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Clausewitz, Carl Philip Gottlieb von (1780-1831), Prussian general and theorist of war. His posthumously published work On War (1832) is the most important general treatment of its subject yet produced. Clausewitz entered the Prussian army as a 12-year-old in the spring of 1792, and was soon drawn into the French Revolutionary wars that began a few weeks before. The following year he fought in the Rhineland and the Vosges, indecisive campaigns of position and manoeuvre typical of what would soon be called ‘the Old Regime’, but sufficient for the moment to bring peace to northern Germany. In 1801 he was admitted to the Institute for Young Officers in Berlin. There he came into contact with the Institute superintendent, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, the seminal intellectual influence of Clausewitz's life. Scharnhorst was among the first to recognize that the French Revolution would transform the conduct of war, and that the social and political institutions it was creating would in turn create new military possibilities which the conservative monarchies of central Europe would be hard-pressed to match. Clausewitz's earliest surviving manuscripts date from his years at the Institute. They reveal a mind already engaged by questions of the broadest military and political significance.
Scharnhorst's insights were vindicated in October 1806, when the forces of Napoleonic France crushed those of Prussia at the twin battles of Jena/Auerstadt. Clausewitz was present as adjunct to the king's nephew. In the retreat that followed he assumed command of part of the rearguard—the only time he commanded troops in combat—and eventually spent seven months interned in France. Upon his return he became involved in the movement to reform the Prussian state and army, in which Scharnhorst, again, was a key figure. In 1812, following Prussia's acceptance of a French alliance, which Clausewitz found politically and emotionally intolerable, he resigned his commission and, along with some 30 other Prussian officers, went to serve in Russia. There he witnessed the epic campaign that would break Napoleon's hold on Europe, a process to which Clausewitz made a modest personal contribution as negotiator, on the Russian side, of the Convention of Tauroggen, by which the Prussian contingent of the Grande Armée withdrew from the war.
As the war moved back into central Europe, Clausewitz worked to raise provincial militia and other irregular forces against the French, activity that was judged treasonous by some since, like the Convention of Tauroggen, it was done without the king's consent. He regained his Prussian commission in April 1814, and was COS to a corps during the Waterloo campaign. In 1818 he became superintendent of the Allgemeine Kriegsschule (War College) in Berlin, a purely administrative post that did not require him to teach, but did afford time for historical and theoretical work. In 1831 he set his studies aside when the outbreak of civil war in Poland caused Prussia to mobilize part of its army. Clausewitz was chosen as COS of the forces deployed to observe the conflict. He died in Breslau of cholera a few months later.
On War was published by Clausewitz's wife the following year. It has always been judged a demanding text, in part because it was never subjected to the comprehensive revision Clausewitz knew it required. The book is thus marred by inconsistencies and omissions that further work would presumably have reduced. On the other hand, anyone familiar with the first chapter of book 1, the only part that Clausewitz declared finished to his satisfaction, may wonder whether, if the entire book had been brought to a comparable state of theoretical density and analytic precision, the results would be any easier to interpret. In the end, whatever difficulty On War poses for the reader does not arise from its accidental shortcomings, but from its author's intellectual ambition.
On War is only secondarily a work of strategic theory, if by that one means a work intended to improve our ability to wage war successfully. Clausewitz had his own ideas about the best way to conduct military operations, and much of On War is devoted to strategic and tactical analyses that were certainly intended to appeal to the practical instincts of other professional soldiers. Yet his study of the history of war had also made him aware that his insights would some day lose whatever practical value they might possess for their own time. His ultimate goal was therefore to reach beyond such instrumental concerns, in order to grasp war as a total phenomenon, and understand its relationship to the social and political world of which it is a part. The result is a work whose most essential propositions are so encompassing that they might be easily mistaken for truisms: that the essence of war is violence, which knows no natural limit; that war ‘does not consist in a single blow’, but involves protracted interaction between opposing wills; that every attack loses impetus as it proceeds, until it reaches a culminating point where it no longer exceeds the strength of the defence that opposes it; that war is dominated by chaos and chance, which Clausewitz characterizes metaphorically as friction; that military genius can be cultivated, but not taught; that the only means in war is combat; that war is merely a continuation of policy; and so on. Theory at this level cannot serve as a guide to action, and is not intended to. On War is not about how to fight. It is about how to think about war.
For Clausewitz, one requirement for clear thinking was an unflinching respect for war's physical, psychological, and historical reality. He disdained bold strategizing that took no account of how difficult the simplest action becomes in the ‘resistant medium’ of war. He recognized the impact of fear, danger, confusion, and fatigue on men in battle, and wrote about them with unusual candour. He also rejected the idea that contemporary military methods represented a normative standard against which past practices could be judged. If wars in the past rarely achieved the scale and violence of Napoleon's greatest campaigns, it did not mean that previous generations had somehow failed to grasp a science whose true principles had now been revealed. For Clausewitz, the goal of theory was not to transpose reality into a system of abstractions, but to illuminate it with as little intellectual distortion as possible. No theory could be adequate that did not account for the full range of military experience captured in the historical record. That record suggested that war at all times possessed what Clausewitz called a ‘dual nature’. Few wars were ever intended to overthrow the enemy completely. Most sought limited goals, and were accordingly fought by limited means.
