The 33 Strategies of War (66 page)

The second round was more of the same, except that Liston, instead of looking murderous, began to look frustrated. The pace was far faster than in any of his earlier fights, and Clay's head kept bobbing and orbiting in disturbing patterns. Liston would move in to strike his chin, only to miss or find Clay hitting Liston's chin instead, with a lightning-quick jab that made him wobble on his feet. At the end of the third round, a flurry of punches came out of nowhere and opened a deep gash under Liston's left eye.

Now Clay was the aggressor and Liston was fighting to survive. In the sixth round, he began taking punches from all angles, opening more wounds and making Liston look weak and sad. When the bell for the seventh round rang, the mighty Liston just sat on his stool and stared--he refused to get up. The fight was over. The boxing world was stunned: Was it a fluke? Or--since Liston had seemed to fight as if under some spell, his punches missing, his movements tired and listless--had he just had an off night? The world would have to wait some fifteen months to find out, until the two boxers' rematch in Lewiston, Maine, in May 1965.

Consumed with a hunger for revenge, Liston trained like a demon for this second fight. In the opening round, he went on the attack, but he seemed wary. He followed Clay--or rather Muhammad Ali, as he was now known--around the ring, trying to reach him with jabs. One of these jabs finally grazed Ali's face as he stepped back, but, in a move so fast that few in the audience even saw it, Ali countered with a hard right that sent Liston to the canvas. He lay there for a while, then staggered to his feet, but too late--he had been down for more than ten seconds, and the referee called the fight. Many in the crowd yelled fix, claiming that no punch had landed. Liston knew otherwise. It may not have been the most powerful blow, but it caught him completely by surprise, before he could tense his muscles and prepare himself. Coming from nowhere, it floored him.

Liston would continue to fight for another five years, but he was never the same man again.

One who studies ancient tactics and employs the army in accord with their methods is no different from someone who glues up the tuning stops and yet tries to play a zither. I have never heard of anyone being successful. The acumen of strategists lies in penetrating the subtle amid unfolding change and discerning the concordant and contrary. Now whenever mobilizing you must first employ spies to investigate whether the enemy's commanding general is talented or not. If instead of implementing tactics, he merely relies on courage to employ the army, you can resort to ancient methods to conquer him. However, if the commanding general excels in employing ancient tactics, you should use tactics that contradict the ancient methods to defeat him.

H
SU
T
UNG, CHINA
, 976-1018

Interpretation

Even as a child, Muhammad Ali got perverse pleasure out of being different. He liked the attention it got him, but most of all he just liked being himself: odd and independent. When he began to train as a boxer, at the age of twelve, he was already refusing to fight in the usual way, flouting the rules. A boxer usually keeps his gloves up toward his head and upper body, ready to parry a blow. Ali liked to keep his hands low, apparently inviting attack--but he had discovered early on that he was quicker than other boxers, and the best way to make his speed work for him was to lure the opponent's chin just close enough for Ali to snap a jab at him that would cause a lot more pain for being so close and so quick. As Ali developed, he also made it harder for the other boxer to reach him by working on his legs, even more than on the power of his punch. Instead of retreating the way most fighters did, one foot at a time, Ali kept on his toes, shuffling back and dancing, in perpetual motion to his own peculiar rhythm. More than any other boxer, he was a moving target. Unable to land a punch, the other boxer would grow frustrated, and the more frustrated he was, the more he would reach for Ali, opening up his guard and exposing himself to the jab from nowhere that might knock him out. Ali's style ran counter to conventional boxing wisdom in almost every way, yet its unorthodoxy was exactly what made it so difficult to combat.

