On War

by Carl von Clausewitz

We have already argued that knowledge and ability are different things—so different that there should be no cause for confusion. A book cannot really teach us how to do anything, and therefore “art” should have no place in its title.

The reason is that, no matter how obvious and palpable the difference between knowledge and ability may be in the totality of human achievement, it is still extremely difficult to separate them entirely in the individual.

To repeat, creation and production lie in the realm of art; science will dominate where the object is inquiry and knowledge. It follows that the term “art of war” is more suitable than “science of war.”

In war, the will is directed at an animate object that reacts.

In another sense, the term “rule” is used for “means”: to recognize an underlying truth through a single obviously relevant feature enables us to derive a general law of action from this feature. Rules in games are like this, and so are the short cuts used in mathematics,

In the conduct of war, perception cannot be governed by laws: the complex phenomena of war are not so uniform, nor the uniform phenomena so complex, as to make laws more useful than the simple truth.

Nor can the theory of war apply the concept of law to action, since no prescriptive formulation universal enough to deserve the name of law can be applied to the constant change and diversity of the phenomena of war.

Principles, rules, regulations, and methods are, however, indispensable concepts to or for that part of the theory of war that leads to positive doctrines; for in these doctrines the truth can express itself only in such compressed forms.

Those concepts will appear most frequently in tactics, which is that part of war in which theory can develop most...

Cooking in the enemy camp at unusual times suggests that he is about to move. The intentional exposure of troops in combat indicates a feint. This manner of inferring the truth may be called a rule because one deduces the enemy's intentions from a single visible fact connected with them.

Routines, on the other hand, represent a general way of executing tasks as they arise based, as we have said, on average probability. They represent the dominance of principles and rules, carried through to actual application.

As such they may well have a place in the theory of the conduct of war, provided they are not falsely represented as absolute, binding frameworks for action (systems); rather they are the best of the general forms, short cuts, and options that may be substituted for individual decisions.

Even if we did know all the circumstances, their implications and complexities would not permit us to take the necessary steps to deal with them. Therefore our measures must always be determined by a limited number of possibilities.

Officers whom one should not expect to have any greater understanding than regulations and experience can give them have to be helped along by routine methods tantamount to rules.

Routine, apart from its sheer inevitability, also contains one positive advantage. Constant practice leads to brisk, precise, and reliable leadership, reducing natural friction and easing the working of the machine.

War, in its highest forms, is not an infinite mass of minor events, analogous despite their diversities, which can be controlled with greater or lesser effectiveness depending on the methods applied.

War consists rather of single, great decisive actions, each of which needs to be handled individually. War is not like a field of wheat, which, without regard to the individual stalk, may be mown more or less efficiently depending on the quality of the scythe; it is like a stand of mature trees in which the axe has to be used judiciously according to the characteristics and development of each individual trunk.

They cannot cope with the impractical and contradictory arguments of theorists and critics even though their common sense rejects them. Their only insights are those that have been gained by experience. For this reason, they prefer to use the means with which their experience has equipped them, even in cases that could and should be handled freely and individually.

The danger is that this kind of style, developed out of a single case, can easily outlive the situation that gave rise to it; for conditions change imperceptibly. That danger is the very thing a theory should prevent by lucid, rational criticism.

The influence of theoretical truths on practical life is always exerted more through critical analysis than through doctrine.

The deduction of effect from cause is often blocked by some insuperable extrinsic obstacle: the true causes may be quite unknown.

Serious trouble arises only when known facts are forcibly stretched to explain effects; for this confers on these facts a spurious importance.

In short a working theory is an essential basis for criticism. Without such a theory it is generally impossible for criticism to reach that point at which it becomes truly instructive—when its arguments are convincing and cannot be refuted.

A critic should never use the results of theory as laws and standards, but only—as the soldier does—as aids to judgment.

When theory has established that an enveloping attack leads to greater, if less certain, success, we have to ask whether the general who used this envelopment was primarily concerned with the magnitude of success. If so, he chose the right way to go about it.

But if he used it in order to make more certain of success, basing his action not so much on individual circumstances as on the general nature of enveloping attacks, as has happened innumerable times, then he misunderstood the nature of the means he chose and committed an error.

One can, after all, not condemn a method without being able to suggest a better alternative. No matter how small the range of possible combinations may be in most cases, it cannot be denied that listing those that have not been used is not a mere analysis of existing things but an achievement that cannot be performed to order since it depends on the creativity of the intellect.

