“Having local spies means employing the services of the inhabitants of a district.”
Natives know the ground and mood no outsider sees; employ them for what only they know.
Chapter 13 begins defining its five classes with the humblest: having local spies means employing the services of the inhabitants of a district. First among equals — before the glamorous inward and converted agents — the people who simply live where the campaign will run. Sun Tzu’s ordering says something: the cheapest intelligence is the neighbor who already knows.
A retailer studies a foreign market through reports from three global consultancies and enters accordingly — failing in two years. The post-mortem interviews locals, who mention, uniformly, the thing no report contained: the site chosen floods every monsoon, and the entire neighborhood resents the landlord the deal was signed with. Every taxi driver in the district could have delivered this intelligence in the first fifteen minutes of the first visit. The locals were available, articulate, and unbilled.
Employing locals is not paying for anecdotes — the inhabitants are sources with coverage and bias like any other, and Chapter 13’s cross-checking discipline applies. What the class provides is ground-truth texture that no remote analysis generates: conditions as they are experienced by people who cannot easily leave. Enter a district without them and you are studying a map of a place that is actively withholding itself.