On War

"The key message is that strategic principles that we, as practitioners, might use in war depend on what the nature of war is. Which is where we get to a shifty terrain because there are any number of ideas about what the nature of war is. His book is set up on the premise that understanding the nature of war makes some principles valid, and some invalid. We have to use our judgement in the application of those principles, so there’s a big emphasis within On War on the use of the commander’s judgement—of exercising that judgement, training that judgement—so you can do better, because there are no absolutes or certainties in the conduct of war. Sometimes it’s almost instinct, but it can be a trained instinct, or a trained judgement that responds as quickly as instinct. That’s one of the things he’s getting at. The nature of war itself comes down to what the major institutions are that are participating in war, how the military is structured, how well it can operate within the realm of chance and uncertainty. Also, to what extent does the populace support the war? What level of hostility is present or not? What is the role of the populace in the military? Are you talking about citizen soldiers, who might be fired up with their passion for the war? Or might the populace in fact be going the opposite way and be very anti-war? In the United States, in the Vietnam era in the 1960s, there were growing anti-war sentiments, but the White House failed to appreciate the importance of those. It started to lose support for the war right out from underneath its feet. Then the Tet Offensive came along in 1968. That was almost the nail in the coffin that killed US hopes for any sort of long-term victory. The public support just dried up, the credibility of the White House was lost and so on. The other element is the government itself. What is the overall purpose? Even if there are specific purposes that are not going to be released to the public, what is it that the government itself wants to achieve? Because if it is just looking for a limited negotiated settlement of some sort like the Korean War—you want to drive the Communists and the North Koreans above a certain line, and to arrive at an armistice and preserve South Korea as a free state—then that’s one thing. If you want to achieve a conquest of someone else in the territories, then that changes the nature of war because it raises the stakes, at least for you. It puts you in a different territory, in terms of your calculations. Likewise, if your opponent wants conquest and if you feel that opponent is not going to stop short of that, then that raises the ante for you as well. So the nature of war depends on the inter relationship between those 3 things, according to Clausewitz. He would say, for instance, that the defence was stronger than the attack in the Napoleonic era because of the nation-in-arms concept. You could fire up the population, get into the passions of patriotism or nationalism or even downright hatred of your opponent. Even if your regular forces were defeated in a major battle, as the Prussians were, they could continue to resist as guerrilla fighters, which made life miserable for the occupying French. He advocates for that course of action, along with a number of others. The Prussian king does not go with it for good reason. I think at the end of the day, Prussia would have just been crushed and it would have been more of a disaster. Many civilians would have been killed in the process. There were a couple of attempts at it, there were some uprisings. They were eventually put down by the French. Clausewitz misread public support for such adventures. He thought that the population would be behind it because he hated the French so much. He was projecting that onto the Prussian society, who were just not ready for it. So Clausewitz was disappointed and fought for the Czar when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. If you’re using mostly a very elite, professional force—mercenaries even—who are not really connected to the populace, and the populace isn’t really invested in the war, that may change which principles are valid. If you put a small professional army against citizen soldiers or a nation-in-arms, Clausewitz believed that the latter would win 9 times out of 10—probably because they would just continue to resist until either the professional force was ground down or the government decided it was not worth the cost anymore and pulled everyone back. No, I think there’s a lot of validity in that. That’s where you get the Maoist theory of the people’s war. Mao doesn’t credit Clausewitz with having given him the idea, but lots of the guerrilla warfare principles parallel very much what Clausewitz was writing about small war and the nation-in-arms. It doesn’t mean that he is necessarily the foundation for those, but there are enough similarities that we can’t ignore. You’ve seen an example of it in Iraq with the Anbar Awakening. That was the Iraqi population taking the insurrection into their hands and trying to drive out Al-Qaeda. “We have more traffic fatalities in the US every year than we’ve lost in Iraq and Afghanistan combined for the whole 15 years” In Iraq, it took the West a little bit longer than it should have to shift its principles to protecting the population and being its guardian as opposed to just going after the “bad guys.” Going after the “bad guys” is always important to do, but if you create more damage and are killing more non-combatants in the process, you’re going to turn that hostility back against you."

