picture of the aircraft carrier in Indonesia. That is, in the era of instant information, Washington has been able to conceal a very powerful war force for days. A secret in which literally thousands of people have participated. Trump has just added a tactical element of combat to his diplomacy: deceit. That’s fine, but someone in Washington should remind him of what Sun Tzu is talking about: war.