Clausewitz Roundtable

Book V is a case study of the armed forces, not of their employment in battle, but rather how they are organized and their “relationship to country and terrain”. It rather like describing how each chess piece is allowed to move on the board, less about how it is used in actual play.

Book V, like all of On War, has many points of interest. In particular, it is a good example of Clausewitz’s own method of analysis, and thinking through how the various elements of the “modern” military forces of his day actually worked. This approach could be fruitfully emulated by application to modern militaries. However, since it is a “drill down” on armies as they were in Clausewitz’s own day it contains a relatively lower proportion of “high grade ore” than some of the other books, particularly the refined material in Book I.

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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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Even the ultimate aim of comtemporary warfare, the political object, cannot always be seen as a single issue.   Even if it were, action is subject to such a multitude of conditions and considerations that the aim can no longer be achieved by a single tremendous act of war.   Rather it must be reached by a large number of more or less important actions, all combined into one whole.   Each of these separate actions has a specific purpose relating to the whole.

Chapter 3

Here we are looking at the political object and its supporting military aim as being close together.   The applicability of the military instrument is something of a sliding scale which increases the more the political purpose and the military aim are the same.   This tracks along very well with the ideal type of absolute war.   At the same time this sequence of actions/decisions is very much tied to the specifics of the political purpose and how the phenomenon of war acts upon/changes/develops it.   So we have a very basic concept of contingency here, that being a sequence of purpose-driven actions/decisions being made over time and being influenced in turn by a complex ever evolving environment.

The concept of contingency as connected to the general theory does not end there however, and by referring to affinitive Weberian concepts can be even expanded upon.

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Book IV is entitled: The Engagement. It has, to a large degree, been surpassed by later developments. Clausewitz saw that in his own day, warfare had moved from the smaller scale, more limited scope wars of the 18th Century, to the full-scale, nation-in-arms, all-out warfare of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. To Clausewitz, the lesson that had been beaten into his head, by the hard lessons of a life spent at war, was that war would not and could not go back to its earlier more limited form.

What did Clausewitz glimpse behind these vast transformations, this new way of war that ate up whole armies, crushed major powers into the dirt, and hacked a swath of destruction across the continent? He saw the face of the God of War himself. Behind the ephemera, however titanic, fiery, bloody — and hence distracting — was the rock-like simplicity of Absolute War. It was not possible to reach the level of Absolute War in reality. But it was the gravitational center toward which war tended. And in an age when earlier limits, which had seemed to be the order of nature, were blown to bits, the nearest approximation of Absolute War was a major battle, an engagement in which the mass of two nation’s armies were pitted against each other, at a unitary place and time, and there slugged it out, consuming men and wearing each other down, until one army had its spirit broken, and began to fall back, and could then be pursued to destruction. “What is the battle? It is the engagement by the main force … the battle must be considered as the true center of gravity of the war.” Battle was the epitome of war in the modern age, as Clausewitz had seen with his own eyes. He experienced the losing side at Jena: (“Those who have never been through a serious defeat will naturally find it hard to form a vivid and thus altogether true picture of it.”) He experienced the victorious side at Waterloo.

He was generally right about the centrality of battle for just over 100 years, from his death until 1945. Not bad at all. Better than most explanatory models outside of the physical sciences.

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