The Thirty-Six Stratagems

A large component of the Way of Strategy is understanding the use of stratagems. A stratagem is different from a strategy. A strategy is an overall gameplan; whereas a stratagem is just a deception or dirty trick used to gain an advantage. Strategies are created by combining several stratagems. Although you may initially reject the thought of using deception to achieve your goals, these stratagems will be used against you at some point in your life, so ignore them at your peril.

The multitude of possible stratagems has been distilled, polished, and codified into The Thirty-Six Stratagems. The identity of the original author of The Thirty-Six Stratagems remains a point of contention among sinologists and historians; the answer has probably been lost to history. The Thirty-Six Stratagems are typically attributed to either Sun-tzu or Zhuge Liang. Zhuge Liang (181-284 CE) was a famous general whose exploits were featured in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. However, even if Sun-tzu never wrote The Thirty-Six Stratagems in ink, he still wrote them in spirit, as he discussed these stratagems in The Art of War, or they are immediate derivable from its teachings.

Why 36?

The Chinese equivalent to the English proverb “he who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day” is “of thirty-six stratagems, retreating is best.” (“Thirty-six” is a Chinese colloquialism for “a large number of things,” much like how an English speaker would say “a million.”) So, in a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor, the original author of these stratagems made sure that their list contained exactly thirty-six items, and had retreating be one of them.

Translator's Note

The original author of The Thirty-Six Stratagems reduced each teaching down to a single phrase or proverb, as a mnemonic. Mnemonics were critical to propagate ideas in ancient and medieval societies. When basic literacy was a luxury reserved for privileged classes, rote memorization had to become the primary method for learning. However, these mnemonics only make sense within the cultural framework in which they were originally created. This, like all concepts, is best explained by an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation. In the episode “Darmok,” the Enterprise and her crew meet aliens with an entirely metaphor-based language. Although the crew of the Enterprise was equipped with a universal translator, it could only produce word salads. (“The river Temarc, in winter! Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!”) Although it could translate the individual words, the universal translator could not grasp the overall meaning of the phrases. A Western reader, who is largely unfamiliar with the Chinese language, culture, history, and literary tradition, would be unable to understand that “besiege Wei to rescue Zhao” means “to find the Achilles’ heel.” Likewise, the average Chinese person, who was raised in a culture free of idiomatic references to The Iliad, would unable to understand what an Achilles’ heel is.

I have attempted to translate the essence of each stratagem, to make them easy for a Western reader to immediately understand, along with a brief explanation of how they are used. While The Art of War is intended to be an in-depth study of the nature of conflict itself, The Thirty-Six Stratagems are intended to be more of a “cheat sheet.” The stratagems are organized into a decision tree of “if-then” statements to provide quick responses to six common situations.

Stratagems for Retaining Superiority

Keep a Hidden Agenda

Use a fake goal to mask your real goal until it is achieved. (e.g., point to the west in front of everyone, when your goal is actually in the east.)

Find the Achilles’ Heel

Avoid a direct confrontation and focus on attacking the enemy’s weak spots instead. Nothing is invincible; there always exists a weakness somewhere.

Utilize the Strength of Others

Have a third party to attack your enemies for you. This can be done by:

1. Tricking an ally into attacking.
2. Bribing an enemy official to turn traitor.
3. Turning the enemy's own strength against them.

Choose Your Battles

Always choose the time and place for a battle; only fight on your own terms. Encourage your enemy to expend their energy in futile pursuits and fool’s errands, while you conserve your strength.

Kick Them When They’re Down

When a country or group is beset by rampant internal conflicts (e.g., disease, famine, corruption, crime, etc.), they are unable to deal with external threats. Likewise, individuals are susceptible to attack when their personal life is in turmoil (e.g., fired from work, foreclosed mortgage, divorce, etc.).

Create Diversions to Keep the Enemy Off-Balanced

The element of surprise provides an overwhelming advantage. Even in direct confrontations, surprise can still be employed by attacking where it is least expected. You must create an expectation in the enemy's mind, to get the enemy to focus his forces and attention to one location, and then attack a weakly-defended point elsewhere.

Stratagems for Confronting an Equally-Powerful Enemy

Propaganda

Tell lies to confuse and frighten the enemy. There are two ways to do this:

1. Create an illusion of something's existence, when it really does not exist.
2. Create an illusion that something does not exist, when it really exists.

