“If the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.”
Time, not just money, is the resource that runs out; plan for the duration or be broken by it.
Chapter 2’s cost argument reaches its ceiling: a protracted campaign will not merely be expensive — the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. This is the verse where duration stops being a cost line and becomes a solvency question. Everything Sun Tzu says about speed afterwards rests on this: campaigns do not fail at their planned length, they fail at their actual one.
A bridge loan funds six months of runway; the plan needs five. The plan takes eleven — not from any single failure, just the ordinary friction of permits, hiring, and one redo. The company does not die of its losses; it dies of month seven. The strain was never modeled, because the plan was only ever stress-tested at its own happy timeline.
Planning for duration is not padding every estimate — that way lies the plan nobody believes. The discipline is scenario-shaped: run the plan at its expected length, then at twice, and know which commitments break at the boundary. Sun Tzu’s statesman knows the strain point, not just the budget.