“In crossing salt-marshes, your sole concern should be to get over them quickly, without any delay.”
When the terrain is hostile, the only plan is speed; delay on bad ground multiplies danger.
Chapter 9 classifies its third terrain: in crossing salt-marshes, your sole concern should be to get over them quickly, without any delay. The key word is sole — Sun Tzu forbids not just camping but any agenda on hostile ground. Salt marshes yield no forage, offer no position, forgive no error. Some ground exists only to be traversed, and strategy’s first duty there is speed.
A company spends three years "building presence" in a market whose structure makes presence unprofitable — a regulatory salt marsh where every sale needs a local entity, every entity needs capital, and no position compounds. A rival treats the same market as a crossing: one distribution deal, exported product, minimal footprint, through in fourteen months and on to fertile ground. The first confused persistence with strategy; the marsh paid neither.
Crossing fast is not abandoning every hard market — some hard ground is hill ground (valuable, worth taking slowly), and the strategist’s job is telling marsh from hill. The test is whether the ground compounds: does each year there make your position stronger, or merely endurable? Where nothing accumulates, the verse applies — get over it, and spend the saved years on ground that pays.