Tag: Clausewitz

On Doctrine – Harry G. Summers Jr.

Synopsis:

In his analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers Jr. advances the notion of American strategy as doctrinally deficient via a cloud of confusion. Following the Korean War, the definition of limited war became increasingly fluid. In this way, means and ends became confused – which tended to influence all levels of war.

Excerpts:

“In World War II this linkage dropped out of our war theories, for the national aim was no longer forcing the enemy ‘to sue for peace’ but rather his unconditional surrender. The destruction of the enemy’s armed forces were therefore no longer means to an end so much as an end in itself.

“The U.S. strategy in Korea after the Chinese intervention was not so much one of limiting the means as it was one of tailoring the political ends so that they could be accomplished within the military means that our political leaders were willing to expend.

“Defining victory only in terms of total victory, rather than more accurately as the attainment of the objectives for which the war is waged, was a strategic mistake.

“But even though we dropped victory as an aim in war, the overall doctrinal effects of our Korean war experience were beneficial. As a result of that war we shed our World War II delusions about total war.

“In like manner the polarity with China was also weakened by our publicly expressed fears of becoming involved in a land war in Asia. This lack of polarity was to lead us into an untenable strategic position where the enemy’s territory was inviolable while the territory of our ally was open to attack.

*All excerpts have been taken from On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Presidio Press.

Defining War – John Keegan

Synopsis:

John Keegan’s cultural theory of war takes aim at the linear approach of Carl von Clausewitz’s prime mover of warfare – i.e. politics. According to Keegan, culture sustains as well as defines politics within human action – which means cultural prime movers operate as the bona fide vital centers of war and strategy. Within such a construct, strategy may be directed by politics – but politics is directed by culture.

Excerpts:

“Clausewitz’s thought is incomplete. It implies the existence of states, of state interests and of rational calculation about how they may be achieved. Yet war antedates the state, diplomacy and strategy by many millennia.

“War as the continuation of policy’ was the form Clausewitz chose to express the compromise for which the states he knew had settled. It accorded respect to their prevailing ethics – of absolute sovereignty, ordered diplomacy and legally binding treaties – while making allowance for the overriding principle of state interest.

“Clausewitz was struggling to advance a universal theory of what war ought to be, rather than what it actually was and had been.

“The Philhellenes tried but failed to make the Greeks accept their military culture. Clausewitz did not try but would have failed to make the Cossacks accept his military culture. What he and they failed to see was that their own Western way of fighting was quite as much an expression of their own culture as the ‘live to fight another day’ tactics of the Cossacks and the klephts.

“Clausewitz, raised in a world in which royal mana and military taboos had been extinguished apparently for good, found the words to legitimize the new order. That it was no order at all, and that his philosophy of warfare was a recipe for the destruction of European culture, he failed to perceive altogether.

*All excerpts have been taken from A History of Warfare, Vintage Books.

The Problem of Peace – JFC Fuller

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.

The Confusion Between Tactics and Strategy in Vietnam – Harry G. Summers Jr.

Synopsis:

The American affection for the operational art vis-à-vis warfighting became obvious during the Vietnam War. Without the strategic character of the conflict rightly defined, military planners – as well as policy makers – tended to confuse the strategic dimensions of ways, means, and ends. In his book on the conflict, Harry G. Summers Jr. analyzes the initial assumptive error, as well as the corresponding strategic confusion which followed.

Excerpts:

“Instead of orienting on North Vietnam – the source of war – we turned our attention to the symptom – the guerrilla war in the south. Our new ‘strategy’ of counterinsurgency blinded us to the fact that the guerrilla war was tactical and not strategic.

“Basic to the success of a strategic defensive in pursuit of the negative aim, therefore, is the assumption that time is on your side. But the longer the war progressed the more obvious it became that time was not on our side.

“Because it did not focus on the political aim to be achieved – containment of North Vietnamese expansion – our so-called strategy was never a strategy at all. At best it could be called a kind of grand tactics.

“Since the insurgency itself was a tactical screen masking North Vietnam’s real objectives (the conquest of South Vietnam), our counterinsurgency operations could only be tactical, no matter what we called them.

“Our failure as military professionals to judge the true nature of the Vietnam war had a profound effect. It resulted in confusion throughout the national security establishment over tactics, grand tactics and strategy, a confusion that continues to this day.

*All excerpts have been taken from On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Presidio Press.

War in Human History – John Keegan

Synopsis:

John Keegan partially defines his cultural theory of war in A History of Warfare by examining it in a context and comparison analysis with traditional Clausewitzian ideas. Keegan believed the Clausewitzian political prime mover for war as too narrow. Politics may be the fountainhead, but culture is the impetus of the flow – and the flow once released from the fountain spreads across all human action. If strategy is directed by politics, then politics is directed by culture.

