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Tag: Clausewitz

  • Strategies: hierarchy or balancing Purpose, Aims and Means?

    Strategies: hierarchy or balancing Purpose, Aims and Means?

    At the beginning of his famous first chapter, Clausewitz defines war as mentioned above within a hierarchy of purpose, aims, and means. His renowned formula is related to this definition. At the end of the same chapter, nevertheless, he introduces the consequences for the theory of war from this initial reasoning about the nature of war and states: “Our task, therefore, is to develop a theory that maintains a balance between these three tendencies, like an object suspended between three magnets”

     

    Strategy Bridge
    “The Strategy Bridge concept leads to battle-centric warfare and the primacy of tactics over strategy.”

    At the outset, I would like to emphasise that in war and in violent action, justifiable ends do not legitimate all means. But I won’t solely treat the means applied by Hamas on October 7th, nor that of the Israel defence forces afterwards. Nevertheless, if someone argued that the ends justify all means, this would have to be applied to both sides. I want to highlight more principal arguments concerning the ‘end-aims-means’ relationship by contrasting a mere hierarchical approach, which is, in my view, leading to a reversal of ends and means, and a floating balance of them. The task of coming to a proper appreciation of Clausewitz’s thoughts on strategy is actually to combine a hierarchical structure with that of a floating balance. This article examines the relation of purpose, aims and means in Clausewitz’s theory and highlights that this relation is methodologically comparable to the floating balance of Clausewitz’s trinity. Modern strategic thinking is characterised by the end, way (aim), means relationship and the concept of the ‘way’ as the shortest possible connection between ends and means  (consider, for instance, Colin Gray’s concept of a strategy bridge[1]). This notion stems from a very early text of Clausewitz: ‘As a result each war is raised as an independent whole, whose entity lies in the last purpose whose diversity lies in the available means, and whose art therein exists, to connect both through a range of secondary and associated actions in the shortest way.’

    Nevertheless, here we can detect the fundamental difference in many of Clausewitz’s interpretations, which understand strategy as the shortest way of connecting purpose and means (battle and combat). Within this quote, Clausewitz speaks of war as an independent whole, a notion which he later rejects fervently.   A central distinction is the concept to which the means attaches: the Taoist tradition and Sun Tzu hold that the means connects directly to the political purpose of the war; in contrast, for Clausewitz, the means attaches to an intermediary aim within a war, which must be sequentially achieved prior to the fulfilment of the war’s political purpose. The distinctive feature of the Taoist tradition is that strategy as a “way” effectively becomes tactics, in the sense that there exists no “strategic” aim, in the meaning of an intermediate military “strategic” war aim inserted between the political purpose of the war and tactical combat.

    Battle-centric Warfare: Winning battles and losing the War

    If strategy is nothing else than the direct way of linking the political purpose with the means, understood as combat, this understanding results in a ‘battle-centric’ concept of warfare that privileges tactical outcomes. One might attribute the loss of the Vietnam War, as well as the defeat of the US in Afghanistan and Iraq, to this misunderstanding about battle. In the early 1980s, Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr wrote a most influential work about the faults made in the Vietnam War. He observed that the US Army won every battle in Vietnam but finally lost the war. Summers recounts an exchange between himself and a former North Vietnamese Army officer some years after the war. It went something like this: Summers: ‘You never defeated us in the field.’ NVA Officer: ‘That is true. It is also irrelevant.’ [2]Winning battles does not necessarily lead to winning the war, and not only in this case. The same point can be made about Napoleon’s campaign in Russia. Napoleon won all the battles against the Russian army but lost the campaign. It was precisely this observation that led Clausewitz to denounce battle-centric warfare.

    ‘War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will,’ Clausewitz wrote at the beginning of his famous first chapter of On War (75).[3] ‘Force … is thus the means of war; to impose our will on the enemy is its purpose’, he continued. ‘To secure that purpose, we must make the enemy defenceless, which, in theory, is the true aim of warfare. That aim takes the place of the purpose, discarding it as something not actually part of war’ (75). This seemingly simple sentence reveals the core problem: what does it mean that the aim ‘takes the place’ (in German: vertritt) of the purpose? Are they identical or different? To put it bluntly, At the beginning of his famous first chapter, Clausewitz defines war as mentioned above within a hierarchy of purpose, aims, and means. His renowned formula is related to this definition. At the end of the same chapter, nevertheless, he introduces the consequences for the theory of war from this initial reasoning about the nature of war and states: “Our task, therefore, is to develop a theory that maintains a balance between these three tendencies, like an object suspended between three magnets” (89).[4] In relation to the concept of strategy, we must combine a hierarchical understanding of the purpose-aims-means-rationality with that of a floating balance of all three.

    Presenting any of these elements as an absolute would be artificially to delimit the analysis of war, as the components are interdependent. Clausewitz’s solution is the ‘trinity’, in which he defined war by different, even opposing, tendencies, each with its own rules. Nevertheless, since war is ‘put together’ in this concept of three tendencies, it is necessary to consider how these tendencies interact and conflict simultaneously rather than one being absolute. Clearly, if we go to war, there is a purpose for that war, and different purposes for war are possible. Each of these possible purposes is connected with different achievable military aims, and finally, each aim can be achieved by various means. The question, therefore, is whether all three are incorporated into a hierarchy or whether their relationship must be understood as a floating balance among them.

