Clausewitz, page 33
And then comes the work that combines elements of all he had written before—On War. So many factors influenced its creation, some of which we have already touched upon: extensive military experience; his study of history; and his reading of the works of Machiavelli, Bülow, Jomini, and many others. If any single event exerted the greatest influence, it was the French Revolution and the harnessing of the population to war.31
As we have seen, Clausewitz acquired some of his method of analysis from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in 1804 or 1805 via the Berlin lectures of Johann Gottfried Kiesewetter. The emphasis on comparative inquiry rooted Clausewitz’s thought in the preceding historical, theoretical, and philosophical works, but he also delved into art and literature, borrowing ideas and concepts from these fields. Many find in Clausewitz’s approach Hegel’s dialectic—the use of thesis-antithesis-synthesis—and even terms taken from the famous philosopher, while others see his methodology as more reflective of the Greek philosophers due to his use of opposites. Another source of inspiration was undoubtedly Scharnhorst, who, Marie wrote, put Clausewitz on the path to On War. Clausewitz credited Scharnhorst for giving him the intellectual confidence he needed.32
Scharnhorst himself was influenced by the writing of the Welsh military historian and theorist Henry Lloyd (1718?–1783), who stressed practical training and development of the mind, and also utilized the concept of “genius” in his work. Another source was George Heinrich von Berenhorst, a veteran of Frederick the Great’s army, who published Reflections on the Art of War beginning in 1796. Berenhorst discussed the psychological forces involved in war, as well as genius and chance. Bülow, Jomini, and Lloyd all touched on the use of war as a state political tool. Clausewitz was familiar with Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws, partially due to Scharnhorst, and Montesquieu’s examination of the motivations of a nation’s people may have influenced his thinking.33
As mentioned earlier, Clausewitz took up the writing of On War at Coblenz in 1816, but his work on it intensified when he assumed his post at the War College in 1818. He labored over the manuscript for the next dozen years. In the spring of 1830 Marie wrote, “He arranged his papers, sealed and labeled the individual packages, and sadly bade farewell to an activity that had come to mean so much to him.” They remained untouched until his death.34
Clausewitz began his magnum opus with the intent of writing a small text, but—as he put it—his tendency to “develop and systematize” led him to expand it. “It was my ambition,” Clausewitz noted, “to write a book that would not be forgotten after two or three years, and that possibly might be picked up more than once by those who are interested in the subject.” Existing military theory was “unscientific,” and he intended to build his work “on the secure foundation either of experience or the nature of war as such.” Nonetheless, he had no illusions that he had written the final word on the subject, and adds a note of modesty: “Perhaps a greater mind will soon appear to replace these individual nuggets with a single whole, cast of solid metal free from all impurities.”35
In a note of July 10, 1827—one generally published with On War—Clausewitz writes that he intended to revise it in light of his idea that wars are either fought for regime change or something less. He had by that point composed no fewer than six books and planned to write eight—the “individual nuggets” had grown exponentially since 1816. “I regard the first six books,” he wrote in the note, “which are already in a clean copy, merely as a rather formless mass that must be thoroughly reworked.” He planned to next revise Book 7 in light of the aforementioned, as well as Book 8, which was little more than a rough draft and also needed to be subjected to his new ideas. His desire for revision is confirmed in another note, traditionally dated to 1830, in which Clausewitz writes, “The manuscript on the conduct of major operations that will be found after my death can, in its present state, be regarded as nothing but a collection of materials from which a theory of war was to have been distilled.” He further adds: “The first chapter of Book One alone I regard as finished.”36
Thus arises the question as to how complete On War was when Clausewitz died. Some believe that at the time of Clausewitz’s death, the tome still had a long way to go. Others, historian Jon Sumida being among the idea’s most recent proponents, view the text as more complete. This argument partly hinges on the accuracy of the date of Clausewitz’s 1830 note, which some contend was written before his July 1827 missive. Earlier dating, it is argued, implies Clausewitz had time to make the changes he insists he intended, and to believe otherwise would be to assert the near-stagnation of Clausewitz’s work between 1827 and 1830.37 In reality, we simply don’t know how complete On War truly is, and this is a question that cannot be definitively answered because we know that Clausewitz never finished the book.
