Reproduced here because JFQ's method of archiving past issues will drive you crazy.
Hugh Smith’s On
Clausewitz repackages
On War, by Carl von
Clausewitz, for the general
reader while striving to do
the least violence to the
understanding of war that
Clausewitz achieved in his
final years. Given the difficulties
Clausewitz’s unfinished
manuscript have presented to
generations of readers since
his widow published On War in the early 1830s, Smith’s
endeavor is laudable.
Smith, however, does
not intend On Clausewitz
to replace On War. Because
the “lucidity of Clausewitz’s
mind can only be appreciated
at first hand,” and because
Clausewitz intended his opus
to stimulate readers to reach
their own judgments about
the problems war presents,
Smith rightly insists that
there is no substitute for
reading Clausewitz directly
(p. xi).
What Smith offers, then,
is a fairly comprehensive
companion volume to On
War. In 23 short, readable
chapters, he summarizes
what scholars and military
men have thought about
such things as Clausewitz’s
life and personality, warfare
during his era, On War’s
intellectual and political
context, Clausewitz’s
approach to war’s theory and
practice, and his relevance
(or the lack thereof) to
warfare in later times down
to the present. The result is a
generally reliable supplement
for any reader, whether tackling
Clausewitz’s unfinished
manuscript for the first time
or revisiting it for the twentieth.
Having scrutinized
sympathetic interpretations
of Clausewitz by scholars
such as Peter Paret, Michael
Howard, Bernard Brodie,
Michael Handel, and Chris
Bassford, as well as critics of
On War, from B. H. Liddell
Hart to Martin van Creveld
and John Keegan, little
escapes Smith’s mention.
His volume may therefore
become a standard reference
for students of Clausewitz.
Nevertheless, reluctance
to depart even slightly from
Clausewitz’s understanding of
land warfare at the time of his
death is both Smith’s greatest
virtue and weakness. On the
one hand, the theorist was
a soldier from the age of 12
until his death at 51 in 1831;
by the time he was 35, he had
fought in 5 land campaigns
against France; and from 1790
to 1820, continental Europe
witnessed some 713 battles
(p. 27). On the other hand,
On War contains virtually no
mention of war at sea during
this period, or of technology’s
potential to transform war’s
conduct even if its underlying
nature remains unchanged.
Following Clausewitz, Smith
presents war fundamentally
as armies fighting armies
(p. 264). In doing so, he
is true to the text of On
War, but his exegesis also
devalues seapower (even in
Clausewitz’s day) and gives
short shrift to truly revolutionary
developments in the
means of warfare after 1820
(for example, machineguns,
mechanization, airpower, and
both thermonuclear and nonnuclear
precision weapons).
Clausewitz, though not
Smith, can be forgiven for
neglecting the technological
dimension. During Clausewitz’s
time, technological
changes in the means of war
were modest compared to
those of the 20th century. As
for seapower, Clausewitz
was a soldier, not a sailor.
Still, neglect of the sea was
a major oversight. Britain’s attainment
of naval dominance
in European waters
during Clausewitz’s lifetime
was the culmination of
“the largest, longest, most
complex, and expensive
project ever undertaken
by the British state and
society” (N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean:
A Naval History of Britain,
1649–1815, W.W. Norton,
2005, p. lxv). And while
many 20th-century historians,
even in Britain, have
downplayed the significance
of Admiral Nelson’s triumph
at Trafalgar in October
1805, his victory ensured
Britain’s survival in a war
“which no other nation survived
unscathed,” left Napoleon
in a strategic box from
which he futilely struggled
to escape for the rest of
his reign, and guaranteed
Britain’s economic prosperity
(Rodger, p. 543).
Smith’s dogged adherence
to Clausewitz’s understanding
of war as fundamentally
armies fighting armies has
other consequences for
appreciating On War’s relevance
to modern conflict.
The most serious is Smith’s
treatment of the Prussian’s
unified concept of a general
friction. While the author
acknowledges Clausewitz’s
view that general friction
constitutes the “only concept
that more or less corresponds
to the factors that distinguish
real war from war on paper”
(Carl von Clausewitz, On
War, edited and translated by
Michael Howard and Peter
Paret, Princeton University
Press, 1976, p. 119), he clings
to the traditional reading that
separates chance from general
friction rather than seeing
chance as merely one of friction’s
sources. Smith’s “trinity
of trinities” diagram (p. 121)
documents his refusal to push
Clausewitz’s unfinished text
beyond where the Prussian
left matters in 1831.
In discussing another
source of general friction—intelligence—Clausewitz
observed that the “difficulty
of accurate recognition constitutes
one of the most serious
sources of friction in war”
(Howard and Paret, p. 117).
The modern term for what
Clausewitz was talking about
is situation awareness, which,
for commanders and combatants,
necessarily includes
their belief systems and
experience. Consequently,
the social phenomenon of
war becomes nonergodic in
Douglass North’s sense that
future states (or outcomes)
cannot be confidently
predicted based on averages
calculated from past
states (Douglass C. North,
Understanding the Process of
Economic Change, Princeton
University Press, 2005, pp.
19, 49–50, 167). The upshot
is friction with a vengeance,
but Smith’s insistence on
halting interpretation of On
War at Clausewitz’s untimely
death ignores such important
insights. JFQ