    Purpose, Aims, and Means in War

    Clausewitz explains this dynamic relationship of purpose, aims and means in war in Chapter Two of Book One. At the beginning of Book One, Chapter Two, Clausewitz writes that ‘if for a start we inquire into the [aim] of any particular war, which must guide military action if the political purpose is to be properly served, we find that the [aim] of any war can vary just as much as its political purpose and its actual circumstances’ (90). The consequence of this proposition is that not every aim and means serves a given purpose. The problem of the relationship between purpose and aims is that each element of the purpose-aims-means construct has a rationality of its own, which Clausewitz emphasises in his proposition that war has its own grammar, although not its own logic. He writes, for example, ‘we can now see that in war many roads lead to success, and that they do not all involve the opponent’s outright defeat.’ Clausewitz then summarises that there exists a wide range of possible ways (94) to reach the aim of war and that it would be a mistake to think of these shortcuts as rare exceptions (94). For example, Clausewitz wrote: ‘It is possible to increase the likelihood of success without defeating the enemy’s forces. I refer to operations that have direct political repercussions, that are designed in the first place to disrupt the opposing alliance’ (emphasis in the original) (92).[5]Another prominent example, Clausewitz emphasised, was the warfare of Frederick the Great. He would never have been able to defeat Austria in the Seven Years’ War if his aim had been the outright defeat of Austria. Clausewitz concludes if he had tried to fight in this manner, ‘he would unfailingly have been destroyed himself.’ (94). After explaining other strategies besides the destruction of the enemy armed forces, he concludes that all we need to do for the moment is to admit the general possibility of their existence, the likelihood of deviating from the basic concept of war under the pressure of particular circumstances (99). But the main conclusion is that in war, many roads may lead to success – but the reverse is true, too, not all means are neither guaranteeing success nor are legitimate.[6]

    But the main conclusion is that in war, many roads may lead to success – but the reverse is true, too, not all means are neither guaranteeing success nor are legitimate.

    Why is that so?   Although Clausewitz finishes Chapter 2 of Book I with the notion that the ‘wish to annihilate the enemy’s forces is the first-born son of war’ (99), he emphasises that at a later stage and by degrees’ we shall see what other kinds of strategies can achieve in war’ (99). Nevertheless, he gives us two clues in this chapter. First, that war is not an independent whole but – an extension of the political sphere: that war has its own grammar but not its own logic.[7] Second, in my interpretation of Clausewitz, the difference between attack and defence represents a distinction between self-preservation and gaining advantages in warfare. Already in Chapter Two, he articulates the ‘distinction that dominates the whole of war: the difference between attack and defence. We shall not pursue the matter now, but let us just say this: that from the negative purpose [comes?] all the advantages, all the more effective forms, of fighting, and that in it is expressed the dynamic relationship between the magnitude and the likelihood of success’ (94).

    My thesis is that Clausewitz is trying to combine the Aristotelian difference between poieses and praxis in his writings – an instrumental view of war for political purposes with the performance of the conduct of war, not just with the execution of the political will. Whereas for the early Clausewitz, the ‘purpose’ is a moment within the war, he later opposes this position, emphasising that this purpose is located outside of the actual warfare. With this differentiation of purposes in war and the purpose of war, Clausewitz covers a fundamental difference between various forms of action, which was initially developed by Aristotle and remains even today. The practical philosophy of Aristotle is based on the basic distinction of techne, as based on poiesis and phronesis, and praxis, based on performance and practical knowledge. Techne is technical, instrumental knowledge.

    In contrast, phronesis or praxis of action can be characterised as performance in warfare. If we compare different purposes for going to war with each other, we are close to what Max Weber called the “value rationality” of purposes. Although Max Weber sometimes seems to overemphasise the difference between the rationality of purposes and military aims, his differentiation is useful to shed light on Clausewitz’s theory. Value rationality is primarily about the relationship of different purposes to one another, which can be classified into a hierarchy of purposes. The subordination of warfare to the shaping of international order, as Clausewitz puts it, is ‘value-rational’ as defined by Max Weber. By contrast, “action rationality” is a principle of action exclusively oriented to achieving a particular military aim through the most effective means and rational consideration of possible consequences and side effects.

                Clausewitz initially makes a two-fold distinction between the purpose-aims-means relationship: first, as a value rationality, in which we find a hierarchical relationship starting from the purpose at the top, with aims and means subordinated respectively; second, as a process rationality, in which the military aim as the object of practical action is the output of the purpose-aim-means relationship.

    He made this distinction at times only implicitly based on the different connotations of the concept of purpose. In part, Clausewitz differentiates between the purpose of war and the purpose in war. He used the same terms throughout, providing various contents from which this distinction could be deduced. Henceforth we need to have a further look at his use of terms and concepts.

