Air University Review , January-February 1979

Master At Arms

Clausewitz in full view

Except for a few years at the Air Corps Tactical School in the 1930s--when Clausewitz's remarks about the significance of defeating the enemy's will were found convenient as introductory material for the course in bombardment aviation--Clausewitz's writings have rarely attracted the attention of Air Force officers. (The recent decision to incorporate Clausewitz in the 1978-79 curriculum at the Air War College may change all this, but' only time will tell.) The reasons for our service's traditional neglect of his writings are many, a partial list of which would have to include all of the following:

• His tactical prescriptions, though still not without relevance to army officers, are of no value to airmen of the late twentieth century.
• His views on military strategy are so hopelessly entwined with the larger question of national policy, as in his insistence, for example, that the two can never be separated without producing "a senseless thing without an object," that any serving officer who takes Clausewitz a t his word runs the risk of crossing clearly established demarcation lines underlying the American military tradition.
• Whether speaking of tactics, strategy, or policy Clausewitz gives the appearance of having precious little to say of interest or concern to junior officers (whether of the military or the foreign service); because he includes heads of states in his audience, many--this reader once included--come to feel that he writes of things beyond their purview.
• A soldier by chosen profession, he nonetheless stood in the first rank among the intellectuals of his day, in a class with Herder, Fichte, Schiller, Humboldt, Kant, and Hegel to name a few, and his writings are often equally difficult for Americans to understand.
• Until only very recently there has been very little available in English by way of interpretation, informed analysis, or biography.
• And finally, his principal work, On War, quite literally defies condensation or abbreviated presentation. There is simply no way a military academy or staff college instructor can put together a 50-minute lesson plan on Clausewitz that will do anything more than befuddle the victims to whom it is applied.

No brief essay such as this can make any appreciable headway against the difficulties suggested above. Some of those difficulties, indeed, like Mount Everest, are simply there. It can make an attempt, nonetheless, to explain some of the foregoing assertions, if only in an effort to defuse the implications of some of them; and it can describe in broad outline the new opportunities for reading and understanding Clausewitz that are now available in English.† The reader should be forewarned that in attempting to do so I shall violate the normal format of a review essay, presenting under that guise what is in fact an ill-disguised plea for the contemporary relevance of Clausewitz.

†Karl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1976, $18.50), 711 pages. 

Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976, $18.95), 467 pages.

On War was originally published in 1832 and first became available in English in 1874--the so-called Graham translation, after British Colonel J. J. Graham. This translation was revised and republished in 1908 with a new introduction by Colonel F. N. Maude and subsequently reissued in 1911, 1918, 1938,1949, and 1962. Other translations have been: (1) in 1943, by O. J. Matthijs Jolles, for The Modern Library, more accurate but based, like Graham-Maude, on what Peter Paret calls "the corrupt third German edition"; (2) in 1962, by Colonel Edward M. Collins, USAF, actually a series of selections amounting to less than 15 percent of the complete text, entitled War, Politics, and Power; and (3) in 1968, a Pelican Classics edition, edited by Anatol Rapoport, which turned out to be nothing more than a severely abbreviated version of the Graham-Maude translation. Each of these previous appearances in English is unsatisfactory for one reason or another: Graham-Maude for inaccuracies and not being based on the first German edition; Rapoport for being a severely truncated version of Graham-Maude; Jolles for not being based on the original text; and Collins for including so little of the text (although it must be admitted that Collins did include the majority of what this reviewer would call those elements in Clausewitz of value to a very wide audience, one including far more than merely serving officers).¹

The wholly new translation by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, over a decade in the making, is among that rare breed of books that is recognized as a classic as it comes off the press. It is now, and seems destined to remain, as close as we shall ever see to a definitive English translation. The scholarly reputations of the three-member Anglo-American consortium responsible for this new edition--Michael Howard, Peter Paret, and Bernard Brodie--are unimpeachable; each in his own right has established a record of excellence in teaching and writing that is the envy of all who know their work: as a team, they shall likely remain unbeatable.

