Beyond Clausewitz: Better ways of thinking strategically

ABSTRACT

Clausewitz has much to tell us about strategy. However, his most fundamental and enduring insights are obscured by his problematic theorizing about war in general. Essentially the same insights have been more clearly and economically articulated in the fields of political philosophy and game theory. As such, these literatures provide a more accessible introduction to the basics of strategy. The real value of Clausewitz resides in his profound understanding of how basic strategic dynamics play out in the specific context of war.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Beatrice Heuser and Ned Lebow for commenting on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

1. My text is Werner Hahlweg's 19th critical edition of Vom Kriege (Bonn: Dümmler, 1980). Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

2. Henri de Jomini, Précis de l'Art de la Guerre (Paris: n. p., 1838); B. H. Liddell Hart, The Ghost of Napoleon (London: Faber and Faber, 1933).

3. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (London: Pimlico, 1994); Martin van Creveld, On Future War (London: Brassey's, 1991). The question of Clausewitz's relevance to contemporary warfare has subsequently generated an extensive literature. For a review see Bart Schuurman, “Clausewitz and the ‘New Wars’ Scholars,” Parameters 40 (2010): 89–100.The recent English-language translation of Clausewitz's writings on “small war” are also interesting in this respect, because they demonstrate that he was interested in guerrilla operations, and had sketched out a theory of them, prior to writing On War. Carl von Clausewitz, Clausewitz on Small War, translated and edited by Christopher Daase and James W. Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Aspects of these earlier writings are evident in Vom Kriege, 799–806.

4. On his satisfaction with the first chapter, see Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 181.

5. Raymond Aron, “Clausewitz's Conceptual System,” Armed Forces and Society 1 (1974): 49.

6. For example: Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State: The Man, His Theories, and His Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976); Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought from the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); Beatrice Heuser, Reading Clausewitz (London: Pimlico, 2002).

7. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 345, 351–2.

8. Here compulsion involves destruction of an enemy's means of resistance, whilst coercion involves threatening costs that are disproportionately high in relation to the value an enemy places on achieving his desired goals. Clausewitz's understanding of strategy also embraces the military activity associated with its practical realization—or what we today term the operational level of war. Nevertheless, he clearly views this activity as emerging from the interplay of political and military imperatives.

9. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 279–83.

10. On essentialism, see Andrew Sayer, “Essentialism, Social Constructionism, and Beyond,” The Sociological Review 45 (1997): 453–87.

11. These days, essentialism and determinism are frequently contrasted with the idea of social constructivism, which holds that the character and causal powers of things are at least partly extrinsic products of human interpretation rather than intrinsic properties of the things themselves. Strictly speaking, this makes constructivism an epistemological, rather than ontological, position because it implies agnosticism about essences. For a lively account of such matters see Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar, The Machine at Work: Technology, Work and Organization (Cambridge: Polity, 1997).

12. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 184, 182.

13. Moreover, the title of Book I is “The Nature of War.”

14. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 191–2, with original emphasis. Elsewhere (pp. 222, 269) he characterizes war's essence as fighting, which is a roughly compatible position.

15. Ibid., although he explicitly mentions only the means and the ends in this context.

16. Ibid., 192–5.

17. On War is littered with analogies drawn from the emerging science of physics. Other examples include “friction,” “culminating point,” and “center of gravity.”.

18. In their 1976 translation of Clausewitz, Michael Howard and Peter Paret conflate absolute and total war. This is unhelpful because they are not the same thing. Whereas the former is the imaginary end-point of Clausewitz's deductive reasoning, the latter (as characterized by the likes of Eric Ludendorff) is a historical category of action. In this regard, it is also worth observing that whilst absolute war results from the compression of military action in time, total war involves extending it through time. Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Howard and Paret; General [Eric] Ludendorff, Der Totale Krieg (München: Ludendorffs Verlag, 1935).

19. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 195–201.

20. Ibid., 201–6.

21. Azar Gat, “Clausewitz on Defence and Attack,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 11 (1988): 23, citing Howard and Paret's translation.

22. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 206–8.

23. It is not always clear whether Clausewitz means politics or policy, because the German Politik does duty for both.

24. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 210.

25. Ibid., 212, with original emphasis.

26. Edward J. Villacres and Christopher Bassford, “Reclaiming the Clausewitzian Trinity,” Parameters 25 (Autumn 1995:, 9–19; cf. van Creveld, On Future War.

27. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 212–3.

28. Philip Windsor, Strategic Thinking: An Introduction and Farewell, edited by Mats Berdal and Spyros Economides (London: Lynne Riener, 2002), 29.

29. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 192.

30. W. B. Gallie, Philosophers of Peace and War: Kant, Clausewitz, Marx, Engels and Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 56–7.

31. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 347.

32. Ibid., 212.

33. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 86–90.

34. Ibid., 90.

35. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by Ernest C. Mossner (London: Penguin, 1985), 541–2.

36. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours Sur l'Origine et les Fondemens de l'Inégalité Parmi les Hommes (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1755), 103.

37. For applications of game theory to Hobbes, see the introduction to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668, edited by Edwin Curley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994). In relation to Hume, see Peter Vanderschraaf, “The Informal Game Theory in Hume's Account of Convention,” Economics and Philosophy. 14 (1998): 215–47.

38. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 230–54.

39. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 199–200.

40. In this respect, Clausewitz's grasp of the importance of real-world context for shaping strategic decisions is arguably sounder than Schelling's. For criticism of the latter's tendency to remain at the level of theoretical abstractions, see Richard Ned Lebow, “Reason Divorced from Reality: Thomas Schelling and Strategic Bargaining,” International Politics 43 (2006): 429–52.

41. Gallie, Philosophers, 56.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Stone

John Stone ([email protected]) is a senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies, King's College London.