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| The Three Lives of Clausewitz: How Anglo-American Strategists Remade On War in Their Own Image |
| 2026-07-23 |
| by Stephen L. Nelson [SmallWarsJournal] “A little research, a little study and reflection bring out the facts that Clausewitz’s book on war, published in 1832, occupies about the same relation to the study of the military profession as does the Bible to all religious studies.” THE MULTIPLE IMAGES OF CLAUSEWITZ Carl von Clausewitz outpaces every contemporary from Napoleon and Jomini to Scharnhorst and Wellington as the premier military theorist of the modern age. His masterwork, On War, published posthumously in 1832, gave the intellectual rationale for later thinking on mid-nineteenth-century warfare and advanced the first rigorous case for civilian control of the military. Admirers have called him the “Shakespeare of military writers” and the “Marx of military theory.” His most famous detractor, B.H. Liddell Hart denounced Clausewitz as “the Mahdi of mass and mutual massacre,” due to his theoretical contribution to the practice of frontal assaults during the First World War. That a single theorist provokes such extreme and opposing reactions across a century of strategic writing is itself a subject worth examining. What follows is a historiographical argument: that Anglo-American writing on Clausewitz from 1950 to the present divides into three distinct schools — strategic holism, strategic atomism, and strategic relativism — and that the competition among them mirrors a deeper transformation in how the word “strategy” itself changed. Strategy began in the twentieth century as a verb, a practice — something commanders did during mobilization to the battlefield. Toward the end of the century, it became a noun —a framework—something governments theorized in committee rooms. Clausewitz, depending on who was reading him, authorized both. The debate over Clausewitz was therefore also a debate over strategy’s transformation: whether strategy remained an art practiced by commanders, had become an abstract framework for policymakers, or could survive only by continual adaptation to new political and technological conditions. MAPPING THE FIELD Strategy and tactics once belonged to the same professional universe. A general understood both because both lived on the same ground — one describing the engagement, the other the campaign it served. You could argue about where one ended and the other began, but the argument happened between soldiers; after 1945, that changed. Strategy got pulled away from the people who had always owned it and handed to a different kind of expert — economists, physicists, political scientists — men whose relationship to combat was largely theoretical. The map table didn’t disappear. It just stopped being where the important conversations happened. More at the link |
| Posted by:badanov |