ABSTRACT
Sun Tzu is meaningful, even valid, after 2,000 years, his works would have been of dubious worth to a corps commander outside Stalingrad. It often seems that the greater the wisdom shown by the writer, the more difficult a sly battlefield application. The nature of the motivation is not essential. It may be patriotism, class hatred, fatalism; it is only necessary that the motive be sufficiently intense to ensure that the population prefers the siege to surrender. Ideally, as Sun Tzu pointed out, those skilled in war capture cities without assaulting them, but since ideal conditions seldom exist during wartime, sieges have been and still are a traditional form of warfare. In the case of Madrid in 1936, no one had anticipated even the theoretical possibility of a siege. To the Nationalists, the city had been envisaged as a goal, never a battleground.