    Beginning with his earliest writings, Clausewitz asserted that war has a purpose. In his Strategie (Strategy), written in 1804, he wrote that the ‘purpose of the war’ can be: ‘Either to destroy the enemy completely, to remove their sovereignty, or to prescribe the conditions for peace.’ The destruction of the enemy forces is the ‘more present purpose’ of war. If the purpose of war, however, is the destruction of the enemy forces, is it a purpose that is realised within warfare?[8]  The problem is that the destruction of the enemy moves from being a means to an aim in and of itself. In contrast to such an understanding of the purpose-aims-means rationality, for Clausewitz, the military aim within the war is an intermediary dimension between purpose and means. In his later writings, Clausewitz replaces the term’ purpose in war’ through the terms’ aims’ and ‘goals in warfare’ [(he uses the same German term Ziel for both aim and goal).

    The late Clausewitz emphasises that the purpose of war lies outside the boundaries of the art of warfare. He argues that one must always consider peace as the achievement of the purpose and the end of the business of war. (215) ‘Even more generally, the consideration of the use of force, which was necessary for warfare, affects the resolution for peace. As the war is not an act of blind passion but is required for the political purpose to prevail, this value must determine the size of our own sacrifices. Once the amount of force and thus the extent of the applied force is being so large that the value of the political purpose was no longer held in balance, the violence must be abandoned, and peace be the result.’ (217)

    Additionally, one has to take into account the counter-actions of the opponent. Clausewitz emphasises this difference in his chapter about the theory of war, Book Two: ‘The essential difference is that war is not an exercise of the will directed at inanimate matter, as in the case with the mechanical arts, or at matter which is animate but yielding, as in the case with the human mind and emotions in the fine art. In war, the will is directed at an animate object that reacts’. (149). Hence, Clausewitz’s final achievement is not a strategy that could be applied to all kinds of war but a reflection on the art of warfare, the performance of warfare within a political purpose.

    If, as it seems to Clausewitz, the purpose of war lies outside of warfare and war is determined only as means for this purpose, then a technical, instrumental understanding of the war is thereby intended. But this is not the whole of Clausewitz. He also emphasises praxis, performance and practical knowledge. If the purpose lies within warfare, this does not contain a complete identity of the goal of martial action with its execution. In this case too, the purpose is not war for war’s sake. My conclusion is that Clausewitz is really trying to combine the Aristotelian difference between poieses and praxis in his writings – an instrumental view of war for political purposes with the performance of the conduct of war, not just with the execution of the political will.

    Further dimensions of the concept of Purpose in Clausewitz

    According to Herfried Münkler, Clausewitz makes a distinction between an existential and instrumental view of war. If purpose exists at the top of a hierarchy in the purpose-aims-means relationship, there is an assumption that war is instrumental, in the sense that there is a choice between different purposes, thus identifying the purpose in terms of Max Weber’s value rationality. However, if war is “existential”, in that the only purpose is the survival of the state, the hierarchy of the relationship is reversed, as the means by which the enemy is defeated gains primacy, which accords with a process of rationality. Clausewitz summarised the difference between both concepts of purpose: ‘Where there is a choice of purpose, one may consider and note the means, and where only one purpose may be, the available means are the right ones.’[9]

    A pure process of rationality can lead to the fact that the military aim and means of warfare become the purpose in themselves. It is for characterising war in this manner, as an instrument facing inwards on itself, rather than outwards to a wider political purpose, that the early Clausewitz can be criticised. He adopted the Napoleonic model from Jena, trying to seize its successes systematically and, without considering the social background of France, to generalise it as an abstraction. In his critique of Clausewitz, Keegan wrote that the military develops war cultures, which correspond with their social environment. If, however, war is seen as purely instrumental and the connection to this environment is cut, then the danger of blurring the military boundaries threatens potentially endless violence. In this view, the roots of Clausewitz’s image of war refer back to the origins of the modern age, which was characterised by the full possession of civil rights, the general right to vote and compulsory military service, all of which completed the portrait of the citizen soldier and the ‘battle scenes’ of the people’s army.

    The question for today is whether the revolution in military affairs as well as fourth and fifth-generation warfare (5th generation warfare is partisan warfare applied by states or state-like entities like Hamas) are tempting to a primacy of the means and aims over meaningful purposes, a primacy of tactics over strategy and the ‘art of war’, which is in Clausewitz’s view even surpassing strategy.

    The French model was, in fact, adapted for the Prussian circumstances: a revolutionary people’s army in the service of the raison d’ état – but without ‘republic’ (meaning a democratically constituted system of government). In this form, Clausewitz’s theory was proved and began to be used later for multiple purposes. It started its triumphant advance through the general staff throughout the war ministries of the world. In Keegan’s view, the result of this process was the general armament of Europe in the 19th century and its excessive increase in the 20th century.[10] Keegan left unmentioned that Clausewitz’s theory of war had yet to be bisected to fulfil this function, especially by the German general staff in the First World War. Nevertheless, his criticism revealed a fundamental problem of modern war: the separation of potential options for warfare from socially meaningful purposes. In World War I, tactics replaced strategy.