Ali's unconventional tactics in the first Liston fight began well before the bout. His irritating antics and public taunts--a form of dirty warfare--were designed to infuriate the champion, cloud his mind, fill him with a murderous hatred that would make him come close enough for Ali to knock him out. Ali's behavior at the weigh-in, which seemed genuinely insane, was later revealed as pure performance. Its effect was to make Liston unconsciously defensive, unsure of what this man would do in the ring. In the opening round, as in so many of his subsequent fights, Ali lulled Liston by fighting defensively, an ordinary tactic when facing a boxer like Liston. That drew Liston in closer and closer--and now the extraordinary move, the speedy punch out of nowhere, had double the force. Unable to reach Ali with his punches, disconcerted by the dancing, the lowering of the hands, the irritating taunting, Liston made mistake after mistake. And Ali feasted on his opponents' mistakes.

Understand: as children and young adults, we are taught to conform to certain codes of behavior and ways of doing things. We learn that being different comes with a social price. But there is a greater price to pay for slavishly conforming: we lose the power that comes from our individuality, from a way of doing things that is authentically our own. We fight like everyone else, which makes us predictable and conventional.

The chief characteristic of fashion is to impose and suddenly to accept as a new rule or norm what was, until a minute before, an exception or whim, then to abandon it again after it has become a commonplace, everybody's "thing." Fashion's task, in brief, is to maintain a continual process of standardization: putting a rarity or novelty into general and universal use, then passing on to another rarity or novelty when the first has ceased to be such.... Only modern art, because it expresses the avant-garde as its own extreme or supreme moment, or simply because it is the child of the romantic aesthetic of originality and novelty, can consider as the typical--and perhaps sole--form of the ugly what we might call
ci-devant
beauty, the beauty of the
ancien regime,
ex-beauty. Classical art, through the method of imitation and the practice of repetition, tends toward the ideal of renewing, in the sense of integration and perfection. But for the modern art in general, and for avant-garde in particular, the only irremediable and absolute aesthetic error is a traditional artistic creation, an art that imitates and repeats itself. From the anxious modern longing for what Remy de Gourmont chose to call, suggestively, "le beau inedit" derives that sleepless and fevered experimentation which is one of the most characteristic manifestations of the avant-garde; its assiduous labor is an eternal web of Penelope, with the weave of its forms remade every day and unmade every night. Perhaps Ezra Pound intended to suggest both the necessity and the difficulty of such an undertaking when he once defined the beauty of art as "a brief gasp between one cliche and another." The connection between the avant-garde and fashion is therefore evident: fashion too is a Penelope's web; fashion too passes through the phase of novelty and strangeness, surprise and scandal, before abandoning the new forms when they become cliche, kitsch, stereotype. Hence the profound truth of Baudelaire's paradox, which gives to genius the task of creating stereotypes. And from that follows, by the principle of contradiction inherent in the obsessive cult of genius in modern culture, that the avant-garde is condemned to conquer, through the influence of fashion, that very popularity it once disdained--and this is the beginning of its end. In fact, this
is
the inevitable, inexorable destiny of each movement: to rise up against the newly outstripped fashion of an old avant-garde and to die when a new fashion, movement, or avant-garde appears.

T
HE
T
HEORY OF THE
A
VANT
-G
ARDE
,
R
ENATO
P
OGGIOLI
, 1968

The way to be truly unorthodox is to imitate no one, to fight and operate according to your own rhythms, adapting strategies to your idiosyncrasies, not the other way around. Refusing to follow common patterns will make it hard for people to guess what you'll do next. You are truly an individual. Your unorthodox approach may infuriate and upset, but emotional people are vulnerable people over whom you can easily exert power. If your peculiarity is authentic enough, it will bring you attention and respect--the kind the crowd always has for the unconventional and extraordinary.

3.
Late in 1862, during the American Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant made several efforts to take the Confederate fortress at Vicksburg. The fortress was at a critical point in the Mississippi River, the lifeline of the South. If Grant's Union army took Vicksburg, it would gain control of the river, cutting the South in half. Victory here could be the turning point of the war. Yet by January 1863 the fortress's commander, General James Pemberton, felt confident he had weathered the storm. Grant had tried to take the fort from several angles to the north and had failed. It seemed that he had exhausted all possibilities and would give up the effort.

