Clausewitz Theory Application to Strategic and Operational Challenges Faced by Today's Military

Clausewitz Theory Application to Strategic and Operational Challenges Faced by Today's Military

War Analysis of Clausewitz

Clausewitz begins his analysis of the nature of war by considering it as an abstract concept. According to him the war is an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will. Clausewitz's influence on European strategy arose from Moltke's successes in the Austrian and French campaigns. As a result, Clausewitz became instantly fashionable. However, though the operational aspects of Clausewitz's writings influenced Moltke, he believed that Clausewitz's subordination of the military to political control was incorrect. It would be Moltke's view of the matter, not that of Clausewitz, which became dominant in Imperial Germany toward the end of the nineteenth century. Even though it was during those years that Clausewitz was being most widely acclaimed.

Then, in 1883, von der Goltz published Das Folk en Waffen challenging Clausewitz's view of the nature of war. For Clausewitz, armies under the direction of the state fought wars. His concept of absolute war, in contrast to total war, was something used in a dialectical analysis of the nature of war. Actual war would be quite different from absolute war because of the forces of friction. Modem economic, technological, and military developments made Clausewitz's Trinitarian view obsolete according to von der Goltz. The railway and telegraph made it possible for the integration of a country's entire resources towards waging war. Between 1870 and 1910 the number of kilometers of railway track in Germany grew from 18,560 to 59,031 while the number of telegraph offices increased more than ten-fold from 4,000 to 45,000. 50 In fact, Germany laid out its railway specifically for military purposes.

During the wars against Austria and France, the German General Staff took control over both the railway and the telegraph system. For von der Goltz, in contrast to Clausewitz, total war involved the supremacy of military priorities over civilian priorities. War gave the military an opportunity to reassert itself over the commercial and industrial classes that, as von der Goltz understood, had used their economic power to gain greater social importance over the military.

Strategic and operational challenges

Today, some states have moved into the information age. Information societies connect to and correspond by computer systems. Instead of mass production, there is customized production for markets using intelligent technology. Military forces reflect these economic changes by employing smart weapons with focused lethality and through a conscious attempt to reduce collateral damage. Information war, or third wave war, relies on sophisticated communications technology and the use of information feeding precision weaponry. According to WMD (weapon of mass destruction) advocates, the development of weapons that have become more accurate and synchronized with each other in their use has changed the nature of war. The system of systems will become more effective and lead to dominance of quality over quantity.

In the mid-1990s, a series of authors argued that Clausewitz's Trinitarian analysis of war, developed as it ...