Four chapters in this book are about the conduct of war: thirty, thirty-one, sixty-eight and sixty-nine. Read together they form a small and consistent body of doctrine, and they are the strongest evidence that the text belongs to the strategic literature of its period as well as to its philosophical literature.
The doctrine is roughly this. War is an instrument of last resort and its costs outlast the campaign. A good general stops when the object is achieved and does not convert victory into seizure. Anger and aggression in a commander are technical faults rather than moral ones, because they produce bad decisions. The defensive posture is stronger than the offensive one, and the side that grieves for the fighting is the side that wins.
That last claim, from chapter sixty-nine, is the one that shows the chapters are not pacifist. They assume there is a battle, they assume somebody wins it, and they say which side does. Chapter sixty-eight ranks kinds of competence in a warrior. Chapter thirty accepts that a campaign may be undertaken because there was no choice.
The vocabulary here overlaps with the military writing of the Warring States, which also prized calculation over ardour, treated the enemy's momentum as something to be borrowed rather than met, and regarded a war won without battle as the best outcome. What this book adds is chapter thirty-one, which is not about effectiveness at all: it requires that a victory be conducted with funeral rites, and no manual of strategy asks that.