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| Carl Von Clausewitz/GettyImages.com |
Inspirado en su
experiencia combativa de las Guerras Napoleónicas, el militar prusiano Carl von
Clausewitz elaboró teorías de guerra tan eficaces que lo han catapultado como
el autor militar más citado hasta ahora.
Su campo de investigación,
que se tradujo en su magna obra 'De la guerra' en 1832, se centró en la teoría
y la práctica de la guerra, y la controvertida y crónicamente incomprendida
relación entre ambas.
"Hoy en día las
doctrinas militares oficiales de Estados Unidos se basan esencialmente en
Clausewitz y es casi imposible encontrar ensayos en las revistas de historia
militar que no hagan referencia sustancial al general prusiano más famoso de la
historia", escribió 'The Daily Beast' haciéndose eco del nuevo libro biográfico
'Clausewitz: His Life and Work', escrito por el profesor Donald Stoker.
Por ejemplo, la
derrota de EE.UU. en la guerra contra una pequeña nación agrícola, Vietnam del
Norte, es atribuida por algunos analíticos al concepto de Clausewitz sobre el
"centro de gravedad" de la guerra, que no se ubicaba en el campo de
batalla sino en el apoyo de la población a una guerra remota y ambigua.
Las guerras
posnapoleónicas -escribió Clausewitz- no serán una actividad cuidadosamente
limitada en escala por los monarcas y realizada solamente por soldados
profesionales, conforme a un estático conjunto de reglas y protocolos.
Han convertido en una
aventura nacional masiva y altamente volátil, que es mejor comprendida como la
interacción de una "trinidad destacable" compuesta de la
"violencia primordial, el odio y la enemistad, que se deben considerar
como fuerza natural ciega; del juego y la probabilidad dentro de cuyos límites
anda el espíritu creativo; y de su elemento de subordinación como herramienta
de la política que lo somete todo a la razón".
"El primero de
estos tres aspectos se refiere a la gente; el segundo al comandante y su
ejército; el tercero el Gobierno", escribió el visionario Clausewitz.
Rt.com. 25/11/14
How Clausewitz Invented Modern War
Inspired by his
combat experience in the Napoleonic wars, Carl von Clausewitz developed
theories of warfare so effective that he is still the most quoted man on the
battlefield.
It’s very hard indeed
to think of a single thinker or writer who looms as large over their chosen
field of study as Carl von Clausewitz. Clausewitz, on the odd chance you
haven’t heard of him in this age of wars and rumors of wars, was a Prussian
scholar-general. His field of study was warfare—or more precisely, the theory
and practice of war, and the vexed, chronically misunderstood relation between
the two.
Clausewitz’s magnum
opus was begun in 1816 after he’d survived the rigors of more than 30 combat
engagements in the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars of Europe, more or less
physically intact. The manuscript for On War was left unfinished at the time of
his death from a cholera epidemic in 1831, and first published in German in
three volumes a few years later by his wife, the former Countess Marie von
Bruhl, who possessed a fine, discriminating intelligence, and a passionate
devotion to her husband and his life’s work.
What makes
Clausewitz’s now longstanding domination of his subject so remarkable is that
since his death in 1831, warfare as a field of study has continuously occupied
the professional attention of thousands of very smart, thoughtful human beings.
A fair number of these men, and a few women, soldiers and civilians alike, have
made important contributions to a steadily growing canon of classic works on
warfare that began some 2,500 years with Thucydides and Sun Tzu. Yet, when it
comes to understanding the nature of war and strategy today, none of the works
in that canon is spoken of so often, or with such reverence and respect, as Clausewitz’s
On War.
Moreover, since his passing, literally
hundreds of wars have been fought, and soldiers and historians have proclaimed
uncontroversially that warfare has been transformed and revolutionized not
once, but a handful of times.
The American Civil
War is generally recognized to be the first industrial war, in which railroads
and mass production played a key role. Then came the horrors of World War I,
with the advent of tanks and airplanes and poison gas. After that terrible
slaughter, the professional military establishments in all the industrialized
countries threw out their field manuals, and began again. But they didn’t throw
out On War.
Twenty years later
came another world war that exploited the tank and the airplane in ways
unimaginable to the generals of the First World War, and introduced several new
strategic dimensions into warfare: the
blitzkrieg, strategic bombing, combined arms war, and finally, nuclear war.
Clausewitz not only survived World War II; he emerged from it with his
reputation greatly enhanced.
In 1982, Col. Harry
Summers’s On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War masterfully
employed Clausewitz’s teachings to offer startling new perspectives on how it
was possible for a tiny agricultural country like North Vietnam to defeat the
United States. Evoking a key
Clausewitzian concept, Summers argued that the Vietnamese communists had struck
at America’s critical “center of gravity” in the war—not its army in the field,
but the people’s support at home for a distant and ambiguous war—and they had
won!