    Although the understanding of the strategy of the early Clausewitz was, in fact, one of an aim or goal independent from the political realm within warfare, the definition of purpose of the later Clausewitz is based on the political purpose outside of warfare. There are still passages in the final version of On War in which Clausewitz does not differentiate clearly between purpose and aims. The question for today is whether the revolution in military affairs as well as fourth and fifth-generation warfare (5th generation warfare is partisan warfare applied by states or state-like entities like Hamas) are tempting to a primacy of the means and aims over meaningful purposes, a primacy of tactics over strategy and the ‘art of war’, which is in Clausewitz’s view even surpassing strategy.

     

    Notes:

    [1]   The relevant discussions may be found in the following books: Echevarria, A. 2007. Clausewitz and Contemporary War. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Gray, C. 1999. Modern Strategy. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Herberg-Rothe, A. 2007. Clausewitz’s Puzzle: The Political Theory of War. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Keegan, J. 1994. A History of Warfare. London and New York: Vintage; Simpson, E. 2012. War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics. London: Hurst; Strachan, H. 2007. Clausewitz’s OnWar. Atlantic Monthly Press, New York; von Ghyczy, T., Bassford, C. and von Oetinger, B. Clausewitz on strategy. Inspiration and insight from a master strategist. Hoboken: Wiley; Heuser, B., 2010, The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Heuser, Beatrice 2010, The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz. Praeger Security International:

    [2]   For details, see Herberg-Rothe, Andreas, Clausewitz’s puzzle. Oxford University Press: Oxford 2007. Clausewitz, Carl von; 1990.  Schriften, Aufsätze, Studien, Briefe, vol. 2, ed. W. Hahlweg. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht.; Clausewitz, Carl von, 1992. Historical and Political Writings, ed. P. Paret and D. Moran, 1992. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Clausewitz, Carl von,  Politische Schriften [Political Literature], ed. H. Rothfels. Munich: Drei Masken Verlag.  1922.

    [3]   The numbers in brackets are references to Clausewitz, Carl von, On War. Translated and edited by Peter Paret and Michael Howard. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1984. As translation is a highly tricky process, I have tried to make some translations of my own only in some cases, especially in trying to distinguish the German terms „Zweck“ and „Ziel“. These terms have been translated as purpose, object, objective, ends, and as aims, goals and sometimes even ways by Howard and Paret. My main intention in this article is to distinguish between purpose and aims. It might be that the great variety of the translations has contributed to the underestimation of the difference between the purpose of the war and the goal within the war. Although they are closely connected with each other, I follow Clausewitz’s assertion that the same purpose could be reached by pursuing different goals.

    [4]   With this notion, we can explain the difference between Clausewitz’s real concept of the trinity and trinitarian warfare, which is not directly a concept of Clausewitz, but an argument made by Harry Summers, Martin van Creveld and Mary Kaldor. In trinitarian warfare, the three tendencies of war are understood as a hierarchy, whereas  Clausewitz describes his understanding of their relationship as a floating balance In my view, each war is differently composed of the three aspects of applying force, the struggle or fight of the armed forces and the fighting community the fighting forces belong to; based on this interpretation I define war as the violent struggle of communities; see Herberg-Rothe, Clausewitz’s puzzle.

    [5]   This reference seems to strengthen the difference made by Emile Simpson between the use of armed force within a military domain that seeks to establish military conditions for a political solution on one side and the use of armed force that directly seeks political as opposed to specifically military outcomes; Simpson, War from the ground up, p. 1.

    [6]   The confusion about the difference between Zweck (purpose) of and Ziel (aims) in warfare concerning Clausewitz might be additionally caused by his own insufficient differentiation in this chapter.

    [7]   For Clausewitz’s concept of Policy and politics, see Herberg-Rothe, Clausewitz’s puzzle, chapter 6.

    [8]           Clausewitz, Carl von, Strategie aus dem Jahre 1804 mit Zusätzen von 1808 und 1809 (Strategy from the Year 1804 with Additions from 1808 and 1809). In EB, Verstreute Kleine Schriften (Small Scattered Writings), pp. 3-61, here pp. 20-21.

    [9]   Clausewitz, Carl von, Historisch-politische Aufzeichnungen von 1809 (Historical-Political Records of 1809). In: Clausewitz, Carl von, Politische Schriften (Political Literature), p. 76.

    [10]         . Keegan, Kultur des Krieges (The Culture of War), in particular, p. 543; Naumann, Friedrich, An den Ufern des Oxos (On the banks of the Oxos). John Keegan corrects Carl von Clausewitz. In: Frankfurter Rundschau from 17.6.98, p. ZB 4.

