How have the theories of Carl Von Clausewitz and/or Henri Jomini influenced the birth of combined arms warfare? In your conclusion, suggest the significance to today’s military professional.

Clausewitz

by Thomas M. Huber

Early modern Europe in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries developed a growing lore of military thought. Much of that lore was captured and reformulated by two thinkers—Carl von Clausewitz and Antoine de Jomini—who came out of the Napoleonic experience and tried to capture its essence in their own theories of warfare. Much of the serious thought about warfare in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has taken one or both of these two thinkers as its point of departure.

Carl von Clausewitz was born in Prussia in 1780. His father had been a minor tax official who had served earlier as a lieutenant in the Prussian army. Carl entered the Prussian army himself and attended the military school in Berlin in 1801, where Scharnhorst had recently become commandant. Clausewitz would be a member throughout his career of the circle of talented military reformers around Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Clausewitz graduated at the top of his class in 1804 in time to serve as an aide to a Prussian prince in the battles of Jena and Auerstadt in 1806. Prussian forces lost badly, and Clausewitz was obliged to spend a year as a prisoner on parole in French territory. He returned to Prussia in 1807 to become an aide to Scharnhorst in the temporary capital of Koenigsberg and between 1807 and 1811 quietly helped Scharnhorst to develop plans to reform the Prussian military to resist Napoleon. Rather than join the force that Napoleon was compelling Prussia to contribute to his coming Russian campaign, Clausewitz and some thirty other officers resigned their commissions and took service in the Russian Army.

In 1812 Clausewitz served as a staff colonel on the Russian side and was finally accepted back in the Prussian service in 1813 after Napoleon's defeat in Russia. Clausewitz was chief of staff for Thielmann’s corps at Wavre during the battle of Waterloo and so played a part in holding Grouchy away from the Waterloo field, an event that may have been decisive for the battle’s outcome. In 1818 Clausewitz was made administrative director of the war college in Berlin and promoted to major general. He took advantage of the years of peace to write numerous campaign histories and political essays, as well as to develop the theoretical writings that would later appear as his famous On War. In 1831, Clausewitz was dispatched to be governor of Prussian territories in Poland where a cholera epidemic had just broken out. Unfortunately, he succumbed to the disease in the same year. His widow arranged for his theoretical writings to be edited and published as On War in 1832.

Clausewitz’s approach to theory was remarkable in that he insisted that theory should remain close to practice. He believed the realm of theory and the realm of practice to be distinct and separate, but he felt that there should be a kind of contrapuntal dialogue between the two realms such that theoretical insights could be constantly used to improve practice and that practical insights could be constantly used to improve theory. In other words he brought Kantian idealism directly to bear on real world problems. Clausewitz was influenced also by Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws (1748) and tried to do for war what Montesquieu had done for law, namely create a comprehensive theory. Clausewitz is also sometimes seen

as an heir to Machiavelli in that he explored the modern relationship of war to politics as Machiavelli had in his Art of War (1520).

Clausewitz viewed the relationship between the theory and practice of war as being somewhat analogous to the relationship between theory and practice in painting, music, or architecture. Theory and practice were interactive and mutually enhancing, as we have seen. He also saw a similar relationship in war as in art between theory and the gifted practitioner. The military genius was like the artistic genius; Napoleon was like a Michelangelo or a Beethoven. What made them alike, besides intrinsic charisma, was their relationship to the rules of their craft. They knew the rules better than others, and more, they were masters of the rules. They knew when and why to break the rules and occasionally discovered new ones. They did not ignore the rules; they used them brilliantly and sometimes transcended them.

Clausewitz saw war as “suspended between three magnets,” policy, probability, and passion. War involved an interplay between these unlike elements so that it was a kind of paradoxical trinity. He viewed war as being “politics by other means,” perhaps his most famous formulation. He elaborated notions of friction, chance, danger, and genius in his analysis of war. He explored psychological factors at work among commanders and troops. He addressed the differences between absolute and limited war. He pondered whether offense or defense were the stronger form of war.

Clausewitz’s work was intelligent, original, and profound, and he would prove to be one of the most influential military thinkers of modern times. This would especially be true after Prussian victories over the French in 1870 focused the world's attention on Prussian methods and Prussian thought. Still, Clausewitz’s main strengths were in approaching political and strategic issues. He attempted to be comprehensive but hardly could have succeeded entirely in so ambitious a project. He had relatively little to say about naval warfare, deployment, psychology of units, or modern people’s war, subjects that fortunately would be addressed by talented contemporaries and successors. In the weeks ahead, we will examine some of these other thinkers—Mahan, Jomini, and Mao.