Editing Carl von Clausewitz (section)

==Influence==
Clausewitz died without completing ''Vom Kriege,'' but despite this his ideas have been widely influential in [[military theory]] and have had a strong influence on German military thought specifically. Later Prussian and German generals, such as [[Helmuth von Moltke the Elder|Helmuth Graf von Moltke]], were clearly influenced by Clausewitz: Moltke's widely quoted statement that "No operational plan extends with high certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy force" is a classic reflection of Clausewitz's insistence on the roles of chance, friction, "fog," uncertainty, and interactivity in war.<ref name=ClausewitzInEnglish>{{cite book|first=Christopher |last=Bassford|title=Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815–1945|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=zmCpdoajce0C&pg=PA20|year=1994|publisher=Oxford UP|pages=20–21|isbn=978-0195083835}}</ref>{{rp|20–21}}

Clausewitz's influence spread to British thinking as well, though at first more as a historian and analyst than as a theorist.<ref name=ClausewitzInEnglish /> See for example Wellington's extended essay discussing Clausewitz's study of the Campaign of 1815—Wellington's only serious written discussion of the battle, which was widely discussed in 19th-century Britain. Clausewitz's broader thinking came to the fore following Britain's military embarrassments in the Boer War (1899–1902). One example of a heavy Clausewitzian influence in that era is [[Spenser Wilkinson]], journalist, the first [[Chichele Professor of Military History]] at Oxford University, and perhaps the most prominent military analyst in Britain from {{circa|1885}} until well into the interwar period. Another is naval historian [[Julian Corbett]] (1854–1922), whose work reflected a deep if idiosyncratic adherence to Clausewitz's concepts and frequently an emphasis on Clausewitz's ideas about 'limited objectives' and the inherent strengths of the defensive form of war. Corbett's practical strategic views were often in prominent public conflict with Wilkinson's—see, for example, Wilkinson's article "Strategy at Sea", ''The Morning Post'', 12 February 1912. Following the First World War, however, the influential British military commentator [[B. H. Liddell Hart]] in the 1920s erroneously attributed to him the doctrine of "total war" that during the First World War had been embraced by many European general staffs and emulated by the British. More recent scholars typically see that war as so confused in terms of political rationale that it in fact contradicts much of ''On War.''<ref>{{cite journal | last = Strachan | first = Hew | year = 2011 | title = Clausewitz and the First World War | journal = Journal of Military History | volume = 75 | issue = 2| pages = 367–391 }}</ref> That view assumes, however, a set of values as to what constitutes "rational" political objectives—in this case, values not shaped by the fervid [[Social Darwinism]] that was rife in 1914 Europe. One of the most influential British Clausewitzians today is [[Colin S. Gray]]; historian [[Hew Strachan]] (like Wilkinson also the [[Chichele Professor of Military History]] at Oxford University, since 2001) has been an energetic proponent of the ''study'' of Clausewitz, but his own views on Clausewitz's ideas are somewhat ambivalent.

With some interesting exceptions (e.g., [[John McAuley Palmer (general)|John McAuley Palmer]], [[Robert Matteson Johnston|Robert M. Johnston]], Hoffman Nickerson), Clausewitz had little influence on American military thought before 1945 other than via British writers, though Generals [[Eisenhower]] and [[Patton]] were avid readers of English translations. He did influence [[Karl Marx]], [[Friedrich Engels]], [[Vladimir Lenin]], [[Leon Trotsky]],<ref name=Cormier>Cormier, Youri. War As Paradox: Clausewitz & Hegel on Fighting Doctrines and Ethics, (Montreal & Kingston: McGill Queen's University Press, 2016) http://www.mqup.ca/war-as-paradox-products-9780773547698.php</ref> {{rp|233–260}} [[Võ Nguyên Giáp]],<ref>T. Derbent: Giap et Clausewitz, éditions ADEN, Bruxelles 2006.</ref> [[Ferdinand Foch]],<ref>Shirer, p. 80</ref> and [[Mao Zedong]], and thus the Communist Soviet and Chinese traditions, as Lenin emphasized the inevitability of wars among capitalist states in the age of imperialism and presented the armed struggle of the working class as the only path toward the eventual elimination of war.<ref>Kipp, Joseph W. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1987539 "Lenin and Clausewitz: the Militarization of Marxism, 1914–1921."] ''Military Affairs'' 1985 49(4): 184–191. {{ISSN|0026-3931}}. In JSTOR</ref> Because [[Vladimir Lenin|Lenin]] was an admirer of Clausewitz and called him "one of the great military writers," his influence on the Red Army was immense.<ref name="Mertsalov, A.N. pages 11-19">Mertsalov, A.N. "Jomini versus Clausewitz" pp. 11–19 from ''Russia War, Peace and Diplomacy'' edited by Mark and Ljubica Erickson, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004 p. 16.</ref> The Russian historian A.N. Mertsalov commented that "It was an irony of fate that the view in the USSR was that it was Lenin who shaped the attitude towards Clausewitz, and that Lenin's dictum that war is a continuation of politics is taken from the work of this [allegedly] anti-humanist anti-revolutionary."<ref name="Mertsalov, A.N. pages 11-19"/> The American mathematician [[Anatol Rapoport]] wrote in 1968 that Clausewitz as interpreted by Lenin formed the basis of all Soviet military thinking since 1917, and quoted the remarks by [[Marshal of the Soviet Union|Marshal]] [[Vasily Sokolovsky|V.D. Sokolovsky]]:

