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This article is about the famous treatise on military strategy by the German military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz; for the controversial manga series, see Neo Gomanism Manifesto Special - On War. Vom Kriege (complete text available here) is a book on war and military strategy by Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, written mostly after the Napoleonic wars, between 1816 and 1830, and published posthumously by his wife in 1832. It has been translated into English several times as On War (complete 1873 text available here). It is one of the most important treatises on strategy ever written, and is prescribed at various military academies to this day. On War is actually an unfinished work; Clausewitz had set about revising his accumulated manuscripts in 1827, but did not live to finish the task.
History Carl von Clausewitz was a Prussian officer among those baffled by how the armies of the French Revolution and Napoleon had changed the nature of war through their ability to motivate the populace and thus unleash war on a greater scale than had previously been the case in Europe. Clausewitz was well educated and had a strong interested in art, science, and education, but he was a professional soldier who spent a considerable part of his life fighting against Napoleon. There is no doubt that the insights he gained from his experiences, combined with a solid grasp of European history, provided much of the raw material for the book. On War (three volumes of the ten in his collected works) represents the compilation of his most cogent observations. It was published after his death by his wife. Synopsis The book contains a wealth of historical examples used to illustrate its various concepts. Frederick II of Prussia (the Great) figures prominently for having made very efficient use of the limited forces at his disposal. Napoleon also is a central figure. Among many strands of thought, three stand out as essential to Clausewitz' concept: Some of the key ideas (not necessarilly original to Clausewitz or even to his mentor Gerhard von Scharnhorst) discussed in On War include (in no particular order of importance): Clausewitz used a dialectical method to construct his argument, leading to frequent modern misinterpretation. The West's modern perception of war is based on the concepts Clausewitz put forth in On War, though these have been very diversely interpreted by various leaders, thinkers, armies, and peoples. Western military doctrine, organization, and norms are all based on Napoleonic premises, even to this day--though whether these premises are necessarilly also "Clausewitzian" is debatable. The "dualism" of Clausewitz's view of war (i.e., that wars can vary a great deal between the two "poles" he proposed, based on the political objectives of the opposing sides and the context) seems simple enough, but few commentators have proved willing to accept this crucial variability--they insist that Clausewitz "really" argued for one end of the scale or the other. On War has been seen by some prominent critics as the place where the concept of total war was made explicit and it has been blamed1 for the level of destruction involved in the First and Second World War, whereas it seems rather that Clausewitz had merely foreseen the inevitable development that started with the huge, patriotically motivated armies of the Napoleonic wars. These resulted (though war's evolution has not yet ended) in the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with all the forces and capabilities of the state devoted to destroying forces and capabilities of the enemy state (thus "total war"). Conversely, Clausewitz has also been seen as "The preeminent military and political strategist of limited war in modern times." (Robert Osgood, 1979) Clausewitz and his proponents have been severely criticized, perhaps quite unfairly, by competing theorists--Jomini in the 19th century, B.H. Liddell Hart in the mid-20th, and Martin Van Creveld and John Keegan more recently. On War is a work rooted solely in the world of the state, says historian Martin Van Creveld, who alleges that Clausewitz takes the state "almost for granted" as he rarely looks at anything previous to Westphalia. He alleges that Clausewitz does not address any form of intra/supra-state conflict, such as rebellion, because he could not theoretically account for warfare before the existence of the state. Previous kinds of conflict were demoted to criminal activities without legitimacy and not worthy of the label "war." Van Creveld argues that "Clausewitzian war" requires the state to act in conjunction with the people and the army, the state becoming a massive engine built to exude military force against an identical opponent. He supports this statement by pointing to the conventional armies in existence throughout the 20th century. On the other hand, Clausewitz never saw these 20th-century states and armies--the states with which he himself was familiar were quite different. In any case, the "Clausewitzian Trinity" that Van Creveld condemns as consisting of a rigid statist hierarchy of "People, Army, and Government," does not in fact consist of those three concrete actors. Typically for the Clausewitz critics, Van Creveld's attack is based on a sloppy reading of On War (or, more likely, of secondary works by U.S. Army Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., who was in fact an admirer of Clausewitz but who interpreted everything in On War through the narrow lens of the Vietnam War). In fact, the words people, army, and government appear nowhere in the paragraph in which Clausewitz defines his famous Trinity. Rather, the Trinity of forces that drive the course of real-world war in Clausewitz's view are 1) violent emotion, 2) the interplay of chance and probability, and 3) human reason. It seems unlikely that emotion, chance, and rationality will cease to play a role in war any time soon, whatever the fate of the state. Notes Editions (Translations are into English unless otherwise noted) See also | ||||||||
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