Quotes About Clausewitz

The Army was always big on Clausewitz, the Prussian; the Navy on Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American; and the Air Force on Giulio Douhet, the Italian. But the Marine Corps has always been more Eastern-oriented. I am much more comfortable with Sun-tzu and his approach to warfare.

Clausewitz summarises both the value and limits of theory: '[Theory] is meant to educate the mind of the future commander, or, more accurately, to guide him in his self-education, not to accompany him to the battlefield.

War is a total social phenomenon. In this respect, Clausewitz's analysis is a precursor of Durkheim's sociology. Clausewitz has things to teach us about "mass" violence and contagion.

Napoleon, von Clausewitz wrote, "We do claim that direct annihilation of the enemy's forces must always be the dominant consideration.... Once a major victory is achieved there must be no talk of rest, of breathing space... but only of the pursuit, going for the enemy again, seizing his capital, attacking his reserves and anything else that might give his country aid and comfort.

Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.

That's why war--explicitly in Clausewitz, implicitly in Tolstoy--must reflect policy. For when policy reflects war, it's because some high-level hedgehog--a Xerxes, or a Napoleon--has fallen in love with war, making it an end in itself. They'll stop only when they've bled themselves bloodless. And so the culminating points of their offensives are self-defeat.

The turn of events in Belgium was a product of the German theory of terror. Clausewitz had prescribed terror as the proper method to shorten war, his whole theory of war being based on the necessity of making it short, sharp, and decisive. The civil population must not be exempted from war's effects but must be made to feel its pressure and be forced by the severest measures to compel their leaders to make peace.

What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on "the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute.

Clausewitz insisted on aggressively following up after concentrating force at the decisive point. Any strategy that doesn't account for how to exploit victory is incomplete, inadequate. "What remains true under all imaginable conditions," he wrote, "is that no victory will be effective without pursuit; and no matter how brief the exploitation of victory, it must always go further than an immediate follow-up.

The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz had defined war as the pursuit of political goals by other means. Confederate strategy in 1864 certainly conformed to this definition. If southern armies could hold out until the election, war weariness in the North might cause the voters to elect a Peace Democrat who would negotiate Confederate independence.

Clausewitz aceptaba que los objetivos militares deberían ser fijados por los políticos.

Only the very simple can work in war," as Clausewitz observed. Complex drills simply won't work, even leaving aside that the time required to condition something goes up with that something's complexity, even as the probability of conditioning it drops.

Reassuring withdrawals, Clausewitz writes in On War, "are very rare." More often armies and nations fail to distinguish orderly disengagements from abject capitulations—or foresight from fear.

Without ever having read Clausewitz—at least as far as we know—the president revived that strategist's great principle that war must be the instrument of politics, rather than the other way around.

According to Clausewitz, the purpose of studying war was to provide commanders with a sound basis for their thinking and render it unnecessary to reinvent the wheel with every new situation.

Karl von Clausewitz states that in war, uncertainty, danger, and unpredictability are countered only through such moral forces of courage, self-confidence, esprit, and a sense of duty.96

In any case, it wouldn't affect the results at all, but that phrase the balance of power always sounds impressive in conversation, as if you'd been reading Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. I