A History of Strategy by Martin van Creveld

been smashed and a decisive victory has been won first.
    However, Clausewitz provided more than a brief summary of the inherent qualities of war. War was not simply a phenomenon in its own right. As a product of social intercourse it was, or at any rate ought to be, a deliberate political act. “A continuation of policy by other means,” to quote the single most celebrated phrase Clausewitz ever wrote. It is true that war had a grammar of its own, i.e. rules which could not be violated with impunity. But it was equally true that it did not have a logic of its own. That logic was to be provided to it from outside, so to speak. Unless its higher conduct and general character were governed by policy, war would be “a senseless thing, without an object.”
    Translated into practical terms, this view of war as an instrument meant that ultimately its conduct had to be laid down not by the commander in chief but by the political leadership. What is more, it enabled Clausewitz to argue that war was morally neutral—as he says—thus once again allowing his tendency towards brutal realism to come to the fore. “There can be no war without bloodshed; in dangerous things such as war, errors committed out of a feeling of benevolence are the worst.” Consequently, in the entire massive work, the only sentence devoted to the law of war is one in which he says that it is so weak and unimportant as to be virtually negligible.
    Towards the end of his life Clausewitz, possibly because the Napoleonic Wars were slowly falling into perspective, underwent a change of mind. He now began to recognize that, besides aiming at the “total overthrow” of the enemy, as would follow from his theoretical premises, another kind of war might be possible whose objectives were more limited. He had started to revise his work when he died, leaving behind a mass of unfinished drafts. Whether, had he lived, he would have been able to maintain his original framework or been forced to replace it with another is impossible to say. The question was, how to reconcile war’s essentially unlimited nature with its use as a tool in the hand of policy. When he died, he had still not found an answer.
    Among Western writers on war, the position of Clausewitz is unique. To resort to a metaphor, his is not an ordinary cookbook full of recipes concerning the utensils and ingredients which, correctly used, will yield certain foods. Instead it contents itself with explaining the nature of cooking and the uses to which it is put, leaving the reader to proceed on his own. As a result, when technological progress caused organization, tactics, and much of strategy to change he alone retained his relevance. Admittedly some of the details of
On War
are without enduring interest. For instance, the discussion of the relationship between the three arms and the methods for attacking a convoy are of little relevance today. But the book as a whole holds up remarkably well as “a treasure of the human spirit.”
    Thus to compare Clausewitz’s advice on this or that detail with that which is proffered by his Western predecessors and contemporaries is to do him an injustice. Unlike them he was a philosopher of war. Only the Chinese classics rival him in this respect, albeit that
their
underlying philosophy is radically different. Clausewitz’s way of thought goes back to Aristotle and is based on the distinction between means and ends. By contrast, it is a fundamental characteristic of
Chinese
thought that such a distinction is absent—to Lao Tzu and his followers, admitting its existence would constitute a departure from
dao
. Accordingly, the Chinese texts regard war not as an instrument for the attainment of this end or that but as the product of stern necessity, something which must be confronted and coped with and managed and brought to an end. Clausewitz emphasizes that war is brutal and bloody and seeks to achieve a great victory. By contrast, the Chinese texts are permeated