Clausewitz's recognition of the theoretical significance of limited war was both a consequence and a source of his insight into war's political and instrumental character. Clausewitz was scarcely the first to see that wars arise from political quarrels, or that they answer to purposes beyond themselves—that they are ‘about’ something. But he was the first to recognize the analytic power that these perceptions possessed when rigorously applied to all aspects of war.
For Clausewitz, the ‘subordination’ and ‘permeation’ of war by politics meant that there could be no ‘purely military solution’ to any military problem. It also exemplified a kind of complex tension that always attracted him. War, he famously proposed, was a ‘remarkable trinity’, whose essential elements—primordial violence and passion, the ‘free play’ of chance and creativity on the battlefield, and intelligent political purpose—could never be fixed in any arbitrary relationship. War's subordination to politics was logically necessary, and the norm in practice. Yet it was never perfect or absolute. War always threatened to escape its political restraints, and often did succeed in modifying the course of policy to some extent. The violence of war and the rationality of politics were thus theoretical opposites whose real existence was nevertheless marked not by mutual repulsion or exclusion, but by intense and continuous interaction.
Similarly dynamic conceptual structures—which in Clausewitz's day would have been described as ‘dialectical’—pervade On War at every level. Violence and reason, genius and friction, attack and defence, risk and decisiveness, ends and means, fear and courage, victory and defeat—such dualities weave their way throughout the text like musical figures, echoing and recurring in unexpected registers that may sometimes startle or disconcert us, but which finally provide the work with an intellectual integrity that transcends its superficial incongruities. In a note written towards what proved to be the end of his life, Clausewitz openly feared that his work would be liable to ‘endless misinterpretation’ and ‘much half-baked criticism’, an apprehension that has been borne out more than once. Yet his ultimate ambition—‘to write a book that would not be forgotten after two or three years’—would also be amply fulfilled. Few comparably demanding works in any field have so thoroughly withstood the test of time.
Bibliography
— Daniel Moran
Clausewitz's On War (1832) is the most important general study of war. Incomplete and in need of revision at the time of Clausewitz's death, its sometimes disconnected arguments are typically remembered as relatively simple propositions, which do not always reflect the complexity of the reasoning that produced them. Among these are: that war is not an autonomous phenomenon, but a political instrument; that the violence of war knows no theoretical limit, and is prone to escalate; that war's theoretically boundless violence is tempered in practice by the political goals of the belligerents, and by the “friction” to which military operations are subject; that armed forces possess “centers of gravity,” whose successful attack promises the most decisive military results; that all attacks lose impetus as they proceed; and that the defensive is the stronger form of war. These and similar insights, although by no means universally accepted, are well established as foundational elements of serious strategic theory in the United States and throughout the world.
Clausewitz's work first attracted widespread attention among English‐speaking readers in the aftermath of Germany's victory over France in 1871, a success that Prussia's chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke, attributed in part to the influence of Clausewitz's ideas. The first English translation of On War appeared two years later, and thereafter Clausewitz acquired a growing reputation among military professionals as a proponent of operations that were swift, violent, offensive, and decisive in character to overcome the strength of defense conducted with modern weapons—an interpretation that owed more to the perceived requirements of industrialized warfare than to a close reading of his work. After 1914, Clausewitz's writings were studied for clues to German military conduct, and increasingly misread as harbingers of Prussian militarism. By the outbreak of World War II, it was not unusual for American authors to find significant links between Clausewitz and Hitler.
This baleful trend was checked primarily by the work of German expatriates like Herbert Rosinski and Hans Rothfels, who presented Clausewitz's ideas with greater comprehensiveness, and greater attention to their original context, than most of their Anglo‐American counterparts had done. Of special significance was Rothfels's contribution to the first edition of Makers of Modern Strategy (1943), which demonstrated the analytic power of Clausewitz's identification of war as a political instrument, and also the fundamental significance of what Clausewitz called the “dual nature” of war, by which he had sought to reconcile the historical preponderance of limited war with the theoretically unlimited violence of war as such. Rothfels also portrayed Clausewitz himself as a figure of great intellectual integrity, striving for a disinterested and universally valid understanding of war.
Rothfels's essay set a new intellectual standard and a new direction for Clausewitz scholarship in English, which reached a culminating point in 1976 with the simultaneous appearance of Peter Paret's magisterial Clausewitz and the State, and a new translation of On War by Paret and Michael Howard. Clausewitz's insistence on war's political nature acquired special resonance in the nuclear era, when the means of organized violence so often threatened to dwarf the aims of policy; while his emphasis on the preeminence of limited war throughout history spoke directly to those who had endured the frustrations of Korea and Vietnam. At the end of the twentieth century, Clausewitz's ideas permeated the professional education and outlook of American military officers. When Michael Howard, writing in the wake of the Persian Gulf War (1991), nominated Clausewitz (in the New York Times) as “Man of the Year,” the proposal was rightly seen less as a jest than as tacit acknowledgment that, 160 years after his death, Clausewitz's influence and reputation had never been greater.
[See also War: Nature of War.]
Bibliography
Clausewitz, Karl Maria von (1780-1831) Prussian general and military theorist.