Summers reignited the
fiery debate about Vietnam through Clausewitz’s compelling frame of analysis,
and On War has remained front and center in the work of American military
intellectuals ever since. In 1989, the U.S. Marine Corps issued a new Bible,
Field Manual No. 1, to every Marine, with the order to “read it and take it to
heart.” Warfighting, its authors freely admitted, was essentially On War in
digest form.
Today the official
fighting doctrines of the U.S. armed services all draw heavily on Clausewitz
unapologetically, and it is next to impossible to find essays in serious
defense and military history journals without substantial references to the
most famous Prussian officer in history.
Why? The short
answer: this brilliant Prussian saw a great deal of combat up close and
personal, read military as well as political history and philosophy
voraciously, and then wrote, and rewrote, about his subject compulsively for 30
years—often drawing on disciplines far afield from war studies to make his
points. He was as much a student of the human soul as he was about war, which
lends his writing about the latter a certain breadth and depth that is hard to
capture in short essay like this.
In the end, Carl Phillip
Gottfried von Clausewitz was able to distinguish war’s timeless elements from
its evanescent ones with a laser-like precision that has startled readers for
generations, and none more so than this one. This melancholy, introspective
Prussian, Professor Donald Stoker argues in his meticulously researched
Clausewitz: His Life and Work, was driven above all else by a passion to
distinguish himself as one of the great combat soldiers of his generation and
ended up producing the most sophisticated and trenchant road map to the study
of organized violent conflict yet written: “Clausewitz brought the study of war
to a new intellectual level,” Stoker opines, “turning it into a genuine
discipline, placing it alongside other fields of study such as art, engineering,
or philosophy … No one before or since Clausewitz has used both history and
analysis to study war and the forces affecting its conduct so deeply.”
The author of On War,
we learn, established his initial reputation in European military circles by exposing the illusions of the pre-eminent strategists of his own time, men who
believed that the scientific method and the rationalistic forces of the
Enlightenment could be harnessed to make war a science, in which success on the
battlefield could be guaranteed merely by working out a series of equations and
ratios relating to firepower, terrain, route marches, and supply trains.
Clausewitz could be intellectually arrogant.
He openly scorned the work of the most renowned French strategist of his
generation, Antoine-Henri Jomini, and had little good to say in print about his
own country’s leading strategist, Adam Heinrich Dietrich von Bulow. These gentlemen, said Clausewitz in brief,
had the misfortune of mistaking the accoutrements of war for its essential nature.
“War,” wrote
Clausewitz, “is an extreme trial of strength and stamina.” It is “an act of force to compel our enemy to
do our will” by spilling blood, and lots of it. It was a duel on a larger
scale, with all the uncertainty and danger that implied. In war, he wrote,
“everything is uncertain … all military action is intertwined with
psychological forces and effects.” So much could go wrong, and so often did! As
he famously scribbled, “Fog can prevent
the enemy from being seen in time, a gun from firing when it should, a report
from reaching the commanding officer. Rain can prevent a battalion from
arriving, making another late by keeping it not three but eight hours on the
march … Action in war is like movement in a resistant element. Just as the simplest
and most natural movements, walking, cannot easily be performed in water, so in
war, it is difficult for normal efforts to achieve even moderate results.”
Besides, because war
always involves an adversary whose intentions are deliberately masked from us,
it “consists of a continuous interaction of opposites.”
Clausewitz’s
contemporaries in the strategic arts, and many of his successors in
contemporary America and Britain, one hastens to add, have been so captivated
by technology’s transformative effects on war as to miss a fundamental truth
about war’s nature: it is an
unpredictable, supremely violent social process, in which the uncertainties
faced by the commander and the soldier alike, and the play of “moral forces”
such as courage, self-confidence, fear, exhaustion and danger, invariably cause
the most meticulous plans to go awry once the shooting starts. “One might say,”
wrote Clausewitz in On War, evoking one of his legion of striking metaphors,
“that the physical [factors] seem little more than the wooden hilt, while the
moral factors are the precious metal, the real weapon, the fine-honed blade.”
While he homed in on
the unchanging essence of war as it was experienced, he was also among the
first to see that the Napoleonic wars signaled a sea-change in the way wars
were going to be fought in the future—in the complexity of their underlying
dynamics, in how they needed to be diagnosed and analyzed with a view to
obtaining future success.
In the wake of
Prussia’s 1806 humiliating defeat at the hands of France, Clausewitz’s brilliant mentor, Gerd von
Scharnhorst, had begun to suss out how Napoleon’s army of poorly trained
peasants, with few proper officers and no formal system of administration or
supply, could beat the tar off highly disciplined, professional armies of
Prussia and her allies. Scharnhorst reckoned correctly that Napoleon’s success
was intimately connected with the rise of French nationalism, with the full
participation of the populace in the glorious cause of the nation’s martial
destiny.