The volume opens with three introductory essays: (1) Paret's "The Genesis of On War," (pp. 3-25); (2) Howard's "The Influence of Clausewitz," (pp. 27-44); and (3) Brodie's "The Continuing Relevance of On War," (pp. 45-58). Each essay is adequate to the task at hand, even if it is also true that the evident embarrassment of the authors at having interjected themselves in front of the master's words has led them to an admirable if nonetheless regrettable brevity. The most noticeable lapse occurs in Howard's essay, in which he has virtually nothing to say about Clausewitz's influence in Russia, a topic of major significance given the importance attached to Clausewitz's work by Engels, Marx, and Lenin. (To be fair to the contributors, however, each has addressed his assigned topic on numerous previous occasions,² and the reluctance to repeat oneself must be judged a merit among academics, a breed often not noted for restraint in that respect.) For the reader who is new to Clausewitz, the three essays taken together represent the best available introduction.

On War, one must always bear in mind, is an unfinished work, compiled from his various drafts and notes by Clausewitz's widow. Many editions of the book fail to make this clear, but here the text begins with four prefatory notes by Clausewitz

(two written between 1816 and 1818, when he first set to work, and two from the period between 1827 and 1830, when he had completed a first draft). These notes carry an important message that might be freely paraphrased as follows:

So much for the inconsistencies so often complained of by later critics; ditto for the occasional charges of intellectual arrogance.

But if intellectual arrogance can be ruled out, sustained intellectual rigor certainly cannot. He demanded it of himself, and his work demands it of his readers at every turn. He knew himself, and he knew other men, whether in the study or under fire; he also recognized the weaknesses of earlier attempts to explain the nature of warfare. Earlier writers had tended to stress as decisive either the objective elements in war (material phenomena, measurable quantities, given tactical principles, etc.--what we might look on as the McNamara inversion) or the subjective elements (the courage of the commander, his self-confidence, the moral strength of an army, the role of chance, etc.--consider the mystique of MacArthur's command style). Recognizing in himself the tendency inevitably to systematize, along with the foolhardiness of arguing in the face of recorded history that all wars can be explained by the dominance of either the objective or subjective elements, he set himself the task of overcoming the difficulties inherent in outlining a general theory of war, one that recognized the dynamic nature of the interactions among many parts, one that would accept within its limits of explanation any known past war and any likely future one. As the following paragraph makes clear, such a theory would inevitably be out of place on the battlefield, but crucial both to the prior preparation of the commander and to the unending need for clear ideas and the ability to show their connection with each other.

The search for a general theory led Clausewitz into many difficulties, a fact he acknowledged in his prefatory notes (pp. 63, 69-71), but he was not a man for halfway measures. The full extent of the revolution in warfare between 1775 and 1815 simply must be defined, he felt, if soldiers and statesmen of the future, especially those of his beloved Prussia, were not to repeat the errors of the past. Any such attempt at definition had to take into account the totality of the revolution, not merely its constituent elements, each of which in turn had to be seen as only one part of a greater whole. (And yes, he would agree, the total effect was greater than the sum of the parts!) Given such a goal, it is especially regrettable that so many future readers would place On War in competition with the Holy Bible as a source for quoting out of context.

The difficulty begins at once in Book I, Chapter I (pp. 75-89) when Clausewitz, after the philosophical fashion of his day, asks "What is war?" and begins his answer with an explanation of war's peculiar essence--violence. Here, grouped together in compelling proximity, we find such thoughts as: War is an act of violence to compel our enemy to do our will….physical force is the means; to impose our will is the object…..in the purely abstract sense there can be no limit to the force that is applied to bring about this object; [cf. "War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds." ] ...to introduce any principle of moderation into the theory of war itself would always lead to logical absurdity….

These opening thoughts have caused countless difficulty, despite the fact that they are for all practical purposes discarded on the fourth page of the opening chapter when Clausewitz reminds us that it is only in the field of abstract thought that the inquiring mind cannot rest until it reaches the extreme. "But move," he writes, "from the abstract to the real world, and the whole thing looks quite different." (p. 78) He then identifies a number of factors that remove war from the realm of pure speculation and make it more a calculation of probabilities, more like a game of cards. ("No other activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance.") The art of war, he reminds us, has to do with living, moral forces; it therefore follows that it can nowhere approach the absolute.

