Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, or Mao Zedong? Who do you consider the best military strategist?

I hope this stirs a lively debate.  I do think everyone should read Michael Handel's Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought.

I would make one comment about this.  Note that we are not discussing anyone who is still alive today. I would add to Professor Holmes' challenge and ask are there any living strategic theorists who should be considered as part of the best military strategist discussion?

V/R

Dave

Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, or Mao Zedong?

November 26, 2012By James R. Holmes

Who do you consider the best military strategist? James Holmes surveys the field for some answers.

Last week we kicked off the winter term in the Naval War College’s Intermediate Level Course, dubbed Strategy & War. We spend the first week of seminars with the giants of strategic theory, namely Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, and Mao Zedong. That provides a platform from which we vault into historical case studies for the balance of the course. We encounter the rest of the greats—Thucydides, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Sir Julian Corbett, David Galula—along the way. At the outset of any seminar I like to canvass the students about their predispositions toward strategy. Solomon-like, I decree that each person justify his choice by listing a favorite passage from that theorist’s writings.

Does Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, or Mao speak to a particular group of people more, and why? Which concepts find more favor? Mao tends to finish third, probably because he carries heavy historical baggage. In six years of overseeing seminars, I have never had a Maoist class. Whatever the Chinese Communist Party chairman’s strategic ingenuity, it’s hard to overlook the mounds of dead Chinese bodies stacked up during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, when Mao made the transition from tearing down a state to building his own. By my unscientific count, around a quarter of students ‘fess up to being admirers of Maoist works such as On Protracted War. On the whole, setting aside Mao’s third-party candidacy, seminars generally incline slightly to Clausewitz’s On War or to Sun Tzu’sThe Art of War.

This result implies that the late Michael Handel, who taught in my department when I was a mere whippersnapper of a student—hard to believe, I know—was correct to conclude that there is no clear-cut Asian or Western way of war. 

(Continued at the link below)

http://thediplomat.com/the-naval-diplomat/2012/11/26/clausewitz-sun-tzu-or-mao-zedong/