The role and place of ‘military territoriality’ in the Clausewitzian conception of war

ABSTRACT

Carl von Clausewitz’s On War has traditionally been analysed from the perspective of his classic ‘trinity’. However, it has not been analysed from the perspective of what John Agnew calls ‘territoriality’, or the political and economic use of a territory to fulfil a state’s objectives. Drawing from Agnew’s concept, I define ‘military territoriality’ as an amalgamation of human morale and a new trinity of strategy, plan and battle as the essence of preparedness in war. Military territoriality is useful to better understand the importance of human morale, battle, plan and strategy in Clausewitz’s conception of war. Moreover, in relation to the new trinity, military territoriality is important for the deployment of men in strategically advantageous positions. It involves making calculations about territorial conditions essential for successfully undertaking all stages of war, from strategic preparations to actual combat. From the perspective of ‘military territoriality’, the importance of Clausewitz’s famous dictum ‘politics is war by other means’ lies in his recognition that an efficient and a strategic understanding of military territoriality is what truly renders war as a political activity. War attains its political character through a careful usage and planning of military territoriality to ensure the greatest chance for victory.

KEYWORDS:

• On War
• military territoriality
• preparedness
• strategy
• non-linearity
• role

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Although spatiality is concerned with place and territory, interrelations, multiplicity, scale, mobility, and networks, these are not concepts relevant to my objective of using ‘military territoriality’ to understand the theoretical importance of battle, plan, and strategy’s value and use in On War. On spatiality, see Massey (1999, pp. 1–12) and Leitner et al. (2008, pp. 157–172).

2 The rise of asymmetrical warfare, or ‘non-kinetic warfare’, to quote Jasmin Čajić’s term, in contemporary wars, through the development of airplanes and tanks during the First World War and the use of information campaigns during the war in Afghanistan in the 21st century, shows that Clausewitz might emphasize the importance of resting even more, had he lived to see wars in the 21st century. A disequilibrium in war will grow more likely with the development of more sophisticated digital warfare (Hart, 1952, pp. 13, 14, 16; Čajić, 2016, pp. 74, 76).

3 For a general consideration of uncertainty in war, see Rathbun (2007, pp. 533–557).

4 One major caveat to this statement is that exerting force to rapidly subjugate the enemy depends on the mood of the leadership after witnessing the manner of the progression of a war and therefore has a mixed record. On the one hand, it could be an ‘operative act of despair to escape a desperate strategic situation’, as one historian has evaluated Adolf Hitler’s use of Blitzkrieg, or, on the other, Clausewitz’s statement proved to be a true adage for President Harry Truman in deciding to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Jersak, 2000, p. 569; Walker, 1990, p. 101).