Clausewitz, who fought in the Napoleonic wars, is most famous for his unfinished treatise On War (Vom Kriege), published posthumously in 1832 (an English translation was published in 1873). His most famous dictum is that war is “merely the continuation of politics by other means.” Clausewitz wrote that a war, though theoretically boundless, is limited by the political objectives of the belligerents and by “friction” (errors, chance, fatigue). He viewed the defensive as the stronger form of war, and advocated that offensive operations be swift, overwhelming, and decisive.See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.
German military leader and strategist Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) has been called the "father of modern warfare." As a member of the officers' corps of the mighty Prussian army from an early age, Clausewitz witnessed some of the most decisive European battles of his century and culled his observations into a body of theories that were outlined in his 1832 tract, On War. Its most enduring statement, "War is a continuation of policy by other means," has been widely misconstrued.
Clausewitz was born Karl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz on June 1, 1780 in the Prussian city of Burg, near Magdeburg, capital of Saxony-Anhalt. He was one of six children of Friedrich Gabriel von Clause-witz, a retired Prussian army officer. Though Prussia no longer exists as a sovereign nation, during Clausewitz's lifetime it was one of Europe's most formidable powers. It originated as a duchy in the seventeenth century, and eventually acquired enough territory and influence to crown a king. Prussia remained independent from the Holy Roman Empire, but enjoyed close ties to it. The military campaigns led by the armies of Frederick the Great greatly added to its territory.
Clausewitz's formal military training began at the age of twelve, when his father brought him to the headquarters of the 34th Infantry Regiment in Potsdam in 1792. Here he began his training as an officer cadet. Such early martial instruction was not uncommon in the Prussia of the late eighteenth century. His older brother, Wilhelm, was already a second lieutenant with the corps. Not long after his arrival at the barracks, Clausewitz witnessed his first battle, when his regiment was sent to liberate the cathedral city of Mainz from French occupying forces. Clausewitz's duties as a Fahnenjunker, or ensign, apart from carrying the regimental standard in marches, included visiting the wounded in the field hospitals and writing reports on them to his commanding officer.
At the King's Court
When the Prussian army withdrew from participation in the French Revolutionary Wars in 1795, Clausewitz was posted to a remote garrison for several years. He occupied his time by reading a great deal, and studying for the entrance examination to the Institute for Young Officers in Berlin. In 1801, he took the test and was accepted. Its director, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, would become a key figure in the modernization of the Prussian army. He implemented changes that would make it one of the most successful forces of the coming century.
Scharnhorst recognized Clausewitz's abilities and became the young officer's mentor. In 1803, Clausewitz graduated first in his class from the Institute, and was appointed military adjutant to the young Prussian prince, August. With this prime posting, he entered the rarefied world of the Berlin royal court, with its round of balls, banquets, and lavish official ceremonies. It was an enriching, but difficult time for Clausewitz. He was still a low-ranking officer with a correspondingly paltry pay rank. Many of his fellow officers were of noble birth and possessed independent family incomes. Still, Clausewitz became acquainted with many famous European political and cultural luminaries of the day here, and also met his future wife at a Berlin gathering late in 1803. Countess Marie von Bruhl came from an old, esteemed Saxon line of aristocrats. It took several years of engagement before her family would grant approval for her marriage to Clausewitz.
Prisoner of War
In France, Napoleon Bonaparte had exploited the political and economic chaos of the post-revolutionary years and seized power. He proclaimed himself emperor in 1804, and launched a war that added territory to France despite opposition from a coalition of British, Austrian, Russian, and Swedish forces. Prussia joined the fight in 1806, but suffered devastating losses at Jena and Auerstadt. It would mark a turning point for both Clausewitz and Prussia. He and Prince August were captured in the area near Prenslau and taken as prisoners of war.
Clausewitz's captivity was not a punitive one. Officers who were taken into custody by a foreign power were usually allowed to move about freely; they only had to surrender their insignia and weapons, and swear an oath that they would not take up arms against the detaining army. Thus Clausewitz spent part of 1806 in Berlin and Neu-Ruppin, but was then sent with Prince August to Soissons, France, where he spent half of 1807. He began writing articles about the military debacles of the previous year. "Observations on Prussia in its Great Catastrophe" was finished in 1806. Its criticisms of how the Prussian regiments had lost at Jena and Auerstadt were considered so inflammatory that the work would not be published in Germany for another seven decades.
Sided with Russia
A major political capitulation occurred in 1807, when Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm signed an agreement with Napoleon. The treaty handed over nearly half of Prussian land to the French. This was seen as a humiliating defeat and incensed many officers, including Clausewitz. Still, it meant that he and the prince were released from official detention. Clausewitz returned to Berlin to aid Scharnhorst, who had been named head of the newly created Prussian Ministry of War and was working to reorganize and reform the army. In 1810, Clausewitz was promoted to the rank of major and began teaching at Berlin's Kriegsschule, the newly reconstituted school from which he had himself graduated with top honors. His salary and good repute combined to finally win the approval of the von Bruhl family. He and the Countess were married at St. Mary's Church in Berlin on December 17, 1810.
Tension between Prussia and Napoleonic France became strained. In February 1812, King Friedrich Wilhelm approved a request to send a Prussian corps of 20,000 men to join Napoleon's march on Russia. Clausewitz wrote a severe denunciation of this act of treachery that went unpublished for several years. Then he resigned, (as did many other high-ranking officers), and took up arms on the Russian side. Before his departure, he left with Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm - for whom he served as military tutor - a manuscript for safekeeping. This work, containing many of his theories and tactics, was the forerunner of his later treatise, On War.
