On War

by Carl von Clausewitz

There was no single standard of excellence in war.

Military institutions and the manner in which they employed violence depended on the economic, social, and political conditions of their respective states.

it was a mistake to believe that war could be mastered by observing this or that set of rules. The variety and constant change in war could never be fully caught by a system.

“War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means. Consequently, the main lines of every major strategic plan are largely political in nature, and their political character increases the more the plan applies to the entire campaign and to the whole state. A war plan results directly from the political conditions of the two warring states, as well as from their relations to third powers. A plan of campaign results from the war plan, and frequently—if there is only one theater of operations—may even be identical with it. But the political element even enters the separate components of a campaign; rarely will it be without influence on such major episodes of warfare as a battle, etc. According to this point of view, there can be no question of a purely military evaluation of a great strategic issue, nor of a purely military scheme to solve it.”

All that theory could do was to give the artist or soldier points of reference and standards of evaluation in specific areas of action, with the ultimate purpose not of telling him how to act but of developing his judgment.

Waging war is very difficult, he wrote, “but the difficulty is not that erudition and great talent are needed…there is no great art to devising a good plan of operations. The entire difficulty lies in this: To remain faithful in action to the principles we have laid down for ourselves.”

“The conduct of war resembles the workings of an intricate machine with tremendous friction, so that combinations which are easily planned on paper can be executed only with great effort. Consequently the commander's free will and intelligence find themselves hampered at every turn, and remarkable strength of mind and spirit are needed to overcome this resistance. Even then many good ideas are destroyed by friction, and we must carry out more simply and modestly what in more complicated form would have given greater results.”

to exclude or deny chance was to go against nature; indeed, chance was to be welcomed because it was part of reality. It was not only a threat but also a positive force to be exploited.

Napoleon expressed this idea perfectly in his operational dictum: Engage the enemy, and see what happens.

The commander put himself in the way of chance; the power at his disposal and his will to use it enabled him to...

The concepts of genius, friction, chance, in their manifold interaction, now made it possible for the theorist to subject vast areas of military reality to logical, systematic analysis.

his preference for the systematic development of ideas and the uniform application of concepts on a broad range of phenomena.

But even in the years of greatest challenge Clausewitz recognized that the demand of absolute or utmost violence, though logically valid, was rarely satisfied in reality. Absolute war was a fiction, an abstraction that served to unify all military phenomena and helped make their theoretical treatment possible. In practice the use of force tended to be limited. The power of friction reduced the abstract absolute to the modifications it assumed in reality. The major, unrevised part of On War is dominated by the mutually clarifying dialectical relationship between absolute and real war.

He did not regard history as a book of examples from which soldiers could learn, directly or by analogy.

Like military theory, history had no lessons or rules to offer the student, it could only broaden his understanding and strengthen his critical judgment.

The role of theory, on the contrary, Clausewitz once declared, was merely to help us comprehend history—a highly telling reversal of roles that few other theorists would have agreed with or even understood.20

the intrinsic violence of war; the dominant role of rational policy in shaping and controlling it; and the all-important dimension of chance.

emphasizes the central paradox of all war, the dialectic between the forces of violence and the forces of reason,

“Strategy is a system of expedients. It is more than a science, it is a science applied to everyday life…the art of acting under the pressure of most arduous circumstances.”

Clausewitz might have “changed his views as to the superiority of the defense over the attack if he had had the opportunity of carefully revising his original text”; an argument frequently used by admirers of Clausewitz—the present writer not excepted—who find aspects of his work not wholly to their liking.

Clausewitz's explicit and repeated insistence on the need to subordinate military means to political ends this final assertion is puzzling.

It was the analogy between war and commerce to which he drew Marx's attention; “A remarkable way of philosophizing about the question,” he commented, “but very good.” Marx expressed equal approval: “the rascal has a ‘common sense' bordering on wit” he replied.

Clausewitz's ideas, though densely packed in, are generally simple and are for the most part clearly expressed in jargon-free language, both in the original and in the present translation. However, these qualities may deceive the casual reader into thinking he is reading mere commonplaces. That may have been why a retired British officer of exalted rank, who was certainly not lacking in intelligence, remarked to this writer some years ago: “I once tried reading Clausewitz, but got nothing out of it.” If he had encountered strange new ideas requiring some effort to comprehend them—like some recent strategic essays that use mathematics, game theory, and the like—he might well have made that effort and perhaps carried away a feeling of being suitably rewarded. Instead he encountered wisdom, and thought it was nothing new. Perhaps he also found some of the ideas not quite to his liking, and not liking ideas is a common reason for misunderstanding them.

