As Hew Strachan points out, CvC saw trinities everywhere, but the general understanding of Government, People, Army can be applied to any armed group and is an extremely useful test to ascertain the distinction between purely criminal endeavours and those that are actually politically motivated. Something that many have failed to do when they started to talk about Narco-terrorism as a threat back in the 1990’s.

It is also worth noting that as concerns Insurgencies, every insurgency that has ever been actually defeated, was so by military means, within the context that Clausewitz describes the use of military force. – again, this is something the post modern counter-insurgents seem very reluctant to admit.

Yup, I agree with your summation of van Creveld more generally. It’s no coincidence that his book is called On Future War in the British editions – is there a clearer signal of intent than that?

Van Creveld is a brilliant scholar, and even On Future War is a valuable addition to the canon. The principal mistake he makes is to assume that as a man of his time, Clausewitz was of that time only. Of course, as I point out, he is not alone in this – Keegan, Luttwak, Kaldor, to name but three, all make this mistake. I know of no philosophers that dismiss Plato out of hand, by contrast. This situation is compounded by an incorrect reading of Clausewitz himself.

Mao had read Clausewitz, and he extended his theories of insurgency. Principally, he differed on the issue of base areas, which Clausewitz deemed unnecessary. For Mao these were strategic necessities due to the protracted nature of the type of warfare in question: without them, a revolutionary army would be simply unable to sustain itself for long periods, and therefore fail to achieve its strategic aims. Mao understood that the vast Chinese countryside made base areas a necessity, but later advised that other circumstances might render them superfluous or ill-advised, as indeed they were in the Second Greek Civil War.

Mao utilised several of Clausewitz’s axioms regarding the ‘people in arms’; for example, that fighting should be fought in the interior, the relevance of national character to the type of warfare undertaken, and the inhospitable nature of the terrain. In the Chinese theatre, the exhortation that the field of operations be large was also inescapable. But where he again differed slightly was in respect to Clausewitz’s advice that an insurgency not be ‘decided by a single stroke’. Whilst this is true for the general conduct of guerrilla warfare, Mao’s third stage of protracted warfare demanded that just such a decisive stroke be exercised in order to achieve the strategic aims of the insurgency, albeit by a conventional army derived from the armed population, guerrillas and enemy defectors.

In the Chinese context this decisive blow was the capture of the Manchurian city of Mukden (Shenyang) from the Guomindang in 1948, from which the Nationalist forces never recovered. Mao did not see guerrilla warfare as an end in itself. He saw that guerrilla forces could transform into conventional forces when required, and that conventional forces could also undertake guerrilla operations when appropriate. The final victory could only be achieved if guerrilla warfare was used to manoeuvre revolutionary forces into a situation where the third stage victory could be implemented.

I have read much of van Creveld, and I think one of his weakest points is his assertion that Clausewitz’s thinking is obsolete and the further implication that he, Martin van Creveld, has replaced him.

Van Creveld is wrong for all of the reasons you set out here, and even more.

For example, Clausewitz, by focusing on the moral/emotive element as part of his trinity, shows us what most terrorists or guerillas are trying to do. They are using violence to directly attack the underpinnings of the war, its moral and psychological foundation, by attacking the popular will of the population, which supports and sustains the army they face, and also or as a result causing the political leadership to consider the costs to outweight the benefits of contininnuing the war, all of this without ever doing the harder task of defeating the army they face. This is wholly within Clausewitz’s conceptual frame. Further, Clausewitz expressly talked about conflicts where one side has a higher stake than the other, and will fight much harder and bear greater sacrifices. This is precisely the situation that developed world militaries face in third world settings, Vietnam to Algeria to any number of other places. There is nothing the least but “unClausewitzian” about any of this.

Your expansion of Clausewitz’s particular case of people-state-army to the larger case of supporters-leaders-fighters is a very helpful clarifying point, and one which I think is totally consistent with the rest of Clausewitz’s book. Expanding the frame of reference in this way does no violence to the work, but helps to fit the basic model to the expanded set of examples we are now facing two hundred years later.