Clausewitz’s 1827 note also forecast one of the problems On War would encounter: “If an early death should terminate my work,” wrote Clausewitz, “what I have written so far would, of course only deserve to be called a shapeless mass of ideas. Being liable to endless misinterpretation it would be the target of much half-baked criticism, for in matters of this kind everyone feels he is justified in writing and publishing the first thing that comes into his head when he picks up a pen, and thinks his own ideas as axiomatic as the fact that two and two make four.” Despite his reservation, Clausewitz still believed the manuscript made significant contributions to military theory. Even in their incomplete state, he wrote, in the first six books the reader “may even find they contain the basic ideas that might bring about a revolution in the theory of war.”38
Clausewitz proved right on both counts (though the latter took a while), and largely has himself to blame for the first. Much of the misreading and criticism of Clausewitz’s text has to do with his putting forward the concept of “absolute war.”39 Clausewitz writes that “war can be thought of in two different ways—its absolute form or one of the variant forms that it actually takes,” meaning that war has an “absolute,” “pure,” or theoretical state, as opposed to war in reality, which is fought either for the overthrow of the enemy government or something less than this. “In the absolute form of war, where everything results from necessary causes and one action rapidly affects another, there is, if we may use the phrase, no intervening neutral void.” Or, in other words, in “absolute war,” nothing inhibits the struggle. But in reality, many things do.40
Clausewitz clouds the picture further by using the term “total war” (ganz Krieg) as a synonym for “absolute war” (absoluter Krieg), and he does not use “total war” in the modern sense where it generally conveys the scale of the conflict (the American Civil War or the First World War—with much debate—usually being deemed the first examples): “This conception would be ineluctable even if war were total war, the pure element of enmity unleashed.” The equality of “absolute” and “total war” is further demonstrated by the discussion in the rest of this chapter and is an example of Clausewitz’s tendency to use different terms for the same concept—something that Peter Paret has noted is not unusual in Clausewitz’s writings. Some authors argue that the concept of “absolute war” derives in at least some manner from Kant, who established the idea of “pure reason,” and from this derived a “practical reason” fit for the everyday. Others, such as Michael Handel, suggest the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his discussion of a “frictionless world.”41
In On War, Clausewitz presents his theory of absolute war while emphasizing the need to keep the political nature of all aspects of war “in mind when studying actual practice.” He continues, “We will then find that war does not advance relentlessly toward the absolute, as theory would demand. Being incomplete and self-contradictory, it cannot follow its own laws, but has to be treated as a part of some other whole; the name of which is policy.”42
Clausewitz then makes his own position difficult by contradicting himself (not unsurprising in an unfinished work). On the one hand, “absolute war” is a theoretical concept, and on the other it is something that Clausewitz said he had himself observed. “After the short prelude of the French Revolution, Bonaparte brought it [war] swiftly and ruthlessly to that point...Surely it is both natural and inescapable that this phenomenon should cause us to turn again to the pure concept of war with all its rigorous implications.” He continues in this vein, arguing that “we must...develop our concept of war as it ought to be fought, not on the basis of its pure definition,” while leaving “room for every sort of extraneous matter.” “We must allow for natural inertia, for all the friction of its parts, for all the inconsistency, imprecision, and timidity of man; and finally we must face the fact that war and its forms result from ideas, emotions, and conditions prevailing at the time—and to be quite honest we must admit that this was the case even when war assumed its absolute state under Bonaparte.” Two pages later he writes that “absolute war has never in fact been achieved.” “Absolute war” was a point of reference, not a reality.43
In 1827 Clausewitz embarked upon a considerable revision of On War.44 There is voluminous literature dedicated to interpreting his ideas in On War and no arguments will be settled here. Those who make use of Clausewitz’s work are typically the least interested in these matters, and perhaps for good reason. The primary students of Clausewitz’s On War are serving military officers exposed to it during some segment of their education, and usually for no more than one or two weeks. Those among them who are truly interested in Clausewitz’s theories often want to know how Clausewitz says one should fight a war, or, more specifically, what Clausewitz tells us about how to win a war. In fact, Clausewitz teaches us that though his work will not tell them how to win a generic war (which Clausewitz would say doesn’t exist), it does do something perhaps more important: teach them how to think about waging war.
Significantly, Clausewitz’s work reminds such soldiers just what they were getting themselves into: “War is an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” He calls it a “duel on a larger scale” and notes that “kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy.”45 Clausewitz had stood on too many battlefields and seen too many of his friends killed and wounded to have any delusions about what was involved.
