A History of Strategy (8 page)

More to the point, Jomini like all his Enlightenment predecessors sought to create a “system” which would tell a commander how to conduct war on the higher level. Particularly in his earlier works, this objective forced him to present war as more rational than it really is, given that only the rational can be systematically analyzed, systematized, and taught. The same was even more true of the Enlightenment as a whole. From about 1770 on, this view came under attack at the hand of the nascent Romantic Movement which insisted that the emotions of the heart, not calculations of the merely mechanical brain, stood at the center of human life. In the military field the most important critic was yet another Prussian officer, diplomat and scholar, Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst.

Published in three volumes between 1796 and 1799, Berenhorst’s
Reflections on the Art of
War
began with a survey of military history. Antiquity had been the great period when the art of war, emerging from its primitive stage where it had been confined to raids, ambushes, skirmishes and the like, was perfected. Then came a long medieval interval marked by nothing but ignorance and disorder; then at some point between Machiavelli and Montecuccoli (Berenhorst had in mind Maurice of Nassau, the early seventeenth-century Dutch commander) order was restored and progress resumed. The very nature of their quest, however, had led all subsequent authors to overestimate the role of immutable laws while underestimating that of the unknown, uncontrollable forces of human will and emotion.

Soldiers were more than robots who could fire so and so many rounds a minute. An army was not simply a machine moving along this axis or that and carrying out evolutions as its commander directed. It was the ever-variable, often unpredictable, state of mind of commanders and troops, and not simply calculations pertaining to time, distance, and the angles between lines of operations which governed victory and defeat, to say nothing about the role played by that great incalculable, chance.

These arguments were illustrated by referring to Frederick the Great. To the majority of late eighteenth-century commentators the king was perhaps
the
greatest commander of recent times. His maneuvers, particularly the famous “oblique approach” in which one wing attacked the enemy while the other was kept back, were assiduously studied. Berenhorst, however, pointed to the fact that during some ten years of active operations in three wars (the First, Second, and Third Silesian Wars) those maneuvers had been carried out no more than two or three times. Those few and far-apart occasions aside, Frederick was primarily a drillmaster. Time after time he forced his troops into murderous battles. Those battles were won—if they were won, for Frederick’s defeats were about as numerous as his victories—only by virtue of iron discipline and sheer force of will.

Well written and provided with plentiful examples, Berenhorst’s work was extremely popular during the years immediately after 1800. He and Jomini formed opposite poles. The one emphasized the rational conduct of war at the hand of the strategist, the other, its essential irrationality, unpredictability, and dependence on chance. Both strands of thought were to be united in the greatest of all Western writers on war, Carl von Clausewitz. Given that he too was a child of his times and went through the same tumultuous events as everyone else, to say exactly what qualified him to play this role is not easy to say. In the production of military theory, as so many other aspects of life, room ought to be left for genius.

Clausewitz’s own life has been told so many times that we can all but skip it here. The essential point is that, while in his mid-twenties, this unusually earnest and well-read officer began to take a serious interest in military theory. There followed his participation in the disastrous campaign of 1806, a period spent as a prisoner of war in France, and an appointment to the General Staff in Berlin. There he helped Scharnhorst, his revered master, rebuild the Prussian Army. By 1811 his talents as a theoretician were already sufficiently well known for him to be entrusted with teaching the Crown Prince (the subsequent Friedrich Wilhelm IV) about war. In 1812 he found himself with the Russian Army that was fighting Napoleon in Russia. During the campaigns of 1813–1815 he was active as a staff officer and in 1817 assumed administrative control of the Berlin Staff College or Kriegsakademie. Rising to the rank of general, it was there that he produced his great work. The palace in which the Akademie was located was destroyed by bombing in World War II. Later it was rebuilt, but none one who works there now can point to Clausewitz’s study or is even familiar with his name.

