“If you are indulgent but unable to make your authority felt, your soldiers must be likened to spoilt children; they are useless.”
Affection without enforceable authority produces useless dependence; both must coexist.
Chapter 10 completes its leadership diptych with the warning stroke: indulgent but unable to make your authority felt, your soldiers are spoilt children — useless. The verse lands one breath after "beloved sons" precisely to prevent the misreading. Care was never the whole instruction; it was the first half of an instrument whose second half is authority, and either half alone produces a force that cannot function.
A beloved manager cannot hold a deadline, cannot deliver hard feedback, cannot protect the bar — and his team adores him for it right up until the reorg dissolves the group for underperformance. The kindest available reading of the post-mortem: he loved them into uselessness. The parallel manager who paired comparable warmth with non-negotiable standards kept her team through the same reorg — beloved sons, not spoilt children, is a leadership outcome and not a mood.
The line indicts the imbalance, not the affection — Sun Tzu never prescribes less care, only commanded care. The practical test is whether the team can receive a "no" from you without the relationship breaking. If every boundary requires a workaround, the indulgence has already done its quiet damage; useless, in the verse, is a forecast.