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.

Jomini

by Thomas M. Huber

Although serious military thinkers today are more likely to refer to Clausewitz, in the Napoleonic age itself Antoine de Jomini was more likely to have that distinction. It is probably fair to say that in general Clausewitz addressed the political and strategic levels of war and Jomini addressed the operational level. The two were born only a year apart. They held similar staff-officer positions in the Napoleonic wars, albeit in different armies. Jomini was by far the more celebrated thinker in his own lifetime.

Jomini was born in 1779 to a mercantile family in Switzerland and spent his youth working as an apprentice clerk in banking and commercial establishments in Switzerland and later in Paris. From the beginning of his career Jomini was preoccupied with military history and the military art. He read avidly about the campaigns of Frederick the Great in order to discover his methods and was especially influenced by Henry Lloyd’s historical accounts of Frederick’s campaigns. In 1805 Jomini published his famous Treatise on Grand Military Operations based on Frederick’s campaigns. (Note that Jomini had acquired the essential principles of Napoleon’s methods the same way Napoleon had acquired them, by a close analysis of Frederick.) Jomini showed the manuscript to Marshal Michel Ney and was accepted by Ney as an unpaid volunteer member of his staff during the Ulm campaign. After Austerlitz Jomini managed to get a copy of his work to Napoleon himself. At first Napoleon was alarmed that a book that perfectly revealed his system had been published so that anyone who wished could see it. Upon reflection, however, he became calmer and noted that old commanders would never read it and that young officers who might read it did not command.

Napoleon, impressed by Jomini’s service to Ney and with his manuscript, commissioned Jomini as a colonel in the French army and assigned him to Marshal Ney’s staff. Napoleon drew Jomini onto his own staff for the Jena and Eylau campaigns of 1806 and 1807. Jomini won the Cross of the Legion of Honor for his service at Eylau. After Friedland Napoleon made Jomini Ney’s chief of staff, and Jomini accompanied Ney to Spain. There Ney, influenced by staff officers who were alienated from Jomini, asked for his reassignment. At this point, Napoleon intervened and promoted Jomini to brigadier general and stationed him in Paris with the assignment of writing a history of the revolutionary wars and of Napoleon’s Italian campaigns. Jomini took part in the Russian campaign of 1812, mostly in rear area staff capacities, such as military governor of Smolensk. Jomini served as Ney’s chief of staff again in the south German campaigns of 1813, and after Bautzen, Ney recommended him for promotion to major general. Berthier, Napoleon’s chief of staff, who had always disliked Jomini, at this point instead of promoting him ordered his arrest for failing to submit certain reports. Jomini was so dismayed by the unfairness of this that he resigned from the French army and accepted a commission in the Russian service. He held a Russian commission, albeit mostly inactive, for the next fifty-six years and was eventually promoted to the rank of lieutenant general. He retired to Switzerland temporarily rather than take part in the allied campaigns on French soil in 1814 and 1815. He later served as head of the committee to found the Russian Military Academy and advised the czar during the Crimean War of 1853–56. He advised Napoleon III at the time of his campaign in Italy in 1859.

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Jomini’s thought was popular in his own day, and in various forms, it is popular still. Jomini’s approach to war was in extreme contrast to Clausewitz’s. Clausewitz served in an army that until 1813 always lost. His vision of war was skeptical and brooding. He saw war as balky, irrational, and always threatening to escape control. For Clausewitz war was tragic, and Clausewitz is associated by some observers with the romantic tradition that emerged in philosophy and art after 1815. Clausewitz always lost, and he tried to explain why war was so hard.

Jomini, except for 1812, always won, and he tried to explain why war was so easy. His view of war was optimistic and rational. He saw war as subject to certain unchanging rules that anyone could master. For him war was heroic though one might also be tempted to say prosaic. Jomini is associated by some observers with the rational Enlightenment tradition of philosophy that prevailed prior to 1815.

Jomini’s ideas really were not a theory of war: they were a theory of deployment. Jomini has been accused from time to time of merely offering a cookbook of war; this by persons who do not reflect on how extraordinarily useful a cookbook may be. His basic ideas, many of them influenced by his reading of Henry Lloyd, include interior and exterior lines, the decisive point, concentration of strength against weakness, annihilation of the enemy force, the primary importance of the offensive, surprise, and the potentially decisive role of logistics. The essential object of all this was to win a favorable result through the concentration of strength against weakness. Jomini felt these were fundamental, almost mathematical, principles of war and that they were good for all time.

It is important to remember what Jomini is and what Jomini is not. Almost all of his work answers one question: how does one deploy units successfully in the main battle? For officers who must answer this question, Jomini’s ideas, the Principles of War, are extremely useful and extremely important. For officers trying to answer any other questions, Jomini is not so useful. A cookbook is all-important for cooks but not very helpful for anyone else. There is almost no treatment of politics, no strategy, no technological change, no strategic resource base, no psychology, no people’s war, no adversary, and indeed no unexpected adversity in Jomini’s work. The operator must remember that while the Principles of War are an essential tool, they are likely to be only one of the many tools he needs for victory.

Jomini’s views were absorbed by Dennis Hart Mahan into the curriculum of the then fledgling United States Military Academy in 1830, where Civil War leaders on both sides learned them. They have become part of the training of the U.S. Army today in the form of the Principles of War, which may be thought of as merely Jomini writ short. Most modern services today teach these principles in some form. Jomini as the classical theorist of deployment has had enormous influence on modern ground services, but Jomini would also influence later theorists of naval and air deployment in the use of technologies that in Jomini’s day had not yet been imagined. As we shall see later on, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Giulio Douhet, and Bernard Brodie would eventually apply some of Jomini’s basic ideas to naval warfare, air warfare, and nuclear warfare respectively.

The readings for this lesson are drawn from Jomini’s Summary of the Art of War of 1838, and from Jomini’s introduction to the Summary. In these essays Jomini is trying to answer the challenge posed by Clausewitz’s On War of 1832. He is paddling hard to make his philosophy broader, more complex, more qualified, to maintain his credibility in the presence of Clausewitz’s new perspectives. In Jomini’s comprehensive treatise of 1838, rather defensive in tone, we see Jomini at his best, or rather better than his best. In his earlier work, Jomini was usually more mechanistic and more simplistic in his views of war than here.

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