At the heart of the versatility of Sun Tzu’s thinking – and a basic reason it is so extraordinarily conducive to digital age applications – stands its unswerving emphasis on the pivotal importance of information as a resource for strategic actors.

“Interface” in present usage is a modern concept whose roots lie in physical science and engineering disciplines. For serendipitous reasons it happens to work well as a conceptual tool for structuring Sun Tzu’s approach to leadership topics, starting with the political level (the ruler) and extending in the military realm down to the level of common soldiers. That is the focus of Theme #13.

Through textually grounded "reverse engineering" of Sun Tzu’s ideas, this study challenges widely held assumptions. Sun Tzu is more straightforward, less "crafty," than often imagined. The concepts are more structural, less aphoristic. The fourteen themes approach provides a way of addressing Sun Tzu’s tendency to speak to multiple, often shifting, audiences at once ("multivocality"). It also sheds light on Sun Tzu’s limitations, including a pervasive zero-sum mentality; focus mostly on conventional warfare; a narrow view of human nature. Sun Tzu’s enduring value is best sought in the text’s extensive attention to warfare’s information aspects, where Sun Tzu made timeless contributions having implications for modern information warfare and especially its human aspects (e.g., algorithm sabotage by subverted insiders). The text points opportunities for small, agile twenty-first-century strategic actors to exploit cover provided by modern equivalents to Sun Tzu’s "complex terrain" (digital systems, social networks, complex organizations, and complex statutes) to run circles around large, sluggish, established institutional actors, reaping great profit from applying Sun Tzu’s insights.

This methodologically oriented chapter starts by defining military concepts: strategy, logistics, tactics, operations. Sun Tzu himself did not distinguish between strategy and tactics, so this is a modern lens on Sun Tzu’s thinking. Next, a standardized five-part format is introduced, to be used to provide uniform structure for the fourteen chapters analyzing fourteen major Sun Tzu themes: (a) list of Sun Tzu passages chosen to illustrate a given theme (just a list, not the passages themselves); (b) Sun Tzu (1) analysis of Sun Tzu’s ideas pertaining to that theme; (c) further Sun Tzu (1) analysis of facets of the given theme that conditions of war and politics in Sun Tzu’s time suggest that Sun Tzu might plausibly have discussed, yet did not discuss; (d) Sun Tzu (2) and (3) "frontiers" of the theme, generalizing Sun Tzu’s relevant ideas in selected Sun Tzu (2) and (3) directions; (e) passages listed in Part (a) (in Griffith’s translation), often with brief commentary . The chapter ends by introducing notational conventions used throughout this study to refer to Griffith verses and passages.

This topic comprises Themes #3 and #4, whose central thrusts are, respectively, cheap military successes and paths to the same larger political end using civilian approaches – i.e., winning without major fighting (at least in a classic military sense). Although it does not capture the sum total of Sun Tzu’s Theme #3 thinking, a core part of that thinking focuses on extremes of both benefits and costs – reaping the former and avoiding the latter.