Also, while genius has scarcity value in every field of human endeavor, in the field of strategic writing it has a special rarity. The reason is that soldiers are rarely scholars, and civilians are rarely students of strategy. Clausewitz's genius is indisputable, and also in his field unique.

War, as Clausewitz asserts in one place, is different from anything else.

“the scribblers of systems and compendia.”

would attract the intelligent reader by what they suggested as much as by what they expressed;

I wanted at all costs to avoid every commonplace, everything obvious that has been stated a hundred times and is generally believed. It was my ambition to write a book that would not be forgotten after two or three years, and that possibly might be picked up more than once by those who are interested in the subject.

war is nothing but the continuation of policy with other means.

the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.

war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst.

If one side uses force without compunction, undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains, the first will gain the upper hand.

Not true if applied to prisoners of war

It would be futile—even wrong—to try and shut one's eyes to what war really is from sheer distress at its brutality.

If wars between civilized nations are far less cruel and destructive than wars between savages, the reason lies in the social conditions of the states themselves and in their relationships to one another. These are the forces that give rise to war; the same forces circumscribe and moderate it. They themselves however are not part of war; they already exist before fighting starts. To introduce the principle of moderation into the theory of war itself would always lead to logical absurdity.

The thesis, then, must be repeated: war is an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. Each side, therefore, compels its opponent to follow suit; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes.

If the enemy is to be coerced you must put him in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the sacrifice you call on him to make.

War, however, is not the action of a living force upon a lifeless mass (total nonresistance would be no war at all) but always the collision of two living forces. The ultimate aim of waging war, as formulated here, must be taken as applying to both sides. Once again, there is interaction.

But if the decision in war consists of several successive acts, then each of them, seen in context, will provide a gauge for those that follow. Here again, the abstract world is ousted by the real one and the trend to the extreme is thereby moderated.

Anything omitted out of weakness by one side becomes a real, objective reason for the other to reduce its efforts, and the tendency toward extremes is once again reduced by this interaction.

Lastly, even the ultimate outcome of a war is not always to be regarded as final. The defeated state often considers the outcome merely as a transitory evil, for which a remedy may still be found in political conditions at some later date. It is obvious how this, too, can slacken tension and reduce the vigor of the effort.

Warfare thus eludes the strict theoretical requirement that extremes of force be applied. Once the extreme is no longer feared or aimed at, it becomes a matter of judgment what degree of effort should be made; and this can only be based on the phenomena of the real world and the laws of probability.

But there are two distinct forms of action in war: attack and defense. As will be shown in detail later, the two are very different and unequal in strength. Polarity, then, does not lie in attack or defense, but in the object both seek to achieve: the decision.

If it is in A's interest not to attack B now but to attack him in four weeks, then it is in B's interest not to be attacked in four weeks' time, but now. This is an immediate and direct conflict of interest; but it does not follow from this that it would also be to B's advantage to make an immediate attack on A. That would obviously be quite another matter.

THE SUPERIORITY OF DEFENSE OVER ATTACK OFTEN DESTROYS THE EFFECT OF POLARITY, AND THIS EXPLAINS THE SUSPENSION OF MILITARY ACTION

The weaker the motives for action, the more will they be overlaid and neutralized by this disparity between attack and defense, and the more frequently will action be suspended—as indeed experience shows.

FREQUENT PERIODS OF INACTION REMOVE WAR STILL FURTHER FROM THE REALM OF THE ABSOLUTE AND MAKE IT EVEN MORE A MATTER OF ASSESSING PROBABILITIES

It is now quite clear how greatly the objective nature of war makes it a matter of assessing probabilities. Only one more element is needed to make war a gamble—chance: the very last thing that war lacks. No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance. And through the element of chance, guesswork and luck come to play a great part in war.

In short, absolute, so-called mathematical, factors never find a firm basis in military calculations. From the very start there is an interplay of possibilities, probabilities, good luck and bad that weaves its way throughout the length and breadth of the tapestry. In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards.

War is a pulsation of violence, variable in strength and therefore variable in the speed with which it explodes and discharges its energy.