Clausewitz, who had
been astonished by Napoleon’s military genius and the resilience of his armies
as he had seen them first hand and learned about them through close study,
built methodically on Scharnhorst’s insights. Henceforth, war would no longer
be restricted to tiny (in relation to population size) professional armies and
the princes that led them. Great leaders willing to harness the powers of the
people by giving them a stake in the nation’s glory could conduct conflicts on
a previously unimaginable scale. The French armies broke all the rules and won,
because Napoleon discarded all the normal political and economic constraints
that had kept wars limited in time, space, and destructive power for centuries.
Post-Napoleonic War
would not be an activity carefully limited in scale by monarchs and carried out
by professional soldiers only, with a static set of rules and protocols. It had
become a massive, highly volatile national undertaking, best understood as the
interaction of a “remarkable trinity,” composed of “primordial violence, hatred
and enmity, which are to be regarded as blind natural force; of the play and
probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its
element of subordination as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to
reason alone. The first of these three aspects concerns the people; the second
the commander and his army; the third the government … When whole communities
go to war, whole peoples, the reason always lies in some political situation,
and the occasion is always due to some political object. War, therefore, is an
act of policy.”
Stoker’s biography
was written in part to reconstruct the Master’s largely unreported roles in the
various wars in which engaged from 1792 until 1815; to suggest some connections
between those experiences and the vast flow of written works he produced when
he was away from the battlefield; and to give us some sense of man’s inner life
and temperament.
Certainly the vast
correspondence between Marie and Carl has been skillfully exploited by Stoker
to flesh out our picture of the man. He shows their deep affection, Carl’s
dependence on Marie’s love to sustain him through bouts of melancholy and
career setbacks, of which there were more than a few, and their unusual (for
the time) intellectual partnership. There is ample evidence in the letters to
support Stoker’s claim that Clausewitz was consumed by a desire to excel in
combat through individual acts of courage, and that he was deeply disappointed
that he never commanded more than a single battalion in combat, and then only
briefly.
Most of his long
career was spent not where he wanted it, but probably where it should have
been, given his temperament and inclinations: as a staff officer, a planner and
organizer, and as one of the main reformers of the Prussian army after its
defeat in 1806.
Clausewitz: His life
and Work is a fine, carefully crafted book, but it seems to me it could have
more imaginatively illuminated the relationship between its subject’s
experience at war and his influential and original ideas if the author had
elected to write a more selective narrative, focusing closer attention on those
battles and campaigns where we know a fair amount about Clausewitz’s own role
in the engagements at hand, and less attention on campaigns in which his role
is unclear, or negligible.
As it stands, the
book rather heavily foregrounds detailed battle narrative, and Clausewitz, our
ostensible subject, fades into the woodwork on a regular basis. At times I felt
I was reading a slightly dry, systematic survey of European conflict sprinkled
with references to Clausewitz, rather than a study which sought to connect his
experience as a soldier to his huge corpus of writing.
Granted, partly this
is a problem of sources the author identifies in the introduction. Documents and firsthand accounts of
Clausewitz at war by others are few and far between. Still, Prof. Stoker might have been a bit
less tentative, a bit more adventurous, in making connections between the life
in the field and the ideas in the books, even if the connections were of
necessity somewhat speculative.
And readers with
little familiarity with European wars of Clausewitz’s time—and there were a
great many—will look in vain for “big picture” introductions explaining what
was basically at stake in each conflict.
The many campaigns have an unfortunate way of blurring into one another.
In many ways Stoker’s
battle narrative works best when it gives us rich context for Clausewitz’s own
accounts of his combat experience, which are invariably as keenly observed as
they are harrowing. Stoker provides an excellent account of the long siege
battle on the Rhine at the battle of Mainz in 1793, in which Clausewitz first
encounters war’s vast devastation in a night attack on one of the French
bastions on the west side of the River:
“Let us accompany a
novice to the battlefield. As we approach the rumble of guns grows louder and
alternates with the whir of cannonballs, which begin to attract his attention.
Shots begin to strike close around us. We hurry up the slope where the commanding
general is stationed … Here cannonballs and bursting shells are frequent, and
life begins to seem more serious than the young man has imagined … Now we enter
the battle raging before us, still almost like a spectacle, and join the
nearest divisional commander … A noise is heard that is a certain indication of
increasing danger—the rattling of grapeshot on roofs and on the ground.
Cannonballs tear past, whizzing in all directions, and musket balls begin to
whistle around us … The air is filled with hissing bullets that sound like a
sharp crack if they pass close to one’s head. For a final shock, the sign of
men being killed and mutilated moves our pounding hearts to awe and pity.”
Such quotes certainly
whet the appetite to read more of Clausewitz’s own, more obscure histories of
campaigns in which he played a part. Regrettably, not many of them have been
adequately translated.
Despite Clausewitz’s
unfortunate tendency to permit battle narrative to dominate the main subject, this is an important and worthy book, especially for those who already have a
reasonable familiarity with Clausewitz’s thought, and want to gain a sense of
the personality and the experiences that gave rise to his ideas. For those less
familiar with the ideas, the best place to start is Michael Howard’s recently
re-issued classic, Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction, and Peter Paret’s
extraordinarily cogent essays on the man and his work in Understanding War.
