Sunzi was a household name by the 1980s and continued to establish itself in the popular imagination in the decades that followed. It was quoted and referred to in movies and television shows without explanation. Outside academic debates as to the universality of Sunzi as a work of strategy, it clearly symbolized the use of strategy for many people. While anyone could mention Sunzi to signal their interest in strategy, serious students of strategy put Sunzi together with Clausewitz to claim to know strategy from A to Z. Robert Asprey actively promoted Sunzi within military circles, both out of conviction of its value and because of his friendship with Samuel Griffith. John Boyd, a retired air force officer, developed his own approach to strategy that was influential mostly in the Marine Corps. Some of his supporters have called Boyd “the greatest strategist since Sunzi.”

Chapter 9 analyzes the theories of John Boyd and William Lind. It describes their lives as well as their "America," which was marked by the widespread sense of malaise that followed America’s failure in Vietnam. Both theoriests contributed to a resurgence of maneuver theory as well as to an empasis on the importance of an adversary’s cultural values and social cohesion. This chapter discusses their assumptions about war’s nature, which formed the modern model.