The remaining 551 pages of On War represent the finest attempt yet made to spell out the meaning of conflict. (Unlike other seminal thinkers--Adam Smith for one example--Clausewitz has had no successors.) Much of it is hard reading:, and in this respect Bernard Brodie's 71page "Guide to the Reading of Clausewitz" (pp. 641-711) will be especially appreciated. Arranged sequentially following Clausewitz's divisions into books and chapters, these pages will help smooth over many of the rough spots. [Two other (far less sophisticated) guides are offered in the boxes on pages 90-91 of this article. While

I have written earlier that Clausewitz defies condensation, "One Man's Version of Clausewitz in One Page" is said to have been of some help to students at both the Air Force Academy and the Naval War College and is offered despite the howls of protest it is likely to evoke from those familiar with the subject. Similarly, the selections recommended in the box on page 91 can be criticized, if not for what is included then certainly for what is left out. My intent, however, if not already all too evident, is to persuade the reader to an examination of the master's words; experience with the difficulties inherent in doing so leads me to fly in the f1jlce of Bernard Brodie's stern dictum that to slip in and out of a subject like Karl von Clausewitz is to betray an undue note of bravura."]

For the reader who can find both the time and the mental energy requisite to the task, Clausewitz has much to offer. As a guide to introspection--whether for the young officer drafting an operations order or the beltway bandit bent on reassessing U.S. strategy in general--he has no equals. Especially is this so in an age (or service) in which many are led to the conclusion that weapons (and other technological tools) can be more potentially decisive than the motives for their employment. By motives I refer to assumptions, rationales, expected or hoped-for outcomes, and expectations relative to impact--calculations we too often arrive at almost in vacuo, as though the human elements of response or reaction can somehow be overcome, or overruled, by displays of technological virtuosity deftly applied. Murphy's Law, Clausewitz repeatedly warns us, awaits at every turning, and is particularly perverse when not anticipated. "Everything in war is simple," he writes, "but the simplest thing is difficult." This is no conundrum but rather a simple though inconvenient fact too frequently ignored in our allegedly sophisticated analyses.

The complexity of warfare situations is Clausewitz's persistent theme, and it is for this reason above all that he appears at first glance to have little to offer the practitioner in the line of fire. It is for this reason also that most precommissioning and professional military education programs have traditionally found little room in their curricula to consider his thoughts. Some would argue that this is as it should be. A line officer, after all, has more urgent things to do than rightly to understand the war in which he engages (rather than take it for something, or try to make of it something, which by its very nature it can never be). This is true all the way from the lieutenant platoon leader on the ground to the F-4 wing commander at, say, Udorn whose primary concern becomes taking out targets assigned to him (or, in less happy circumstances, maintaining a sortie rate superior to that of his "rival," the skipper of the Kitty Hawk off Yankee Station).

Similarly, the practitioner in the line of fire would be ill-advised to spend too much time pondering Clausewitz's dictum that there are many ways to the object in war and that, indeed, the defeat of the enemy forces in the field is not always necessary. The object of war, after all, is not his concern, let alone responsibility to determine. Does this mean, then, that only statesmen and senior generals should read Clausewitz?

The answer, in one man's opinion, must be a resounding no, for the simple reason that when a man attains to a position of high responsibility he will inevitably find that it is too late to play catch up ball, that the demands on his time will overpower any inclination he might have to refurbish his education in accord with newly assigned responsibilities. The British naval historian Captain S. W. Roskill put it this way:

It is well known among scientists that a climax of accomplishment [,getting that Wing, Division, Air Force, Joint Staff--job whatever] comes in life, for most of us between forty and fifty years of age, when education and experience combine to bring a person's gifts to the full fruition of which he or she is capable. The leader should therefore recognize the need to continue [on his own] his education right up to that point, so fitting himself for the time when, in a fighting service, he may be called on to shoulder the heavy and lonely responsibility of high command.³

The education of which Captain Roskill wrote includes more than keeping up with developments in one's particular field or specialty, important and time-consuming as that alone can be. In fact it is an education that leans heavily in the direction of what were once referred to as the humane studies--the study of man, and of particular men, and their struggles, some successful, some not, with problems involving other men and their beliefs, hopes, dreams, and expectations. These sorts of problems; after all, are the ones that engage the great majority of any commander's (statesman's, president's) time and energies. And if there is a list of books, or of authors, that one could compile--by way of filling the sort of mental knapsack that Roskill had in mind--then Clausewitz is among those who could be most profitably included.

