Clausewitz lives

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Thu Mar 27 03:56:26 PST 2003


On Wed, 26 Mar 2003 andienachgeborenen wrote:


> > To make Clauswitz normative is to turn him on his head. And to make
> > him even more redundant in the post WWI period, since thereafter no
> > one anymore claimed glory or self-expression as a sufficient
> > justification for going to war.
>
> Today, those notions are not widely shared. But we have their
> counterparts, such as the idiot notion of prestige or face that kept the
> US in Vietnam long after it became clear that it was a losing
> proposition.

Against which Clausewitz is no antidote. The people who thought and think like that are the ones most likely to know their Clausewitz. And Vietnam is exactly the war Clausewitzians are least able to understand.

The textbook on strategy in the Army War college has since the early 1980s been _On Strategy: A Critical Examination of the Vietnam War_ by Col. Harry Summers. As you can tell by the title, it is essentially an homage to Clausewitz and an attempt to apply his precepts to our most recent and central war experience. If you want to see how somebody can get blinded to reality by Clausewitzian logic (and take others with him), this is the book. As many people have pointed it out, he and the army would both have done better to have read Basil Liddell Hart.

Clausewitzian thinking has very little to do with his widely quoted apercu about politics. It is rather about how the truth of war is revealed when it is reduced to an essentialist physics about Force and Matter and Speed and Unity of Action. It's kind of like reading Znosko-Borovsky on chess combinations. In chess, this way of thinking presents a delightfully antique exercise in Enlightenment hubris. But when The Elements of Hubris is taught to warriors, the prospect is less delightful.

Secondly, the apercu itself has nothing with war having a purpose. This idea rests on a slightly inaccurate translation. The original actually says that war is the continuation "of political discourse" (des politischen Verkehrs) "with the intermixing of other means" (mit Einmischung anderer Mittel.) If political discourse is the discourse of face, then so too will war be.

Lastly, while the argument that you are making -- that war ought to have a purpose and ought to make sense -- is completely sound, you don't need Clausewitz's long and turgid tome to make it, or any other book for that matter. It is immediately apparent to any person of sound reason. And those who are not of sound reason will never be convinced by Clausewitz. They'll just be ensorcelled into a late 18th/early 19th century thinking style.

An die Nachgeborenen indeed :o)

Michael



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