Excerpts:

“The wars Clausewitz knew, the wars in which he fought, were the wars of the French Revolution, and the ‘political motive’ for which he always looked as the precipitating and controlling factor in warmaking was, at the outset at least, always present… It must also be recognized that Clausewitz as a historian had nothing to guide him toward the importance of cultural factors in human affairs.

“For Clausewitz, as I have said, was even in his time an isolated spokesman for a warrior culture that the ancestors of the modern state were at pains to extirpate within their own borders.

“War, when it came in a ‘true’ form to that corner of Polynesia called Easter Island, proved to be a termination first of politics, then of culture, ultimately almost of life itself.

“Had Clausewitz’s mind been furnished with just one extra intellectual dimension – and it was already a very sophisticated mind indeed – he might have been able to perceive that war embraces much more than politics: that it is always an expression of culture, often a determinant of cultural forms, in some societies the culture itself.

“Man is a political animal,’ said Aristotle. Clausewitz, a child of Aristotle, went no further than to say that a political animal is a warmaking animal. Neither dared confront the thought that man is a thinking animal in whom the intellect directs the urge to hunt and the ability to kill.

*All excerpts have been taken from A History of Warfare, Vintage Books.

In the Shadow of Hans von Seeckt – B.H. Liddell Hart

Synopsis:

B.H. Liddell Hart’s examination of the German High Command in his book, The German Generals Talk, begins with Hans von Seeckt as the cultural prime mover of German military doctrine following World War One. Disturbed by the political/military fusion Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff exercised over the German Empire during World War One, Seeckt endorsed an unambiguous civil/military separation. The so-called Seeckt-pattern professional developed in Germany throughout the interwar era – and seemed to act as an enabling component for Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship.

Excerpts:

“The General Staff was essentially intended to form a collective substitute for genius, which no army can count on producing at need. Of its very nature it tended to cramp the growth of genius, being a bureaucracy as well as a hierarchy, but in compensation it sought to raise the general standard of competence to a high level.

“A newly-promoted general is always confident that the situation is better than it appeared to his predecessor, and that he can succeed where the latter failed. Such a disposition is a powerful lever in the hands of any ruler.

“When soldiers concentrate on the absolute military aim, and do not learn to think of grand strategy, they are more apt to accept political arguments that, while seeming right in pure strategy, commit policy beyond the point where it can halt. Extreme military ends are difficult to reconcile with moderation of policy.

“Technical science and tactical skill were the keys to the future. ‘A conscript mass, whose training has been brief and superficial, is cannon fodder in the worst sense of the word, if pitted against a small number of practiced technicians on the other side.’

“There was a wise warning, too, in another of his wider reflections – ‘the statement that war is a continuation of policy by other means has become a catch-phrase, and is therefore dangerous. We can say with equal truth – war is the bankruptcy of policy.’

*All excerpts have been taken from The German Generals Talk, Quill.

The Relation of Diplomacy to War – Antoine-Henri Jomini

Synopsis:

The American military has long been bewitched operationally and strategically by Antoine-Henri Jomini’s formulaic approach to warfare. The universality of the Jominian consciousness is so well established other strategic schools usually operate beside it – or as a passing veneer above its perpetual architecture. Likewise, Jomini’s geopolitical and diplomatic wisdom is usually less pronounced – but does offer some strategic bull’s-eyes.

Excerpts:

“War is always to be conducted according to the great principles of the art; but great discretion must be exercised in the nature of the operations to be undertaken, which should depend upon the circumstances of the case.

“In an offensive movement, scrupulous care must be exercised not to arouse the jealousy of any other state which might come to the aid of the enemy. It is a part of the duty of a statesman to foresee this chance, and to obviate it by making proper explanations and giving proper guarantees to other states.

“…if the principles of strategy are always the same, it is different with the political part of war, which is modified by the tone of communities, by localities, and by the characters of men at the head of states and armies.

“All history teaches that no enemy is so insignificant as to be despised and neglected by any power, however formidable.

“The love of conquest, however, was not the only motive with Napoleon: his personal position, and his context with England, urged him to enterprises the aim of which was to make him supreme.

*All excerpts have been taken from The Art of War, BiblioBazaar.

Nations in Arms – Daniel Moran

Synopsis:

Daniel Moran traverses the geostrategic landscape of the twentieth century Cold War era by keenly analyzing the Soviet policy of enabling wars of national liberation across the globe. Moran examines all of the major conflicts on every continent, and pieces together the root causes, political spectrum, as well as the tactical methodologies employed. Considering the scope of the narrative involved the book successfully blends brevity with wisdom.

