“Bring war material with you from home, but forage on the enemy. Thus the army will have food enough.”
Live off what you capture; depending only on your own supply caps how far you can go.
Chapter 2 shifts from cost to supply design: bring war material from home, but forage on the enemy. The principle is radius — an army that carries everything is capped by its baggage train, while one that draws sustenance from the territory it moves through has no fixed limit. Sun Tzu states it as arithmetic, not romance: thus the army will have food enough.
A consultancy funds every new practice out of retained earnings: a year of unbilled research before each launch, and a ceiling of one new practice per decade. A rival builds the same practice inside a client engagement — the research gets paid for by the problem it solves, the case study writes itself, and the second practice launches within the first’s cash flow. Same expertise; one carries its provisions, one forages.
Foraging does not mean draining your customers — an army that strips the territory starves on the return march, and Sun Tzu is explicit elsewhere about winning the population. The modern discipline is structural: does the work generate its own next resource — data, reputation, revenue, learning — or does every step need fresh supply from home?