War & Peace Quote by Sun Tzu

War isn’t won by brilliance alone; it’s won by incentives that make other people’s bravery rational. Sun Tzu’s line cuts through the romantic fog that tends to gather around “victory” and names the engine underneath it: reward. The intent is bluntly managerial. If you want soldiers to recognize the advantage of defeating an enemy, you can’t rely on abstraction (duty, glory, the state). You have to attach tangible gain to the outcome so the calculation becomes personal as well as strategic.

The subtext is a cool-eyed view of human motivation. Sun Tzu assumes perception is not automatic; it’s shaped. “Advantage” is not some objective truth that troops will naturally internalize once a general explains it. It’s something that must be made legible through consequences. Rewards don’t merely compensate sacrifice; they teach people what matters. In that sense, he’s talking about propaganda before propaganda: the material proof that your side keeps its promises.

Context matters. In the era of warring states and shifting loyalties, armies were often assembled from conscripts, allied contingents, or factions with only conditional commitment. A commander couldn’t afford moralistic wish-casting about patriotism. Reward systems were governance tools: a way to stabilize loyalty, standardize risk-taking, and prevent the battlefield from turning into a marketplace of desertion.

What makes the sentence work is its unsentimental honesty. It refuses the flattering story leaders tell themselves-that others will fight for the leader’s reasons. Sun Tzu insists that victory is an institutional design problem: align the private interest of the many with the strategic aims of the few, or lose to someone who does.