Thanks for that reference. Shamefully, had never heard of "The Role of Force in History" - only knew of the letters written by Marx and mostly Engels, collected here:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/letters/subject/war.htm
I'll look into the work you recommended, for sure. Cheers. It sounds like it dovetails pretty well with a line of thought I'm knocking around in my head at the moment re: military science, social science, applied social sciences (like Social Work), and whether military science, like social work, is an applied social science -- thus making warfighting a form of Social Work. Just as macro-practice social workers make analyses through the lenses of conflict theory or structural functionalist theory, etc., so military science uses guiding warfighting paradigms (what the US Army calls "doctrine"), which are ideological constructs in many ways similar to "grids of intelligibility" Foucault spoke of when he also reversed Clausewitz's dictum and said "Politics is war fought by other means" in _Society Must Be Defended_.
The official US Army guiding warfighting paradigms are detailed in Field Manual 100-5. The latest declassified one is from 1993, when I believe the AirLand approach was the guiding doctrine, have supplanted "Maneuver Warfare" from only a decade before, which the Marines explicitly endorsed in their own literature. And "Maneuver Warfare" as a warfighting doctrine was indeed decided through wargaming (see _The Global Wargame_ book by the Newport, Rhode Island's Naval War College, from 1993, which describes the complex wargames these commanders fought out in a big room, and on a board, etc., sounding much like Avalon Hill board gamers from the 1980s), contests of position papers in scholarly journals, sometimes written by civilian "armchair generals" with no military experience but a lot of academic cred, etc., etc.
I have Clausewitz's _Principles of War_ but obviously a lot has changed since those days, even if there are some maxims that are memorable or strikingly prescient.
-B.
Charles Brown wrote:
"Engels wrote encyclopedia articles on military science and the 'history of force'. He fought as an artillery officer in the revolutionary war of 1848. One of his nicknames was "The Colonel". http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1887/role-force/index.htm - Works of Frederick Engels 1887: _The Role of Force in History_"