The Clausewitz Collection (merged thread)

[Tc2642]

Having read through this article it does appear that the writer has not even taken any time to read through Clausewitz (why bother if you think he is redundant?). In terms of theory far from being redundant I would state that he is very much relevant to today’s and future wars. There are a number of inconsistencies in this text, I doubt Clausewitz would have disagreed with ‘know thy enemy and know thyself’, but this does not suggest that Clausewitz is dogmatic, his work was meant as a tool for learning not the end in itself.

He also made very clear in his work that each age war would have its own characteristics particular to that age, that theory should be there to show how things are not how they should be.

Like the aging Marxists with a Karl of their own, the Clausewitzians today are more interested in exonerating their idol from the evil perpetrated in his name than in demonstrating what good he could bring to the current challenges facing the military. It may well be that Marx and Clausewitz were indeed mostly "misread" by most people most of the time, but if the risks of "misreading" are statistically greater than the chances of getting it right, what's the point of making it required reading in the first place?

Yeah, why bother reading something if it is too difficult to understand first time around, this from my point of view is lazy thinking, the ideas and concepts are complex but by rereading certain parts over and reading “On War” in it’s entirety you can avoid misreading it.

A decade ago already, U.S. Army War College professor Steven Metz remarked: "Like adoration for some family elder, the veneration heaped on Clausewitz seems to grow even as his power to explain the world declines. He remains an icon at all U.S. war colleges (figuratively and literally) while his writings are bent, twisted, and stretched to explain everything from guerilla insurgency (Summers) through nuclear strategy (Cimbala) to counternarcotrafficking (Sharpe). On War is treated like holy script from which quotations are plucked to legitimize all sorts of policies and programs. But enough! It is time to hold a wake so that strategists can pay their respects to Clausewitz and move on, leaving him to rest among thehistorians."7

I refer to, http://www.clausewitz.com/CWZHOME/METZSLAM.htm,

Does the obsession with Clausewitz really matter that much? You bet it does. As the military-educational complex (150 institutions, of which the Naval War College is the crown jewel) takes in interagency education, the danger is that "strategism" and "Clausewitzology" will spread to other agencies and may aggravate already dysfunctional civil-military relations at the working level. The Iraqi precedent, in that respect, does not bode well.

I don’t like this term strategism, strategy in the simplest terms is using battles to achive the political objective of the war that is being fought. Not strategy for the sake of strategy, who would fight a battle for the sake of it?

But the successor generations should have logically benefited from the "lessons learned" in Vietnam as well as the growing literature on counterinsurgency. Yet instead of being exposed to the policy-relevant Clausewitzian realism of Osgood's Limited War Revisited (1979), the new generation of officers was force-fed with the Clausewitzian "surrealism" of Summers's On Strategy (1981) -- the true beginning of strategy for strategy's sake in America.

So he has more of a problem with Clausewitz being taught in a ‘surrealist’ way than the policy relevant realism of Clausewitz? Hold on, I thought Clausewitz should be confined to the dustbin of history? Not taught from a different perspective

Not really sure about the military educational establishment so will pass without comment.

Yet, while the Osamas of this world were issuing fatwas against "Jews and Crusaders" and defining their own struggle in terms of "Fourth-Generation Warfare," our Clausewitzian Ayatollahs were too busy turning Vom Kriege in a military Quran and issuing fatwas against the theoreticians of 4GW, Netwar, and other postmodern "heresies." If that attitude does not qualify as "dereliction of duty," what does?

I would again state, that from my point of view as a Clausewitzian and someone who belives that Fourth Generational war is with us that the two are not mutually inconceivable together, that they can be conflated.

‘if the Clausewitzian text is indeed so filled with fog and friction, if On War is so hard to teach from that even most educators can't teach it properly, then surely thought should be given to retiring Clausewitz, or the educators -- or both.

I would disagree, may have taken a bit of time but I now have a better understanding of Clausewitz and a broader conception of his ideas and some of the more nuanced points of his work

If, as Gray rightly points out, "strategy is -- or should be, the bridge that connects military power with policy," what kind of a bridge is On War, which devotes 600 pages to military power and next to nothing to policy?

Clausewitz was a soldier, not a politician, thefore why should he write anything about policy, that’s left up to the government.

Why such an irrational "resistance" (in the Freudian sense) on the part of military educators? After all, it does not take an Einstein to realize that, from Alexander the Great to Napoleon, the greatest generals for 20 centuries had one thing in common: They have never read Clausewitz. And conversely, in the bloodiest century known to man, the greatest admirers of Clausewitz also have had one thing in common: They may have won a battle here and there, but they have all invariably lost all their wars.

Hm, Lenin, Mao, Lawerence?

As of this writing (August 2006), it is too early to tell whether Baghdad will be America's Battle of Algiers -- or Battle of Jena. But it is not too early to call for a Renaissance in Strategic Education -- for military and civilians alike. In diplomacy as in academe and in the media, there is unquestionably a need for greater strategic literacy, and the military can play a constructive role; but by the same token, the military will have to free itself from the Clausewitzian straitjacket if it ever wants to make a significant contribution to grand strategy.

http://www.clausewitz.com/CWZHOME/Keegan/KEEGWHOL.htm

I will try and make a go of going through the rest, but those are my thoughts so far