"Well, this is the sort of Bible of military strategists. Clausewitz was a Prussian soldier who fought in the Napoleonic wars (1799-1815) and this had a transformative effect on him. He got a job at the defence academy and wanted to write a theory of war but he never actually finished it. He died in 1831 not having finished On War, but his widow put it together for him. It has had an enormous impact and really is the Bible of war. His theory of war is that it is the essence of war to go to the very extremes. War is an act of violence designed to force our will on our opponent. It is only if you put absolutely everything into this effort that you can win. Absolute war is an ideal concept and it is different from real war. In real war, the tendency to fight to extremes is moderated by politics or by what he called “friction” – weather, logistics, accident, etc. Clausewitz argued that Napoleon had demonstrated that absolute war could be a reality. He describes war as involving “the trinity” – you have reason (the government), chance and strategy (the generals) and passion and emotion (the people). Napoleon married passion to reason, thereby mobilising the people, and so war reached its absolute point. Clausewitz said that war was the instrument of politics, like a language, but rather than writing notes you fight battles. The question is – are we still Clausewitzian? No. But military people love him and say that you can be Clausewitzian even if not all wars are extreme. Other people think we have become post-Clausewitzian and the First and Second World Wars were the most absolute. He thought Napoleon was just amazing. There is lots of manual in it. For example, he says there’s an asymmetry in war in that the defence is always stronger than offence. You need more power to attack than to defend because defence can retreat and wear down the offence. But he did think that “the Mighty Sword of Vengeance” would have to be used in the end, that you mustn’t be squeamish. He is often used to justify annihilation. I think his definition of war is wrong. For him war is a contest of wills using violence. I think it is still framed like that but it isn’t always the case. Often the violence of war is legitimised in terms of the conflict when really it is a mutual enterprise. If you look at the Cold War or the War on Terror, both sides need an enemy and are really interested in other things. And if the war is a kind of mutual enterprise it goes on for much longer. In Yugoslavia the Serbs and the Croats basically wanted to carve up territory and in Iraq the Sunnis and the Shias are doing the same, and, rather than fighting battles, they were killing ordinary people."

"Of the five books that I’ve chosen, two of them are analyses of war as a whole, that is to say, Clausewitz On War and Sun Tzu The Art of War . The other three describe the actual experience of war as it is fought, which gives a three-dimensional picture of the whole activity. I’d like to start with Clausewitz who sets the whole scene. Clausewitz himself was a Prussian general who fought in the Napoleonic wars from the very beginning to the very end and saw how the whole nature of war changed. He started in the 1790s and the early years of the French Revolution when war was still fought by regular armies. By the end, by 1815, it was being fought by whole nations. The very limited activity of 18th-century warfare had expanded into something like the total war which was to distinguish warfare in the 19th and the 20th centuries. So that set him analysing the whole thing and trying to see what was the essence of war and how it was changed by its political, ideological and social context. Clausewitz’s definition of war applied to all the various changing natures of war. He comes from giving a broad analysis of what war is and what war was going to be to then focus on the kind of war he experienced. From the point of view of his own experience, a great deal of what he said has changed and is no longer relevant, but overall his analysis of war and the nature of war and the problems confronting anybody going to war still do remain as valid now as they were then. ‘Clausewitzean war’, as describing the war which he experienced in his own lifetime, is very narrow and a mistaken interpretation of him. In the first place he says that war must be regarded as a method of conducting national strategy, the way in which nations or states conduct their relationships with one another. The use of force is one tool they use in that. The use of force is determined by the policy of the states and that applies irrespective of the kind of force used. Certainly the kind of force which people now use is quite different from that used in Napoleonic times, but the use of force as a tool of politics is still there, as much in applying a no-fly zone to Libya as it was when the Duke of Wellington was fighting Napoleonic armies in the peninsula. To that extent Clausewitz remains a universal guide as to the nature and the conduct of war."

