Guns, Drums And A Nokia Phone
The ART OF WAR: How Sun Tzu got through the filters, and Napoleon did not
By Susan Pavan, M.A.Journ.
Mastery of the Military Mind was one of our first restorations. It was put together before we used AI for anything, in the old way: source texts, scans, proofs, and a great deal of arguing about typography.
Our publishing house's founding partner (and my husband), Shane, usually carries this book, keys, wallet, and his Nokia phone. And this is not ironic. Until last year, he had almost no contact with artificial intelligence, and his position on the whole subject could fairly be summarized as a raised eyebrow. On the other hand, I have spent almost thirty years in media production, so between us we had a reasonable idea of how a film gets made and no idea at all of how one gets refused by a machine.
Which brings us to the trailer for this particular book, and to an afternoon that became an unintentional field test of its own contents.
The brief
Mastery of the Military Mind pairs Sun Tzu's The Art of War with Napoleon's Maxims of War, and continues into A General's Letters to His Son on Minor Tactics and selections from the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius. Two military minds, separated by roughly 2,300 years, chosen for much the same reason: they are two of the figures most often quoted by people who have never fought anything.
So the trailer needed both of them. One sequence in the Eastern world, one in the Western. Simple enough.
Sun Tzu walked straight through
The Chinese general went through on the first attempt. A figure on a ridge, banners below, an army assembled in mist at dawn, a scroll in his hand. No objection from any system we used.
Which is faintly amusing, because The Art of War is not a gentle book. Sun Tzu devotes an entire chapter to attack by fire. He devotes another to the use of spies, ranked by type. He discusses deception as a first principle, the handling of sieges, basically starving out the enemy, and the circumstances under which a commander should decline battle altogether.
He passed without comment.
Napoleon did not
Napoleon set off multiple systems, one after another. Violence cautions. Refusals. The generators saw a French uniform, a bicorne hat, smoke, cannon, and a burning skyline, and declined.
This was not good. We had a book about two commanders and a trailer with one of them in it.
Where the book started working
At which point somebody said the obvious thing, which was that we were holding the solution in our hands.
Know the ground. The first problem was that we did not actually know what was triggering the refusal. We assumed it was Napoleon. It was not. It was the composition around him: ordnance, fire, the visual grammar of an engagement already in progress. Sun Tzu insists throughout on knowing conditions before committing forces. We had done the opposite, and simply charged at the same wall repeatedly.
Attack where the enemy is unprepared. The systems were watching for combat. They were not watching for a parade. So we moved the entire scene away from the battlefield and into the return: flags, laurel, a river, a bridge, and a column of drummers.
Subdue without fighting. This is one of the great ideas in The Art of War and one of the most frequently reduced to a motivational poster. Sun Tzu's actual point is harder. Winning battle after battle is not the highest achievement; the superior result is the one obtained without having to fight at all. So we stopped trying to defeat the filter and asked instead what we actually needed. Napoleon. The period. An army. Movement. Anticipation. Not one cannon was required to get any of it.
Persevere. Napoleon's contribution to the afternoon, and Shane's. There is a plate on our wall from the 2009 European Cup, where he was man of the match for Italy in a side that lost, the award given for keeping the team pushing when the result was already going the other way. Restoring old books runs on the same quality more often than you would think.
How many attempts did it take? I asked Shane.
“Thousands.”
It was not thousands. It was enough.
Drums and guns
The version that finally worked has no cannon and no burning city. It has drummers.
And here is the part we did not expect. It is an image with a particular meaning. The cannon showed the violence. The drums make you anticipate it, and anticipation is the older technique and usually the stronger one, because the threat lives outside the frame, where the viewer has to build it.
Neither of our authors would have called that a compromise. Sun Tzu writes about gongs and drums as the instruments by which an army of any size is made to move as one mind. Shane had edited that passage, and did not need it explained. Napoleon's columns advanced to drums. The restriction had pushed us off the obvious image and onto the more interesting one.
We arrived at the right answer by being told no repeatedly, which, on reflection, is a fair description of how a great many tactics are discovered.
What the episode was actually about
Two things worth saying plainly.
The first is the asymmetry. A treatise containing detailed instruction on burning encampments and running networks of spies produced a serene image of a man holding a scroll. A collection of maxims on the conduct and movement of armies produced a refusal.
The difference was not the presence of warfare in the ideas. It was whether the picture looked like violence.
That is a real and useful distinction. It is roughly the distinction between an image and an argument. And, increasingly, between a feed and a library.
The second is stranger. A military text written more than two millennia before the computer gave us workable guidance for a problem created by artificial intelligence. Not as metaphor but as a method. Survey the ground. Work out what is actually stopping you. Decide what you genuinely need. Change the approach rather than repeating it. Stop fighting the thing you do not need to defeat.
This may be one reason old books keep outliving new technology, especially those that filter historical documents. The technology changes, but the problem underneath it usually does not.
Shane still has the Nokia. He still prefers to talk in person.
Mastery of the Military Mind: The Art of War by Sun Tzu and Napoleon's Maxims of War, with A General's Letters to His Son on Minor Tactics, selections from Marcus Aurelius, and a foreword drawn from Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen's West Point address, is published by Trumpet Publishing House. View the edition.
Susan Pavan, M.A.Journ., has worked in journalism and media production for almost thirty years. She is the publisher at Trumpet Publishing House and the author of The Cadet Code, Cocaine Communism, The Billionaire vs The House, Guardians of the Canon, The Alphabeets, and Bella and Bosco. She was named Top Independent Publisher & Journalist of 2026 by IAOTP.
Images: Trumpet Publishing House.