Excerpts:

“Like ‘People’s Republic’, ‘National Liberation’ is a revolutionary slogan, designed to conceal sordid truths. It served to hurl back into the face of the oppressor the idea of the nation, which Europe invented, and the ideal of liberty, which the West cherishes above all others in politics, while deflecting attention from the methods and interests of the liberators themselves.

“Free societies have proved to be among the least common outcome of wars of national liberation; while such conflicts remain among the most worrisome in the eyes of professional soldiers called upon to fight them.

“The first theorist to note the historical preponderance of limited war, Carl von Clausewitz, did so at a time when most experts were convinced that the all-in conflagration of the Napoleonic era represented the perfection of earlier forms of fighting, from which there was no going back. Clausewitz, on the other hand, thought that wars fought to achieve the total defeat of an enemy would always be rare, for reasons arising from war’s character as a political instrument, and from the ‘friction’ that attended its use. War for limited objectives – a province, a concession, an apology, prestige – was the norm, and any strategic posture that failed to take this into account was likely to be discredited in the long run.

“The persistent complaint that Western armies since 1945 have fought for poorly defined goals is misleading if it is taken to mean that military and political objectives should automatically cohere, or that conditions in which they do not are always fraught with disaster. It is rather the case that war and politics, having briefly learned to speak something like the same language in the course of an all-encompassing global conflict, thereafter ceased to do so once the political stakes had shrunk to more normal proportions.

“Wars of national liberation are frequently represented as episodes of spontaneous combustion produced by pervasive misery and injustice: war as the product of revolution. Yet the opposite dynamic is equally apparent: revolution as a product of war, waged by a committed vanguard whose outlook does not command widespread support at the start, and who may obtain only grudging acquiescence even at the end… The line between political action and banditry, as Mao might have said, is one that mere persistence cannot erase.

*All excerpts have been taken from Wars of National Liberation, HarperCollins Publishers LLC.

The Political Problems of Guerrilla Warfare – Mao Tse-tung

Synopsis:

On Guerrilla Warfare presents the ideological underpinnings of Mao Tse-tung’s theory of insurgency warfare. In true Clausewitzian style he devotes a chapter to the dynamic political dilemmas engendered by revolutionary guerrilla warfare.

Excerpts:

“Military action is a method used to attain a political goal. While military affairs and political affairs are not identical, it is impossible to isolate one from the other.

“A revolutionary army must have discipline that is established on a limited democratic basis.

“Officers should live under the same conditions as their men, for that is the only way in which they can gain from their men the admiration and confidence so vital in war. It is incorrect to hold to a theory of equality in all things, but there must be equality of existence in accepting the hardships and dangers of war.

“It is only undisciplined troops who make the people their enemies and who, like the fish out of its native element, cannot live.

“We further our mission of destroying the enemy by propagandizing his troops, by treating his captured soldiers with consideration, and by caring for those of his wounded who fall into our hands. If we fail in these respects, we strengthen the solidarity of our enemy.

*All excerpts have been taken from On Guerrilla Warfare, Mao Tse-tung, University of Illinois Press.

War, Politics, and Power – Karl von Clausewitz

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Synopsis:

War, Politics, and Power is an abridgment of the well-known On War by Carl von Clausewitz. It takes from On War the critical abstractions, and presents them in an intellectually satisfying form. Although On War is seminal and without equal War, Politics, and Power offers the writings of Clausewitz in a tolerable way for those that have either never read Clausewitz before, or for those experienced readers who desire a quick reference book.

Excerpts:

“We are, instead, considering all the combined tendencies of the mind and soul toward military activity, and these we may regard as the essence of military genius. We say ‘combined,’ for military genius consists not of a single capacity for war, but rather of a harmonious combination of powers, in which one may predominate but none may be in opposition.

“War is the province of uncertainty; three-fourths of the things upon which action in war is calculated lie hidden in a fog of uncertainty. A fine penetrating intellect is thus required to feel out the truth with instinctive judgment.

“If we take a comprehensive view of the four components of the atmosphere of war – danger, physical effort, uncertainty, and chance – it is readily understood that a great moral and mental force is needed to cope with these baffling elements. We find historians and military chroniclers describing this force as energy, firmness, staunchness, strength of mind and character.

“A great part of the information in war is contradictory, a still greater part is false, and by far the greatest part is somewhat doubtful. This requires that an officer possess a certain power of discrimination, which only knowledge of men and things and good judgment can give. The law of probability must be his guide.

“Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction beyond the imagination of those who have not seen war.

*All excerpts have been taken from War, Politics, and Power, Regnery Publishing, Inc.