Sun Tzu's essays on The Art of War from the earliest of known treaties on the subject ,but have never been surpassed in comprehensiveness and depth of understanding. They might well be termed the concentrated essence of wisdom on the conduct of war. Among all the military thinkers of the past only Clausewitz is comparable,and even he is more dated than Sun Tzu, and in part anticipated, although he was writing more than two thousand years later.Sun Tzu has clearer vision, more profound insight, and eternal freshness.
Civilization might have been spared much of the damage suffered in the world wars of this century if the influence of Clausewitz's monumental tomes On War, which moulded European military thought in the era preceding the First World War, had been blended with and balanced by a knowledge of Sun Tzu's exposition on The Art of War. Sun Tzu,s realism and moderation form a contrast to Clausewitz's tendency to emphasize the logical ideal and the absolute which his disciples caught ob to developing the theory and development was fostered by Clausewitz's sictum that : To introduce into the philosophy of war a priciple of moderation would be an absurdity war is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds . Yet subsequently he qualified this assertion motive of the war , should be the stabdard for determining effort to be made . Moreover, his eventual conclusion was that to pursue the logical extreme entailed that 'the means would lose all relation to the end'.