     

    Feature Photo Credit: Dennis Jarvis – War on the Rocks

  • Balancing Civilizations: Neither Clash, mere Multiplicity nor Conversion

    Balancing Civilizations: Neither Clash, mere Multiplicity nor Conversion

    The modern world is a product of intense competition and conflict that evolved from the European ‘system of states’ propensity and greed for the acquisition of territory and resources through colonialism and imperialism. The post-1945 world continues to suffer the ills of Western domination and exploitation as is evidenced by the innumerable number of wars, conflicts, and interventions….supposedly part of the imperial civilising missions. As the non-Western world rises the choices are either conflict or cooperation. The G20 Summit 2023 being held in New Delhi is an opportunity to recognise and chart a new path for the world. The authors, Andreas Herberg-Rothe and Key-young Son, emphasise the importance and need for cooperation and harmony amongst the civilisations of the world.

    G20 Summit 2023 in New Delhi is underway on September 9-10, 2023. 

    We propose the non-binary concepts of Clausewitzian floating equilibrium, Confucian harmony, and Arendtian politics of plurality as key ideas to avert and mitigate contemporary conflicts.

    In many of the world’s hot spots, both civil and governmental combatants have become embroiled in unending conflicts based on a binary position: “us against the rest.” After two hundred years of imperialism and Euro-American hegemony that have produced varying degrees of adaptation or rejection of Western modernity, it may be time for the world’s great civilizations to learn how to live harmoniously with one another. The world order of the twenty-first century will not be based entirely on modernist ideas and institutions such as nation-states, laissez-faire capitalism, individualism, science and technology, and progress. How then can we accommodate other civilizations and cultures?

    We propose mediation, recognition, harmony and floating balance as key principles for inter-civilizational and inter-cultural dialogue and conviviality, accompanied by the awareness that we are all descended from a small group of African ancestors. Mediation and recognition between friends and enemies will be the initial recipes for transforming hostility into partnership, while harmony and floating balance between and within opposites, such as individual versus community, freedom versus equality, will help sustain the momentum for forging constructive relationships.

    After the process of political decolonization in the twentieth century, we still need to decolonize our way of thinking. The values of the East and the West cannot survive in their absolute form in this globalized world.

    As former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin put it, “You don’t have to make peace with your friends; you have to make peace with your enemies. As a legacy of previous centuries, however, the binary thinking of “us against them” has paradoxically retained a strong presence in twenty-first-century international relations. If this thinking continues to be the decisive force, we could repeat the catastrophes of the twentieth century. After the process of political decolonization in the twentieth century, we still need to decolonize our way of thinking. The values of the East and the West cannot survive in their absolute form in this globalized world. It is our deepest conviction that the Western and like-minded states could only hold on to values such as freedom, equality, emancipation and human rights if they could be harmoniously balanced with the contributions of other civilizations and cultures.

    The concept of floating equilibrium, derived from our interpretation of the “wondrous trinity” of the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, means not relativity, but relationality and proportionality. At the end of his life, Clausewitz drew the conclusion for the theory of violent conflict that every war is composed of the three opposing tendencies of primordial violence, which he compared to hatred and enmity as a blind natural force, to chance and probability, and to the subordination of war as a political instrument, which makes war subject to pure reason. With Clausewitz’s concept, it is clear that war involves two extreme opposites – primordial violence on the one hand and pure reason on the other. By adding the third tendency, chance and probability, wars become different in their composition.

    We use Clausewitz’s concept as a methodological starting point to find a floating balance between various contrasts and contradictions that are evident in the current phase of globalization, which Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity”. These contrasts include those between the individual and the community, equality and freedom, war and peace, and recognition and disrespect. We argue that Clausewitz’s wondrous trinity and “floating equilibrium” can be used as a way to interpret and mitigate today’s conflicts, although Clausewitz developed these notions to analyze the warfare of his time.

    Globalization has led to the “rise of the rest” or Amitav Acharya’s “multiplex world” of nation-states, NGOs, global institutions, global terrorism, and violent gangs of young people from the suburbs of Paris to the slums of Rio who are excluded from the benefits of globalization. This includes both of the following macro developments:

    On the one hand, globalization allows the former empires (China, Russia and India) and some developing countries with large populations (Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa) to regain their status as great powers. This development could lead to a global network of megacities competing on connectivity rather than borders, as in China’s efforts to reestablish the ancient trade routes of the Silk Road. On the other hand, it dissolves traditional identities and forms of governance to some extent as a result of social inequality, leading to fragmented societies and a re-ideologization of domestic conflicts, as already seen with the rise of the far right in the US, Europe and Russia, but also Salafism, exaggerated Hindu and Chinese nationalist movements.

    the terrible inequalities in this world, where 1% of the world’s population has as much as 99% of the “rest”, or 62 billionaires own as much as 3.5 billion people, are the result of unrestricted and unbalanced freedom. We need to reinvent a balance between freedom and equality so as not to legitimize the inversion of freedom in the name of freedom by the aristocracy of property owners.

