Clausewitz and Modern Strategy

Michael I. Handel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136285479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Published in 1996, Clausewitz and Modern Strategy is a valuable contribution to the field of Military Strategic Studies. The magnum opus of Carl von Clausewitz, On War, is a work frequently quoted (usually the one famous quotation) but often superficially read. The essays in this book were presented at an international conference 'On Clausewitz' held at the US Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania in April 1985.

PART ONE

CLAUSEWITZ REVISITED

The Eternal Clausewitz

MARTIN VAN CREVELD

The problem which the present article seeks to address is why, among all the better-known writers on military theory within Western civilization, it is Clausewitz alone whose work appears able to withstand every kind of political, social, economic, and technological change since it was published, and seems to stand fair chance of remaining forever of more than purely historical interest.¹ It is a problem which would have intrigued Clausewitz himself, for he was an ambitious if frustrated man. Like Shakespeare (‘so long as men can breathe or eyes can see/so long lives this and this gives life to thee’) and Horace (‘a monument I have built/more durable than bronze’) he fully intended his work to last. As he wrote in an introductory note, ‘It was my purpose to write a book that would not be forgotten after two or three years and which would be consulted more than once by those interested in the subject.’ The question that needs answering is why, of all those who tried, he was the only one to succeed.

To begin with, a few observations on what Clausewitz is not. His work is acutely relevant to the actual conduct of war and has been so for the century and a half since it was written; yet its popularity has nothing to do with the kind of ‘usefulness’ that causes good handbooks to sell, and indeed it is precisely those sections where he comes closest to offering advice of the how-to-do-it-variety – concerning fortress warfare, for example – which are most often regarded as hopelessly obsolete.

Nor can its continuing fame be attributed to its being readable in a literary or journalistic sense. True, many of Clausewitz’ metaphors, such as the one comparing war to a game of cards (thus bringing out the role of chance), battle to cash payment in a business transaction (illustrating battle’s role in war), and activity in war to walking in water (clarifying the nature of friction) are very well selected. On War also contains an occasional quotable sentence, such as ‘War is the continuation of politics by other means’ or ‘The best strategy is always to be really strong, first in general and then at the decisive point.’

The work violates the rules of composition in that it offers no single, clear progression of thought, no well-defined ‘culminating point’ towards which everything strives, not even ‘conclusions’ succinctly summarizing the main points that it seeks to make. Instead, it moves about in a spiral-like way. It examines the same arguments from many different angles, sends the reader back and forth by means of innumerable cross references, and returns time and again to ram home the same fundamental points. Although the overall division of the work into eight books, each with its own title, is logical enough, the structure of the individual books is often complicated and always asymmetrical, the section-captions themselves being almost invariably dull and pedestrian. What would an editor of Time make of a caption that reads: ‘Frequent periods of inaction remove war still further from the realm of the absolute and make it even more a matter of assessing probabilities’? How exciting is the annoncement that ‘The preceding chapter showed that the nature of war is complex and changeable. I now propose to inquire how its nature influences its purpose and its means’? Surely, anybody who wrote like this in a creative writing course would see his work thrown out the window.

Thus, Liddell Hart in The Ghost of Napoleon to the contrary, Clausewitz’ writings are very far from constituting a kind of ‘Prussian Marseillaise’ which ‘inflames the blood and intoxicates the mind’;³ in fact few writers have tried to make their influence felt so purely by means of the intellect alone. Both in his personal life and his work, Clausewitz deliberately avoided any appeal to the emotions. Although it probably is possible to sum up Clausewitz’ doctrine in a few ringing phrases, to do so would represent a gross narrowing down and even distortion of the real significance of his work, and would often lead to mere banalities.⁴ The greatest of all writers on war, in brief, makes for no easy bedside reading. If one is to benefit fully from his work – and if it is not to give rise to endless misunderstandings, as he himself feared it would – it has to be studied repeatedly, seriously, and in depth, taking into account both the immediate historical background against which it was written and its timeless eternal character. Thus, whatever the reasons behind Clausewitz’ growing fame and continuing popularity, they do not include a facile pen making for easy reading and quick understanding.

I

Without a doubt, one reason why Clausewitz has succeeded in retaining his relevance through a century and a half of very rapid changes in warfare is the sheer comprehensiveness of his writings. Although he did not deal with economics (the entire problem of mobilizing the state’s material resources for war) or with technology (which he regarded as constantly changing and therefore as essentially irrelevant to the unchanging verities he was concerned with)⁵ for the rest there is practically no kind or element of war on which he does not have something sensible to say within the scope of a single book. The statesman and the politician may find in him a guide to war as one of their instruments and also to the way in which war ought to relate to policy. The warlord may find much to help clarify his thoughts concerning strategy, battle, attack, defense, surprise, external and internal lines, and a host of related matters. The tactician may find in him, besides a profound analysis of the nature of battle and the way it is decided, some of the best discussions ever of such subjects as mountain warfare and cordon defense. The historian will look to On War for guidance on the functions of military history and the way in which it ought to be studied and written, whereas the theoretician can find an immense amount of value in Clausewitz’ discussion of the nature of military theory and the way in which it does and ought to relate to military practice. Although written mainly with conventional warfare in mind, the book is also relevant to guerrilla warfare,⁶ and its definition of war as a rational instrument in the hands of politics puts it into the very center of the nuclear debate.⁷ On War, in short, differs from other works in that it contains much more than occasional insights however trenchant or even brilliant. Nor does it commit another common error, that of trying to reduce war to a handful of ‘nothing buts’. Instead it presents a systematic, comprehensive and well-rounded discussion that would, as was the author’s explicit intention, have been even more complete had it not been for his untimely death. Consequently whatever the kind of armed conflict one plans, or is engaged in, or investigates, one is certain to find something relevant in Clausewitz.