{{blockquote|In describing the essence of war, Marxism-Leninism takes as its point of departure the premise that war is not an aim in itself, but rather a tool of politics. In his remarks on Clausewitz's ''On War,'' Lenin stressed that "Politics is the reason, and war is only the tool, not the other way around. Consequently, it remains only to subordinate the military point of view to the political."<ref name=Rapoport>Rapoport, Anatol "Introduction" pp. 11–82 from ''On War,'' London: Penguin, 1968.</ref>{{rp|37}}}}

[[Henry A. Kissinger]], however, described Lenin's approach as being that politics is a continuation of war by other means, thus turning Clausewitz's argument "on its head."<ref name=ClausewitzInEnglish />{{rp|198}}

Rapoport argued that:

{{blockquote|As for Lenin's approval of Clausewitz, it probably stems from his obsession with the struggle for power. The whole Marxist conception of history is that of successive struggles for power, primarily between social classes. This was constantly applied by Lenin in a variety of contexts. Thus the entire history of philosophy appears in Lenin's writings as a vast struggle between "idealism" and "materialism." The fate of the socialist movement was to be decided by a struggle between the revolutionists and the reformers. Clausewitz's acceptance of the struggle for power as the essence of international politics must have impressed Lenin as starkly realistic.<ref name=Rapoport />{{rp|37–38}}}}

Clausewitz directly influenced Mao Zedong, who read ''On War'' in 1938 and organised a seminar on Clausewitz for the Party leadership in [[Yan'an]]. Thus the "Clausewitzian" content in many of Mao's writings is not merely a regurgitation of Lenin but reflects Mao's own study.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Zhang|first1=Yuanlin|year=1999|title=Mao Zedongs Bezugnahme auf Clausewitz|journal=Archiv für Kulturgeschichte|volume=81|issue=2|pages=443–471|doi=10.7788/akg.1999.81.2.443|s2cid=183164307}}</ref> The idea that war involves inherent "friction" that distorts, to a greater or lesser degree, all prior arrangements, has become common currency in fields such as business strategy and sport. The phrase ''fog of war'' derives from Clausewitz's stress on how confused warfare can seem while one is immersed within it.<ref>{{cite book | last = Berkun | first = Scott | title = The Art of Project Management | isbn = 978-0-596-00786-7 | year = 2005 | publisher = OŔeilly | location = Beijing | url-access = registration | url = https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780596007867 }}</ref> The term [[Center of gravity (military)|center of gravity]], used in a military context derives from Clausewitz's usage, which he took from [[Newtonian mechanics]]. In U.S. military doctrine, "center of gravity" refers to the basis of an opponent's power at the operational, strategic, or political level, though this is only one aspect of Clausewitz's use of the term.<ref>{{cite book|author=Joseph W Graham|title=What the U. S. Military Can Do to Defeat Terrorism|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9hxB-FA5a5gC&pg=PA7|date= 2002|page=7|publisher=iUniverse |isbn=978-0595222599}}</ref>

