Category: Military History

“Each period, therefore, would have held to its own theory of war…It follows that the events of every age must be judged in the light of its own peculiarities.”

Book 8 Ch 3

While Clausewitz strove for timelessness, much has changed since On War’s publication in 1832, even when he was absolutely correct.  Which perhaps he wasn’t.  Clausewitz’s emphasis on the importance of battle and the destruction of enemy forces has taken quite a beating over the last two hundred years.  The time and geography over which a universal theory of war must hold have expanded, and weapons have become more lethal over a longer range.  I’ll go into some particulars below, and look at what I think is still relevant in a future post (here).

Decisive Battle

“1. Destruction of the enemy forces is the overriding principle of war […]

2. Such destruction of forces can usually be accomplished only by fighting.
3. Only major engagements involving all forces lead to major success.
4. The greatest successes are obtained where all engagements coalesce into one great battle.”

Book 4 Ch 11

“Marches by separate columns and divisions, advance guards and flanking corps, reserves intended to support more than one strategic point, the concentration of individual corps…the small change, so to speak, of the strategic budget, while important battles and other operations comparable in scale may be considered its gold and silver.”

Book 4 Ch 7

The centerpiece of On War, and also the source of its greatest contradiction, is the emphasis the author places on decisive battles.  When he began writing in 1809, Clausewitz’s had a basically unqualified vision of the battle as the path to the destruction of enemy forces, and the destruction of enemy forces as a route to victory.  His service during the campaign of 1812, among other things at least, clearly changed his mind.  He notes how absurd would have been the Russians bringing Napoleon to battle at the border, with the latter at his greatest strength, and the wisdom (albeit, in his telling, accidental) of allowing Napoleon to deplete his strength advancing into the interior.  As in everything else, Clausewitz wisely qualifies the value he places on battles.  He has a much less totalizing view of victory and defeat than those of us living in the post-WW2 world.  An inferior state might win a battle but lose a war; still, in Clausewitz’s reckoning, they would likely put themselves in a better position when they negotiated surrender.  They might even gain easier terms by losing such a battle!   Clearly wars of annihilation, where a country faces the total destruction of its people and institutions as a result of a loss, are not being accounted for properly.

Besides that, is battle truly necessary for victory?  Are guerrilla and rear-area actions simply “small change”?  Vietnam might offer one counterexample.  However, I don’t think it fits; using a suitably nuanced view of Clausewitz, the entire Northern effort to rid the South of American forces might only be considered a shaping effort for the invasion and subsequent decisive engagements of 1975.  Also, Clausewitz does not neglect moral factors in his writing: a loose reading could fit the Tet Offensive into the role of the decisive battle.  The Korean War, I think, makes a better counterexample to Clausewitz: there wasn’t really a single, decisive battle that led to the war’s end state.

Then again, there was a counteroffensive in March 1951 that pushed the Chinese back up to around the 38^th parallel.  Was that a battle?  I suspect a suitably stubborn Prussian answer would be that since those actions produced a decisive strategic effect, they constituted decisive battles.  Certainly the rather circular reasoning Clausewitz uses to dismiss certain frictions on the part of an invader support this answer.

Obstacles of this nature [logistical] tend to vanish in the face of decisive victories.

Book 5, Ch 15

After all, battles in Clausewitz’s time lasted for a day, being halted by the onset of nightfall.  This certainly wasn’t the case in 1914, and any adjustments to the concept of a “battle” that can accommodate Passchendaele, Stalingrad, or even Kursk into anything resembling a Clausewitzian framework would allow for COURAGEOUS or TOMAHAWK to count.

I think an answer lies in examining Clausewitz’s rationale for the importance of battle more closely.  He claims, without using the term, that the opportunity cost of other forms of military effort (e.g. deception, feints, infiltration, harassment, turning movements) is too high, that battle – destruction of the enemy’s fighting forces — is always the most efficient method of allocating military effort, with the later qualification of conditions being set.

The North Vietnamese did attempt to shape and fight decisive battles (against the French, Americans, and the RVN).  However, I don’t think their efforts were primarily in that direction.  At best it was one of several lines of effort, and arguably not a wisely managed one.  More recently, the mujahideen who drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan didn’t devote much of their resources to such ends.  Clausewitz does have a ready reply to these examples: they give weaker forces hope, if not material benefit.  Deception, then, is a resort of weakness if not desperation.

Battles – intensifications of combat operations, if not quite like how Clausewitz thought of them – will continue to occur in warfare.  The ability to win battles and to tactically exploit or mitigate victory or defeat is necessary for armies.  Did Clausewitz overemphasize their importance?  Yes.  Sometimes attempting to fight pitched, set-piece battles will produce the desired strategic effect.  Other times, it is foolish.  It is not always and everywhere the coin of the realm.