The Pincer Maneuver (The Two-Pronged Attack)

Deceive the enemy with an obvious, slow-moving approach, while surprising them with another attacking force that takes a shortcut and sneaks up on them. As the enemy concentrates on the decoy, they ignore the true attack. (e.g., you try to kick your enemy in the groin, and when they drop their hands to cover themselves, you punch them in the face.)

This tactic is a variation Creating Diversions, which uses highly-visible, physical baits or threats in addition to misinformation. These baits or threats must also be legitimate attempts, or else they will draw suspicion.

Let Your Enemies Fight Each Other

Delay entering a battle until everyone involved has become exhausted from fighting amongst themselves. Then, attack at full strength and pick up the pieces.

Hide Knives with Smiles (Infiltrate and Sabotage)

Charm and ingratiate yourself into your enemy’s group. When you have gained their trust, secretly makes moves against them.

Sacrifice Pawns to Protect Queens (Scapegoat Stratagem)

Realize there are circumstances where you must sacrifice short-term objectives in order to reach a long-term goal. This is the “scapegoat stratagem,” where someone must suffer dire consequences so that the rest of the group does not.

Exploit Targets of Opportunity

Your plans should be flexible enough to take advantage of any small opportunities that present themselves, in order to take advantage of whatever slight profit they offer.

Stratagems for Persuading the Enemy to Surrender

Shock and Awe

Perform aimless, but spectacular actions to provoke the enemy to respond, thereby giving away their plans or positions, or just to taunt them. Doing something unusual, strange, and unexpected will arouse the enemy's suspicion and disrupt their thinking. However, beware that these actions will also reveal your position and intentions to the enemy.

Reinvent the Past

The classics were classics for a reason, so re-appropriate a forgotten or discarded institution, technology, method, or ideology. Everything new was inspired by something old, so mine the past for ideas, customs, symbols, images, traditions, etc. and revive, repurpose, and reinterpret them to fit your needs -- especially if it can provide a mythos or other form of legitimacy. (e.g., your plans will sound more credible when they're based on principles from ancient Chinese military texts.)

Siege Warfare is Counterproductive

Never directly attack a well-positioned or fortified opponent. Instead, lure them away from their position and separate them from their sources of strength.

Do Not Corner the Enemy

Cornered prey will mount a final, desperate attack. Prevent this by letting the enemy believe he still has a chance for freedom, and their morale is thus dampened by the desire to escape. In the end, when the chances for freedom are proven a false, the enemy's morale will be crushed, and they will be apt to surrender.

Sacrifice Worms to Catch Fish

In order to bait or goad someone, you need to offer them something of relative or apparent worth in order to attempt to gain something of even greater worth.

Decapitation

If the enemy's army is motivated by money, superstitions, or threats, then target their leader -- when they fall, there will be no one to give orders, so the enemy army will either disband or become your new ally.

However, do not target leaders if the enemy’s army is motivated by loyalty. This turns their leaders into martyrs, and the army will continue to fight, in order to seek vengeance.

Stratagems for Dealing with Chaotic Environments

Eliminate the Source of the Enemy’s Strength (Indirect Attacks)

Instead of attacking the enemy's fighting forces, attack the enemy’s ability to wage war by targeting their main arguments, key assets or personnel, or critical supply lines. Drain their sources of power -- find what it is that makes the enemy strong, and prevent them from drawing upon this resource. You must steal, destroy, or disable this power source by any means at your disposal. Even if you fail at this sabotage, the attempt will still devastate enemy morale.

Take Advantage of Confusion

Intentionally create confusion, and use the resulting distraction to further your own goals.

Hide Behind Illusions

Mask yourself to escape from a superior enemy. Either leave your distinctive traits behind and become inconspicuous, or masquerade as something or someone else.

Entrap and Destroy

Prior to attacking, cut off your enemy's supply lines and all but one escape route. This requires prudent planning.

Befriend Distant Enemies to Attack Nearby Enemies

Bordering nations tend to become enemies, while nations separated by distance and obstacles become allies. When you are the strongest in one field, your greatest threat is from the second-strongest in your field; and not the strongest from some other field. Beware your neighbors even if they appear to be friends; they will have the easiest time taking advantage of you when you are away. Even if your neighbors are weak, they could form an alliance and quickly gain strength.