    Failed states, the wave of migrants and refugees around the world, climate catastrophes, and growing inequalities are the result of the “liquid modernity” that accompanies the dissolution of individual, community, and state identities. Ideologies did not dissolve with the end of the twentieth century or the advent of globalization but rather shifted from modern, utopian ideologies such as socialism and democracy and their aberrations such as Nazism and Stalinism to postmodern ones. The rise of postmodern ideologies such as Salafism is the result of globalization and the West’s refusal to recognize other civilizations and cultures. Moreover, the terrible inequalities in this world, where 1% of the world’s population has as much as 99% of the “rest”, or 62 billionaires own as much as 3.5 billion people, are the result of unrestricted and unbalanced freedom. We need to reinvent a balance between freedom and equality so as not to legitimize the inversion of freedom in the name of freedom by the aristocracy of property owners.

    In short, we propose the non-binary concepts of Clausewitzian floating equilibrium, Confucian harmony, and Arendtian politics of plurality as key ideas to avert and mitigate contemporary conflicts. Both Confucian harmony and Hanna Arendt’s concept of plurality are based on the harmonious relationship between different actors, or the floating balance of equality and difference, given that all human beings are similar enough to understand each other, but each is an individual endowed with uniqueness.

    Due to the speed and scale of information processing and transmission, the contemporary world is turning much faster than the commonly known modern world. If modernity is a temporal and spatial playground for rationality, the contemporary world is rather a playground for the mixture of the Clausewitzian trinity: reason, emotion, and chance. This means that while we would like to use reason in making decisions, we are often swamped by emotion and ultimately forced to take chances, given the short time frame available for any reasonable calculation and the ever-changing, chameleon-like internal and external environments. As an analyst of war, Clausewitz had long studied this trinity, for war, as a microcosm of human realities, is where reason, emotion, and chance play their respective roles.

    In this everyday situation of war, Clausewitz’s revived ideas can offer his posterity many valuable insights. All in all, Clausewitz diverts our attention from the unbalanced diet of the modernists in favour of rationality and offers a healthy recipe for analyzing contemporary problems where reason, emotion, and chance intersect, often with an unexpected outcome.

    No matter how powerful a single state may be, it will remain a minority compared to the rest of the world. In this globalized world, there would be no room for any kind of exceptionalism, American or Chinese, but only a floating balance between the world’s great civilizations.

    It is a choice between repeating the same mistake of forcibly imposing our own values on the rest of the world, as we did in the twentieth century, or embarking on a new civilizational project of harmony and co-prosperity. No matter how powerful a single state may be, it will remain a minority compared to the rest of the world. In this globalized world, there would be no room for any kind of exceptionalism, American or Chinese, but only a floating balance between the world’s great civilizations. Such a floating balance is a kind of mediation between the opposites of Huntington’s clash of civilizations on the one hand and the generalization of the values of only one civilization on the other. A mere multiplicity of approaches would only lead to a variant of the clash of civilizations. The first step in this direction is to recognize that in a globalized world, great civilizations must learn from each other for their own benefit and interest. If the values of the Western world lead to such terrible and immoral inequalities, we need to rethink our value systems – and if the concept of hierarchy in the Eastern world leads to violations of a harmoniously balanced society, we need to rethink those value systems as well. Whereas in classical Confucianism harmony was based on strict hierarchical oppositions, in a globalized world we need a floating balance between hierarchical and symmetrical social relations, combining Clausewitz and Confucius.

    Feature Image Credit: Storming of the Srirangapattinam Fort by the British. Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, 1799. Consolidation of colonialism and imperialism. www.mediastorehoise.com

  • Clausewitz and Sun Tzu – Paradigms of Warfare in the 21st Century

    Clausewitz and Sun Tzu – Paradigms of Warfare in the 21st Century

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    “No principle in the world is always right, and no thing is always wrong. What was used yesterday may be rejected today, what is rejected now may be used later on. This use or disuse has no fixed right or wrong. To avail yourself of opportunities at just the right time, responding to events without being set in your ways is in the domain of wisdom. If your wisdom is insufficient (…) you’lle come to an impasse wherever you go.”

    –  Taostic Text

    Every war has its own strategy and also its own theorist. In fact, there are only two great theorists of war and warfare, the Prussian “philosopher of war” Carl von Clausewitz, and the ancient Chinese theorist of the “art of war”, Sun Tzu. Nevertheless, there is no single strategy that applies equally to all cases, i.e., not even Clausewitz’s or Sun Tzu’s. Often an explanation for success or failure is sought in the strategies used only in retrospect. For example, Harry G. Summers (Summers 1982) attributed the defeat of the United States in the Vietnam War to the failure to take into account the unity of people, army, and government, Clausewitz’s “wondrous trinity.” In contrast, after the successful campaign against Iraq in 1991, the then Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, Colin Powell, appeared before the press with Clausewitz’s Book of War and signaled, see, we learned from the mistakes of the Vietnam War and won the Iraq War with Clausewitz (Herberg-Rothe 2007). Similarly, after World War I, there was a discourse that amounted to if the German generals had read Clausewitz correctly, the war would not have been lost. This position referred to the victory of the German forces in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the assessment of the then Chief of General Staff, Helmut von Moltke, that he was able to fight this war successfully by studying Clausewitz’s “On War.” Since then, Clausewitz’s book has been searched for reasons for victory or defeat (Herberg-Rothe 2007).

