What is war?
Powers, Thomas
Of several minds: Thomas Powers WHAT IS WAR? FROM CLAUSEWITZ TO SHERMAN FOR THE LAST thirty years of his life, Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), the great Prussian military writer, tried to...
...The victors longed only to go back to 1789, to forget the intervening horrors...
...It is the wars themselves, seen as a single dark whole, emerging out of nowhere, that leave us mystified when we try to say what war is...
...It all seems mild enough compared to World War II, perhaps, but Europe was exhausted for decades thereafter...
...During the years of Napoleon's dominance in Europe, the Prussia of Frederick the Great was reduced to the status of minor power, neglected and scorned...
...Later he amended his definition to read, "War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds...
...No statesman seems willing to concede this possibility, and it's not hard to see why...
...That, truly, was "an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds...
...But if we join Clausewitz in explaining war as what properly follows the sort of provocation Napoleon visited upon Prussia, how do we explain this sort of provocation...
...He did not think of it as a tragedy to be avoided - a kind of natural calamity - but as the only possible solution to a genuinely desperate problem...
...We have no difficulty explaining why others chose to resist...
...There he said,'' War is only a continuation of State Policy by other means...
...Modern delivery systems for nuclear warheads - missiles, manned aircraft, and submarines - are so constructed and controlled they might go on "fighting" after their sponsors were all dead...
...his letters of the time reveal a positive longing to die rather than witness further national humiliations...
...But history seems to be telling us something different, and nowhere more clearly than in the years 1914-1918...
...This aspect of war did not escape Clausewitz...
...Sometimes one method was appropriate, sometimes the other...
...It was history - the revolutionary upheaval which began in 1789 and ended at Waterloo in 1815 - that posed war as the central question of Clausewitz's life...
...In Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812 alone, only a few thousands returned from a French expeditionary force of half a million...
...Clausewitz neither glorified war nor sentimentalized its horrors...
...His final choice is the one most often quoted...
...Clausewitz did not tell us what war is, but rather urged us to approach it in a mood of utmost sobriety...
...who wins...
...It was "perfect explosions" which Clausewitz tried to prevent with his emphasis on policy...
...If we are to explain what war is, then we must account for both factors in the equation...
...One did not go to war lightly, nor seek more than was reasonable from victory, nor fight on senselessly when defeat was already clear...
...But Clausewitz could not bear to think of war as violence alone...
...For him the objects of war and diplomacy were identical...
...If the sheer horror of nuclear weapons is not sufficient guarantee they will never be used, then we are even closer to the edge than we generally allow ourselves to think...
...In his major work, Vom Krieg (On War) - never finished and published only after his death - he tried to reduce war to its essence again and again...
...The war began and continued without rational motive, a collision of great armies which bled Europe until Germany collapsed in agony...
...But the real theme of Clausewitz's life was thinking about war, not fighting...
...In 1812 he humbled Prussia yet again by forcing Friedrich Wilhelm to join his war against Russia and even to provide a 20,000-man corps...
...The king might submit, but not Clausewitz...
...For both great powers the preservation of peace is thought to rest on a single point: the certainty of "unacceptable" consequences in the event of war...
...We have lived too long with the results to believe the blind commitment to victory made sense...
...It is not enough to say that war is sometimes necessary...
...Looked at in this light William Tecumseh Sherman's definition - "War is hell" - serves better than Clausewitz's...
...He was intoxicated with patriotic ardor...
...The destructive capacity of nations now is vastly greater than it was in Clausewitz's day...
...We know war is irrational, but fear it anyway, without quite being able to put our finger on the ultimate source of danger...
...The politician should fall silent the moment that mobilization begins," said the elder Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the Prussian General Staff, later in the century...
...The rest were captured, died in battle, drowned crossing the River Berezina, starved, froze...
...It was this attitude which Clausewitz fought throughout his career...
...Guaranteeing that certainty is at the heart of every debate on weapons systems, and the effort has so far been a successful one...
...Military "victory" merely prepared the ground for acceptable terms of peace...
...Consider for a moment the background of Clausewitz's life - war upon war for two and a half decades, involving some of the greatest battles of history in which scores of thousands often died in a single day...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...Indeed it is hard not to conclude that Clausewitz was not defining war at all, but trying to give it a rationale, to find some thread of reason in the chaos, to rescue us from despair in the face of something so blindly destructive...
...For him the important questions were why wars start, and how they end...
...Napoleon and Hitler crammed war down their neighbors' throats...
...The Napoleonic era was one of military cataclysms which, like the cataclysms of 1939-1945, are for convenience blamed on the overweening ambition, the charismatic power to lead, and the human recklessness of individual men '- Napoleon in the first instance, Hitler in the second...
...in the terrible Russian campaigns of 1812, where the ravages of winter were as deadly as the rifle and cannon...
...With the aid of Clausewitz and others, Scharnhorst rebuilt the Prussian army, but the timid king would not risk war again, despite abundant provocation...
...He was introduced to war at the siege of Mainz in the summer of 1793, a thirteen-year-old cadet in a Prussian infantry regiment...
...But in fact he was both romantic and passionate...
...Khrushchev meant that war would be too terrible to make sense, and he was right...