Like almost all other military writers since 1800, Clausewitz wanted to penetrate the secret of Revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare which, as he and the rest saw, clearly differed from what had gone before. Some had sought that secret in the mobilization of all national resources advocated by Guibert and made possible by the Revolution. Others, in the conduct of strategy as explained by von Bülow and, above all, Jomini. Clausewitz, however was not simply a thoughtful soldier but a true philosopher in uniform. While accepting that the Revolution had made it possible for war to be waged “with the full energy of the nation,” he sought to go back to first principles.

This he did by focusing on two questions, to wit: 1. What war was; and 2. What purpose it served. From the answers to these, and while constantly checking his thought against both military history and actual experience, he sought to deduce all the rest. His approach was therefore both deductive and inductive. He discusses the ways in which war ought to be studied as well as the purpose which such study ought to serve. His purpose was not to go into the details of armament and formations, let alone to offer a solution for every problem that might arise. According to Clausewitz, the purpose of studying war was to provide commanders with a sound basis for their thinking and render it unnecessary to reinvent the wheel with every new situation. In the eyes of some informed readers, the pages which deal with this aspect of the problem are the best and most enduring part of his entire
opus
.

To answer the first question Clausewitz in the last book of
On War
constructed an imaginary picture of “absolute war.” Meaning, war as it would have been if, stripped of all practical considerations concerning time, place, and intent, it had been able to stand up naked, so to speak. This device, borrowed from the contemporary philosopher Immanuel Kant, enabled him to define war as an elemental act of violence in which all ordinary social restrains were cast off. Since force would naturally invite the use of greater force, war also possessed an inherent tendency towards escalation. That made it essentially uncontrollable and unpredictable, “a great passionate drama.” As such it was not primarily a question of acting in accordance with specific principles or rules. Instead it represented the domain of danger, friction, and uncertainty. Its successful conduct was above all a question of possessing the qualities needed in order to counter and master these inherent characteristics. Where those qualities were to come from is another question, into which he refuses to enter.

Clausewitz also had much to say about willpower, bravery, and endurance both in the commander—whose “genius” they formed—and in the army which, from top to bottom, had to be imbued with “military virtue.” Though allowing the use of every expedient and requiring the full participation of the intellect, at its core, war was not a question of knowledge, but of character.

Much like his immediate predecessors, Clausewitz distinguished between tactics, which he called the art of winning battles, and strategy, which he defined as the art of using battles to gain the objectives of the campaign. More fundamentally, though, war was a duel between two independent minds. Its interactive nature sharply differentiated it from other activities. To paraphrase, making swords (which only involved acting upon dead matter) was one thing. Using them against another swordsman who is capable of parrying one’s own thrusts and replying with others of his own is quite another. In a brief but brilliant discussion of the theory of war, Clausewitz acknowledges that the system proffered by each of his predecessors contained some elements of truth. Yet no system ought to be allowed to obscure the elemental fact that war consisted of fighting and that fighting—in other words, battle—determined the outcome of wars. No amount of fancy maneuvering could do any good unless it was backed up with a big, sharp sword.

Furthermore, and given the high degree of uncertainty and friction involved, Clausewitz tended to belittle the effect of maneuver, surprise, and stratagems of every kind. Trying to achieve victory by such means was well and good. However, the higher the level at which war was waged, and the greater the masses which took part in it, the less likely they were to achieve decisive results. “The best strategy is always to be very strong, first in general and then at the decisive point.” War was “a physical and moral struggle by means of the former.” Since the enemy’s strength was concentrated in his armed forces, the first objective of strategy ought always to be to smash them. This achieved, his capital could be captured and his country occupied. Thus, compared to much of what had gone before from the time of Montecuccoli on (and to much of what was to come later during the second half of the twentieth century), Clausewitz’s
On War
puts forward a brutally realistic doctrine. Clausewitz himself says as much.

