“In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.”
Frontal contact starts the fight; the win comes from the indirect angle the opponent did not watch.
Chapter 5 states the thesis its metaphors will elaborate: in all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods are needed to secure victory. The division of labor is precise — direct forces make contact and fix the enemy’s attention; indirect forces arrive where that attention is not. Neither wins alone; the pairing is the engine.
A company contests the market’s mainstream head-on: the direct sales force, the feature parity releases, the conference presence — all meeting the incumbent where he is strongest, exactly as he prepared for. Meanwhile its real growth comes from the indirect element nobody watches: an open-source library its rivals’ own engineers adopt, quietly seeding the standard. The frontal contest was real — it is what kept everyone looking there.
Indirect does not mean sneaky or dishonest — it means arriving from an angle the defense did not cover, and the defense can always have covered it. Nor is the direct method a feint to be despised: without the fixing force, the indirect arrives at an enemy with full freedom of response. The misreading is choosing one method as an identity instead of orchestrating both.