The theory being expounded here encompasses, however, a far larger group than those who will rise to high command. It extends to all those who would serve--even as majors, lieutenant colonels, or colonels--at theater level or above, and particularly in Washington where we excuse so many of our failures by reference to the imperatives of bureaucratic politics, whether within a single service or among several. Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham (USA, Ret.) has written of a "decline of strategic thought in the United States," the root cause of which he sees in the increasing domination of programs over purpose in the Pentagon, the domination of program managers over strategists.⁴ As one example he cites the fierce competition among various individual hardware programs to the detriment of big-picture thinking. To be sure, selfish career (careerist?) concerns playa part in such things, and supervisors exert certain pressures that the jaded among us come to take for granted. And yet another reason for the problem may well be that many officers have not prepared themselves, in Roskill's sense, for so-called big-picture thinking--or "blue sky thinking" as Hap Arnold called it in his decidedly nonsectarian way. To the extent that this charge might be true, it will be argued, certainly a book written a century and a half ago is not the place to look for help. The two best rejoinders I know to that argument are Brodie's introductory essay (pp. 45-58) and an article ("Clausewitz in the Nuclear Age," Journal of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies [London], September 1977, pp. 81-82) by Group Captain R. A. Mason, Director of Defence Studies for the Royal Air Force.

Brodie, whose influence on nuclear strategic thought in this country has been as great as anyone's, firmly believes that Clausewitz is as "pertinent to our times as most of the literature specifically written about nuclear war." Why? In the first instance because Clausewitz strove always to get to the fundamentals of each issue he examined, beginning with the fundamental nature of war itself. This is important, says Brodie, because "war, as Clausewitz asserts in one place, is different from anything else. Thus, however much it may change within itself from one era to another, its essential character remains distinct from every other pursuit of man," a circumstance not always apparent to those whose skills lie in "systems analysis and related esoteric disciplines" (or, as Mason puts it, to those who sometimes seem to believe that "in the beginning was The Bomb"). Brodie's second major reason may be more simply stated (and may be safely accepted on faith alone): "Clausewitz is virtually alone in his accomplishment. His is not simply the greatest but the only truly great book on war."

The Key Pages

Group Captain Mason is more pointedly pragmatic. One who doubts the relevance of Clausewitz's major concepts in an age of thermonuclear confrontation should turn first to Sokolovsky (Military Strategy: Soviet Doctrine and Concepts, p. 18) who, after referring to the views of Western strategists that "atomic war has lost its meaning as a tool of politics," writes:

It is quite evident that such views are the consequence of a metaphysical and antiscientific approach to a social phenomenon such as war, and are a result of idealization of the new weapons. It is well known that the essence of wars as a continuation of politics does not change with changing technology and armaments.

With this warning in front of him, and a reflective reading of Clausewitz behind him, Group Captain Mason argues, the modern strategist might then profitably ponder certain crucially important questions relating to a war in Central Europe. Among the questions suggested by Mason are the following: What is the Warsaw Pact's "center of gravity"--is it the Soviet armies, the Soviet government, or the Soviet heartland? When senior officials undertake either to initiate or evaluate a peacetime exercise, do they take fully into account the likely effects of "friction"? What are the alliance implications of fighting tactical nuclear warfare on friendly territory? Could NATO forces ever afford to wait for the advantages accruing from "a culminating point"? Is Western strategy in fact based on a "correct appraisal of how much of our resources must be mobilized for war" and an accurate assessment of "the character and abilities of our own government"? Are we in fact recognizing war as it is likely to be, or war as we would like to have it?

