4 Clausewitz felt the need to confront this reality early on. His first article, published in 1805, was a critique of the most widely read theorist of the day, Heinrich Dietrich von Bülow, who believed that the essence of war could be captured mathematically, through such things as the geometric relationship between the location of an army’s objective and its base.5 Clausewitz castigated von Bülow for distorting the nature of his object. He was trying to turn war into a science because that would make it understandable and tractable. That attempt, Clausewitz believed, created a dangerous
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