The Clausewitz Collection (merged thread)

[marct]

Thanks for posting this. I think I am going to assign it as required reading for my 3rd year theory students.

Aktarian, you noted that

He largely ignores Clausewitz's "war is continuation of policy with different means" dictum. Which can be translated into "if you don't have clearly defined long term political goals military actions don't matter". and I think this is main problem in Iraq as golas of "making Iraq democratic" and such are not defined what exactly that means and can mean anything or nothing.

I'm not so sure that he ignored it so much as tried to reformulate it. Certainly that dictum can be interpreted as a requirement for a clear engineering plan for goals. It also should be interpreted that way when it comes to planning specific operations such as OIF.

I think what Corn is trying to do is to look at the next level or two above operational planning - i.e. geo-political strategy. As such, I think it is probably a very useful conceptual exercise to avoid black box conceptual thinking. If we treat "war as a continuation of policy" and "policy as a continuation of war", both "by other means", then it may be possible to set up and train for multiple operational situations. By way of example, if we can train people to recognize when to shift from conventional to COIN, that increases operational flexibility.

CR6, you ended your post with what I think is a really interesting observation.

The idea of professionals talking "anthropology" has some merit, but I am unsure of the level of anthropology we can teach to our leaders and troops. Lawrence spent much of his pre-war adulthood on the Arabian penninsula, and was the right man in the right place for the uprising. His success had little to do with officer PME.

Certainly Lawrence got his "training" by doing - and that included his anthropology (he had no formal training in it). Holding him up as an example of what can be done with appropriate cultural knowledge is a good idea. Using him as an example of what an Anthropologist could do to help out in operations is, I'm afraid, a mistake.

Let me expand on this a bit. I am an Anthropologist and I have taught courses in the history and theory of Anthropology. There are certainly some good examples of Anthropologists working well with the military - Ruth Benedict's analysis of Japanese culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, that became the US occupation plan for Japan at the end of WWII is an example. I think more germain examples would be The Nuer by E.E. Evans-Pritchard or Montaignard Tribal Groups of the Republic of Vietnam, US Army Special Warfare School, Fort Bragg (2nd Ed. 1965). One little known, and rarely mentioned, fact is that during WWII, over 60% of people with Ph.D.'s in Anthropology in the US were working either for the military or for the State department. There are an aweful lot of really good works produced from 1939-1946 or so that deal with using Anthropology in a political military situation.

If we come into the recent present, however, we find a very different story. In 1968, Project Camelot blew up in the news and led to a reaction against using Anthropology within the military. At the 1968 meeting of the American Anthropology Association, a new code of ethics was created (see Handbook on Ethical Issues in Anthropology Chapter 1 - http://www.aaanet.org/committees/ethics/ch1.htm - for some of the history on this). Probably the most import effect of this debate was to influence an entire generation of Anthropologists away from anything to do with the military. Indeed, I have been at conferences where I have been told by a senior professor with a completely straight face, that the military are "a bunch of fascists who are even worse than their capitalist exploiting bosses". The message is quite clear - don't have anything to do with the military and don't have anything to do with businesses. The Corn article talks about Clausewitz being the "scripture" of the military - for Anthropology, the "scriptures" became Marx, Gramsci, and Foucault.

What I am trying to get at here is that, as an institution, Anthropology in North America is pretty strongly opposed to the military. There are very few Anthropologists who are willing to work for the military - it's professional suicide. This situation is slowly changing, but it is going to be difficult to find Anthropologists who are willing or able to work with the military (I exclude myself from this generalization since I am already unpopular for working in the area of business (Organizational Culture) and I'm too interested in military history for most of my colleagues).

All of this is a round about way at trying to answer CR6's uncertainty about "... I am unsure of the level of anthropology we can teach to our leaders and troops". I am quite certain that enough Anthropologists can be found to work with the military on training to give a pretty good structural grounding in the theories and methods in order to conduct analyses. What will probably be missing, at least for the present, is the area specialists who can flesh those structures out into operation information such as that which shows up in Montaignard Tribal Groups of the Republic of Vietnam. And, in all honesty, that is probably exactly the type of analyses that are needed.

Marc

[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

[SWJED]

On Clausewitz in Wonderland...