Vom Kriege (complete text available here) is a book on war and military strategy by Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, written mostly after the Napoleonic wars, between 1816 and 1830, and published posthumously by his wife in 1832. It has been translated into English several times as On War (complete 1873 text available here). It is one of the most important treatises on strategy ever written, and is prescribed at various military academies to this day. Neo Gōmanism Manifesto Special - On War (Japanese: 新・ゴーマニズム宣言SPECIAL 戦争論, Shin Gōmanism Sengen Supesharu - Sensō Ron) is a controversial series of manga written by right-wing Japanese manga artist Yoshinori Kobayashi. ... Look up war in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Military stratagem in the Battle of Waterloo. ... Motto: Suum cuique Latin: To each his own Prussia at its peak, as leading state of the German Empire Capital Königsberg, later Berlin Political structure Duchy, Kingdom, Republic Duke1  - 1525–68 Albert I  - 1688–1701 Frederick III King1  - 1701–13 Frederick I  - 1888–1918 William II Prime Minister1,2... Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz (June 1, 1780 – November 16, 1831) was a Prussian soldier, military historian and influential military theorist. ... Combatants Allies: Austrian Empire[1] Kingdom of Portugal Kingdom of Prussia[1] Russian Empire[2] Kingdom of Spain[3] Kingdom of Sweden United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland[4] French Empire - Kingdom of Holland - Kingdom of Italy - Kingdom of Naples - Duchy of Warsaw - Kingdom of Bavaria[5] - Kingdom of... 1816 was a leap year starting on Monday (see link for calendar). ... Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix commemorates the July Revolution 1830 (MDCCCXXX) was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar). ... 1832 was a leap year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... A military academy is a military educational institution. ...

On War is actually an unfinished work; Clausewitz had set about revising his accumulated manuscripts in 1827, but did not live to finish the task. Naval Battle of Navarino by Carneray 1827 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar). ...

History

Carl von Clausewitz was a Prussian officer among those baffled by how the armies of the French Revolution and Napoleon had changed the nature of war through their ability to motivate the populace and thus unleash war on a greater scale than had previously been the case in Europe. Clausewitz was well educated and had a strong interest in art, science, and education, but he was a professional soldier who spent a considerable part of his life fighting against Napoleon. There is no doubt that the insights he gained from his experiences, combined with a solid grasp of European history, provided much of the raw material for the book. On War represents the compilation of his most cogent observations. Motto: Suum cuique Latin: To each his own Prussia at its peak, as leading state of the German Empire Capital Königsberg, later Berlin Political structure Duchy, Kingdom, Republic Duke1  - 1525–68 Albert I  - 1688–1701 Frederick III King1  - 1701–13 Frederick I  - 1888–1918 William II Prime Minister1,2... The French Revolution (1789-1799) was a period of major political and social change in the political history of France and Europe as a whole, during which the French governmental structure, previously an absolute monarchy with feudal privileges for the aristocracy and Catholic clergy, underwent radical change to forms based... For other uses, see Napoleon (disambiguation). ... Look up war in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Synopsis

The book contains a wealth of historical examples used to illustrate its various concepts. Frederick II of Prussia (the Great) figures prominently for having made very efficient use of the limited forces at his disposal. Napoleon also is a central figure. Frederick II (German: ; January 24, 1712 – August 17, 1786) was a King of Prussia (1740–1786) and an enlightened monarch of the Hohenzollern dynasty. ... For other uses, see Napoleon (disambiguation). ...

Among many strands of thought, three stand out as essential to Clausewitz' concept:

• War must never be seen as a purpose to itself, but as a means of physically forcing one's will on an opponent ("war is the continuation of politics through other means").
• The military objectives in war that support one's political objectives fall into two broad types: "war to achieve limited aims" and war to "disarm” the enemy--“to render [him] politically helpless or militarily impotent."
• The course of war will tend to favour the party devoting more resolve and resources (a notion twisted by Germany's leaders in World War One into "total war"--the pursuit of complete military victory regardless of the political consequences).

Some of the key ideas (not necessarilly original to Clausewitz or even to his mentor Gerhard von Scharnhorst) discussed in On War include (in no particular order of importance): Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst (November 12, 1755 - June 28, 1813) was a general in Prussian service, Chief of the Prussian General Staff, noted for both his writings and his leadership during the Napoleonic Wars. ...

