On War

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This article is about the treatise on military strategy. For for the manga series, see Neo Gomanism Manifesto Special - On War.

Vom Kriege is a book on war and military strategy by Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, written mostly after the Napoleonic wars, between 1816 and 1830, and published posthumously by his wife in 1832. It has been translated into English several times as On War. It is one of the most important treatises on strategy ever written, and is prescribed at various military academies to this day.

On War is actually an unfinished work; Clausewitz had set about revising his accumulated manuscripts in 1827, but did not live to finish the task.

Contents

[edit] History

Carl von Clausewitz was a Prussian officer among those baffled by how the armies of the French Revolution and Napoleon had changed the nature of war through their ability to motivate the populace and thus unleash war on a greater scale than had previously been the case in Europe. Clausewitz was well educated and had a strong interest in art, science, and education, but he was a professional soldier who spent a considerable part of his life fighting against Napoleon. There is no doubt that the insights he gained from his experiences, combined with a solid grasp of European history, provided much of the raw material for the book. On War represents the compilation of his most cogent observations.

[edit] Synopsis

The book contains a wealth of historical examples used to illustrate its various concepts. Frederick II of Prussia (the Great) figures prominently for having made very efficient use of the limited forces at his disposal. Napoleon also is a central figure.

Among many strands of thought, three stand out as essential to Clausewitz' concept:

  • War must never be seen as a purpose to itself, but as a means of physically forcing one's will on an opponent ("war is the continuation of politics through other means").
  • The military objectives in war that support one's political objectives fall into two broad types: "war to achieve limited aims" and war to "disarm” the enemy--“to render [him] politically helpless or militarily impotent."
  • The course of war will tend to favour the party devoting more resolve and resources (a notion twisted by Germany's leaders in World War One into "total war"--the pursuit of complete military victory regardless of the political consequences).

Some of the key ideas (not necessarilly original to Clausewitz or even to his mentor Gerhard von Scharnhorst) discussed in On War include (in no particular order of importance):

  • the dialectical approach to military analysis
  • the methods of "critical analysis"
  • the uses and abuses of historical studies
  • the nature of the balance-of-power mechanism
  • The relationship between political objectives and military objectives in war
  • the asymmetrical relationship between attack and defense
  • the nature of "military genius"
  • the "fascinating trinity" (Wunderliche Dreifaltigkeit) of war
  • philosophical distinctions between "absolute or ideal war," and "real war"
  • in "real war," the distinctive poles of a) limited war and b) war to "render the enemy helpless"
  • "War" belongs fundamentally to the social realm—rather than the realms of art or science
  • "strategy" belongs primarily to the realm of art
  • "tactics" belongs primarily to the realm of science
  • the essential unpredictability of war
  • the "fog of war"
  • "friction"
  • strategic and operational "centers of gravity"
  • the "culminating point of the offensive"
  • the "culminating point of victory"

Clausewitz used a dialectical method to construct his argument, leading to frequent modern misinterpretation.

The West's modern perception of war is based on the concepts Clausewitz put forth in On War, though these have been very diversely interpreted by various leaders, thinkers, armies, and peoples. Western military doctrine, organization, and norms are all based on Napoleonic premises, even to this day--though whether these premises are necessarilly also "Clausewitzian" is debatable.

The "dualism" of Clausewitz's view of war (i.e., that wars can vary a great deal between the two "poles" he proposed, based on the political objectives of the opposing sides and the context) seems simple enough, but few commentators have proved willing to accept this crucial variability--they insist that Clausewitz "really" argued for one end of the scale or the other. On War has been seen by some prominent critics as the place where the concept of total war was made explicit and it has been blamed1 for the level of destruction involved in the First and Second World Wars, whereas it seems rather that Clausewitz had merely foreseen the inevitable development that started with the huge, patriotically motivated armies of the Napoleonic wars. These resulted (though war's evolution has not yet ended) in the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with all the forces and capabilities of the state devoted to destroying forces and capabilities of the enemy state (thus "total war"). Conversely, Clausewitz has also been seen as "The preeminent military and political strategist of limited war in modern times." (Robert Osgood, 1979)

Clausewitz and his proponents have been severely criticized, perhaps quite unfairly, by competing theorists--Antoine-Henri Jomini in the 19th century, B.H. Liddell Hart in the mid-20th, and Martin van Creveld and John Keegan more recently. On War is a work rooted solely in the world of the state, says historian Martin Van Creveld, who alleges that Clausewitz takes the state "almost for granted" as he rarely looks at anything previous to Westphalia. He alleges that Clausewitz does not address any form of intra/supra-state conflict, such as rebellion, because he could not theoretically account for warfare before the existence of the state. Previous kinds of conflict were demoted to criminal activities without legitimacy and not worthy of the label "war." Van Creveld argues that "Clausewitzian war" requires the state to act in conjunction with the people and the army, the state becoming a massive engine built to exude military force against an identical opponent. He supports this statement by pointing to the conventional armies in existence throughout the 20th century.

On the other hand, Clausewitz never saw these 20th-century states and armies--the states with which he himself was familiar were quite different. In any case, the "Clausewitzian Trinity" that Van Creveld condemns as consisting of a rigid statist hierarchy of "People, Army, and Government," does not in fact consist of those three concrete actors. Typically for the Clausewitz critics, Van Creveld's attack is based on a sloppy reading of On War (or, more likely, of secondary works by U.S. Army Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., who was in fact an admirer of Clausewitz but who interpreted everything in On War through the narrow lens of the Vietnam War). In fact, the words people, army, and government appear nowhere in the paragraph in which Clausewitz defines his famous Trinity. Rather, the Trinity of forces that drive the course of real-world war in Clausewitz's view are 1) violent emotion, 2) the interplay of chance and probability, and 3) human reason. It seems unlikely that emotion, chance, and rationality will cease to play a role in war any time soon, whatever the fate of the state.

[edit] Notes

  1. For example, writing in his introduction to Sun Tzu's Art of War, B.H. Liddell Hart stated that Civilization might have been spared much of the damage suffered in the world wars of this century if the influence of Clausewitz's monumental tomes On War, which molded European military thought in the era preceding the First World War, had been blended with and balanced by a knowledge of Sun Tzu's exposition on `The Art of War'. This comment is tempered by the comment that the ill-effects of Clausewitz's teaching arose largely from his disciples' too shallow and too extreme interpretation of it, but it remains an influential criticism. Extracted from "The Art of War (UNESCO Collection of Representative Works)" Samuel B. Griffith [1]

[edit] Editions

(Translations are into English unless otherwise noted)

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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