Eurocentrism

“…at this time the armies of practically all European states have reached a common level of discipline and training. […] It has evolved methods that are common to most armies, and that no longer even allow the commander scope to employ special artifices.”

Book 3, Ch 4

Clausewitz generally speaks only for the European continent, and acknowledges that some of his tenets do not hold outside of the European core where he lived and served.  As a result, he makes certain assumptions regarding conquests, war aims, and politics.  Warfare in Clausewitz’s day was by no means a pretty affair, but the atrocity of the Thirty Years War lay well outside of living memory.  Mass warfare and “peoples in arms” existed, in fact (following the French Revolution) they were the chief innovation of his day.  However, the political and strategic situation in Europe remained, if not static, then relatively balanced.  Even the rise of Napoleon in Europe didn’t fundamentally shift this paradigm; France had always been a major power.  Compare, in Antiquity, the ascent of Athens following the Median War, or even Alexander, as opposed to the Roman occupation.

Because of this relatively stable and insular environment, Clausewitz downplays both the consequences of defeat and the rapacity of conquerors.  Nations defeated in war weren’t exterminated through mass killings, enslavement, or displacement.  Even the most megalomaniacal conquerors contented themselves with obeisance and tribute from the vanquished rather than additional bloodshed.  Hence Clausewitz’s recommendation to weaker states to fight for better surrender terms rather than to avoid total destruction.

Relatedly, Clausewitz assumes relatively static patterns of settlement and demography and can’t account for the strategic impact of mass migration, ethnogenesis, or state formation.  This means he can’t explain the military activities of the New World really at all.  Perhaps Clausewitz considered these political considerations outside the realm of military strategy, but again, they were extremely important to the contemporary military situation in the Americas, as well as (to a lesser extent) in the Far East.  When On War veers towards these topics in discussing the French Revolution or “the people in arms”, Clausewitz becomes noticeably reticent.

Rear Areas and Supply Lines

“Convoys, as a rule, move in the rear of their own army…Consequently, only minor forces can be attached to attack them, which must protect themselves by strong reserves. […] The attack must usually be satisfied with cutting the traces, taking out the horses, blowing up ammunition carts, and so on.  This will halt the convoy and throw it into confusion, but it will not actually be lost.”

Book 7 Ch 18

Rest assured, the destruction of vulnerable materiel is nowhere near this labor-intensive or ineffective nowadays (although the lives of civilian drivers are spared even by the most ruthless partisans more often than one might naively assume).  Repeating firearms and high explosives have made sure of that.  Soldiers in Clausewitz’s day didn’t even have cigarette lighters.  He mostly dismisses damage to supply lines as a waste of effort for regular forces, although he says that irregular fighters (such as civilian partisans) ought to do it when possible.  Aside from the increased destructive power of modern weaponry, modern soldiers must also consider range.  Deep strikes by aviation and over-the-horizon artillery (which did not exist in the early 19^th century) also mostly negate the natural ability of the supported forces to protect their own supply lines simply by their presence.  These factors apply equally to operations against rear-area troop billets, which Clausewitz considered rarely effective, much less decisive.

Another major change: lines of communication are much more critical to industrialized armies than to premodern forces.  In the magisterial Supplying War, Martin van Creveld provides quite convincing evidence that the logistical needs of armies from the homeland “base” prior to the First World War were relatively trivial, the primary need being recruits.  Nowadays, armies need spare parts, petroleum, medical supplies, etc. and these must come, eventually, from the homeland industrial base.  Communist revolutionary guerrillas did have some success early in the 20^th century by living off of their enemies in these matters.  However, this policy ran into serious limitations in the Korean War and was always of limited applicability.

The bottom line is that operations against lines of communication are both more feasible and more effective than in Clausewitz’s time, although they are not decisive in themselves.

Deception

“Strategy is exclusively concerned with engagements and with the directions relating to them…To prepare a sham action with sufficient thoroughness to impress an enemy requires a considerable expenditure of time and effort…there is always the risk that nothing will be gained and that the troops deployed will not be available when they are really needed.”