The fortress was located at the top of a two-hundred-foot escarpment on the riverbank, where any boat that tried to pass was exposed to its heavy artillery. To its west lay the river and the cliffs. To the north, where Grant was encamped, it was protected by virtually impassable swamp. Not far east lay the town of Jackson, a railroad hub where supplies and reinforcements could easily be brought in--and Jackson was firmly in Southern hands, giving the Confederacy control of the entire corridor, north and south, on the river's eastern bank. Vicksburg seemed secure from all directions, and the failure of Grant's attacks only made Pemberton more comfortable. What more could the Northern general do? Besides, he was in political hot water among President Abraham Lincoln's enemies, who saw his Vicksburg campaign as a monumental waste of money and manpower. The newspapers were portraying Grant as an incompetent drunk. The pressure was tremendous for him to give it up and retreat back to Memphis to the north.

Grant, however, was a stubborn man. As the winter dragged on, he tried every kind of maneuver, with nothing working--until, on the moonless night of April 16, Confederate scouts reported a Union flotilla of transport ships and gunboats, lights off, trying to make a run past the batteries at Vicksburg. The cannons roared, but somehow the ships got past them with minimal damage. The next few weeks saw several more runs down the river. At the same time, Union forces on the western side of the river were reported heading south. Now it was clear: Grant would use the transport ships he had sneaked past Vicksburg to cross the Mississippi some thirty miles downriver. Then he would march on the fortress from the south.

Pemberton called for reinforcements, but in truth he was not overly concerned. Even if Grant got thousands of men across the river, what could he do once there? If he moved north toward Vicksburg, the Confederacy could send armies from Jackson and points south to take him from the flank and rear. Defeat in this corridor would be a disaster, for Grant would have no line of retreat. He had committed himself to a foolhardy venture. Pemberton waited patiently for his next move.

Grant did cross the river south of Vicksburg, and in a few days his army was moving northeast, heading for the rail line from Vicksburg to Jackson. This was his most audacious move so far: if he were successful, he would cut Vicksburg off from its lifeline. But Grant's army, no different from any other, needed lines of communication and supply. These lines would have to connect to a base on the eastern side of the river, which Grant had indeed established at the town of Grand Gulf. All Pemberton had to do was send forces south from Vicksburg to destroy or even just threaten Grand Gulf, endangering Grant's supply lines. He would be forced to retreat south or risk being cut off. It was a game of chess that Pemberton could not lose.

And so, as the Northern general maneuvered his armies with speed toward the rail line between Jackson and Vicksburg, Pemberton moved on Grand Gulf. To Pemberton's utter dismay, Grant ignored him. Indeed, so far from dealing with the threat to his rear, he pushed straight on to Jackson, taking it on May 14. Instead of relying on supply lines to feed his army, he plundered the area's rich farmlands. More, he moved so swiftly and changed direction so fluidly that Pemberton could not tell which part of his army was the front, rear, or flank. Rather than struggle to defend lines of communication or supply, Grant kept none. No one had ever seen an army behave in such a manner, breaking every rule in the military playbook.

A few days later, with Jackson under his control, Grant wheeled his troops toward Vicksburg. Pemberton rushed his men back from Grand Gulf to block the Union general, but it was too late: beaten at the Battle of Champion Hill, he was forced back into the fortress, where his army was quickly besieged by the Union forces. On July 4, Pemberton surrendered Vicksburg, a blow the South would never recover from.

Interpretation

We humans are conventional by nature. Once anyone succeeds at something with a specific strategy or method, it is quickly adopted by others and becomes hardened into principle--often to everyone's detriment when it is applied indiscriminately. This habit is a particular problem in war, for war is such risky business that generals are often tempted to take the road well traveled. When so much is necessarily unsafe, what has proven safe in the past has amplified appeal. And thus for centuries the rules have been that an army must have lines of communication and supply and, in battle, must assume a formation with flanks and a front. Napoleon loosened these principles, but their hold on military thinkers remained so strong that during the American Civil War, some forty years after Napoleon's death, officers like Pemberton could not imagine an army behaving according to any other plan.