Victory at a Terrible Price
In Russia, Clausewitz participated in several infamous battles. The French army managed to reach Moscow, but was decimated by its long, harsh winter. In late November 1812, a turning point was reached when the French were routed at the Berezina River. In the last days of the calendar year, Clausewitz was involved in negotiations that came to be known as the Convention of Tauroggen. This changed the course of the war decisively. The entire Prussian army joined with the Russians to defeat the French, and won a great victory at Leipzig in October 1813. Paris was seized five months later, and Napoleon was banished to the Mediterranean island of Elba.
After Tauroggen, Clausewitz was reinstated in the Prussian army as a colonel. However, he still was disliked by King Friedrich Wilhelm, and was not appointed to any command position. In early 1815, Napoleon escaped from Elba and once again gathered a force that retook Paris and did battle with a combined force of Prussian, Austrian, British, and Russian troops. At the battle of Ligny, at which Clause-witz was present, the French inflicted great casualties. Napoleon was defeated that same week by the British at Waterloo, in Belgium.
A Low Profile
In October 1815, Clausewitz was appointed chief of staff for Prussia's Army of the Rhine. He and his wife lived in Koblenz, Germany at this time. In 1818, Clausewitz was promoted to the rank of general and became the administrative director of the Kriegsschule. He had been recommended for the post by another key figure in the Prussian military organization, August von Gneisenau. Clausewitz had come to known Gneisenau through Scharnhorst, and had served under him during the Napoleonic Wars.
The position was a rather dull one, however, and Clausewitz spent much of the 1820s writing his opus. Because of the continued disfavor of the king and a postwar mood of conservatism, he was not able to teach or implement any of his ideas at the officers' college. He kept a low profile, and was even known as somewhat of a recluse. There were rumors that he was a drinker, due to his ruddy complexion. But this was caused by dermatological damage he had suffered during the Russian winter of 1812, when battlefield temperatures sometimes dropped to forty degrees below zero.
In 1830, tensions erupted at Prussia's border with Poland. Clausewitz had harsh words for the Poles, whom he considered unfit for self-government. He was appointed chief of staff to Gneisenau, commander of Prussia's Army of the East, and departed for Breslau, to serve as an inspector near the border. Before he departed, he sealed all his manuscripts, including what would become On War.
War was averted, but a cholera epidemic struck the area in late 1831, and felled Gneisenau in Poznan. Clause-witz was quarantined for a time, but then allowed to return to Breslau. Ten days later, on November 16, 1831, he died of cholera. His wife edited the manuscripts and had them published in 1832.
Theories of Conflict
On War, the work's English title, is difficult reading in any language. Its eight sections bear headings such as "On the Nature of War," "The Engagement," "Defense," and "War Plans." Clausewitz believed that the time-tested mathematical strategies for battle were increasingly useless in his modern age. War, unlike mathematics, was mostly unpredictable. In his writing, Clausewitz draws upon his own battlefield experiences in detailing innovative methods of retreat, flank positions, marches, and subsistence. He also wrote at length on more theoretical topics, such as his notion of what he called "absolute war." This would become On War 's most infamous and misunderstood passage. According to Clausewitz, absolute war was violence unchecked by any controls, whose aim is to utterly annihilate the enemy. "The destruction of the enemy's military force is the leading principle of war; … The results will be greatest when combats unite themselves into one great battle," he wrote. But Clausewitz went on to note that in reality, such abstract "pure" war did not exist, for political strategies and goals served to restrain such massive carnage.
On War belongs to a genre of controversial works that have, at times, been subject to many conflicting interpretations - Machiavelli's The Prince and Das Kapital by Karl Marx have earned a similar place on the bookshelves of history. Indeed, the Marxist-Leninist theory of war is culled significantly from Clausewitz's theories. It remains an important, though controversial text in military academics, and has been an integral part of the United States officers' curriculum since the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
Clausewitz's groundbreaking writings have prompted some to note wryly that as people became more civilized, warfare grows increasingly vicious. Despite the nature of his professional beliefs, Clausewitz was anything but a belligerent man. Extant images and memoirs reveal him as serious, shy, and, in appearance, closer to that of a poet or composer than the stereotypical Prussian general.
Further Reading
Aron, Raymond, Clausewitz: Philosopher of War, Simon and Schuster, 1983.
Parkinson, Roger, Clausewitz: A Biography, Stein and Day, 1971.
Clausewitz, Karl von (Burg nr. Magdeburg, 1780-1831, Breslau), Prussian general and military writer, entered the infantry in 1792 and almost immediately saw active service in the French campaigns of 1792-3. He came to the notice of Scharnhorst and after Jena, where he was taken prisoner, was active in the War Department. He emigrated to Russia and served in the War of 1812 and the War of Liberation (see Napoleonic Wars). In 1814 he returned to the Prussian army and was present at Ligny and Wavre. After 1815 he held various high appointments, dying of cholera at Breslau.
