Clausewitz Roundtable

Adam Elkus posts on “Clausewitz, The Rage of the People, and Strategies of Positive Ends”

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This is an excellent, link-laden post on Rethinking Security: Asymmetric Analysis by Adam Elkus. Adam points out that many of the modern manifestations of large scale violence in recent times are derived from one of the three segments of Clausewitz’s “trinity” — the rage of the people. But, as Adam notes, without the other segments, political aim and military organization and direction and discipline, the violence cannot accomplish anything. It either burns itself out, or turns into a pointless “vortex” of violence. (Vortices go around and around as I recall.)

The challenge for policy makers, military commanders and democratic publics in developed countries is: How do you deal with this type of outbreak? As we know:

The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and the commander have to make is to establish by that test [i.e., what’s the value of the objectives] the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to make it into something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.

If you are the French, and it is happening in Algeria, you leave. If you are the USA and these events are happening in a place that threatens your oil supply, or in a collapsing state that has nukes such as Pakistan may eventually be, what then? What if one side has all the elements of Clausewitz’s trinity in place, but its opponent does not? What if only one side has an articulable political purpose? Is the conflict a war at all? I ask this not to be pedantic. Getting terms clear from the outset is an essential aid to analysis. I think it is a war, since at least one side has political goals. But it is war which most of the time may have a relatively dilute mixture of what we would now call “kinetics”. Whether it is called a war or not, there are likely to be political and/or police measures rather than military measures in place much of the time. Bribing and coopting a faction in the “vortex” may make more sense than sending your own people into it, for example. The British failed to conquer Nepal, and they made lemons into lemonade — they brought the Gurkhas into their employ, to their mutual benefit for almost two centuries.

Clausewitz, “On War”, Book 2: the fog of war

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Many people talk about “the fog of war”, even if they don’t know who coined the phrase. It was Clausewitz, and he used it to describe the pervasive difficulties of uncertainty, distorted perception and unreliable information that plague the commander in battle:

“all action takes place…in a kind of twilight, which, like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.” [2.2]

In Clausewitz’s era – the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries – the commander’s sense of the battle was shaped by what he and his aides could see and hear, and on reports coming to him from subordinates. Good generals stuck close to the action, but much was hidden by ground, trees, mist, rain, noise, and the billowing clouds of white smoke that issued from thousands of muskets and guns firing. Information was slow in coming, contradictory, fragmented and inaccurate. Perceptions were distorted by worry, fear, excitement, fatigue and mental strain. “Whatever is hidden from full view in this feeble light,” Clausewitz wrote, “has to be guessed at by talent or simply left to chance”.

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Clausewitz, On War, Book 2: The “theory” of war is purely a means of professional formation.

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Clausewitz attempted to discern, and show to us, the “nature of war”, in Book I. He discerned that there is a theoretical “ideal case” or “maximum” case, that he calls “absolute war”, a sort of gravitational core toward which war by its nature, will tend. He also showed that this ideal case is unrealizable in practice. So, the nature of War in the ideal case, in the simplicity of the ideal case, will never be encountered. Instead, all actual cases, will be complicated (both the verb and the adjective) in a variety of ways.

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Clausewitz, On War, Book 2: Clausewitz’s Science

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After the apparent clarity of Book 1, we find something of a muddle in Book 2. Clausewitz warned us of this. In his unfinished note, probably of 1830, he says that the first chapter of Book 1 is the only part of the book he regards as finished. The first six books, he says in an earlier note, are a “rather formless mass.”

He says quite a bit, but not enough, about how he planned to revise the book and how he wrote it. I recognize in these comments and in the shape of On War many undesirable characteristics of my early drafts. I sit at a keyboard, however, able to highlight and delete, rewrite and move sentences and paragraphs with a few keystrokes. I see a printed version in which my eyes can easily take in the contradictions within a paragraph. Clausewitz used a quill pen, or, if he was really up to date, a metal-nibbed dip pen. In any case, simply getting the words on paper required much more physical effort than I am expending, with more distractions. More friction towards getting ideas properly expressed within the written words, he might have said.

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Clausewitz, On War: Book 1-Proposition: War is fractal

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Snip from Cheryl Rofer, commenting:

That is, do the same conditions apply to war overall, to engagements, battles and on down?

In my mind, when I look at the essence of conditions, I see fractal qualities. If I were king, benevolent of course, I would have my visionary thinkers and information disseminators begin their work from this premise: War is an act of force, an instrument of policy. Complete comprehension of war is to be found in a trilateral communication–a communal sharing of thoughts and feelings, policy and action– of the people, the government, and the military.

Propostion: War is fractal.

For me, as benevolent king, thinking as such allows for policy/action interventions, appropriate to the dynamics of extremes.

Postscript: Before I made myself benevolent king, I was captain of a ship. It sank, without a trace. But that’s another story, less I digress…