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45 C H A P T E R T W O The Doctrinal Development of the American Military Profession I see many soldiers: would that I saw many warriors! “Uniform” one calls what they wear: would that what it conceals were not uniform! Friedrich Nietzsche The future author of a book that would serve as scripture for the conservative political realists of late twentieth-century American military and diplomatic officialdom, Carl von Clausewitz, was serving as a staff officer in the rear guard of the Prussian forces seeking to cut off the French forces trying to reinforce Napoleon at Waterloo. A few miles away, the future author of General Order No. 100, Francis Lieber, a Prussian enlisted soldier, lay wounded and near death. Many of the philosophic inclinations of Clausewitz were the reverse of Lieber’s. In fact, the two men’s contrasting views of the nature of war would mark a key point of divergence between informal and formal norms in the American military profession. It is ironic that the two key individuals associated with such disparate martial legacies at one point shared the same uniform and participated in the same campaign. Clausewitz is only known to history because the French Revolutionary army followed the common customs and usages of war at the time in granting him quarter and providing him medical care after he fell wounded in an earlier battle in 1806.1 Following his recovery and parole , Clausewitz joined Field Marshals August Wilhelm Gneisenau and Gelhard Johann von Scharnhorst in modernizing and reforming the defeated and antiquated Prussian army. Being the most politically conservative and antirevolutionary of the Prussian military reformers, Clausewitz discarded his uniform and donned a Russian one in 1812 rather than fight for Napoleon, not returning to Prussian service until his sovereign had discovered the error of his ways by turning on the French Emperor after his defeat in Russia. After his retirement, Clause- 46 C H A P T E R T W O witz put down his military insights and observations in a book that would end up being one of the most selectively read texts in history. The significance of its belated adoption by conservative American military theorists can only be compared to the reception in the Englishspeaking world of the King James Bible in the sixteenth century. In 1832, Clausewitz died in the midst of a major revision of his seminal On War, completing only its first chapter.2 Although the author died in relative obscurity, the sponsorship of Clausewitz’s ideas by Field Marshals Helmuth von Moltke and Colmar von der Goltz in the late nineteenth century, as they undertook to prepare the new nation of Germany for total war, turned Clausewitz into a military icon. Clausewitz ’s influence in Europe rose steadily until this ideal of total war was experienced first-hand by Europeans during the First World War.3 Aside from the many questionable historical processes for which he has been either blamed or credited, it is fairly incontrovertible that Clausewitz understood the nature of war as intrinsically violent, political , unpredictable, and resistant to positivistic scientific systematization . For someone with no formal university training, the philosophical influences on Clausewitz were considerable. His posited dichotomy between absolute war and actual war places him in the idealist tradition of Immanuel Kant, and his reification of the nation-state reflects the influence of Georg Friedrich Hegel.4 Insofar as he considered some societies more naturally virtuous than others, Clausewitz was completely Aristotelian in his views on ethical or humanitarian conduct in warfare . For Clausewitz, normative patterns of humanitarian conduct in war were societal rather than professional. In On War, Clausewitz wrote that “if wars between civilized nations are far less cruel and destructive than wars between savages, the reason lies in the social conditions of the states themselves and in their relationship to one another”; and that “to introduce the principle of moderation into the theory of war itself would always lead to logical absurdity.”5 Unlike Lieber and Augustine, Clausewitz separates justice and morality from warfare. Like Thomas Hobbes, and Niccolò Machiavelli before him, his writings are addressed to those working on behalf of a self-interested nation-state in a zero-sum competition, where adjustments in the balance of power at the expense of other nation-states occur with no other justification than that of raison d’état.6 [3.14.6.194] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...

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