Clausewitz wrote a number of military books, including accounts of the campaigns of 1813 and 1815. His most famous work, Vom Kriege, was left unfinished and published in the first three volumes of Hinterlassene Werke (10 vols., 1832-7). It sees war as a continuation of politics, the ultimate arbiter when all else has failed. He supported the conception of national war and insisted that wars must be conducted swiftly and ruthlessly in order to reach a clear decision in the minimum time. Clausewitz was not a warmonger; his doctrine is a logical deduction from existing conditions.
Bibliography
See P. Paret, Clausewitz and the State (1976).
Quotes:
"War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of politics by other means."
| Carl Philipp Gottfried von[1] Clausewitz | |
|---|---|
![]() in Prussian service, 1999 painting based on an 1830 original by Karl Wilhelm Wach |
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| Born | June 1, 1780 Burg bei Magdeburg, Prussia |
| Died | November 16, 1831 (aged 51) Breslau, Prussia |
| Allegiance | (1792–1808, 1813–1831) (1812–1813) |
| Years of service | 1792–1831 |
| Rank | Major-General |
| Unit | Russian-German Legion III Corps |
| Commands held | Kriegsakademie |
| Battles/wars | Siege of Mainz Napoleonic Wars |
Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz[1] (
/ˈklaʊzəvɪts/; July 1, 1780 – November 16, 1831[2]) was a Prussian soldier and military theorist who stressed the moral (in modern terms, "psychological") and political aspects of war. His most notable work, Vom Kriege (On War), was unfinished at his death.
Clausewitz espoused a romantic conception of warfare, though he also had at least one foot planted firmly in the more rationalist ideas of the European Enlightenment. His thinking is often described as Hegelian because of his references to dialectical thinking but, although he probably knew Hegel, Clausewitz's dialectic is quite different and there is little reason to consider him a disciple. He stressed the dialectical interaction of diverse factors, noting how unexpected developments unfolding under the "fog of war" (i.e., in the face of incomplete, dubious, and often completely erroneous information and high levels of fear, doubt, and excitement) call for rapid decisions by alert commanders. He saw history as a vital check on erudite abstractions that did not accord with experience. In contrast to Antoine-Henri Jomini, he argued that war could not be quantified or reduced to mapwork, geometry, and graphs. Clausewitz had many aphorisms, of which the most famous is that "War is the continuation of Politik by other means" (Politik being variously translated as 'policy' or 'politics,' terms with very different implications), a description that has won wide acceptance.[3]
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Von Clausewitz's Christian names are sometimes given in non-German sources as "Carl Philipp Gottlieb" or "Carl Maria", because of reliance on mistaken source material, conflation with his wife's name, Marie, or mistaken assumptions about German orthography. He spelled his own given name with a "C" in order to identify with the classical Western tradition; writers who wrongly use "Karl" are seeking to emphasize his German identity. "Carl Philipp Gottfried" appears on Clausewitz's tombstone and thus is most likely to be correct.
Clausewitz was born on June 1, 1780 in Burg bei Magdeburg, Kingdom of Prussia, the fourth and youngest son of a lower middle-class family. His grandfather, the son of a Lutheran pastor, had been a professor of theology. Clausewitz's father was once a lieutenant in the Prussian army and held a minor post in the Prussian internal revenue service. Clausewitz entered the Prussian military service at the age of twelve as a Lance-Corporal, eventually attaining the rank of Major-General.[4]
Clausewitz served in the Rhine Campaigns (1793–1794) including the Siege of Mainz, when the Prussian army invaded France during the French Revolution, and served in the Napoleonic Wars from 1806 to 1815. He entered the Kriegsakademie (also cited as "The German War School," the "Military Academy in Berlin," and the "Prussian Military Academy") in Berlin in 1801 (age 21), studied the writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and won the regard of General Gerhard von Scharnhorst, the future first chief of staff of the new Prussian Army (appointed 1809). Clausewitz, Hermann von Boyen (1771–1848) and Karl von Grolman (1777–1843) were Scharnhorst's primary allies in his efforts to reform the Prussian army between 1807 and 1814.
Clausewitz served during the Jena Campaign as aide-de-camp to Prince August. At the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt on October 14, 1806 – when Napoleon invaded Prussia and defeated the massed Prussian-Saxon army commanded by Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick – he was captured, one of the 25,000 prisoners captured that day as the Prussian army disintegrated. He was 26. Clausewitz was held prisoner in France from 1807 to 1808. Returning to Prussia, he assisted in the reform of the Prussian army and state.
On December 10, 1810 he married the socially prominent Countess Marie von Brühl and socialized with Berlin's literary and intellectual elite. She was a member of the noble German von Brühl family originating in Thuringia. They first met in 1803.
Opposed to Prussia's enforced alliance with Napoleon I, he left the Prussian army and served in the Russian army from 1812 to 1813 during the Russian Campaign, including the Battle of Borodino. Like many Prussian officers serving in Russia, he joined the Russian-German Legion in 1813. In the service of the Russian Empire, Clausewitz helped negotiate the Convention of Tauroggen (1812), which prepared the way for the coalition of Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom that ultimately defeated Napoleon and his allies.