The war ended for the 1ère Armée more with a whimper than a bang. While Sixth Army Group had succeeded in eliminating the Colmar Pocket, morale in the 1ère Armée at the end of a tough winter campaign was low, especially as soldiers felt that the French population had disengaged from the war. Operation Cheerful saw the French army invading Germany as part of the Sixth Army Group, directed by de Gaulle to seize objectives to force the Allies to designate a zone d’occupation française. The liberation and occupation of Germany had witnessed a recurrence of violence inflicted on the civilian population by French soldiers as in Italy, earning for the French the nickname “Russians of the West.” De Gaulle’s post-Liberation celebration of victory sought to diminish the role of the Allies and the 1ère Armée, while celebrating that of the resistance and Leclerc’s 2e DB. None of this served either to repair French civil–military relations, badly damaged by the war, or to acknowledge the role played by the empire in France’s liberation, all of which stored up future tensions. Incorrigible to the last, de Lattre settled into an extravagant lifestyle at his headquarters in Lindau, which flouted the conditions of post-war austerity, and caused de Gaulle to recall him to France. Committed to the retention of empire as a symbol of French grandeur, de Gaulle insisted that France reclaim its Indochinese “balcony on the Pacific.” However, the fact that the French colonial infrastructure had been obliterated by the Japanese, allowing Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh, with Chinese complicity, to fill Vietnam’s political vacuum would have made it difficult in the best of circumstances for a debilitated France to reassert its sovereignty in Southeast Asia. France’s return to its far-away colony was hobbled by an absence of a viable policy for Indochina, a situation worsened by political instability in Paris following de Gaulle’s surprise January 1946 resignation, a dysfunctional command tandem in Saigon that yoked two headstrong commanders in d’Argenlieu and Leclerc, each with different priorities, and political concessions made by France’s negotiators led by Salan under pressure from Leclerc to catch the tides to launch Operation Bentré – the reoccupation of Vietnam north of the 16th parallel.

While the French longed for Liberation, they also feared its destructive and divisive potential. Given diminutive conventional French forces, de Gaulle counted on popular resistance to symbolize the participation of the French people in their own liberation. However, the fear that a “national insurrection” would cause great slaughter, and benefit the communists, caused planners to define down the concept. The STO crisis and emergence of the maquis phenomenon seemed to offer political opportunities to various players. However, the réduits maquisards played at best a marginal role in the Liberation, while their destruction offered another “black legend” of betrayal by the Gaullists and the Allies, one promoted by the PCF. The liberation of Paris served as one of the Second World War’s iconic moments, both as a milestone in the rollback of Nazi power and as a consecration of France’s republican resurrection. De Gaulle’s GPRF moved rapidly to assume the levers of national power, forcing a resistance that had consecrated, democratized, and legitimized him to step back into the ranks. De Gaulle’s acclamation removed any lingering reservations, even in Washington, that he was the legitimate leader of France. The levée was finished, the emergency over, and former FFI would henceforth fight the Germans “amalgamated” as soldiers in the regular army, not serve the political ambitions of resistance leaders and communists facilitated by the interface services.

As a mechanism of social control, the post-Liberation amalgame of l’armée d’Afrique and the FFI of the internal resistance might be considered a partial success, insofar as it formed part of a larger Gaullist strategy to reestablish a legal state and curtail the temporary anarchy of the Liberation. But it failed to repair French civil–military relations, further strained by defeat and widespread military support for Vichy. Some of the more politicized FFI rejected l’amalgame altogether, to remain politically active in Paris, Toulouse, and elsewhere. L’amalgame’s military utility is more debatable. In one respect, l’amalgame was the only option open to the GPRF to replenish its exhausted Anfa divisions desperate for replacements. Optics were also a factor, as one goal of l’amalgame, and its corollary the blanchiment – that is substituting FFI for Senegalese in de Lattre’s 1ère Armée – was to reinforce the Gaullist mantra that France had been liberated by its own people, not by empire and the Allies. But insofar as it was a product of military necessity, l’amalgame lacked means. In the straightened circumstances of the Liberation, training for France’s new soldiers was ad hoc and piecemeal, with weapons in short supply and logistics dependent on the Americans at the very moment the 1ère Armée was to face one of the most challenging campaigns of the war in Alsace. In this respect, l’amalgame might be considered a “semi-failure.” The experiment of amalgamating FFI units as distinct organizations had been completely abandoned by early 1945, as the CFLN transformed itself into a provisional republic (GPRF) that began the divisive process of purging Vichy aparatchiks from the government and military, and punishing French women who had fraternized with German occupiers. It remained to be seen in the invasion of Germany whether France could field only une armée en trompe l’œil. In the meantime, many of the Vichy loyalists were evacuated to Sigmaringen, accompanied by a rump of Francs-Gardes and their families. Few of the collaborators who evacuated to Germany to be integrated into what became the Charlemagne Division Germany survived.