    If Clausewitz’s status seemed unchallenged after the Iraq war in 1991, it was gradually questioned and often replaced by Sun Tzu. Two reasons played a role here – on the one hand, the new forms of non-state violence and, on the other, the new technological possibilities, the revolution in military affais (RMA), which is far from being completed. In particular, robotic and hybrid warfare, as well as the incorporation of artificial intelligence, that of space, and the development of quantum computers. The trigger of the change from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu was a seemingly new form of war, the so-called “New Wars”, which in the strict sense were not new at all, but are civil wars or those of non-state groups. In the view of the epoch-making theorist of the “New Wars”, Mary Kaldor (Kaldor 2000, much more differentiated Münkler 2002), interstate war was replaced by non-state wars, which were characterized by special cruelty of the belligerents. These weapon bearers, seemingly a return to the past, were symbolized by child soldiers, warlords, drug barons, archaic fighters, terrorists, and common criminals who were stylized as freedom fighters (Herberg-Rothe 2017).

    Since Sun Tzu lived in a time of perpetual civil wars in China, his “art of war” seemed more applicable to intrastate war, (McNeilley 2001) while Clausewitz’s conception was attributed to interstate war. In combating these new weapons carriers and the “markets of violence,” civil war economies, or “spaces open to violence” associated with them, Napoleon’s guiding principle was applied: “Only partisans help against partisans” (Herberg-Rothe 2017). Accordingly, conceptions of warfare were developed by John Keegan and Martin van Creveld, for example, that amounted to an archaic warrior with state-of-the-art technologies (Keegan 1995, van Creveld 1991). On the military level, the transformation of parts of the Western armed forces as well as the Bundeswehr from a defensive army to an intervention army took place. In contrast to the United States, the Bundeswehr placed greater emphasis on pacifying civil society in these civil war economies, and ideally the soldier became a social worker in uniform (Bredow 2006).

    The battle was fought by highly professional special forces in complex conflict areas. The initial success of the U.S. Army in Afghanistan can be attributed to the use of such special forces, which, as a result of modern communications capabilities, were able to engage superior U.S. airpower at any time. Because interstate warfare has returned to the forefront with the Ukraine war, Clausewitz may regain relevance in the coming years – unless the controversial concepts of hybrid warfare, John Boyd’s OODA loop, or NATO’s comprehensive approach gain further influence. At their core, these are based on non-state warfare by states, thus enabling a renaissance of Sun Tzu.

    However, the paradigm shift from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu became even clearer during the Second Iraq war in 2003. From the perspective of one commentator, this campaign was won in just a few weeks because the U.S. army was guided by Sun Tzu’s principles, while Saddam Hussein’s Russian advisors adhered to Clausewitz and Moscow’s defense against Napoleon (Macan 2003/Peters 2003). Before the fall of Afghanistan, former U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis brought up the Clausewitz/Sun Tzu distinction anew. “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.” (Mattis 2008).

    Without fully following this distinction, it gives us hints that we cannot find absolutely valid approaches in Clausewitz’s and Sun Tzu’s conceptions, but differentiations in warfare. If we simplify the difference between the two, Clausewitz’s approach is more comparable to wrestling (Clausewitz 1991, 191), while Sun Tzu’s is comparable to jiu-jitsu. The difference between the two becomes even clearer when comparing Clausewitz’s conception to a boxing match. The goal is to render the opponent incapable of fighting (Clausewitz 1991, 191) by striking his body, as Clausewitz himself points out, thereby forcing him to make any peace. In contrast, Sun Tzu’s goal is to unbalance his opponent so that even a light blow will force him to the ground because he will be brought down by his own efforts. Of course, all two aspects play a major role in both Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, but Clausewitz’s strategy relates more to the body, the material means available to the war opponents, Sun Tzu’s strategy more to the mind, the will to fight. Both strategies have also often been conceptualized as the antithesis of direct and indirect strategy – in direct strategy, two more or less similar opponents fight on a delineated battlefield with roughly equal weapons and “measure their strength” – in indirect strategy, on the other hand, attempts are made, for example, to disrupt the enemy’s supply of food and weapons or to break the will of the opposing population to continue supporting the war. Examples of this in World War II would be the tank battles for symmetric and the bombing of German cities and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an example of asymmetric warfare. Non-state warfare is also asymmetrically structured in nearly all cases, as it is primarily directed against the enemy civilian population (Wassermann 2015). Perhaps asymmetric warfare was most evident in the Yom Kippur War between Israel and the Egyptian army. The latter had indeed surprised Israel and managed to overrun Israeli positions along the Suez Canal. However, instead of giving the Egyptian army a tank battle in the Sinai, a relatively small group of tanks set back across the Suez Canal and in the back of the Egyptian army, cutting it off from the water supply, forcing the Egyptian army to surrender within a few days (Herberg-Rothe 2017).

    This distinction between Clausewitz and Sun Tzu can be contradicted insofar as Clausewitz begins with a “definition” of war in which the will plays a major role and which states that war is an act of violence to force the opponent to fulfill our will (Clausewitz 1991, 191). But how is the opponent forced to do this in Clausewitz’s conception? A few pages further on it says by destroying the opponent’s forces. By this concept of annihilation, however, he does not understand physical destruction in the narrower sense, but to put the armed forces of the opponent in such a state that they can no longer continue the fight (Clausewitz 1991 215).

