“Now an army is exposed to six several calamities: flight, insubordination, collapse, ruin, disorganisation, and rout.”
Six specific failures wreck armies; naming them lets you watch for the early signs.
Chapter 10 pivots from ground to force: six calamities an army may suffer — flight, insubordination, collapse, ruin, disorganisation, and rout. The pivot is the chapter’s argument in miniature: terrain is only half the battle; the other half is what the force does to itself. And crucially, the coming verses attribute each calamity not to the enemy but to command decisions — the army’s failure modes are manufactured at home.
A post-mortem of a failed product group reads like the list: talent flight after comp changes, regional insubordination (each office running its own roadmap), collapse of the shared platform team, ruin from the vanity enterprise deal, disorganisation under a rotated-leadership regime, and finally rout — the panicked holiday pricing that erased the brand’s positioning in a week. Six calamities, all self-inflicted, none requiring a competitor.
The six are not six flavors of bad luck — the following verses assign each a specific command cause, which is what makes the list usable rather than depressing. Treating them as risks to be insured against misses the teaching: they are decisions to be not-made. The audit question for each is "what am I currently doing that produces this?"