In 1815, the Russo-German Legion was integrated into the Prussian Army and Clausewitz re-entered Prussian service. He was soon appointed chief of staff of Johann von Thielmann's III Corps. In that capacity, he served at the Battle of Ligny and the Battle of Wavre during the Waterloo Campaign in 1815. The Prussians were defeated at Ligny (south of Mont-Saint-Jean and the village of Waterloo) by an army led personally by Napoleon, but Napoleon's failure to destroy the Prussian forces led to his defeat a few days later at the Battle of Waterloo, when the Prussian forces unexpectedly arrived on his right flank late in the afternoon to support the Anglo-Dutch forces pressing his front.
Clausewitz was promoted to Major-General in 1818 and appointed director of the Kriegsakademie, where he served until 1830. In that year the outbreak of several revolutions around Europe and a crisis in Poland appeared to presage another major European war. Clausewitz was appointed chief of staff of the only army Prussia was able to mobilize, which was sent to the Polish border. He died after commanding the Prussian army's efforts to construct a cordon sanitaire to contain the great cholera outbreak in 1831 (the first time cholera had appeared in Europe, causing a continent-wide panic).
His widow published his magnum opus on the philosophy of war in 1832, on which he had started working in 1816, but had not completed.[5] She wrote the preface for On War and by 1834 had published several of his books. She died two years later.
Clausewitz was a professional soldier who was involved in numerous military campaigns, but he is famous primarily as a military theorist interested in the examination of war. He wrote a careful, systematic, philosophical examination of war in all its aspects. The result was his principal work, On War, the West's premier work on the philosophy of war. It was only partially completed by the time of his death, but just how close to completion it was is a matter of considerable scholarly dispute. It clearly contains material written at different stages in Clausewitz's intellectual evolution, producing some significant contradictions between different sections, and the sequence and precise character of that evolution is a source of much debate. Clausewitz constantly sought to revise the text, particularly between 1827 and his departure on his last field assignment, to include more material on "people's war" and forms of war other than between states, but little of this material was included in the book.[5] Soldiers before this time had written treatises on various military subjects, but none had undertaken a great philosophical examination of war on the scale of those written by Clausewitz and Leo Tolstoy, both of which were inspired by the events of the Napoleonic Era.
Clausewitz's work is still studied today, demonstrating its continued relevance. More than ten major English-language books focused specifically on his work were published between 2005 and 2010. Lynn Montross, writing on that topic in War Through the Ages (1960), said; "This outcome... may be explained by the fact that Jomini produced a system of war, Clausewitz a philosophy. The one has been outdated by new weapons, the other still influences the strategy behind those weapons."[page needed] Although Jomini also wrote extensively on war, he did not attempt to define war. Clausewitz did, providing a number of definitions. The first is his dialectical thesis: "War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will." The second, often treated as Clausewitz's 'bottom line,' is in fact merely his dialectical antithesis: "War is merely the continuation of policy by other means." The synthesis of his dialectical examination of the nature of war is his famous "trinity," saying that war is "a fascinating trinity—composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason."[6]
The degree to which Clausewitz managed to revise his manuscript to reflect that synthesis is the subject of much debate. His final reference to war and Politik, however, goes beyond his widely quoted antithesis: "War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means. We deliberately use the phrase "with the addition of other means" because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs. The main lines along which military events progress, and to which they are restricted, are political lines that continue throughout the war into the subsequent peace."
Clausewitz introduced systematic philosophical contemplation into Western military thinking, with powerful implications not only for historical and analytical writing but also for practical policy, military instruction, and operational planning. He relied on his own experiences, contemporary writings about Napoleon, and on historical sources. His historiographical approach is evident in his first extended study, written when he was 25, of the Thirty Years War. He rejects the Enlightenment's view of the war as a chaotic muddle and instead explains its drawn-out operations by the economy and technology of the age, the social characteristics of the troops, and the commanders' politics and psychology. In On War, Clausewitz sees all wars as the sum of decisions, actions, and reactions in an uncertain and dangerous context, and also as a socio-political phenomenon. He has several definitions, the most famous one being that war is the continuation of politics by other means. He also stressed the complex nature of war, which encompasses both the socio-political and the operational and stresses the primacy of state policy.
The word "strategy" had only recently come into usage in modern Europe, and Clausewitz's definition is quite narrow: "the use of engagements for the object of war." Some modern readers find this narrow definition disappointing, but his focus was on the conduct of military operations in war, not on the full range of the conduct of politics in war. Nonetheless, Clausewitz conceived of war as a political, social, and military phenomenon which might — depending on circumstances — involve the entire population of a nation at war. In any case, Clausewitz saw military force as an instrument that states and other political actors use to pursue the ends of policy, in a dialectic between opposing wills, each with the aim of imposing his policies and will upon his enemy.[7]
Clausewitz's emphasis on the inherent superiority of the defense suggests that habitual aggressors are likely to end up as failures. The inherent superiority of the defense obviously does not mean that the defender will always win, however: there are other asymmetries to be considered. He was interested in cooperation between the regular army and militia or partisan forces, or citizen soldiers, as one possible — sometimes the only — method of defense. In the circumstances of the Wars of the French Revolution and with Napoleon, which were energized by a rising spirit of nationalism, he emphasized the need for states to involve their entire populations in the conduct of war. This point is especially important, as these wars demonstrated that such energies could be of decisive importance and for a time led to a democratization of the armed forces much as universal suffrage democratized politics.
