Ancient Doctrine Guiding Futuristic Warfare in Gulf : Strategy: Sun Tzu’s tiny book, written more than 2,500 years ago, is influencing U.S. and Iraqi tactics.

A general who long ago led troops with brass-tipped spears and rhinoceros-hide shields is today helping guide the high-tech missile and tank warfare in the Persian Gulf.

He is Sun Tzu, a shadowy figure of 6th-Century BC China who preached a military philosophy of subtlety and cunning in a tiny book called “The Art of War.” Long a revered text in Asian military academies, the volume of aphorisms has stirred new interest among the U.S. armed forces and contributed to a revolution in basic tactics in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Indeed, Sun Tzu’s principles are even being applied by the Iraqis, who absorbed his ideas in the 1970s and 1980s from their Soviet military advisers, according to military analysts.

“You could say Sun Tzu’s spirit is hovering above the whole conflict,” says Col. Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force officer who used to head a department at the National War College in Washington.

Sun Tzu’s doctrine is the opposite of the thinking that some people associate with the U.S. military.

Rather than applying massive firepower, Sun Tzu argued that the successful military leader will outwit his adversary with deception, disinformation, lightning flank attacks--anything that will throw the enemy off balance and achieve the desired goal at minimal cost.

“To subdue the enemy without fighting,” he wrote, “is the acme of skill.”

And for Sun Tzu, as for such later theorists as the 19th-Century Prussian strategist Karl von Clausewitz, the key to successful military strategy was understanding its political goal.

The Chinese general’s admirers stretch back through history. They include China’s Mao Tse-tung and Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, as well as, according to legend, Genghis Khan and Napoleon.

The book’s praises are also sung by warriors in business suits, such as former Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater, who claimed to have read it 20 times. Charles E. Bryan, pugnacious head of Eastern Airlines’ machinists union, began studying the book when he heard a rumor that Eastern’s management was using it against him.

Sun Tzu has his share of detractors. Some contend that his sayings are little more than common sense, or are so general as to be nearly valueless.

“It’s like ‘Buy low, sell high’--great idea, but how do you do it?” asks Michael Handel, a military analyst affiliated with the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. A German academic, Helmut Deckert, has described Sun Tzu as “chewing gum. You can stretch him to any shape you want.”

And some orthodox American military men believe that Sun Tzu’s subtlety can never replace the persuasive power of bombs and missiles. Some at the Pentagon “suspect this indirect approach may be slightly un-American,” says Gardiner.

Such quibbles don’t bother Sun Tzu’s fans, including those in the Marine Corps. Since August, scores of copies of a 90-page English translation of “The Art of War” have found their way to the Saudi wastes in the duffel bags of young Marines.

The Corps has even sent some tape cassettes of the book to the troops, who can listen to it on their Walkmen as they think about the Marine amphibious assault on Kuwait that some analysts expect to be launched any day now. The Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Alfred M. Gray, last year made Sun Tzu’s treatise the book of the year, which meant everybody in the Corps was supposed to study it.

But do the 18-year-olds really read it?

“You bet they do,” insists a Marine Corps major in Saudi Arabia.

In one way, Sun Tzu’s teaching could hardly be more relevant to the troops.

The Corps shaped its cinematic image charging up Pacific beaches, suffering huge casualties to claim real estate they considered strategic. The philosophy is summarized in the Corps maxim, “Hi diddle diddle, straight up the middle,” and it was good enough for John Wayne in “Sands of Iwo Jima.”

But for Sun Tzu, the frontal attack is just about the least attractive option: “Do not attack your enemy when he occupies key ground,” he advised. “In precipitous ground, lure him by marching off.”

Some analysts expect the Marines to follow Sun Tzu’s approach when the invasion order comes. Rather than a frontal assault, these analysts expect to see landing craft, helicopters and Harrier vertical takeoff jets punch through vulnerable spots in the Iraqi lines, then turn to strike them from the rear.

Sun Tzu’s work has been read in U.S. military schools for a long time, but the armed forces began to take it more seriously when the loss of the Vietnam War set off soul-searching and rethinking of basic military doctrine.

“The question was, what did we do wrong?” asks Col. Michael D. Wyly, vice president of the Marine Corps University at Quantico, Va., and a former combat officer who served two tours in Vietnam.

