(Martin van Creveld)
Clausewitz was wrong!
(Or, if he wasn't wrong then, he's wrong now because the world has changed, and so has war.)As so often happens, I skimmed this book and put it aside last fall when it was assigned reading. More recently I picked it up and became fascinated with it. Van Creveld is an Israeli historian, so he has seen more war than most academics. He is always interesting, though not always right. (He says that serious peace negotiations were underway in Moscow in the days before Little Boy obliterated Hiroshima. Nonsense! The Russians weren't brokering Japanese peace offers; they were fending them off, because they were about to go to war against Japan on their own account.) In The Transformation of War, he takes on no less a figure than Carl von Clausewitz, whose On War has been the strategist's bible for nearly 200 years. Here are my notes on what van Creveld has to say:
'... contemporary "strategic" thought ... is fundamentally flawed; and, in addition, is rooted in a "Clausewitzian" world-picture that is either obsolete or wrong. We are entering an era ... of warfare between ethnic and religious groups. Even as familiar forms of armed conflict are sinking into the dustbin of the past, radically new ones are raising their heads.... Already today the military power fielded by the principal developed societies in both "West" and "East" is ... more illusion than substance.' (p.ix) Note that this was written a decade before 9/11, and even before the Soviet Union imploded.
Of unconventional forms of warfare: '... what we are dealing with here is neither low-intensity nor some bastard offspring of war. Rather, it is WARRE in the elemental, Hobbesian sense of the word, by far the most important form of armed conflict in our time.' (p.22)
'... there are solid military reasons why modern regular forces are all but useless for fighting what is fast becoming the dominant form of war in our age.' (p.29) In Vietnam, the US and ARVN vastly outnumbered the communist forces, but three-quarters of American troops were in support functions. 'At the place where it mattered, in the jungle, the number of "maneuver battatlions" actually available was about equal on both sides.' (p.30)
'So expensive, fast, indiscriminate, big, unmaneuverable, and powerful have modern weapons become that they are steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet, as it were; that is, into environments where those weapons do not work, and where men can therefore fight to their hearts' content.' (p.32) The ultimate weapon of course is the atomic bomb, which hasn't been used since August 1945.
Of World War II: 'Whatever else total war may have done, it put an end to any idea that armed conflict, including specifically the largest ever fought, is necessarily governed by the Clausewitzian Universe. Historically speaking, in fact, trinitarian war--in other words, a war of state against state and army against army--is a comparatively recent phenomenon; hence, the things that the future has in store for humanity may also be very different indeed.' (p.49)
'If any part of our intellectual baggage deserves to be thrown overboard, surely it is not the historical record but the Clausewitzian definition of war that prevents us from coming to grips with it.' (p.58)
'Considered from the point of view of the identity of those by whom it is waged, [low-intensity] conflict is much closer to the most primitive forms of nontrinitarian war than to war as conducted, say, in the days of Moltke or ... Eisenhower. The same applies to the weapons that it employes, the methods that it uses, and even the reasons it is waged.' (p.62)
'Nor is it advisable to forget that, behind the human will, there are often at work psychological forces that are uncontrollable, even unknowable, and that may cause even the most rational opponent to react in unexpected ways. As Moltke once put it, of the three courses that the enemy can take normally he selects the fourth.' (p.110)
'If any army is to launch a successful attack against an opponent which is as strong as itself, it will have to concentrate. It will have to weaken its forces at one point and reinforce at another.... The greater the risk that a force takes, the more likely it is to succeed but the worse also the consequences if it does not.' (p.113)
'The art of strategy ... consists of employing strength against weakness or, to speak with the ancient Chinese military writer Sun Tsu, it consists of throwing rocks at eggs. The opponent, however, is assumed to be intelligent and active.... Thus, the primary condition for success is represented by the ability to to read the opponent's mind while concealing one's own thoughts.' (p.119)
The 'paradoxical logic of strategy': 'In ordinary life, an action that has succeeded once can be expected to succeed twice.... But this elementary fact--on which are based the whole of science and technology--does not apply to war, football, chess, or any other activity that is governed by strategy.' (p.120) In war, 'The economical, efficient, and streamlined an organization the greater its vulnerability.' (p.121)
Pace Clausewitz, 'the view of war as a continuation of Politik, let alone Realpolitik, is in some ways a modern invention. Even if we substitute "rulers" for "state," the view does not date further back than the Renaissance.' (p.126)
Non-political war: war for religion. 'Beginning with the Treaty of Westphalia [1648] ... Westerners mostly abandoned religion in favor of more enlightened reasons for slaughtering one another. However, in the part of the world subscribing to Islam the same thing only happened much later, and then to a much more limited extent.... Present-day Islamic sects differ among themselves as to the importance of Jihad as compared to other Islamic duties; however, by and large every free, adult, able-bodied, male Muslim is considered duty-bound to fight and die for the greater glory of Allah....' (p.139)
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