The real problem, however, is not merely how to say something about everything; rather, it consists of compressing a subject of infinite complexity and size – war – into a book of finite length. It is a problem that confronts every great work of philosophy and art, and it is very largely by their success in solving it that the greatness of such works is measured. Clausewitz’ solution is to argue by polarities. He always postulates a thing and its opposite. There is theory and there is practice. There is real war and there is absolute war. There is the moral and there is the physical. There is the genius of the individual and there is the spirit of the army. There is attack and there is defense. There is annihilation and there is attrition. There is regular war and people’s, or guerrilla, warfare. There is a profound awareness of the individuality of each separate historical event, but there is also a grasp of ‘history’ as a whole. This method of argumentation makes certain that, whatever one’s particular problem and selected course of action, it will always be possible to compare it with its opposite and thus clarify one’s thoughts, which is the true objective of theory.

Moreover, the poles once they have been set up do not remain entirely distinct. While opposed to each other, they are also shown to merge into each other, complement each other, and contain elements of each other. It is in this way that Clausewitz – like, for instance, Sigmund Freud, who uses the same device in postulating such concepts as eros and thanatos – achieves that most difficult feat, compressing a multi-dimensional, kaleidoscopic, rich reality into the sequential order of language and thought.

Characteristic of Clausewitz’ dualistic approach is his discussion of the phenomenon of genius on the one hand and its relationship with what might be called ‘the rules of the game’ on the other.⁸ The question as to whether genius breaks the rules – in this case imposed by the total of the means available to the art of war at a given time and place – or merely grasps them more completely and applies them more successfully than anybody else is of course a very ancient one. Believing that genius breaks the rules leads to hero worship of the kind associated with Carlyle; whereas believing in the genius’ complete understanding results in analyses of the ‘objective’ circumstances which made this or that action ‘inevitable’. Typically, Clausewitz’ solution to the problem combines the two approaches. Living after Napoleon but before Marx, he insists that they do not contradict but rather complement each other, that genius both makes its own rules and obeys existing ones, both makes the utmost use of the available means and combines them in new and unprecedented ways.⁹ Thus genius without those means is nothing, but those means without genius will never rise above the mediocre.

Another good example of Clausewitz’ dual approach is the way in which he approaches the question of rationality in war. Surely nobody has ever been more insistent than he that war is (or, at any rate, ought to be) a rational instrument in the hands of policy; at the same time, however, Clausewitz more than anybody else emphasizes that war is the domain of anger and fear, boldness and passion, in short, of the most violent emotions known to man, and that any analysis of it which does not take these emotions into account will be completely without value. In war as elsewhere reason and emotion stand poles apart, yet at the same time they must complement each other and interact with each other, indeed make use of each other. It is precisely his insistence that both these things are and should be present which sets Clausewitz apart from theoreticians such as Jomini or du Pic who have emphasized the one or the other.

When a work is able to look at both sides of the coin, to contrast them and yet at the same time bring out their relations and overlappings, that work may be described as profound. It moves on many different levels, captures many different meanings at once. Like Plato’s Republic or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it is capable of evoking not a single interpretation – no work of philosophy capable of being understood in only one way will last for long – but many different ones.¹⁰ And this Clausewitz does in language which, though not always simple, is neither abstruse, nor technical, nor pedantic, but readily understandable to specialist and layman alike. It is a remarkable achievement.

II

One way to understand why Clausewitz has lasted so well is to compare the study of war with the study of nature. War does not qualify as a natural event, but partly for that very reason, its study does offer some useful analogies and contrasts to the methods of natural science. As understood since the time of the ‘scientific revolution’ – that is, the days of Galileo and Descartes – natural science consists of examining physical nature and establishing the existence of regularities in it. For example, Newton’s studies of nature led him to the conclusion that bodies move according to the formula A = F/M (acceleration equals force divided by mass). Einstein found that energy equals mass times the square of the velocity of light (E = MC²). Newton’s conclusion was dubbed the Second Law of Mechanics; Einstein’s, the General Law of Relativity. Both regularities are supposed to exist in nature regardless of whether or not they are observed or by whom; it is in this sense that they are said to be ‘objective’.

Given that it is the business of science to discover regularities, ‘scientific progress’ may mean one of several things. It may mean the establishment of more and more regularities within a single field; their progressive extension to new fields (for example, from physics and astronomy, where the process began in the seventeenth century, to chemistry and biology, which became scientific two hundred years later); their progressive reduction, as far as possible, to ever broader, more comprehensive and fewer regularities (such as the attempt to combine the four basic forces known to us in a single formula); and the discovery, from time to time, that this or that regularity which was supposed to hold true does not in fact exist in nature. Conversely, a work on natural science may be said to be ‘out of date’ either because the regularities which it postulates are false, or because it does not regard them in their proper context, or because it does not take cognizance of additional regularities which were discovered after the time it was published.

In any case, once a work of this kind is ‘out of date’, once nature has been shown to obey regularities additional to or deeper than or different from those which it postulates, it generally ceases to be of any but historical interest – that is, as evidence of the way people thought about nature at a given time and place. Although it may still attract attention because of the historical importance of its thesis (a good example would be Charles Darwin’s Origins of Species), or else because of the sheer elegance of its reasoning, it can no longer be regarded as a correct explanation of the way things work and, consequently, as a useful guide as to how they will work if tried.¹¹

Understood in this sense, then, natural science presents a double face. It is concerned with explanation in the sense of discovering regularities in the way things actually happen; and,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART 1. Clausewitz Revisited
• PART 2. On War: Theoretical Dimensions
• PART 3. Clausewitz Misperceived