Officers such as Wyly saw a lot of Sun Tzu in the tactics that allowed the North Vietnamese to overcome superior American weaponry.

A standard North Vietnamese tactic was to begin an attack with mortar shelling, then infiltrate a small number of troops behind U.S. lines to sow confusion and set up a strike from the rear. This followed precisely Sun Tzu’s advice about seizing the enemy’s attention with the application of a “direct” force, or cheng, then knocking him off balance with an “extraordinary” force, or ch’i.

“I became very aware of how powerful just a couple of enemy soldiers behind us could be, when nobody knew where they were or what they were doing,” says Wyly. When he read Sun Tzu after the war, “I felt cheated that I hadn’t seen it before.”

Many officers who led small units in Vietnam discovered by trial-and-error the effectiveness of Sun Tzu’s precepts, says Wyly. Swift thrusts and retreats often proved far more effective in hurting the enemy than did head-on advances supported by heavy firepower, he says.

“Just by hiding behind paddy dikes and ambushing them, we could get a far higher body count,” Wyly recalls.

Sun Tzu’s ideas were incorporated in the 1980s into the Marine doctrine called “maneuver warfare.” The new thinking plays down the difference between offensive and defensive movements, and it emphasizes rapid thrusts through enemy lines, surprise, deception and delegation of decision-making to field officers.

Sun Tzu “is the foundation on which all maneuver warfare is based,” says Gray.

Wyly predicts that Sun Tzu’s thinking will have a noticeable influence in the Persian Gulf land battles, particularly in the tactics used by the younger officers who have been heavily exposed to his writings.

Some American officers believe the Vietnam War showed that Sun Tzu’s thinking made sense on a strategic level, as well as in battlefield tactics.

In their reaction to American bombing, the North Vietnamese followed Sun Tzu’s lesson about allowing the adversary to wear himself out by throwing his strength where it couldn’t inflict decisive damage.

“Avoid his strength and strike his emptiness and, like water, none can oppose you,” counsels “The Art of War.”

And in a war where the Americans often struggled to understand the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese seemed to succeed in following Sun Tzu’s advice about understanding the psychology of foe and friend, and fostering good relations with civilians.

Ho Chi Minh “let us wear ourselves down and defeat ourselves, while he was patient and got people throughout Vietnam to help him,” says Col. Jim Donovan, associate director of the Center for Defense Information, a private research group in Washington.

Ho’s allies in the Soviet Union were also students of Sun Tzu, and they passed on his teaching to the Iraqis during their decades as chief advisers to the country’s military. Some military analysts contend that Sun Tzu’s influence has been abundantly evident in Saddam Hussein’s conduct of the war, even if Hussein himself has never read “The Art of War.”

“There is definitely a conceptual link,” says Gardiner, the retired professor.

The Soviets, who have studied Sun Tzu in eight translations of his book, taught their Iraqi students Sun Tzu-style ground war tactics and also drilled them in the kind of deceptive techniques the Iraqis have used to throw off the allied air attack that began Jan. 17, some analysts say.

The Iraqis have used fake fiberglass tanks and aircraft, for example, to trick the allies into wasting million-dollar missiles on useless targets. They have camouflaged serviceable runways to make them appear destroyed and save them from allied fire, while making damaged runways appear unhit, to draw the allied attack.

Saddam’s Scud missile attacks on Israel, aimed at drawing Israel into the war and unraveling the anti-Iraq coalition, fit in with Sun Tzu’s advice that destroying alliances should be a top objective.

“If the enemy has no alliances, the problem is minor and the enemy is weak,” advised Sun Tzu.

But if Hussein inherited these ideas from the Chinese master, some analysts say that overall he deserves some sort of prize as the world’s worst student of Sun Tzu:

* While Sun Tzu urged that civilians and prisoners should be treated well, Hussein has bombed cities and apparently mistreated allied airmen.

* While Sun Tzu argued that heavy enemy casualties would rarely win a war, for months Hussein built his strategy around a ground war that could quickly kill thousands.

* And some analysts maintain that the Iraqi leader violated one of Sun Tzu’s first precepts when he invaded Kuwait: Don’t pick a fight you may not be able to win.

“Saddam risked the survival of the state, which is the very last thing Sun Tzu would recommend,” says Col. Ralph Cossa, a professor at the National War College.

Times staff writer David Lamb, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, contributed to this story.