Still continuing with strategy, and to illustrate the way in which Clausewitz proceeds from first principles, consider his discussion of the relationship between attack and defense that had occupied many previous authors. The outstanding quality of the attack, he writes, is the delivery of a blow. The outstanding quality of the defense is the need to wait for that blow and parry it. Since anything that does not happen favors the defense, it is easier to defend than to attack, all else being equal. Moreover, the farther away an attacker gets from his base the greater his logistic difficulties and the more forces he will lose owing to the need to leave behind garrisons, safeguard his communications, and the like. Conversely, falling back on his base, the defender will gather his forces and reinforce them. In the end, and it is here that Clausewitz shows his originality over his predecessors, inevitably there will come a “culminating point.” The attack will turn into a defense and the defense into an attack. That is, unless the enemy has been smashed and a decisive victory has been won first.

However, Clausewitz provided more than a brief summary of the inherent qualities of war. War was not simply a phenomenon in its own right. As a product of social intercourse it was, or at any rate ought to be, a deliberate political act. “A continuation of policy by other means,” to quote the single most celebrated phrase Clausewitz ever wrote. It is true that war had a grammar of its own, i.e. rules which could not be violated with impunity. But it was equally true that it did not have a logic of its own. That logic was to be provided to it from outside, so to speak. Unless its higher conduct and general character were governed by policy, war would be “a senseless thing, without an object.”

Translated into practical terms, this view of war as an instrument meant that ultimately its conduct had to be laid down not by the commander in chief but by the political leadership. What is more, it enabled Clausewitz to argue that war was morally neutral—as he says—thus once again allowing his tendency towards brutal realism to come to the fore. “There can be no war without bloodshed; in dangerous things such as war, errors committed out of a feeling of benevolence are the worst.” Consequently, in the entire massive work, the only sentence devoted to the law of war is one in which he says that it is so weak and unimportant as to be virtually negligible.

Towards the end of his life Clausewitz, possibly because the Napoleonic Wars were slowly falling into perspective, underwent a change of mind. He now began to recognize that, besides aiming at the “total overthrow” of the enemy, as would follow from his theoretical premises, another kind of war might be possible whose objectives were more limited. He had started to revise his work when he died, leaving behind a mass of unfinished drafts. Whether, had he lived, he would have been able to maintain his original framework or been forced to replace it with another is impossible to say. The question was, how to reconcile war’s essentially unlimited nature with its use as a tool in the hand of policy. When he died, he had still not found an answer.

Among Western writers on war, the position of Clausewitz is unique. To resort to a metaphor, his is not an ordinary cookbook full of recipes concerning the utensils and ingredients which, correctly used, will yield certain foods. Instead it contents itself with explaining the nature of cooking and the uses to which it is put, leaving the reader to proceed on his own. As a result, when technological progress caused organization, tactics, and much of strategy to change he alone retained his relevance. Admittedly some of the details of
On War
are without enduring interest. For instance, the discussion of the relationship between the three arms and the methods for attacking a convoy are of little relevance today. But the book as a whole holds up remarkably well as “a treasure of the human spirit.”

Thus to compare Clausewitz’s advice on this or that detail with that which is proffered by his Western predecessors and contemporaries is to do him an injustice. Unlike them he was a philosopher of war. Only the Chinese classics rival him in this respect, albeit that
their
underlying philosophy is radically different. Clausewitz’s way of thought goes back to Aristotle and is based on the distinction between means and ends. By contrast, it is a fundamental characteristic of
Chinese
thought that such a distinction is absent—to Lao Tzu and his followers, admitting its existence would constitute a departure from
dao
. Accordingly, the Chinese texts regard war not as an instrument for the attainment of this end or that but as the product of stern necessity, something which must be confronted and coped with and managed and brought to an end. Clausewitz emphasizes that war is brutal and bloody and seeks to achieve a great victory. By contrast, the Chinese texts are permeated by a humanitarian approach and have as their aim the restoration of
dao
.