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1. The Strategy
The seventh of the Hundred Unorthodox Strategies is a position problem dressed up as a naval one. Fight near a river or a lake and you need boats, barges, ferries, that part is obvious. What is not obvious, and what the whole strategy turns on, is which bank you fight from and which way the water is moving under you. Take the upwind position and fire becomes a weapon you can throw across the water at the enemy. Take the upstream position and the current itself becomes a battering ram, letting high-walled vessels close and smash a lower fleet before it can answer. Sawyer’s translation puts the payoff as a flat guarantee: get both, and “you will always be victorious in battle.”
The rule cites the Art of War directly for the closing word on it ‘do not move upstream to meet the enemy; let the enemy come to you instead.’
The text’s own illustration is a small, sharp one. In the late sixth century BCE, Prince Guang of Wu attacked the state of Chu. Chu’s diviners read the omens as bad. Its Minister of War disagreed, on grounds that had nothing to do with omens: Chu held the upstream position, so how could the day be unlucky? Chu’s fleet used exactly that advantage: heavy, high-sided vessels driving down with the current inorder to punch through Wu’s line and break its army on land as well as water.
2. Eastern Wisdom
Lionel Giles’ 1910 translation of the same chapter gives the rule in its more famous phrasing: “Moor your craft higher up than the enemy, and facing the sun… Do not move up-stream to meet the enemy.” Giles’ commentary adds the mechanism Sawyer’s version leaves implicit : Tu Mu’s note that a river force made the mistake of camping on the lower reaches once and paid for it, because the enemy simply opened the sluices upstream and drowned them out (Giles, p.138).
That is not a hypothetical worry in Giles’ notes; it is the exact trick that decided a battle. When the Han general Han Hsin faced Lung Chu across a river, he attacked, then staged a retreat back across the water. Lung Chu, convinced his enemy had broken, pursued him into the crossing! At which point Han Hsin’s men cut open sandbags they had stacked upstream overnight, releasing a wall of water that cut Lung Chu’s army in half mid-crossing. What survived on the near bank was destroyed piecemeal; the far bank scattered outright, Lung Chu among the dead (Giles, p.138). Two illustrations, two different centuries and two different translators, and both cash out the same rule: the water is a weapon before either army has swung a blade.
3. A Western Mirror
The West’s clearest failure of this exact principle is Gallipoli — specifically the second landing, at Suvla Bay in August 1915, which Robert Greene uses in The 33 Strategies of War as a study in command breakdown rather than terrain. General Ian Hamilton had, by Greene’s account, solved every problem Sun Tzu would recognize: he identified Tekke Tepe, the high ground inland, as the position that would decide the campaign; he planned the landing, the beaches, and the logistics of getting 20,000 men ashore in the dark. What he did not solve was the chain carrying his order to the men who had to execute it. Told politely and without a deadline to take the high ground “as soon as possible,” the order softened at every hand-off to “if possible,” to a request for artillery support first, to a night’s rest before advancing …. until a position that stood empty and undefended on the first morning was defended by Turkish reinforcements who reached it roughly thirty minutes ahead of the British (Greene, pp.170–176). The water had been crossed. The position had been correctly read. The army lost anyway, because getting ashore and getting the order obeyed turned out to be two different issues.
On the table: The Battle for Normandy, The Killing Grounds, even Omaha from DG all apply Sun Tzu’s calculation — do you actually have what a water crossing requires? Landing into or onto a metered, contestable resource instead of a free action once you’ve picked the right bank or beachhead? You can hold the perfect beach and the perfect tide and still not have the ability to exploit it. PErhaps the most savage battle in modern times during WWII for me that is most visceral about water is Alligator Creek on Guadalcanal. There there was no damn, the wall was steel and brass at high cyclic rates across a relatively shallow but wide river or stream.
4. Sun Tzu vs Clausewitz
Both writers reach for water as their image for the hardest kind of fighting, and they reach for it for opposite reasons. Sun Tzu’s water is a solved position: read the current, read the wind, take the high bank, and the outcome is not in doubt — “you will always be victorious in battle” is a formula, not a hope.
Clausewitz reaches for the same element to say the opposite thing. Discussing friction — the gap between war on paper and war as fought — he writes that “action in war is like moving in a resistant element,” that the simplest movement, walking, “cannot easily be performed in water,” and that this resistance “cannot, as in mechanics, be reduced to a few points” (On War, pp.119–121, quoted in artofWar_OnWar-compare.pdf, p.63). For Sun Tzu, water is the terrain you calculate correctly and then win. For Clausewitz, water is what calculation itself feels like once you are standing in the actual war rather than the planned one — the thing no position, however correctly read, entirely gets you out of.
Series Note
Post #7 of 100. Next: Strategy #8 — Chariots (車) — publishes November 2026.