"What Clausewitz is trying to do in On War is to help you understand war as a phenomenon. Most military writing, not least by his contemporaries, was trying to establish principles for the conduct of war. It had an instructional purpose. It might use military history—and Clausewitz wrote a lot of military history—but its intention was, essentially, to provide a set of principles. Clausewitz, in a way, wanted to write that sort of book. He wanted to establish a theory of war. But he was both too good a historian and, in some ways, too good a political philosopher—although he was self-taught in both respects—to succumb to that pressure. Every time he found an exception to a general proposition or a general rule, instead of disregarding it he would say, ‘Well, this has to be part of the discussion. If we’re going to understand war as a general phenomenon, we need to embrace both sides, or several sides.’ One of the challenges is that people read Clausewitz selectively and quote him selectively—because in the end you can probably find something that will support any proposition in relation to war within what he’s writing. (That’s not exactly true, he doesn’t talk about war at sea, for example, and he doesn’t really talk about the economic dimensions of war). But he is absolutely engaged in an internal dialogue. So it’s a book about how to understand war more than a book about how to make war. There’s a famous book on Clausewitz by Raymond Aron, called Penser la Guerre . (In English it’s called Clausewitz, Philosopher of War ). The point is that it’s about thinking about war, not about how to make war. Clausewitz’s contemporary, a man called Jomini, is the subject of a biography by a Swiss historian called Jean-Jacques Langendorf. It’s a good book, which he calls Faire la Guerre , to make the distinction between thinking about war and actually doing it. “How On War has been received has varied from generation to generation” Clausewitz was a practitioner and his practice and his experience matter. But he is also historically conscious. He was told by the father figure in his life, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, to think historically. Because he was a Prussian, he also had to think about how his experience of war, fighting Napoleon, related to the experience of his father, who’d been an officer in the Seven Years’ War fighting for Fredrick the Great. Even that level of historical comparison led to differences and debate in his thinking. And, as he wanted to write a theory which he hoped would be valued across generations, he had to be open to the realisation that his own experience wasn’t the only experience, that there are other ways and forms of war. The fact that he is not technologically determined—he’s not really concerned with things that we might now see as central to understanding war, a ‘post-industrial’ view of war—and much more politically and socially determined, makes him more flexible. If you think of wars today in Iraq and Afghanistan, Clausewitz has really gone through a pretty good revival—having been denigrated very often in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War—because of the rise in non-state actors. It’s precisely because he sees war in a social and political context that, in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan—where technology has been less important than the historical background, the cultural background, the social conditions—he has things to say to us. He’s a way of asking questions about war. Absolutely. No, he assumes you know the history of his times. The references don’t really go back before 1742, but we should not neglect what he wrote at one time about war in the 17th century. He noticed states were not as developed as in his own day, that war too was not in the same condition. This was itself instructive. So he absolutely saw the value of wider historical study. But for him, and for most of his generation, and indeed for most people who wrote about war theoretically, right up probably until 1945, military history was the core discipline. They weren’t trained academic historians, self-evidently, but military history was the underpinning of their theory. So alongside On War , which is the famous work, there’s much, much more that is straight military history that he wrote and used as the anvil on which he could hammer out what his theory was. Most military historians and most students of war will say there’s never been a book as important as Clausewitz’s On War . Some will say it’s an indication of the poverty of the subject, that it still remains the most important theoretical book on war. I think it’s partly because of Clausewitz’s own approach. As we would put it today, he’s multidisciplinary. He may use history particularly, but he was self-taught as a political philosopher, and he clearly read quite a lot of mathematics and science as a post-Enlightenment figure in Berlin. It’s not that this is directly applied, but he provides it as a way of thinking about some of the problems. And of course he’s not facing a publisher’s deadline. On War was never published in his lifetime. It was an ongoing work. He didn’t have his editor ringing him up saying, ‘Where the hell is this book?’ the whole time. And while I’m being flippant about this, I think if he were still alive he’d still be writing it, actually. Yes, it’s an attempt to deal with his arguments, to give a bit of context to them. How On War has been received has varied from generation to generation. People tend to hijack it for their own purposes and stress different aspects of the book as though their version, the version as of 2018, is the version. Actually, the whole point about the book is its subtlety and variety. Those who work on war will say they go back and look again, and something strikes them afresh. Sometimes my students will quote something from Clausewitz at me and I think, ‘Gosh, I had never read it that way’ or ‘I missed that!’ It has that textual variety and depth which does provide an endless source of inspiration."

