It's been a while...

Work and school have taken a good deal of time, but I've been working hard on Clausewitz as well. My research has been almost 100% in support of school.

A professor asked his students in one of my courses whether Clausewitz's theories applied to asymmetric warfare. Below are my thoughts on the question:

I am an adherent of Christopher Bassford’s statement that “Clausewitz was a practical soldier and he intended his work to serve as a practical approach to real world complexities”. (1) Bassford, professor of strategy at the Army War College, takes issue with the notion that the style of warfare such as that faced by the United States today in Iraq and Afghanistan represents some form of “non-Clausewitzan” warfare. (2) He believes Clausewitz’s work, especially his concept of the Trinity, serves a framework for thinking about war that transcends concepts of conflict between nation states and provides the means for examining war in all its forms.

Clausewitz described a society’s war making capability as residing in the intersection of the elements of a “remarkable trinity” of passion/violence, chance and reason. Bassford writes that the Trinity, while arguably not the central concept of “On War”, is the concept that ties all of Clausewitz’s many ideas together and binds them into a meaningful whole.” (3) It establishes the dynamic interplay of violence, chance and reason that comprises war, while not prescribing a fixed relationship between the elements. (4)

American Army Colonel Harry G. Summers used Clausewitzian theory in his analyses on the United States’ involvement in Vietnam and the First Gulf War. In his writings on strategy, he embraced the idea that the components of the trinity (as described in Book VIII of “On War”) (5) were embodied by a nation’s people, its army and the leaders that governed them. Summers specifically emphasized that when the three components of the remarkable trinity were in harmony, a nation stood a better chance of achieving strategic success than a nation that went to war with an imbalance between the three.(6)

Anti-Clausewitzian writers such as Martin van Creveld make the case that the Trinity no longer has bearing on the conduct of war due to the decline in “traditional” state vs state warfare relative to the ascendancy of trans-national, non-governmental threats such as Al Qaeda. Their justification for this claim is the state-centric model of the trinity employed by Summers. (7) K.M. French writes that any form of warfare that does not involve two opposing states “is else entirely, that is, non-Trinitarian warfare.” Army War College professor Antulio J. Echevarria demonstrates however, that the people/army/state construction of the Trinity is simply one subjective model, and that the concept of the Trinity as violence, chance and reason is a more objective, and hence more widely applicable, tool with which to analyze war. The people are ”populations of any society or culture”, not just the discrete body of people residing within defined borders, an army is “a warring body from any period”, and a state or government is “any ‘personified intelligence’”. (8) Applying this more objective model of the Trinity to the Global War on Terror, one can see the in the words and actions of Al Qaeda’s Islamic “constituencies”, operational cells, and trans-national leadership the interplay passion, chance and logic that one can apply to the population of the United States, its military, and its elected leadership. (8) Hence, warfare that adherents of Van Creveld would identify as non-Trinitarian can still be examined through Clausewitzian theory.

1. Christopher Bassford, “Tip-Toe Through the Trinity”, http://www.clausewitz.com/CWZHOME/Trinity/Trinity8.htm

2. Ibid

3. Ibid

4. Ibid

5. Antulio J. Echevarria, “Clausewitz and the Nature of the War on Terror”, in “Clausewitz and the 21st Century” edited by Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007), p 204.

6. Harry G. Summers, “On Strategy II: A Critical Analysis of the Gulf War” (New York, Dell Publishing, 1992), pp 17-18.

7. K.M. French, “Clausewitz vs The Scholar”, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1992/FKM.htm

8. Antulio J. Echevarria, “Clausewitz and the Nature of the War on Terror”, in “Clausewitz and the 21st Century” edited by Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007), p 205.