The Art of War

Is war an art? Is war a part of our daily lives? Some people would say it is. One of those people would be the famous Chinese general Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu was a brilliant military strategist who's ideas were well before his time. His ideas have been immortalized in his book, The Art of War. This book changed the way people looked at warfare. Many modern leaders implement the knowledge of Sun Tzu.


I wish I could tell you that is where it stopped. I want tell you that war is a horrifying and undesirable thing. I wish I could convince you what the media is feeding people is wrong, and that war has been romanticized to a point that people think all soldiers look like Jeremy Renner and Josh Hartnett. But I can't. War has been engrained in our culture. In fact, it has been engrained in almost every culture since the beginning of time. That is why a sixth century Chinese general has a best selling book. And why his book has been reinterpreted to fit people's daily lives. Books like The Art of War for Executives: Ancient Knowledge for Today's Business Professional are in every bookstore around America, and we eat it up. We love war. We have made it into an art. People search it out. As James A. Nadeau says in his article The Hurt Locker and the Contemporary War Film, On a basic level the anxieties of war are an integral part of the human experience and the war film serves to enable us (those of us fortunate enough to not have to experience it) to experience it vicariously. It allows those who haven’t (and probably never will) see for a brief time just what it might be like."

Many people think war is an art, but do you?