...War was not Prussia's doing alone, but Napoleon's as well...
...It is probably inevitable that we assume the choice for war is always ours...
...This was more than Clausewitz could bear...
...When he came to sum up a lifetime of war and thinking about war, his objectivity failed him...
...He resigned his commission and left to fight with Russia, the last continental power still willing to resist Napoleon...
...Clausewitz did not shrink from this side of war...
...Napoleon was a master not only of battle, but of studied national insult...
...But does it really describe what war is...
...After that no one will be able to go to war even if he wants to...
...The fact of its necessity is part of its nature...
...In 1958 Khrushchev told the Yugoslav ambassador to Moscow, "The Soviet Union will continue to fight stubbornly for peace, which we have especial need of for the next fifteen or twenty years...
...It was discovered after his death in a note apparently written in 1827...
...perhaps five thousand French soldiers, as well as three thousand Prussians, died before the surrender on July 22...
...Both the United States and the Soviet Union appear to understand this fact...
...I stayed while Mainz was being burned to the ground in the fire we had started," he wrote later...
...But it has not made us feel safe...
...War is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will," he wrote on the first page of his book...
...He concerned himself with nothing but the political significance of the outcome, and it is here that he departs most dramatically from the traditional military mind...
...Where do we find a thread of reason in that calamity...
...The siege of Mainz was a brutal battle...
...At the heart of this fear, I think, is the suspicion that war is not really policy - a rational enterprise - in the sense Clausewitz intended, but something darker and less predictable, something which happens to us without reason or purpose...
...Few have written with such scorn of those who would include pity among its principles...
...He fought at the battle of Au-erstadt in October 1806, where the Prussian army was shattered by Napoleon...
...But Clausewitz was never quite satisfied with the results...
...I added my childish shout to the triumphant cheers of the soldiers...
...Like Clemenceau after him, Clausewitz thought war too important to be left to generals who care for nothing but...
...The key to Clausewitz's thinking was the fact it grew out of a profound national crisis...
...Clausewitz tried to remove the mystery from war, to see it as the doing of men rather than the working of fate...
...Moscow was not the only city burned in those years...
...At this point the mystery is rein-troduced...
...The austerity of this dictum has earned Clausewitz a reputation as the supreme rationalist of military thinkers...
...On June 18 Prussian cannon opened fire on a trapped French revolutionary army...
...The limits of Clausewitz's view are a matter of more than academic interest, for the simple reason we cannot hope to avoid war indefinitely if we don't know what it is...
...This seems an entirely sensible approach to the problem...
...Even his best-known formula comes in many variations, all making the same point in slightly different words...
...Throughout those years Clausewitz concerned himself with the fate of Prussia, threatened in 1792 and then crushed and in effect occupied after the military disasters of Jena and Auerstadt in 1806...
...But Clausewitz, like any other boy in a uniform on the periphery of the worst horrors, was swept up by the thrill of the thing...
...He did not find reason at the heart of war, but only hoped to put it there...
...At times it seemed the kingdom might even be carved up and swallowed entirely by its more powerful neighbors...
...It offers a way to tame the chaos, give point to the suffering, and even limit the damage...
...It is here that Clausewitz's dictum reveals its limits...
...and in the final battles of Napoleon's eclipse, ending at Waterloo...
...War was Clausewitz's life, as it was Europe's, for the next twenty-three years...
...Let us not hear of generals who conquer without bloodshed," he wrote...
...If the victors wanted nothing from their victory but the way things had been, what were the Napoleonic wars about...
...Hence his dictum, "War is only a continuation of State Policy by other means...
...FROM CLAUSEWITZ TO SHERMAN FOR THE LAST thirty years of his life, Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), the great Prussian military writer, tried to complete the sentence, "War is . . ." The many attempts all add something to our knowledge of war, at once the most common and the least understood of human enterprises...
...First the army failed the king, and then the king failed the army...
...If a bloody slaughter is a horrible sight, then that is ground for paying more respect to war, but not for making the sword we bear blunter by degrees of humanity, until someone steps in with one that is sharp, and cuts off the arm from our body...
...Violence pushed to its utmost bounds" is now beyond the capacity of society to bear...
...His romantic streak led him to write to his wife often of the beauty of death in battle, but his daily work focused on the reform of the Prussian army with his mentor and friend, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, and on saving the nation from the timidity of its king, Friedrich Wilhelm III, who was more interested in details of uniform than tactics, and always chose the wrong moment to fight...
...Ensuring that we do avoid it is, of course, the central question of our time...
...Above all was the importance of a sense of proportion: military operations must be in scale with political goals, and risk commensurate with gain...
...This realism gives Clausewitz's thinking about war a business-like cast...
...I think it must have been the poetic streak in his character which led him to insist that war has another face...
...The city's wooden houses were soon in flames, food and water were in short supply, horribly wounded soldiers were left to die without care, clouds of smoke hung over the city as the awful cannonade went on for nearly five weeks...
...It is quite possible," he wrote,"for such a state of feeling to exist between two states that a very trifling political motive for war may produce an effect quite disproportionate - in fact a perfect explosion...
...in other circumstances he might have been a poet or scholar...
Vol. 109 • April 1982 • No. 7
