Clausewitz and his critics

Thanks to the Faceless Bureaucrat for alerting us to the latest attempt to take down Clausewitz. As ever, the more the Prussian thinker is attacked, the bigger he seems to get.

Clausewitz shouldn’t be fetishised. He doesn’t tell us everything. There’s not much in ‘On War’ about seapower, or technology. Were he around today, he probably couldn’t explain everything about narco terrorism or militant religion. Despite his more dogmatic neoclassical defenders, he isn’t the final word on strategy (given that his book is mostly about war as a phenomenon, rather than grand strategy). His book is an incomplete work in progress, banged out over a lifetime and then only published after his death, because of his wife’s efforts.

But the question is, can we draw insights from his work? I think we can.

Phillip Meilinger’s critique of Clausewitz combines two intellectual flaws: an impoverished idea of Clausewitz’s complex, dialectical writing; and an equally shallow view that non-Western actors wage war with politics left out.

First: Clausewitz did not – did not- insist thar war ‘can only be a rational act of state policy.’ His concern wasn’t only policy, but Politik, a word that can also refer to politics, the struggle for and distribution of power. Because Clausewitz was interested in description as well as prescription, he came to acknowledge that war ought to be an activity conducted in line with rational policy objectives. But in his trinity, arguably the central idea of his work and strangely unmentioned by Meilinger, he recognised that two other forces drove war: primordial violence, and chance or friction. As Clausewitz himself said: ‘it would be an obvious fallacy to imagine war between civilized peoples as resulting merely from a rational act on the part of their governments.’

Second, Meilinger argues that ‘Although partisan warfare occurred- in Iberia, America and Russia- Clausewitz largely ignored it to focus on the major conventional battles fought by his contemporaries. That myopia courses throughout ‘On War’, and the problems such a limited purview entails are with us today.’

Well, Clausewitz was a bit distracted by the intensity of the Napoleonic wars. But he wrote on the subject in Chapter 6 of On War, lectured on Small Wars at the Berliner Kriegsschule in 1811-12, and studied the insurgencies of his time, the Roman Catholic uprising in the Vendee against French Revolutionaries 1793-6, the Spanish guerrilla war from 1808, and Tyrolean rebellion of 1809. He noticed that there was emerging the Volkskrieg (‘people’s war’), especially where populations defeated in the field refused to accept their leaders’ formal surrender. A few hours research are enough to discover this.

Third, there is the slightly embarrassing exoticism argument, that non-Western, non-Modern people fight mainly out of primal urges, not for instrumental or political reasons. Although he claims to dislike Clausewitz’s false claims to universality, here Meilinger lumps together Plains Indians, Al Qaeda and the Taliban as people who fight mainly because they have been fighting for a long time and that it feels good. There is something ridiculous in the notion that instrumentality doesn’t occur to Afghan insurgents who want to expel foreigners from their land, or that Plains Indians thought that hunting rights, land and power were irrelevant to their wars.

Here is what Al Qaeda’s chief theoretician Ayman al-Zawahiri has to say. It makes pretty clear that non-Westerners can also grasp basic strategic logic:

‘If the successful operations against Islam’s enemies and the severe damage inflicted on them do not serve the ultimate goal of establishing the Muslim nation in the heart of the Islamic world, they will be nothing more than disturbing acts, regardless of their magnitude, that could be absorbed and endured…’

Here Al Qaeda’s strategist is very interested indeed in policy aims, practical outcomes, and the relationship between ends and means. That might explain why a copy of Clausewitz’s ‘On War’ was found in AQ’s hideout in the Tora Bora caves in 2001, and why AQ incorporates Western texts from Clausewitz to Fourth-Generation War into their doctrine.
Its true that we should avoid the fallacy of ethnocentrism, the idea that folks are all like us. But that doesn’t entitle us to indulge in condescending exoticism, the notion that we are strategic and political, whereas our benighted enemies are visceral and barbaric. Its that denial of common humanity, not to mention the sheer reciprocity and dynamism of war, which is what Meilinger’s article comes down to. As Clausewitz would probably agree, Others can be strategic too.