The essence of these arguments is that "the nuclear input to war" (as a sublimely confident U.S. Air Force Academy cadet once casually phrased it) has not rendered irrelevant all prior experience with war. And certainly our actual experience with war since August 1945 clinches the argument. In Michael Howard's words, the armed forces of the Western powers 

have certainly been trained in an autonomous professionalism which excludes popular passions (these get knocked out of conscripts on the barrack square) and which until the Second World War took little account, save at the very top, of political control. But in the nuclear age, and indeed the age of popular insurrection, the element of political control has been as dominant in Western armies as anywhere else. They may not have political commissars attached to them, but none the less American forces in Vietnam, British forces in Northern Ireland and NATO forces in Western Europe have hardly been able to move a unit without the hot breath of their political masters breathing down their necks. We are all Clausewitzians now.⁵

Finally, on the off chance that these remarks have convinced a reader or two that they want to know more about Karl von Clausewitz, let me suggest that the best single source to which they should refer is Peter Paret's Clausewitz and the State. This is a biography and then some, treating as it does both the man and his times. Readers unfamiliar with the course of European thought in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries may find the going difficult now and then, but not if they keep their eyes to the mark--to Clausewitz himself and the development of his thought over the period from 1805 to his death. In this respect, the section on "studies in policy and theory," (pp. 147-68) will be especially helpful.

Some aspects of Clausewitz's personal life may come as a surprise--in particular the high circles in which, even as a young man, Clausewitz moved. And those whose mental image of the man conjures up a pure scholar, only tangentially in uniform, will find Paret's account of the battle of Grossgorschen (1813) enlightening. There, Clausewitz, along with the other senior Prussian generals and their staffs,

...having no share in the overall conduct of the action, could do little else than encourage the troops by fighting in the first rank. He himself was unharmed, although at one point he found himself in the middle of a French battalion, warding off "a small Frenchman with a bayonet." But Blucher suffered a contusion, Grolman was slashed by a bayonet, while Scharnhorst had one horse killed under him and a second wounded, bullets pierced his hat and coat, and in the early evening his leg was struck below the knee [a wound that became infected and led to his tragically early death the following month]. (p. 239)

The Appearance of this new translation of On War, together with both Paret's biography and another important new study by Raymond Aron in France,⁶ may well mark the beginnings of a renaissance of Clausewitzian studies. If any reader still thinks such a situation inexplicable in view of how removed in time we are from Clausewitz's day, he would do well to call to mind that those involved in the effort to produce this new opportunity include Michael Howard, Bernard Brodie, and Raymond Aron, three of the most influential scholars in the entire field of national security studies since World War II. There is no way they can be wrong in unison.

1. For a discussion of translations into various languages, see Peter Paret, "Clausewitz: A Bibliographical Survey," World Politics. January 1965, pp. 272-85; and Clausewitz and the State. pp. 441-fi9.

2. For some examples see, by Peter Paret: (1) the article cited in note I; (2) "Education, Politics and War in the Life of Clausewitz," Journal of the History of Ideas, XXIX (1968), pp. 394-408; (3) "Clausewitz and the Nineteenth Century," in Michael Howard, editor, The Theory and Practice of War (London: Cassell, 1966), pp. 23-41. Bernard Brodie: (1) "On Clausewitz: A Passion for War," World Politics, January 1973, pp. 288-307; (2) Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 22-23, 27.29, 33-38, 4~-45, 66.69; (3) War and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 1-11,440-53. Michael Howard: "The Military Philosopher," The (London) Times Literary Supplement, 25 June 1976, pp. 754-55.

3. S. W. Roskill, The Art of Leadership (London: Collins, 1964). p. 29.

4. "The Decline of US Strategic Thought," Air Force Magazine. August 1977, pp, 24-29.

5. Times Literary Supplement. 25 June 1976, p. 755.

6. Raymond Aron, Penser la Ruerre, Clausewitz. 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).

Contributor

Lieutenant Colonel David MacIsaac (Ph.D., Duke University) is currently a Fellow with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C. He has served as a personnel officer in SAC and as a professor of history at the USAF Academy. Other assignments have included advisor to the DCS/Training. Hq VNAF and Visiting Professor of Strategy, U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of Strategic Bombing in World War II: The Story of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey and editor of Garland Publishing’s recent 10-volume series of USSBS reports. He is a graduate of the College of Naval Warfare, U.S. Naval War College. Colonel MacIsaac has been a frequent contributor to the Air University Review.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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