While Clausewitz was intensely aware of the value of intelligence at all levels, he was also very skeptical of the accuracy of much military intelligence: "Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.... In short, most intelligence is false." This circumstance is generally described as the fog of war. Such skeptical comments apply only to intelligence at the tactical and operational levels; at the strategic and political levels he constantly stressed the requirement for the best possible understanding of what today would be called strategic and political intelligence. His conclusions were influenced by his experiences in the Prussian Army, which was often in an intelligence fog due partly to the superior abilities of Napoleon's system but even more to the nature of war. Clausewitz acknowledges that friction creates enormous difficulties for the realization of any plan, and the fog of war hinders commanders from knowing what is happening. It is precisely in the context of this challenge that he develops the concept of military genius, whose capabilities are seen above all in the execution of operations.
Clausewitz's "fascinating trinity" (wunderliche Dreifaltigkeit) comprises (1) a blind impulse, located in the people and their passions, including hate and enmity, (2) free will, which belongs to the army and its leader and includes chance and probability, and (3) pure reason, which pertains to the government.[8] The theory of war needs to deal with all three factors.
Key ideas discussed in On War include:
Clausewitz used a dialectical method to construct his argument, leading to frequent misinterpretation of his ideas. British military theorist B. H. Liddell Hart contends that the enthusiastic acceptance by the Prussian military establishment – especially Moltke the Elder – of what they believed to be Clausewitz's ideas, and the subsequent widespread adoption of the Prussian military system worldwide, had a deleterious effect on military theory and practice, due to their egregious misinterpretation of his ideas:
As so often happens, Clausewitz's disciples carried his teaching to an extreme which their master had not intended.... [Clausewitz's] theory of war was expounded in a way too abstract and involved for ordinary soldier-minds, essentially concrete, to follow the course of his argument – which often turned back from the direction in which it was apparently leading. Impressed yet befogged, they grasped at his vivid leading phrases, seeing only their surface meaning, and missing the deeper current of his thought.[11]
As described by Christopher Bassford, professor of strategy at the National War College of the United States:
One of the main sources of confusion about Clausewitz's approach lies in his dialectical method of presentation. For example, Clausewitz's famous line that "War is a mere continuation of politics by other means," ("Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln") while accurate as far as it goes, was not intended as a statement of fact. It is the antithesis in a dialectical argument whose thesis is the point – made earlier in the analysis – that "war is nothing but a duel [or wrestling match, a better translation of the German Zweikampf] on a larger scale." His synthesis, which resolves the deficiencies of these two bold statements, says that war is neither "nothing but" an act of brute force nor "merely" a rational act of politics or policy. This synthesis lies in his "fascinating trinity" [wunderliche Dreifaltigkeit]: a dynamic, inherently unstable interaction of the forces of violent emotion, chance, and rational calculation.[2]
Another example of this confusion is the idea that Clausewitz was a proponent of total war as used in the Third Reich's propaganda in the 1940s. He did not use the term: rather, he discussed "absolute war" or "ideal war" as the purely logical result of the forces underlying a "pure," Platonic "ideal" of war. In what he called a "logical fantasy," war cannot be waged in a limited way: the rules of competition will force participants to use all means at their disposal to achieve victory. But in the real world, such rigid logic is unrealistic and dangerous. As a practical matter, the military objectives in real war that support political objectives generally fall into two broad types: "war to achieve limited aims"; and war to "disarm" the enemy, "to render [him] politically helpless or militarily impotent." Thus the complete defeat of the enemy may not be necessary, desirable, or even possible.
In modern times the reconstruction of Clausewitzian theory has been a matter of some dispute. One analysis was that of Panagiotis Kondylis, a Greek-German writer and philosopher, who opposed the interpretations of Raymond Aron in Penser la Guerre, Clausewitz, and other liberal writers. According to Aron, Clausewitz was one of the first writers to condemn the militarism of the Prussian general staff and its war-proneness, based on Clausewitz's argument that "war is a continuation of politics by other means." In Theory of War, Kondylis claims that this is inconsistent with Clausewitzian thought. He claims that Clausewitz was morally indifferent to war (though this probably reflects a lack of familiarity with personal letters from Clausewitz, which demonstrate an acute awareness of war's tragic aspects) and that his advice regarding politics' dominance over the conduct of war has nothing to do with pacifist ideas. For Clausewitz, war is simply a means to the eternal quest for power, of raison d'État in an anarchic and unsafe world.
Other notable writers who have studied Clausewitz's texts and translated them into English are historians Peter Paret of Princeton University and Sir Michael Howard, and the philosopher, musician, and game theorist Anatol Rapoport. Howard and Paret edited the most widely used edition of On War (Princeton University Press, 1976/1984) and have produced comparative studies of Clausewitz and other theorists, such as Tolstoy. Bernard Brodie's A Guide to the Reading of "On War", in the 1976 Princeton translation, expressed his interpretations of the Prussian's theories and provided students with an influential synopsis of this vital work.
The British military historian John Keegan has attacked Clausewitz's theory in his book A History of Warfare.[12] Keegan argued that Clausewitz assumed the existence of states, yet 'war antedates the state, diplomacy and strategy by many millennia'.
