I know this is a bit late, and if I missed the answer in someone else’s post, I’m sorry for bringing it up again. It’s a minor point perhaps, but on page 143 Clausewitz states that both time of day and weather are of minor importance in the engagement. This runs counter to what intuition would suggest. Can someone explain to me why Clausewitz says this is so?
Month: January 2009
Clausewitz, On War, Book 2: No One-Size-Fits-All Solution
In book II, Clausewitz goes into great detail about the formation and application of theory. While he espouses little actual theory here, he does hammer home one extremely important idea.
The most prominent point, in my mind, is that there is no one-size fits-all solution. Clausewitz discusses the use of “routine“ as necessary for ancillary functions and training, as it provides basic knowledge on a tactical level for troops in the field, and provide the junior officer with “brisk, precise, and reliable leadership, reducing natural friction and easing the working of the machine” (p. 153).
Hawkwind: Urban Guerilla (1973)
“Let’s not talk of love and flowers and things that don’t explode.”
(For Bill Ayers, who switched from “infantile Leftist” to successful practitioner of 5GW.)
Womb Envy, Title Envy
How much of the reaction to Palin and now to Gillibrand comes because they seem to be carrying infants in many photos and carrying them as they discuss policy? Traditionally, women have been granted more power after menopause. However, a woman carrying a baby – even one she has had relatively late in life – is clearly not post-menopausal.
While some who opposed Palin argued that her only qualification was not choosing an abortion, it seemed a strange observation, especially when she’d defeated ex-governors of both parties. Of course it reveals much about those who made that charge. The children weren’t props but part of her life. One of the few television series that tried to capture the casual and ever-present impact of children on professional couples was Thirty-something..
Clausewitz, On War, Book 2: The Oblique Order, the Road Not Taken, and the Black Swan
Themes and passages scattered throughout Book 2 reminded me of themes and passages scattered throughout mad prophet Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan. Both Book 2 and the The Black Swan detail the ways humans fool themselves, sometimes in disproportionately disastrous ways. Both preach a critical and conservative empiricism in the face of a baffling and shifting world. Both use some of the same empirical techniques, in Clausewitz’s case two hundred years too early.
One of Taleb’s main themes is the tendency for specialists in any field to develop physics envy and attempt to reduce the horrifically complex phenomena they study to a deterministic and mechanistic model complete with grand and complex equations. This envy doesn’t lead to a higher level of truth and accuracy. It leads to a higher level of systemic self-deception and delusion. It creates financial weapons of mass destruction such as an MBA armed with a spreadsheet and the belief that manipulating rows and columns bestows the ability to prophesy. Vain dreams.
Clauswitz joins Taleb in explaining why this delusion will lead to ruin:
The essential difference is that war is not an exercise of the will directed at inanimate matter, as is the case with the mechanical arts, or at matter that is animate but passive and yielding, as is the case with the human mind and emotions in the fine arts. In war, the will is directed at an animate object that reacts. It must be obvious that the intellectual codification used in the arts and sciences is inappropriate to such an activity. At the same time it is clear that continual striving after laws analogous to those appropriate to the realm of inanimate matter was bound to lead to one mistake after another. Yet it was precisely the mechanical arts that the art of war was supposed to imitate. The fine arts were impossible to imitate, since they themselves do not yet have sufficient laws and rules of their own. So far all attempts at formulating any have been found too limited and one-sided and have been constantly been undermined and swept away by the currents of opinion, emotion and custom.
You can see Clausewitz calling out Jomini here, since Jomini tried (and failed) to reduce war to a science that followed predictable and universal principles (see Clausewitz’s picking on Jomini’s beloved interior lines for a specific example). Many died in the Civil War because of Jomini and his perverse inspiration (they may also have been killed by a second generation of warfare but rifles, Minié balls, and Napoleon guns are a poor defense against an out-of-control theory straining for relevance or killer generations). For those that disbelieve that military theory can’t kill, Clausewitz provides warnings a plenty.