===Late 20th and early 21st century===
The deterrence strategy of the United States in the 1950s was closely inspired by President [[Dwight Eisenhower]]'s reading of Clausewitz as a young officer in the 1920s. Eisenhower was greatly impressed by Clausewitz's example of a theoretical, idealized "absolute war" in ''Vom Kriege'' as a way of demonstrating how absurd it would be to attempt such a strategy in practice. For Eisenhower, the age of nuclear weapons had made what was for Clausewitz in the early-19th century only a theoretical vision an all too real possibility in the mid-20th century. From Eisenhower's viewpoint, the best deterrent to war was to show the world just how appalling and horrific a nuclear "absolute war" would be if it should ever occur, hence a series of much-publicized nuclear tests in the Pacific, giving first priority in the defense budget to nuclear weapons and to their delivery-systems over conventional weapons, and making repeated statements in public that the United States was able and willing at all times to use nuclear weapons. In this way, through the [[massive retaliation]] doctrine and the closely related foreign-policy concept of [[brinkmanship]], Eisenhower hoped to hold out a credible vision of Clausewitzian nuclear "absolute war" in order to deter the Soviet Union and/or China from ever risking a war or even conditions that might lead to a war with the United States.<ref>Gaddis, John Lewis ''We Now Know'', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1997], pp. 233–234.</ref>

{{blockquote|...Philanthropists may easily imagine there is a skillful method of disarming and overcoming an enemy without causing great bloodshed, and that this is the proper tendency of the art of War. However plausible this may appear, still it is an error which must be extirpated; for in such dangerous things as war, the errors which proceed from a spirit of benevolence are just the worst. As the use of physical power to the utmost extent by no means excludes the co-operation of the intelligence, it follows that he who uses force unsparingly, without reference to the quantity of bloodshed, must obtain a superiority if his adversary does not act likewise. By such means the former dictates the law to the latter, and both proceed to extremities, to which the only limitations are those imposed by the amount of counteracting force on each side.|author= Clausewitz |source= ''On War'', Book I, Chapter 1<ref name=OnWar1873 />{{rp|Vol. I, pp. 1–2}}}}

After 1970, some theorists claimed that [[nuclear proliferation]] made Clausewitzian concepts obsolete after the 20th-century period in which they dominated the world.<ref>{{cite journal | author = Sheppard, John E. Jr. | title = On War: Is Clausewitz Still Relevant? | journal = Parameters | volume = 20 | issue = 3 | date = September 1990 | pages = 85–99 }}</ref> John E. Sheppard Jr., argues that by developing nuclear weapons, state-based conventional armies simultaneously both perfected their original purpose, to destroy a mirror image of themselves, and made themselves obsolete. No two [[nuclear powers|powers]] have used nuclear weapons against each other, instead using [[diplomacy]], [[conventional warfare|conventional means]], or [[proxy wars]] to settle disputes. If such a conflict did occur, presumably both combatants would be [[Mutually assured destruction|annihilated]]. Heavily influenced by the war in Vietnam and by antipathy to American strategist [[Henry Kissinger]], the American biologist, musician, and game-theorist [[Anatol Rapoport]] argued in 1968 that a Clausewitzian view of war was not only obsolete in the age of nuclear weapons, but also highly dangerous as it promoted a "zero-sum paradigm" to international relations and a "dissolution of rationality" amongst decision-makers.<ref name=Rapoport />{{rp|73–77}}

The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century have seen many instances of state armies attempting to suppress [[insurgency|insurgencies]] and [[terrorism]], and engaging in other forms of [[asymmetrical warfare]]. Clausewitz did not focus solely on wars between countries with well-defined armies. The era of the French Revolution and Napoleon was full of revolutions, rebellions, and violence by "non-state actors" - witness the wars in the French Vendée and in Spain. Clausewitz wrote a series of "Lectures on Small War" and studied the [[War in the Vendée|rebellion in the Vendée]] (1793–1796) and the Tyrolean uprising of 1809. In his famous "Bekenntnisdenkschrift" of 1812 he called for a "Spanish war in Germany" and laid out a comprehensive guerrilla strategy to be waged against Napoleon. In ''On War'' he included a famous chapter on "The People in Arms".<ref>{{cite book|author=[[Reiner Pommerin]]|title=Clausewitz Goes Global: Carl von Clausewitz in the 21st century |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=3UTaAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA293|year=2014|page=293|publisher=BoD – Books on Demand |isbn=978-3937885780}}</ref>