• the dialectical approach to military analysis
• the methods of "critical analysis"
• the uses and abuses of historical studies
• the nature of the balance-of-power mechanism
• The relationship between political objectives and military objectives in war
• the asymmetrical relationship between attack and defense
• the nature of "military genius"
• the "fascinating trinity" (Wunderliche Dreifaltigkeit) of war
• philosophical distinctions between "absolute or ideal war," and "real war"
• in "real war," the distinctive poles of a) limited war and b) war to "render the enemy helpless"
• "War" belongs fundamentally to the social realm—rather than the realms of art or science
• "strategy" belongs primarily to the realm of art
• "tactics" belongs primarily to the realm of science
• the essential unpredictability of war
• the "fog of war"
• "friction"
• strategic and operational "centers of gravity"
• the "culminating point of the offensive"
• the "culminating point of victory"

Clausewitz used a dialectical method to construct his argument, leading to frequent modern misinterpretation. The fog of war is the lack of knowledge that occurs during a war. ...

The West's modern perception of war is based on the concepts Clausewitz put forth in On War, though these have been very diversely interpreted by various leaders, thinkers, armies, and peoples. Western military doctrine, organization, and norms are all based on Napoleonic premises, even to this day--though whether these premises are necessarilly also "Clausewitzian" is debatable.

The "dualism" of Clausewitz's view of war (i.e., that wars can vary a great deal between the two "poles" he proposed, based on the political objectives of the opposing sides and the context) seems simple enough, but few commentators have proved willing to accept this crucial variability--they insist that Clausewitz "really" argued for one end of the scale or the other. On War has been seen by some prominent critics as the place where the concept of total war was made explicit and it has been blamed¹ for the level of destruction involved in the First and Second World Wars, whereas it seems rather that Clausewitz had merely foreseen the inevitable development that started with the huge, patriotically motivated armies of the Napoleonic wars. These resulted (though war's evolution has not yet ended) in the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with all the forces and capabilities of the state devoted to destroying forces and capabilities of the enemy state (thus "total war"). Conversely, Clausewitz has also been seen as "The preeminent military and political strategist of limited war in modern times." (Robert Osgood, 1979) Total war is a military conflict in which nations mobilize all available resources in order to destroy another nations ability to engage in war. ... Combatants Allied Powers: Russian Empire France British Empire Italy United States Central Powers: Austria-Hungary German Empire Ottoman Empire Bulgaria Commanders Nikolay II Aleksey Brusilov Georges Clemenceau Joseph Joffre Ferdinand Foch Robert Nivelle Herbert H. Asquith D. Lloyd George Sir Douglas Haig Sir John Jellicoe Victor Emmanuel III Luigi Cadorna... Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 18 km into the air. ...

Clausewitz and his proponents have been severely criticized, perhaps quite unfairly, by competing theorists--Antoine-Henri Jomini in the 19th century, B.H. Liddell Hart in the mid-20th, and Martin van Creveld and John Keegan more recently. On War is a work rooted solely in the world of the state, says historian Martin Van Creveld, who alleges that Clausewitz takes the state "almost for granted" as he rarely looks at anything previous to Westphalia. He alleges that Clausewitz does not address any form of intra/supra-state conflict, such as rebellion, because he could not theoretically account for warfare before the existence of the state. Previous kinds of conflict were demoted to criminal activities without legitimacy and not worthy of the label "war." Van Creveld argues that "Clausewitzian war" requires the state to act in conjunction with the people and the army, the state becoming a massive engine built to exude military force against an identical opponent. He supports this statement by pointing to the conventional armies in existence throughout the 20th century. Jomini Antoine-Henri, baron Jomini (March 6, 1779–March 24, 1869), general in the French and afterwards in the Russian service, and one of the most celebrated writers on the art of war, was born at Payerne in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland, where his father was syndic. ... The military historian Basil Liddell Hart. ... Martin van Creveld (1946- ) is an Israeli military historian and theorist. ... Sir John Keegan (born 1934) is an English military historian. ... A state is a set of institutions that possess the authority to make the rules that govern the people in one or more societies, having internal and external sovereignty over a definite territory. ... A state is a set of institutions that possess the authority to make the rules that govern the people in one or more societies, having internal and external sovereignty over a definite territory. ... The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster by Gerard Terborch (1648) Banquet of the Amsterdam Civic Guard in Celebration of the Peace of Münster by Bartholomeus van der Helst, 1648 The Peace of Westphalia, also known as the Treaties of Münster and Osnabrück, refers to the...