If war’s outcome cannot be controlled, its purpose can be guided. To Clausewitz, the establishment of the political objective is of supreme importance. “When whole communities go to war—whole peoples, and especially civilized peoples—the reason always lies in some political situation, and the occasion is always due to some political object. War, therefore, is an act of policy.” The goal being sought by the combatant drives what they are willing to do to get it, and for how long. When the “value of the object” has exceeded what one is willing to pay, “the object must be renounced and peace must follow.” But one must also remember that the political objective can change, being driven by events and their effects. Where Clausewitz stands apart from other theorists is not the fact that he identifies war as a political instrument, but in insisting that political goals affect every level of military activity.” “The political object is the goal,” Clausewitz writes; “war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.”46
From the aforementioned Clausewitz points us to the next step: consideration of the means required to achieve the political objective. But how does one determine this? Clausewitz recommends doing what in today’s defense parlance would be part of an assessment. First, consider each side’s political aim; then evaluate the strength of the enemy and compare the character and abilities of its government and people against one’s own; and finally, examine the political inclinations of other states and the effect of the struggle upon them. Clausewitz is keenly aware of the challenge faced by those saddled with the task of determining the resources to be mobilized for war: “To assess these things in all their ramifications and diversity,” he writes, “is plainly a colossal task.”47
Paramount to the assembly of a proper assessment, Clausewitz believes, is to gain an understanding of the nature of the war being fought. This, in his mind, is the most important task of the political and military leaders, and “the first of all strategic questions.” While Jomini provides a laundry list of types of wars (“Wars of Expediency” and “Wars of Intervention,” for example), Clausewitz boils war down to the two types mentioned herein, evoked most fully in his July 10, 1827, note: “War can be of two kinds, in the sense that either the objective is to overthrow the enemy to render him politically helpless or militarily impotent, thus forcing him to sign whatever peace we please; or merely to occupy some of his frontier-districts so that we can annex them or use them for bargaining at the peace negotiations.” Later, he breaks these down further, arguing that there are two types of limited wars, an “offensive war with a limited aim” and a “defensive war.”48
Given Clausewitz’s core belief in the political nature of war, we might again ask how it connects to “absolute war.” As noted earlier, some say Clausewitz argues that war should be waged so. Actually, however, it is all but impossible for this to happen. War cannot reach this absolute (though it dearly wants to) because of various factors acting upon it to restrain the forces unleashed by the conflict. Key among these—again—is politics itself. Clausewitz writes that “we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different.” Political direction places limits on the war, be these geographical, related to resources and manpower, or any number of other factors. Human nature—or moral forces—are also counted among these chains. Clausewitz writes that “since the moral elements are among the most important in war,” they “constitute the spirit that permeates war as a whole, and at an early stage they establish a close affinity with the will that moves and leads the whole mass of force.” The difficulty with such forces, Clausewitz notes, is that they “will not yield to academic wisdom. They cannot be classified or counted. They have to be seen or felt.” Such “Principal Moral Elements” include “the skill of the commander, the experience and courage of the troops, and their patriotic spirit.”49
War may be driven by the logic of internal politics, but it is susceptible to contingencies, external factors of which the greatest is perhaps chance. “No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance” as war—an unpredictable experience that “most closely resembles a game of cards.” And through chance, he notes, “guesswork and luck come to play a great part in war.” Uncertainty, incomplete information, circumstances—all these influence how the war is fought. These are all part of war’s “human factor.” For this reason, “a sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.”50
Indeed, “intelligence” of a different sort is a significant factor in Clausewitz’s discussion of uncertainty. “By “intelligence,” he means “every sort of information about the enemy and his country—the basis, in short, of our own plans and operations.” But such intelligence is not easy to come by. Clausewitz advises skepticism here, arguably cynicism. Most of the information those fighting wars receive is, he insists, “unreliable and transient,” making war “a flimsy structure that can easily collapse and bury us in ruins.” “Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain...and the effect is to multiply lies and inaccuracies.” The “general unreliability of all information” thus adds to the uncertainty constantly present in war. “All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.”51
Such views have produced the accusation that Clausewitz did not value intelligence. As noted earlier, it would be presumptuous to draw a straight line from Clausewitz’s experience at the battle of Sehestedt in 1814—when all of his unit’s information incorrectly said the Danes had taken a different route—to his doubts here, but considering Clausewitz’s background as a staff officer handling the material coming in, it is probably safe to say that his Sehestedt experience was not his only such contact with an intelligence failure. While such experiences undoubtedly colored his view of tactical intelligence during wartime, it is obvious from other parts of the text that Clausewitz values information on the enemy and his intentions. He is insistent upon calculating whether or not one has available the military means for achieving their political ends. How can one deduce this other than by gathering intelligence—or information—on the enemy? In 1804, in his unpublished Strategie, Clausewitz wrote: “Good intelligence is indispensable, in order to know the enemy disposition in general.”52
How is a soldier (or the reader of On War) to make sense of the crucial importance of intelligence as well as its potential unreliability? Clausewitz offers advice in two places. First, he suggests one should be “guided by the laws of probability.” Second, he writes, one has to be either naturally talented or willing to gamble. “Whatever is hidden from full view in this feeble light has to be guessed at by talent, or simply left to chance. So once again for lack of objective knowledge one has to trust to talent or to luck.”53
Along with “chance” and “intelligence,” another factor that makes absolute war an impossibility is “friction,” which has come up earlier. Friction is “the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult.” In other words, friction is essentially any difficulty that can arise. Clausewitz insists that it cannot “be reduced to a few points,” and that it “brings about effects that cannot be measured, just because they are largely due to chance.” The weather provides an example: fog can prevent an enemy from being seen, the effects of which then ripple over the combatants. Fear is also a form of friction. When someone is trying to kill you, it can affect the efficient performance of the task at hand.54