One prominent critic of Clausewitz is the Israeli military historian [[Martin van Creveld]]. In his 1991 book ''The Transformation of War'',<ref>Martin van Creveld, ''The Transformation of War: The Most Radical Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict Since Clausewitz'' (New York: The Free Press, 1991).</ref> Creveld argued that Clausewitz's famous "Trinity" of people, army, and government was an obsolete socio-political construct based on the state, which was rapidly passing from the scene as the key player in war, and that he (Creveld) had constructed a new "non-trinitarian" model for modern warfare. Creveld's work has had great influence. Daniel Moran replied, 'The most egregious misrepresentation of Clausewitz's famous metaphor must be that of Martin van Creveld, who has declared Clausewitz to be an apostle of Trinitarian War, by which he means, incomprehensibly, a war of 'state against state and army against army,' from which the influence of the people is entirely excluded."<ref>Daniel Moran, "Clausewitz on Waterloo: Napoleon at Bay", in Carl von Clausewitz and Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, ''On Waterloo: Clausewitz, Wellington, and the Campaign of 1815'', ed./trans. Christopher Bassford, Daniel Moran, and Gregory W. Pedlow (Clausewitz.com, 2010), p. 242, n. 11.</ref> Christopher Bassford went further, noting that one need only ''read'' the paragraph in which Clausewitz defined his Trinity to see <blockquote>"that the words 'people,' 'army,' and 'government' appear nowhere at all in the list of the Trinity's components.... Creveld's and Keegan's assault on Clausewitz's Trinity is not only a classic 'blow into the air,' i.e., an assault on a position Clausewitz doesn't occupy. It is also a pointless attack on a concept that is quite useful in its own right. In any case, their failure to read the actual wording of the theory they so vociferously attack, and to grasp its deep relevance to the phenomena they describe, is hard to credit."<ref name=TipToe /></blockquote>

Some have gone further and suggested that Clausewitz's best-known aphorism, that war is a continuation of policy with other means, is not only irrelevant today but also inapplicable historically.<ref>See for instance John Keegan, ''A History of Warfare'' (New York: Knopf, 1993), ''passim''.</ref> For an opposing view see the sixteen essays presented in ''Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century'' edited by [[Hew Strachan]] and Andreas Herberg-Rothe.<ref>{{cite book |editor1-first= Hew |editor1-last= Strachan |editor2-first= Andreas |editor2-last= Herberg-Rothe |title= Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century: Proceedings of a March, 2005 conference at Oxford |publisher= Oxford University Press |year= 2007 }}</ref>

In military academies, schools, and universities worldwide, Clausewitz's ''Vom Kriege'' is often (usually in translation) mandatory reading.<ref>Giuseppe Caforio, ''Social sciences and the military: an interdisciplinary overview'' (2006) p. 221</ref>

Some theorists of [[management]] look to Clausewitz  - just as some look to [[Sun Tzu]] - to bolster ideas on the concept of [[leadership]].<ref>
For example:
{{cite book
 |last1                = Paley
 |first1               = Norton
 |date                 = 8 May 2014
 |title                = Clausewitz Talks Business: An Executive's Guide to Thinking Like a Strategist
 |url                  = https://books.google.com/books?id=kpt_AwAAQBAJ
 |publication-place    = Boca Raton
 |publisher            = CRC Press
 |page                 = 224
 |isbn                 = 9781482220278
 |access-date          = 29 February 2024
 |quote                = Strategy Guideline 7: Develop Leadership Skills
}} 
</ref><ref>
Compare:
{{cite book
 |last1                = Coker
 |first1               = Christopher
 |author-link1         = Christopher Coker
 |date                 = 15 May 2017
 |title                = Rebooting Clausewitz: 'On War' in the Twenty-First Century
 |url                  = https://books.google.com/books?id=_ispDwAAQBAJ
 |publication-place    = New York
 |publisher            = Oxford University Press
 |page                 = xx
 |isbn                 = 9780190862749
 |access-date          = 29 February 2024
 |quote                = Had [Clausewitz] lived in the twenty-first century he could have expected to [...] have seen his book go into several editions. Perhaps his work would be raided by editors in search of an endless series of quotes. Perhaps while browsing airport bookshops we would find books with titles such as ''Clausewitz's Six Leadership Lessons'' [...].
}} 
</ref>