Become allies with your enemy’s neighbors to force them into fighting on multiple fronts, so their forces cannot work together. Besides, if you do have to go to war in distant lands you will have to pass over or through nearby countries, and they must be non-hostile in order to do this.

Always be up to date about what alliances are happening; these shift the balance of power. Disrupt threatening alliances, forge beneficial alliances, and beware of your allies changing sides.

Alliances are Temporary

Borrow an ally’s resources to attack a mutual enemy. Then, once the mutual enemy is defeated, those same resources can be turned on the ally who lent them.

Stratagems for Improving Your Position

Defeat from Within

Destroy or damage the sustaining structures the enemy depends on, and replace them with systems which you control. Make the enemy dependent upon you, and then pull the rug from under them at your convenience.

Discredit the enemy’s friends and advisers, so they do not know who to trust.

Find and exploit situations where the enemy’s strengths become their weaknesses.

Disrupt enemy plans and actions. Act in unexpected ways -- break the normal rules of engagement -- so the enemy will be confused, and become paralyzed into inaction or panicked into disarray.

Indirect Persuasion ("Mean Girls" Maneuver)

Analogies and innuendos can be used to discipline, control, or warn people who cannot be confronted directly due to their status or position. Since you are not directly naming names, the accused cannot retaliate without revealing themselves.

Conversely, severely punishing someone will intimidate the other group members into compliance.

Play Dumb

Pretend to be a fool, a drunk, a madman, etc. to mask your intentions and motivations. Once the opponent has written you off as being harmless, they'll drop their guard.

Burn Bridges

Use baits and deceptions to lure your enemy into dangerous situations, and cut off their lines of communication and escape routes.

Use Decoys

You don’t actually need to be powerful; you just need to appear powerful. So, use tricks and disguises to make something worthless appear valuable; to make the unthreatening appear dangerous; to make the useless appear useful.

Create Dependency

The easiest way to control someone is to have them depend on you. Take control of negotiations, to usurp leadership in situations where you are normally subordinate. Infiltrate your target and take control of their supply chain.

Desperation Stratagems

Subversion by Seduction (Honeypot Trap)

Send your enemy beautiful women to instigate problems within their base. This works because:

1. The (presumed male) ruler becomes so enamored with the beautiful women that he neglects his duties and allows his vigilance to wane.
2. Other males will begin to display aggressive behaviors that will inflame any minor differences, which will hinder cooperation and destroy morale.
3. Other females, motivated by jealousy and envy, will begin to plot intrigues, further exacerbating the situation.

The Empty Fort Stratagem (Corbomite Maneuver)

When you are about to be overrun by a numerically superior enemy, drop all pretenses of military preparedness, act calmly, and taunt the enemy. Try to convince the enemy that you are planning a huge ambush. For best results, you must act calm and at ease when your enemy expects you to be tense. (This ploy is only works if you have powerful hidden forces most of the time; the empty fort strategy can only be used sparingly.)

Counter-Espionage (Drama Bombs)

Secretly feed false information to enemy spies, creating strife between the enemy and their friends, allies, advisors, family, commanders, soldiers, population, etc. While they are preoccupied with settling these fabricated internal disputes, they are not thinking about attacking or defending. To perform this stratagem, you first need to know who the enemy’s spies are. This can be done by:

• Using your spies to steal personnel lists from the enemy.
• Bribing or blackmailing enemy officials for information.
• Performing careful detective work after an information leak.
• Secretly monitoring all information flows.
• Planting your own agents in places and situations where they can be recruited by the enemy spy network, in order to gain access to that network.
• Catching enemy spies and turning them into double agents.

Inflict Self-Harm or Play Possum to Gain Sympathy

Pretending to be injured has two possible applications:

1. The enemy is lulled into lowering his guard, since they no longer consider you to be an immediate threat.
2. Pretending that the injury was caused by a mutual enemy will win the trust of your other enemies.

Combine Stratagems (Defense-in-Depth)

To keep the enemy from discerning your plan, do not rely on any one stratagem. Instead, keep your options open by using a combination of stratagems simultaneously. This way, if any one stratagem fails, the entire scheme will not unravel.

Retreat

If it becomes obvious that your current course of action will lead to defeat, then retreat, regroup, and rethink your plans. When your side is losing, the options are:

1. Surrender; a complete, total defeat.
2. Compromise; a partial defeat.
3. Escape; avoiding defeat entirely. Remember, as long as you are not defeated, you have a chance at victory.