“We come now to the question of encamping the army, and observing signs of the enemy.”
Positioning and reading the enemy are the first acts; settle only after observing well.
Chapter 9 announces its program: we come now to the question of encamping the army, and observing signs of the enemy. The two verbs of the whole chapter — settling and reading — arrive in one sentence because they are one activity in Sun Tzu’s practice. The longest chapter in the book is essentially a field guide to observation, and it opens by sequencing: the reading comes before (and decides) the settling.
A retailer signs a flagship lease on a street’s "obvious" best corner — the settling before the reading. The observation it skipped: foot traffic counts by hour, the neighboring anchor’s lease expiry, the city’s infrastructure plan that will tear up the block for a year. The competitor two streets over spent three months watching before committing to a worse-looking corner that the data said was better. Same budget; one read the signs.
Observation has a deadline — armies on the march cannot study forever, and Chapter 2 prices every day of delay. The verse orders reading before settling, not instead of it. The misreading turns reconnaissance into procrastination with binoculars; Sun Tzu’s observer reads specific, listed signs and then decides, briskly, like everything else in this book.