Book 3 Ch 10

Clausewitz believes deception to be a of limited use and, again, to detract from the principle focus of winning battles.  As usual he makes some allowance for minor efforts in this area, but clearly doesn’t think it of much importance.  Charitably, Clausewitz may be warning only about the dangers of making demonstrations and feints; probably he believes that the confusion and demoralization inflicted by a successful battle exceeds anything achievable through misdirection.  While it is possible for commanders to overcomplicate plans or misallocate resources in attempting to deceive the enemy, this is true of practically every aspect of an organization’s operation.  Possibly because the matter was outside his specialty and because he never held high command himself, I believe Clausewitz seriously underplays the importance of good intelligence in military strategy.  Other than armed reconnaissance such as that conducted by cavalry scouts, intelligence collection is always smothered in secrecy.  Deception is fundamentally about denying the enemy accurate intelligence, so Clausewitz’s dismissal of the former probably reflects his underestimation of the latter.

Additionally, the increased range and power of modern weapons noted above has made deception more valuable.  The air power of their enemies required Asian armies to develop deception tactics to a very high degree in the latter half of the 20^th century.  Similar ruses enabled Serbian forces to minimize the damage from the NATO air campaign of 1998, even though waged by the same air forces that had so thoroughly devastated Iraq’s army less than a decade earlier.  The considerable effort expended on these protective deceptions certainly exceeded the value of accumulating or employing additional combat power.

The Center of Gravity

Probably more has been written on the “Center of Gravity” (Schwerpunkt) than any other aspect of Clausewitz’s writing, so I don’t want to dwell on it too long myself.  That some parts of an organization in space and time are more important than others follows from some basic principles of the universe we live in: a perfectly homogeneous army, with no one part actually more important than the other, almost certainly defies the laws of physics.  In books 4 and 6 Clausewitz refers to major battles as the “center of gravity” of a war or campaign; the more enduring definition he gives in Book 8, Chapter 4:

“The hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends. That is the point against which all our energies should be directed”

He follows with several examples of possible centers of gravity: for great conquerors, their army.  For “countries subject to domestic strife”, the capital;

“[i]n small countries that rely on large ones, it is usually the army of their protector.  Among alliances, it lies in the community of interest, and in popular uprisings it is the personalities of the leaders and public opinion…Blow after blow must be aimed in the same direction…Not by taking things the easy way – using superior strength to filch some province…by constantly seeking out the center of his power, by daring all to win all, will one really defeat the enemy.”

This is a quite “modern” understanding of the concept; although Clausewitz does omit industrial and commercial centers in his examples, his definition does not preclude them, and he does not neglect the “hearts and minds” of counter-insurgency thinking.

This thinking does suggest attacking the enemy’s strength (how do I stop Frederick?  Defeat his army!)  Both sides (or any side) of a conflict have their own centers of gravity, obviously, although Clausewitz speaks of protecting them only through implication, part of a general underemphasis on protection that likely speaks to the characteristics of his era.  Still, protected they are whenever possible, even when they do not actually constitute a military force in themselves.  These include not only the military defenses of a capital, but less tangible means like political indoctrination of cadres.

Anyway, modern theory now appends “critical vulnerabilities” and “critical requirements”, which allow for centers of gravity to be neutralized indirectly (by identifying and attacking those requirements and vulnerabilities).  The resulting concept exceeds Clausewitz’s probably-incomplete musings.

Fortresses

Several points Clausewitz makes I have completely ignored because they obviously no longer apply.  Fortresses – strategically significant hardened defenses – might be of those, but they make for some interesting thought experiments, and are much more clearly a mixed bag of applicability than musings on horse population.

The Composition of Armies

In Clausewitz’s day, armies consisted of infantry, cavalry, and artillery.  Abstracted into mass, speed, and firepower, we still have a reasonably useful way to think about armed forces.  However, the devil is in the details.  In my opinion many modern novelties fall roughly into the realm of “artillery” conceived generally, as they cannot (unlike cavalry) occupy terrain.  Attack aviation, for instance.  However, all of these capabilities are far more diverse than in Clausewitz’s day, when a horse was a horse was a horse. The relative fungibility of troops was particularly pronounced in Europe itself.  Today that an F-22 is not anything much like a P-51, nor an Abrams tank like a Sherman tank, is something we take for granted, but for Clausewitz “saber or lance?” pretty much covered the gamut of technical capability in the cavalry.  The usefulness of intellect, which On War does note, has increased as the result of the complications imposed by technology, a requirement merely to understand capabilities.

The professionalization of support branches like transportation and medical corps was only nascent when On War was written; these are now much more clearly “part of the army” than in the early 19^th century.

Conclusion

Some parts of On War have not held up well; much has changed since Clausewitz wrote.  I have not covered some areas which, although of historical interest, are obviously obsolete, except perhaps in passing.  On War is a trove of insight; several times I opened it to dig out a quotation only to realize that the author had anticipated a criticism or that I had not read him with proper nuance.  Still, as deep as the well runs, it is a product of its time and place.  In a future post, I’ll look at what I think are its most useful concepts.