On the other hand, Clausewitz never saw these 20th-century states and armies--the states with which he himself was familiar were quite different. In any case, the "Clausewitzian Trinity" that Van Creveld condemns as consisting of a rigid statist hierarchy of "People, Army, and Government," does not in fact consist of those three concrete actors. Typically for the Clausewitz critics, Van Creveld's attack is based on a sloppy reading of On War (or, more likely, of secondary works by U.S. Army Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., who was in fact an admirer of Clausewitz but who interpreted everything in On War through the narrow lens of the Vietnam War). In fact, the words people, army, and government appear nowhere in the paragraph in which Clausewitz defines his famous Trinity. Rather, the Trinity of forces that drive the course of real-world war in Clausewitz's view are 1) violent emotion, 2) the interplay of chance and probability, and 3) human reason. It seems unlikely that emotion, chance, and rationality will cease to play a role in war any time soon, whatever the fate of the state. Harry G. Summers, Jr. ... Combatants Republic of Vietnam United States Republic of Korea Thailand Australia New Zealand The Philippines National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam Democratic Republic of Vietnam People’s Republic of China Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea Strength US 1,000,000 South Korea 300,000 Australia 48,000...

Notes

1. For example, writing in his introduction to Sun Tzu's Art of War, B.H. Liddell Hart stated that Civilization might have been spared much of the damage suffered in the world wars of this century if the influence of Clausewitz's monumental tomes On War, which molded European military thought in the era preceding the First World War, had been blended with and balanced by a knowledge of Sun Tzu's exposition on `The Art of War'. This comment is tempered by the comment that the ill-effects of Clausewitz's teaching arose largely from his disciples' too shallow and too extreme interpretation of it, but it remains an influential criticism. Extracted from "The Art of War (UNESCO Collection of Representative Works)" Samuel B. Griffith [1]

Sun Tzu (孫子 also commonly written in pinyin: Sūn Zǐ) was the author of The Art of War, an influential ancient Chinese book on military strategy (for the most part not dealing directly with tactics). ... The Art of War (Chinese: 孫子兵法 sūn zi bīng fǎ) was a Chinese military text written during the 6th century BC by Sun Tzu. ... Basil Henry Liddell Hart (October 31, 1895 _ January 29, 1970) was a military historian and is considered among the great military strategists of the 20th century. ...

Editions

(Translations are into English unless otherwise noted)

• Translated by Colonel J. J. Graham, 1873, republished 1908 Project Gutenberg eBook
• Edited with introduction by Anatol Rapoport, Viking Penguin, 1968 (Paperback, 464 pages) ISBN 0-14-044427-0
• Translated by O. J. Matthijs Jolles, 1943
• Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton University Press, 1976 (revised and index added 1984) ISBN 0-691-05657-9

Anatol Rapoport (born May 22, 1911) is a Russian-born American Jewish, mathematical psychologist. ... Viking Press is an American publishing company currently owned by Penguin Books. ... Otto Jolle Matthijs Jolles (1911-1968) performed a major service to strategic studies in the United States by providing the first American translation of Carl von Clausewitzs magnum opus, On War. ... Sir Michael Eliot Howard, OM, CH, KBE, MC (born 29 November 1922) is a retired British military historian, formerly Chichele Professor of the History of War and Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University. ... Peter Paret (April 13, 1924-) is American military and art history historian with a particular interest in the German history. ... The Princeton University Press is a publishing house, a division of Princeton University, that is highly respected in academic publishing. ...

See also

• The Art of War
• Philosophy of war

For other uses, see The Art of War (disambiguation) A modern edition of The Art of War translated into English by Samuel B. Griffith. ... The Philosophy of war examines war beyond the typical questions of weaponry and strategy, inquiring into the meaning and etiology of war, what war means for humanity and human nature as well as the ethics of war. ...

External links

• The Clausewitz Homepage
• Online version of "On War" - the 1873 translation