Critics, unable to recommend a better way of resistance, have considered this an unavoidable misfortune.

One does, however, have to think of it in order to consider it and to compare it with the means which Bonaparte in fact employed. Whatever the result of this comparison the critic should not fail to make it.

If the critic wishes to distribute praise or blame, he must certainly try to put himself exactly in the position of the commander; in other words, he must assemble everything the commander knew and all the motives that affected his decision, and ignore all that he could not or did not know, especially the outcome.

The critic will, as a rule, have more information than the participant. One would think he could easily ignore it, but he cannot. This is because knowledge of previous and simultaneous circumstances does not rest on specific information alone but on numerous conjectures and assumptions.

A critic should therefore not check a great commander's solution to a problem as if it were a sum in arithmetic. Rather, he must recognize with admiration the commander's success, the smooth unfolding of events, the higher workings of his genius. The essential interconnections that genius had divined, the critic has to reduce to factual knowledge.

The critic will do this only if he pushes himself into the limelight and implies that all the wisdom that is in fact derived from his complete knowledge of the case is due to his own abilities.

If the critic points out that a Frederick or a Bonaparte made mistakes, it does not mean that he would not have made them too. He may even admit that in the situation of these generals he might have made far greater errors. What it does mean is that he can recognize these mistakes from the pattern of events and feels that the commander's sagacity should have seen them as well.

This is a judgment based on the pattern of events and therefore also on their outcome. But, in addition, the outcome may have a completely different effect on judgment—when the outcome is simply used as proof that an action was either correct or incorrect. This may be called a judgment by results. At first sight such a judgment would seem entirely inadmissible, but that is not the case.

The crucial question remains the same: no matter how much more successful the advance on Moscow might have been, it would still have been uncertain whether it could have frightened the Czar into suing for peace.

And even if the retreat had not led to the annihilation of the army, it could never have been anything but a major strategic defeat. If the Czar had concluded a disadvantageous peace, the campaign of 1812 would have ranked with those of Austerlitz, Friedland, and Wagram.

What can be more natural than to say that in 1805, 1807, and 1809 Bonaparte had gauged his enemy correctly, while in 1812 he did not? In the earlier instances he was right, in the latter he was wrong, and we can say that because the outcome proves it.

In war, as we have already pointed out, all action is aimed at probable rather than at certain success. The degree of certainty that is lacking must in every case be left to fate, chance, or whatever you like to call it.

In our reflections on the theory of the conduct of war, we said that it ought to train a commander's mind, or rather, guide his education; theory is not meant to provide him with positive doctrines and systems to be used as intellectual tools.

The complex forms of cognition should be used as little as possible, and one should never use elaborate scientific guidelines as if they were a kind of truth machine.

A far more serious menace is the retinue of jargon, technicalities, and metaphors that attends these systems. They swarm everywhere—a lawless rabble of camp followers. Any critic who has not seen fit to adopt a system—either because he has not found one that he likes or because he has not yet got that far—will still apply an occasional scrap of one as if it were a ruler, to show the crookedness of a commander's course.

But it is inevitable that all the terminology and technical expressions of a given system will lose what meaning they have, if any, once they are torn from their context and used as general axioms or nuggets of truth that are supposed to be more potent than a simple statement.

Thus it has come about that our theoretical and critical literature, instead of giving plain, straightforward arguments in which the author at least always knows what he is saying and the reader what he* is reading, is crammed with jargon, ending at obscure crossroads where the author loses his readers.

Sometimes these books are even worse: they are just hollow shells. The author himself no longer knows just what he is thinking and soothes himself with obscure ideas which wou...

What is the practical value of these obscure, partially false, confused and arbitrary notions? Very little—so little that they have made theory, from its beginnings, the very opposite of practice, and not infrequently the laughing stock of men whose military competence is beyond dispute.

Historical examples clarify everything and also provide the best kind of proof in the empirical sciences. This is particularly true of the art of war.

Historical examples are, however, seldom used to such good effect. On the contrary, the use made of them by theorists normally not only leaves the reader dissatisfied but even irritates his intelligence.

In the Middle Ages firearms were a new invention, so crude that their physical effect was much less important than today; but their psychological impact was considerably greater.

If, in warfare, a certain means turns out to be highly effective, it will be used again; it will be copied by others and become fashionable; and so, backed by experience, it passes into general use and is included in theory.