Clausewitz died without completing On War, but despite this his ideas have been widely influential in military theory and have had a strong influence on German military thought specificially. Later Prussian and German generals such as Helmuth Graf von Moltke were clearly influenced by Clausewitz: Moltke's notable statement that "No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy" is a classic reflection of Clausewitz's insistence on the roles of chance, friction, "fog", uncertainty, and interactivity in war.
After 1890 or so, Clausewitz's influence spread to British thinking as well. One example is naval historian Julian Corbett (1854–1922), whose work reflected a deep if idiosyncratic adherence to Clausewitz's concepts. Clausewitz had little influence on American military thought before 1945, but influenced Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong, and thus the Communist and Soviet traditions, as Lenin emphasized the inevitability of wars among capitalist states in the age of imperialism and presented the armed struggle of the working class as the only path toward the eventual elimination of war.[13] Because Lenin was an admirer of Clausewitz and called him "one of the great military writers", his influence on the Red Army was immense.[14] The Russian historian A.N. Mertsalov commented that "It was an irony of fate that the view in the USSR was that it was Lenin who shaped the attitude towards Clausewitz, and that Lenin's dictum that war is a continuation of politics is taken from the work of this anti-humanist anti-revolutionary."[14] Clausewitz directly influenced Mao Zedong, who read On War in 1938 and organized a seminar on Clausewitz as part of the educational program for the Party leadership in Yan'an. Thus the "Clausewitzian" content in many of Mao's writings is not merely second-hand knowledge via Lenin (as many have supposed), but reflects Mao's own in-depth study.[citation needed]
The idea that war involves inherent "friction" that distorts, to a greater or lesser degree, all prior arrangements, has become common currency in fields such as business strategy and sport. The phrase fog of war derives from Clausewitz's stress on how confused warfare can seem while immersed within it.[15] The term center of gravity, used in a military context derives from Clausewitz's usage, which he took from Newtonian Mechanics. In U.S. military doctrine, "center of gravity" refers to the basis of an opponent's power, at the operational, strategic, or political level, though this is only one aspect of Clausewitz's use of the term.
After 1970, some theorists claimed that nuclear proliferation made Clausewitzian concepts obsolete after the 20th-century period in which they dominated the world.[16] John E. Sheppard, Jr., argues that by developing nuclear weapons, state-based conventional armies simultaneously both perfected their original purpose, to destroy a mirror image of themselves, and made themselves obsolete. No two powers have used nuclear weapons against each other, instead using conventional means or proxy wars to settle disputes. If such a conflict did occur, presumably both combatants would be annihilated.
The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century have seen many instances of state armies attempting to suppress insurgencies, terrorism, and other forms of asymmetrical warfare. If Clausewitz focused solely on wars between countries with well-defined armies, as many commentators have argued, then perhaps On War has lost its analytical edge as a tool for understanding war as it is currently fought. This is an ahistorical view, however, for the era of the French Revolution and Napoleon was full of revolutions, rebellions, and violence by "non-state actors", such as the wars in the French Vendée and in Spain. Clausewitz wrote a series of “Lectures on Small War” and studied the rebellion in the Vendée (1793-1796) and the Tyrolean uprising of 1809. In his famous “Bekenntnisdenkschrift” of 1812, he called for a “Spanish war in Germany” and laid out a comprehensive guerrilla strategy to be waged against Napoleon. In On War he included a famous chapter on “The People in Arms.”
One prominent critic of Clausewitz is the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld. In his book The Transformation of War,[17] Creveld argued that Clausewitz's famous "Trinity" of people, army, and government was an obsolete socio-political construct based on the state, which was rapidly passing from the scene as the key player in war, and that he (Creveld) had constructed a new "non-trinitarian" model for modern warfare. Creveld's work has had great influence. Daniel Moran replied, 'The most egregious misrepresentation of Clausewitz’s famous metaphor must be that of Martin van Creveld, who has declared Clausewitz to be an apostle of Trinitarian War, by which he means, incomprehensibly, a war of 'state against state and army against army,' from which the influence of the people is entirely excluded."[18] Christopher Bassford went further, noting that one need only read the paragraph in which Clausewitz defined his Trinity to see "that the words 'people,' 'army,' and 'government' appear nowhere at all in the list of the Trinity’s components.... Creveld's and Keegan's assault on Clausewitz's Trinity is not only a classic 'blow into the air,' i.e., an assault on a position Clausewitz doesn't occupy. It is also a pointless attack on a concept that is quite useful in its own right. In any case, their failure to read the actual wording of the theory they so vociferously attack, and to grasp its deep relevance to the phenomena they describe, is hard to credit."[19]
Some have gone further and suggested that Clausewitz's best-known aphorism, that war is a continuation of policy by other means, is not only irrelevant today but also inapplicable historically.[20] For an opposing view see Strachan, Hew, and Herberg-Rothe, Andreas, eds. Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century (2007).[21] Others argue that the essentials of Clausewitz's theoretical approach remain valid, but that our thinking must adjust to the realities of particular times and places. Knowing that "war is an expression of politics by other means" does us no good unless we use a definition of "politics" that is appropriate to the circumstance and to the cultural proclivities of the combatants in each situation; this is especially true when warfare is carried on across a cultural or civilizational divide, and the antagonists do not share as much common background as did many of the participants in the First and Second World Wars.
In military academies, schools, and universities worldwide, Clausewitz's literature is often mandatory reading.[22]
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