Truly Bizarre Reading of Clausewitz
This blog post has been getting some attention:
The U.S. Military’s ‘German Fetish’ – Idea of the Day Blog – NYTimes.com
They view war less as a man-made disaster than as a creative science and art, a la Karl von Clausewitz.
It would be more interesting if this, in any way, described Clausewitz’s view. Clausewitz did not see war as a situation where “well-trained and highly motivated leaders can impose their will on events.” Instead, he saw it as a messy instrument of statecraft, difficult to control due to the passions unleashed and subject to the disruptive effects of chance and “friction.” Clausewitz’s view was, however, that war was often a factor for states, in state sense part of the natural order. He also argued that because it was such a complex instrument, it required a particular combination of intellectual discipline and personal characteristics to best master the challenges of warfare. And yes, he does, in a narrow sense say that the commander’s will can overcome friction, but only in the short-run and not in a way that makes war a predictable instrument. For Clausewitz, the key was mitigating the risks associated with war, but he certainly did not see it as a positive opportunity for creativity.
Anyone who reads Clausewitz and fails to see it as a warning against rash decisions to use force is misreading the argument.
I think Dr. Astore was making the same point you are making. Further down in his text he writes, “By reading him [Clausewitz] selectively and reaffirming our own faith in military professionalism and precision weaponry, we tricked ourselves into believing that we had attained mastery over warfare.”
His point is that the military learned the wrong (or incomplete) lesson from Clausewitz.
Of course I’m hopelessly biased–Dr. Astore was a prof of mine at USAFA.
Ah, gotcha. That makes more sense, though I still don’t like the way poor Clause gets bashed because people are too lazy to read him carefully. It is a hard, hard book to master — much like Hegel — but well worth the effort — unlike Hegel.
This paper struck me as quite bizarre indeed. Astore seems to confuse American military love of Clausewitz with their love of blitzkrieg. For the latter, the Germans were (and are still for that matter) held in esteem as masters of maneuver warfare (and they’ve always has awesome tanks – really awesome tanks). While blitzkrieg itself wasn’t exactly an RMA in 1939, it was pretty damned impressive – just as were the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq.
While Auftragstaktik was an important aspect of blitzkrieg, American obsession with it does not mean an obsession with Clausewitz – few US Army officers would be able to point in On War the sections that discuss that type of stuff. Astore is correct that “politics by other means” and “fog of war” are probably the only two specific aspects of the tome that have held on all these years, but they’re pretty important concepts for your average combat leader.
I think there are a number of other flaws in this paper, but I’ll focus in on one more. This quote: “Ask the average officer about Clausewitz, and he’ll mention “war as the continuation of politics” and maybe something about “the fog and friction of war” — and that’s about it. What’s really meant by this rendition of Clausewitz for Dummies is that, though warfare may seem extreme, it’s really a perfectly sensible form of violent political discourse between nation-states.”
I have never met an officer in the U.S. military that believes the last sentence – I’ve never even heard the idea before. Clausewitz provides the philosophical context between this inter-state interaction known as war – that’s why we care about him. The “continuation of politics” is an important intellectual source of the U.S. military’s subordination to its civilian masters.
I don’t see how Dr. Astore comes to that statement (unless he kept company with half-wits) or why the actual concepts behind the slogans are so bad or why we shouldn’t adhere to them. Bizarre – maybe USAFA should screen their profs a little better…