Book Reviews
Times Literary Supplement -- April 1, 2005
On Clausewitz: A Study of Military and Political Ideas
Hugh Smith
Palgrave MacMillan, 303pp
by Ian Garrick Mason
Napoleon Bonaparte inaugurated the nineteenth century by giving Europe a
lesson in the potential of warfare. Abjuring traditional campaign strategies
of maneuver and position, in which risk-averse commanders jousted for
possession of a province here or a fortress there, the French emperor
channeled the popular energies unleashed by the Revolution into wars of
unlimited ambition and unprecedented decisiveness. Armed conflict would
never be the same again.
The Prussians learned this lesson in 1806, when Napoleon routed their armies
at Jena and Auerstädt, and went on to annex and occupy much of the country.
The political shock was immense, and one of the most profoundly affected by
it was a young staff officer of independent mind named Carl von Clausewitz.
After Napoleon’s defeat, Clausewitz set out to analyze the nature of war
itself, grappling with concepts like friction (“Just as the simplest and
most natural of movements, walking, cannot easily be performed in water, so
in war it is difficult for normal efforts to achieve even moderate
results.”), political supremacy (“war is nothing but the continuation of
policy with other means”), and the contrast between limited and absolute
war. The resulting work, On War, contains eight books in varying states of
completion; Clausewitz died in 1831 before having a chance to revise them
all.
At first, Clausewitz’s work was received with polite posthumous respect,
outshone as it was by the writings of rival military theorist Antoine-Henri
Jomini, whose prescriptive rules of strategy appealed to military officers
desperate for practical guidance. Even as his influence grew in the latter
part of the century, his incomplete work proved, as he himself had feared,
“liable to endless misinterpretation”: German commanders and theorists used
On War selectively to justify their doctrines of total war and massive
offensives. Though General Gunther Blumentritt later observed that giving
Clausewitz to the military is like “allowing a child to play with a razor
blade”, the writer's reputation suffered greatly by association with the
carnage of WWI.
Clausewitz was given another chance, however, after limited but frustrating
wars in Korea and Vietnam prompted American generals to seek a more
sophisticated approach to questions of politics and war. Thinkers like
Raymond Aron, Michael Howard, and Peter Paret translated and interpreted
Clausewitz for a newly attentive Cold War audience. Yet the dangers of
simplification and misinterpretation always remain, and Australian defence
academic Hugh Smith’s new book, On Clausewitz: A Study of Military and
Political Ideas, is in part an attempt to forestall this. Since his
predecessors’ scholarship was intended for specialist audiences, Smith
points out, a “straight-forward and extended exposition of Clausewitz’s
ideas” is required.
This is exactly what Smith provides. On Clausewitz is a thorough survey of
all of Clausewitz’s most important insights, drawn not only from On War but
also from his voluminous writings on military history and international
politics. Smith is particularly good at outlining the intellectual
influences on Clausewitz, noting both his Enlightenment emphasis on reason
and analysis, and his Counter-Enlightenment sensitivity toward human
psychology and the role of chance. Far from being the bloody-minded apostle
of total war portrayed by his detractors, Smith’s Clausewitz is a complex
and fully-rounded thinker.
To better consolidate Clausewitz’s ideas, Smith reworks the activity-focused
structure of On War (“the engagement”, “attack”, “defense”, “war plans”,
etc.) into horizontal layers of expanding scope: war as fighting, as
strategic contest, and as instrument of state policy. Though logically
sound, it gives the book a distinctly un-Clausewitzian tenor, which is
abetted by paragraphs packed too full of short quotes and by an
over-cautious “on the one hand, on the other hand” approach. What Smith
himself thinks about a particular controversy is too often unclear.
In his final chapters, Smith mounts a convincing defence of the continued
relevance of Clausewitz against those who claim that evolution at the upper
bounds (nuclear war) and lower bounds (revolutionary war and insurgency) of
traditional warfare have made his work redundant: “[War] is a chameleon”, he
concludes, “and the means employed can be seen as simply changes in colour
-- dramatic but not so far altering its fundamental nature”.
But Clausewitz remains relevant in another sense. Though perhaps half of On
War consists of thoughts about Napoleonic-era military operations, few of
which are useful today, Clausewitz’s aim was to rigorously analyze all such
operations -- to demonstrate that nothing is simple, that variables are
many, and that wisdom does not lie in the use of abstract rules. Smith
provides a fascinating section on Clausewitz’s engagement with “fundamental
epistemological problems”, and observes that that Clausewitz hoped to
identify “the factors in the equation; he does not necessarily offer the
solution for all time.” Strategists and commanders should read Clausewitz
because many of his fundamental observations remain true -- but they should
read him even more to learn how to think.
I would go even further. Like choreographers who feel free to adapt the work
of past masters to the needs of today’s audiences, strategists should treat
On War as a template, not a bible. Once every twenty-five years, “a
pragmatic military man with a remarkable analytical ability, considerable
breadth of mind and an unusual openness to ideas” (as Smith describes
Clausewitz) should be asked to update and rework On War for a new generation
of commanders. Smith is absolutely right to declare that “there is no
substitute for Clausewitz” -- but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be trying
to improve on him.
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