Synopsis:
JFC Fuller’s The Conduct of War, surveys the evolution of warfare from the Napoleonic era into the post World War Two order. In the final chapter, Fuller analyzes the idea of peace within a bi-causal context of nuclear weapons and a clash of civilizations. According to Fuller, such a context tends to generate prime conditions for proxy warfare between the competing superpowers.
Excerpts:
“Clausewitz’s insistence that war is a political instrument is the first principle of all military statecraft, but his equal insistence on the complete overthrow of the enemy vitiates the end of grand strategy, which is that a profitable peace demands not the annihilation of one’s opponent, but the elimination or modification of the causes of the war.
“There is always a relationship between force and aim. The first must be sufficient to attain the second, but not so excessive that it cancels it out. This is the crux in nuclear warfare.
“A limited war is a war fought for a clearly defined limited political object, in which expenditure of force is proportioned to the aim; therefore strategy must be subordinated to policy.
“When both sides are equipped with nuclear weapons, that they will become deterrents on the tactical level, which reduces the idea of fighting a limited nuclear war to an absurdity. Thus it comes about that the stalemate is doubly assured, and except for wars other than those which directly involve the two great nuclear camps, such as wars by proxy or police operations.
“While Clausewitz failed to see that peace was the ultimate aim in war, Marx failed to see that in the steam age the ultimate economic and social aims were to create an industrial society through an evolutionary and not a revolutionary process.
*All excerpts have been taken from The Conduct of War: 1789-1961, Da Capo Press.
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