Carl von Clausewitz
Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) was a German military theorist who stressed the moral and political aspects of war. His great work On War was unfinished at his death. He used a romantic or Hegelian conception of warfare, stressing the dialectic of how opposite factors interact, and noting how unexpected new developments unfolded under the "fog of war" and called for rapid decisions by alert commanders. Clausewitz saw history as a complex check on abstractions that did not accord with experience. In opposition to Antoine-Henri Jomini he argued war could not be quantified or graphed or reduced to mapwork and graphs. Clausewitz had many aphorisms, of which the most famous is, "War is not merely a political act, but also a political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means," a working definition of war which has won wide acceptance.
Career
He was born in Burg, near Magdeburg, Prussia, on June 1, 1780, the son of a retired Prussian officer. His first active army service was in the Rhine campaigns, 1793-1794. In 1801 he entered Berlin Military Academy, where Gen. Gerard J. D. von Scharnhorst, Prussian chief of staff in the war against Napoleon, recognized his ability. In 1809 Clausewitz became departmental chief in the ministry of war and instructor in the German War School, of which he was appointed director in 1818. He was instrumental in the reorganization of the Prussian army and became a close friend of Count August Neihardt Gneisenau, Prussian field marshal. When King Frederick William III concluded an alliance with Napoleon in 1812, Clausewitz left the Prussian service and joined the army of Russian Tsar Alexander I, which continued to oppose Napoleon. He later took part in the wars of liberation and was chief of staff of the third Prussian corps in the Waterloo campaign. Clausewitz developed the modern strategy applied by Prussia in the wars of 1866 and 1870, which later became the basis of military teaching in many countries. He died of cholera in Breslau, Nov. 18, 1831. His unfinished masterpiece, Vom Kriege (On War), was published in 1833.
Ideas
Clausewitz stressed the primacy of national policy in war. Clausewitz conceived of war as a political, social, economic, and military totality involving the entire population of a nation at war. He sees war as a social act and as an extension of politics. He stressed that wars are decided by decisive battles (unlike Jomini who stressed control of central geographical locations.) However Clausewitz's emphasis on the superiority of the defense suggests aggressive attacks can be failures. Clausewitz emphasizes the fusion of the regular army with militia, or citizen soldiers, as the only effective method of national defense. This point is especially important as it ends the independence and isolation of the regular military and democraticizes the armed forces much as universal suffrage democraticized politics.
In contrast to Jomini, Clausewitz largely dismissed the value of military intelligence: "Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain. . . . In short, most intelligence is false." His conclusions were influenced by his personal experiences in the Prussian Army, which was often in an intelligence fog due to the superior abilities of Napoleon's system.
Clausewitz had a strong influence on German military thought, and after 1900 on British thought. He had little influence on American military thought before 1945. But he influenced Lenin and the Soviet tradition, 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.[1] Clausewitz directly influenced Chinese leader Mao Zedung. Mao read Clausewitz's 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 secondhand knowledge, via Lenin (as many have supposed), but reflects Mao's own in-depth study.
Bibliography
- Aron, Raymond. Clausewitz: Philosopher of War. (1985). 418 pp.
- Bassford, Christopher. Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815-1945. (1994)
- Echevarria, II, Antulio Joseph. "Neo-Clausewitzianism: Freytag-Loringhoven and the Militarization of Clausewitz in German Military Literature before the First World War." PhD dissertation Princeton U. 1994. 300 pp. DAI 1994 55(4): 1068-A. DA9423391 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
- Gat, Azar. The Origins of Military Thought from the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (1989)
- Handel, Michael I., ed. Clausewitz and Modern Strategy. 1986. 324 pp.
- Handel, Michael I. Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought. (2001) 482 pages. Based on comparison of Clausewitz's On War with Sun Tzu's The Art of War
- Paret, Peter, Gordon A. Craig, and Felix Gilbert, eds. Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (1986)
- Smith, Hugh. On Clausewitz: A Study of Military and Political Ideas. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 303 pp.
- Wallach, Jehuda L. The Dogma of the Battle of Annihilation: The Theories of Clausewitz and Schlieffen and Their Impact on the German Conduct of Two World Wars. (1986). 334 pp.
Primary Sources
- Clausewitz, Carl Von, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. (2nd ed. 1984). ISBN 0691056579.