Why we should stop teaching Clausewitz:
Interesting read and a compelling argument. Simply put: we are no longer fighting conventional wars of attrition, so Clausewitz's tactics are counter-productive.
Read the rest at the link above.Carl von Clausewitz is one of the most profound military thinkers of all time. His famous book On War is our bible and he is a god among military strategists. But we should stop teaching Clausewitz in the U.S. military.
Most will view this discussion as blasphemy. How dare I advocate that we stop teaching the divine inspirations of Clausewitz. Sean McFate provides a similar discussion in his new book The New Rules of War: "A hagiography exists around the man, and his book On War is enshrined in Western militaries as a bible. When I teach this text to senior officers at the war college, the room grows silent with reverence. His ideas constitute the DNA of Western strategic thought."
On War was published in 1832 and we continue to look to it for timeless principles of warfare, but why? As Ian T. Brown wrote in A New Conception of War, "We must move beyond the past."
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I am not insisting that Clausewitz does not provide valuable lessons. But by focusing on Clausewitz we miss important discussion that should be brought to military education. This leads me to the purpose of this article, for which I have two primary goals. First, to point out specific things which Clausewitz got wrong and reasons why we should stop teaching On War. Think of it like moving from a devotional reading of The Bible to a historical critical examination of it. Second, to identify what we should start teaching more of in all military education.
Let's first look at what Clausewitz got wrong.
Strength on Strength
Russell Weigley, author of American Way of War, points out that Clausewitz' leading principle of war was that of annihilation, which is more in line with attrition warfare where the goal is to wear down the enemy. This is an absolute waste.
Sun Tzu informs us that force is the fool's way of war, and that battlefield victory was the mark of an inept general. Sun Tzu brilliantly informed us that "the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."
The indirect approach is the ideal approach. Sean McFate illustrates this point in The New Rules of War. McFate points out that, "wit beats muscle." Similar to Sun Tzu, he informs us that we should use the indirect approach.
We won every battle, but lost the war
Gen. William Westmoreland unintentionally, yet brilliantly summarized a huge error in reading too much Clausewitz, at a press conference in 1967: "Militarily, we succeeded in Vietnam. We won every engagement we were involved in out there." Blinded by Clausewitz, Westmoreland remarked,
In On Strategy by Harry Summers, we are provided with a conversation between a U.S. colonel and a North Vietnamese colonel that, again, brilliantly, but unintentionally summarized this error: "You know you never defeated us on the battlefield," said the American colonel. The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. "That may be so," he replied, "but it is also irrelevant."
In addition, Michael Handel points out in Sun Tzu and Clausewitz: The Art of War and On War Compared, that, "despite Clausewitz's recognition of the primacy of politics, his study of war is concerned primarily with that which occurs once hostilities have commenced. According to him, it is possible, even advisable, to distinguish between the preparatory, as opposed to combat and operations, phases of warfare."
So, is it any surprise that we, the U.S. military, win nearly all tactical engagements, yet fail to win the actual war? Our devotion to Clausewitzian principles prevents us from seeing reality.
Conventional War
Another important point McFate discusses is that of conventional war.
"There is just one problem with conventional war: no one fights this way anymore," he writes. "There is nothing conventional about it, because war has moved on. Despite this problem, conventional war remains our model, and this is why the West continues to lose against weaker enemies who do not fight according to our preferences. To win, we must ditch our traditional way of fighting, because it's obsolete. It is neither timeless nor universal. On the contrary, conventional war has a beginning, middle, and end."
He argues that Clausewitz is the father of conventional war, where Sun Tzu is the father of unconventional war: "Clausewitz curses chaos and the fog of war as barriers to victory; Sun Tzu creates chaos and weaponizes it for victory. Clausewitz believes cunning ruses are the weapon of the weak; for Sun Tzu they are the weapon of choice. Clausewitz thinks spies untrustworthy and intelligence reports unreliable; Sun Tzu finds them indispensable."