> Clausewitz has BTW been held rather high regard by Marxists.
> Both Marx and Engels (who fancied himself an expert in military
> matters) had great admiration for the old Prussian officer
He made a lot more sense back then. There were still living in his undemocratic world.
I think most people hold up him or Sun Tzu simply because they signify strategy an independent branch of thought, like rhetoric or logic, that they want to say doesn't deserve its oblivsion. People cite Quintillian the same way. Then people usually go on to say what they think, which may be entirely different, and which may be smart.
Almost no one who reads Sun Tzu, for example, realizes that he was a theorist of warlord war, i.e., that he assume the rule is that you will have multiple opponents. Which makes him very different from the Western tradition, which always assume one front war as the norm and multiple front war as the exception.
It gives an entirely different meaning to his often quoted phrase "the greatest victory is the one you don't fight." What he meant was: the one where your two worst enemies kill each other for you and let you come in later and mop up.
Michael