Zenpundit

My home blog is Zenpundit - devoted to history, defense policy, foreign policy, strategic theory, futurism, cognition, education and such esoteric subjects that manage to catch my eye. I teach, consult and write the occasional article.

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book III: Calculation

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I have to apologize to my fellow roundtable participants for my lengthy absence. I will endeavor to catch up, starting with this post.

My background is in 20th century diplomatic and economic history, with an emphasis in the Cold War and related Soviet Studies. Our former Communist adversaries, especially the doctrinaire ideologues among them, were fond of employing a term “correlation of forces” to describe the geopolitical situation as being favorable or unfavorable to some proposed course of action. While it was woodenly uttered Marxist jargon, “correlation of forces” was far from meaningless as a phrase. It was a reminder in that grotesquely ideological world that it was important in affairs of state to calculate rationally. Even the old monster Joseph Stalin was known to bark at his henchmen” This is not a propaganda meeting!” when matters of war were being discussed in council.

Clausewitz devoted Book III of On War to matters of general strategy and he has an important section on the nature of calculation ” Possible Engagements are to be Regarded as Real Ones because of Their Consequences“:

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SWJ: My Interview with Tom Barnett

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The Small Wars Journal has published an interview I conducted with Dr. Thomas Barnett regarding his new book Great Powers: America and the World After Bush.

“Ten Questions with Thomas P.M. Barnett”

…. 4. In Great Powers, you delve deeply into American history. What lessons did you find in our nation’s past that the diplomat overseas, the Army colonel in Afghanistan or the U.S. Aid worker in Africa should know to navigate their mission today?

This is all about frontier integration. Globalization is like America’s rapid and aggressive push Westward across the 19th century: a lot of the same bad actors and a lot of the same tools applied. So don’t be surprised when the Pinkertons show up, or when the covered wagons are attacked, or when the Injuns head to the Badlands for sanctuary. Thus, the goals of our frontline players are fairly straightforward: create the baseline security to allow the connectivity to grow. Focus on social trust and institutions as much as possible, but co-opt existing structures whenever and wherever you can. It doesn’t have to be perfect and it sure as hell doesn’t have to measure up to America’s mature standards. This is a frontier setting within globalization-treat it as such. The good news is, the settlers are already there, with more uncredentialed wealth than we realize (see Hernando DeSoto), if you respect their existing rule-sets and realize they will change only when the locals see the need themselves, so no instant rule-set packages applied by outsiders, please. Finally, acknowledge that with growing connectivity with the outside world, you will see more nationalism, more ethnic tensions, and more religious identity. These are all natural reactions, and not signs of your failure, so patience is the key.

Read the whole thing here.

Special thanks to Dave Dilegge for providing the forum and to Sean Meade and Lexington Green with editorial assistance and astute advice.

Clausewitz, On War, Book 2: War is an Act of Human Intercourse

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I’d like to follow up on Younghusband’s excellent post “Clausewitz, On War, Book 2: Clausewitz as social theorist”

Social factors can play a pivotal role in an engagement. During the Kamakura period the Japanese style of one on one combat with longswords was forever changed after facing a Mongol cavalry charge and a wall of Chinese spearmen. Furthermore, social factors abound in the first Book of On War where Clausewitz lists the general variables of war (see my equation for examples). Part of Clausewitz’s military “genius” could be “social intelligence”. This type of intelligence plays an important role in understanding personal relations, navigating and influencing politics, and affects interpretive skills such as those needed in intelligence analysis. As in the Mongolian example above, social rules periodically clash with changing times or new enemies. A military “socialite” would have the attuned social intelligence to not only detect these changes but to be able to react to them.
 
Clausewitz was correct to identify the social dimension as a weak point of the materialists. His only fault was being 250 years ahead of his time, before social constructivism had an established framework to deal with the problem.

A nice piece of analysis by Younghusband. I was stirred to ponder along a related tangent by Clausewitz’s passage ” War is an Act of Human Intercourse”:

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Clausewitz, On War, Book I.: A Man of His Time or for All Times?

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Should we still read Carl von Clausewitz?

I am by training, a historian and that education leads me, when I am reading great books like On War, to ask fundamental questions about them as I read – “Is Clausewitz the last, best and final word on the nature of War?” or ” How far did Clausewitz see and where was he blind?”. Such training also inclines me to pay closer attention to the cultural and historical context in which seminal works emerged.

Should American officers today be leading troops or planning campaigns without having had the benefit of the lessons Clausewitz can teach? Supposedly, Moltke the Younger and his generation of officers on the Grossgeneralstab disdained to read Clausewitz(1) but given the results of the Great War, it is reasonable to assume that they and Imperial Germany might have profited from the exercise.

It is is difficult not to be impressed with the brilliance of Clausewitz’s insights as I read Book I. His disciplined yet speculative mind was not constrained by the Newtonian paradigm that governed the 19th century’s increasingly deterministic understanding of nature; nor did he become intoxicated by the mythic Romanticism that pervaded European elite culture and abandon the rigor that can be found on every page of On War. There is ample evidence to be found in Book I. of Clausewitz surpassing his times to grasp concepts and truths that do not emerge in other fields for decades or more than a century.

Yet there are also passages that show the rootedness of the worldview of a European military officer who survived the cataclysm of the Napoleonic wars. I finished Book I. firmly convinced of Clausewitz’s genuine greatness as a philosopher but remain unconvinced that that he has discovered the eternal nature of war in all it’s varied manifestations – I am also deeply skeptical that such a thing could even be possible.

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