"If you’re trying to understand any conflict you still have to start with the dead Prussian. If we’re assigning a reading list to understand the war in Afghanistan, we first have to understand war as a phenomenon. It has a certain logic. There’s still no other book that’s as significant in terms of understanding war as On War. First, as Clausewitz said, you have to establish the kind of war on which you’re embarking. One of the criticisms of the counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan is that there’s been a disconnect between counterinsurgency operations and the political aims of the decision-makers back home. There hasn’t been any strategic bridge. I think that’s probably a good criticism. The operations in Afghanistan have taken on a life of their own, they have become disconnected from the politics. There’s a divide between the civil policymakers and the military on the ground, and I think both sides are responsible for that. That is one area in which we have failed in Afghanistan. We’ve misdiagnosed the conflict at several key junctures. I’m not sure we even understand the war right now. I always think the US and its allies have been a step too slow in understanding the conflict in Afghanistan. For many years, we continued to fight what we called a counter-terror campaign. We then decided to fight a counterinsurgency campaign, but decided to fight it without the resources we knew would be necessary. Then, even after we surged resources, we were dealing with a partner in Afghanistan… Traditionally, the problem a government faces when it faces an insurgency is a lack of capacity. When we think about counterinsurgency, we think about the problem being the capacity of the Afghan government. But one of the observations we made in 2009 was that the problem in Afghanistan was not necessarily the lack of capacity of the Afghan government, but also its behaviour. We’ve never created a political campaign to go along with our military campaign. We’ve waged operations to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al-Qaeda and to degrade the Taliban , but we’ve never come up with a coherent political strategy to address the behaviour of the Afghan government at all levels. The problem is not corruption per se. A state can be corrupt and still exist. The United States deals with corruption. The problem in Afghanistan – and one of the things that disheartens even people like me, who have invested a lot of time and sweat into the war in Afghanistan – is things like the Kabul Bank fiasco . You have officials who not only want to eat the golden egg, but also kill and cook the goose that laid it. The problem we have in Afghanistan is this mentality – in large part fed by the psychology of a population that’s been living with conflict for 30 years – that is all about maximising returns over the shortest period of time, without thinking about long-term institution building. In the case of Kabul Bank, people just tried to make themselves as rich as possible without really worrying about whether or not the bank itself was going to collapse. We have never developed a coherent strategy to use our influence over Hamid Karzai and others, to affect the behaviour of key Afghan decision-makers. Personally, I think books one, two and eight [of On War ] are just as relevant today as they were when they were written. In book eight there is a section about how war is only a branch of political activity. War is in no sense autonomous, it is simply a continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means. And yet, you’ve seen the conflict in Afghanistan being prosecuted almost entirely by the US and allied militaries without really thinking through the political nature of the war. Had we thought through the war in Afghanistan as a political problem, that the end goal was not necessarily the destruction of the enemy’s fighting forces, but political reconciliation, had we thought through the political behaviour of the Afghan government, then I think we’d look at a campaign that looks very different from the one we’ve been waging. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I’ve co-authored a paper that talks through how the US can draw down. I think the US needs to have an enduring commitment to the region, but it’s entirely reasonable for the US and allied taxpayers to demand that the war in Afghanistan be fought with fewer resources and in a way that does not tie down the vast majority of our military and intelligence capabilities in a landlocked country in Central Asia. We have to be honest here – the US has very few interests in Afghanistan. It makes no sense for the US to be over-committed to Afghanistan over the long term. Personally, I wish the Obama administration had done things a little differently. I wish we had made a long-term commitment to Afghanistan with fewer resources. Instead, we made a commitment with a lot of resources but over a very short period of time. The way we committed to Afghanistan has encouraged behaviour among the Afghans – and Pakistanis as well – to simply try to get as much out of the United States and its allies over the shortest period of time possible."