    Sun Tzu

    Sun Tzu’s approach relates more directly to the enemy’s thinking. “The greatest achievement is to break the enemy’s resistance without a fight” (Sunzi 1988, 35). Accordingly, Basil Liddell Hart later formulated, “Paralyzing the enemy’s nervous system is a more economical form of operation than blows to the enemy’s body.” (Liddel Hart, 281). Sun Tzu’s methodical thinking aims at a dispassionate assessment of the strategic situation and thus at achieving inner distance from events as a form of objectivity. This approach is rooted in Taoism, and in it the presentation of paradoxes is elevated to a method. Although the “Art of War” contains a number of seemingly unambiguous doctrines and rules of thumb, they cannot be combined into a consistent body of thought.

    In this way, Sun Tsu confronts his readers (who are also his students) with thinking tasks that must be solved. Often these tasks take the form of the paradoxical. This becomes quite obvious in the following central paradox: “To fight and win in all your battles is not the greatest achievement. The greatest achievement is to break the enemy’s resistance without a fight.”(Sun Tzu). In clear contradiction to the rest of the book, which deals with warfare, Sun Tsu here formulates the ideal of victory without a battle and thus comes very close to the ideal of hybrid warfare, in which possible battle is only one of several options.

    Obviously, he wants to urge his readers to carefully consider whether a war should be waged and, if so, under what conditions. It is consistent with this that Sun Tsu repeatedly reflects on the economy of war, on its economic and social costs, and at the same time refers to the less expensive means of warfare: cunning, deception, forgery, and spies. Victory without combat is thus the paradox with which Sun Tsu seeks to minimize the costs of an unavoidable conflict, limit senseless violence and destruction, and point to the unintended effects.

    The form of the paradox is used several times in the book, for example when Sun Tsu recommends performing deceptive maneuvers whenever possible; this contradicts his statement that information about the opponent can be obtained accurately and used effectively – at least when the opponent is also skilled in deceptive maneuvers or is also able to see through the deceptions of his opponent. This contradiction stands out particularly glaringly when one considers that Sun Tsu repeatedly emphasizes the importance of knowledge, for example when he says: “If you know the enemy and yourself, there is no doubt about your victory; if you know heaven and earth, then your victory will be complete” (Sunzi 1988, 211). In a situation in which one must assume that the other person also strives to know as much as possible, this sentence can only be understood as a normative demand, as an ideal: Knowledge becomes power when it represents a knowledge advantage, as Michel Foucault has emphasized in more recent times: For him, knowledge is power. Cunning, deception, and the flow of information, even when they are not absolutely necessary, are, however, in danger of becoming ends in themselves, because they alone guarantee an advantage in knowledge. Information, then, is the gold and oil of the 21st century.

    The presentation of paradoxes is not an inadequacy for Sun Tsu, but the procedure by which he instructs his readers/students. In contrast to the theoretical designs of many Western schools, Sun Tsu relies here on non-directive learning: the paradox demands active participation from the reader, mirrors to him his structure of thinking, and makes him question the suitability of his own point of view in thinking through the position of the opponent. Sun Tsu thereby forces his recipients to constantly examine the current situation and to frequently reflect. By repetitively thinking through paradoxical contradictions, the actor gains the inner distance and detachment from the conflict that are necessary for an impersonal, objectifying view of events. By being confronted with paradoxes, the reader learns to simultaneously adopt very different points of view, to play through the given variants, to form an understanding for the contradictions of real situations, and at the same time to make decisions as rationally as possible. In this way, the text encourages people not to rely on the doctrines it formulates as positive knowledge about conflict strategies, but to practice repeated and ever new thinking through as a method. Sun Tzu’s approach is thus characterized by highlighting paradoxes of warfare by designing strategies of action through reflection aimed at influencing the thinking of the opponent.

    Elective Affinities with Mao Tse-tung

    The conception of the “people’s war” by the Chinese revolutionary Mao Tse-Tung is a further development of that of Sun Tzu and the dialectical thinking of Marx and Engels. At the same time, in these paradoxes, he tries to provide an assessment and analysis of the situation that is as objective-scientific as possible, linking it to subjective experience: “Therefore, the objects of study and cognition include both the enemy’s situation and our own situation, these two sides must be considered as objects of investigation, while only our brain (thought) is the investigating object” (Mao 1970, 26).

    The comprehensive analyses that Mao prefaces each of his treatises have two purposes: On the one hand, they serve as sober, objective investigations before and during the clashes, which are intended to ensure rational predictions of what will happen and are based on reliable information and the most precise planning. On the other hand, Mao uses them to achieve the highest level of persuasion and to mobilize his followers through politicization. Not for nothing are terms like “explain,” “persuade,” “discuss,” and “convince” constantly repeated in his writings, since the people’s war he propagates requires unconditional loyalty and high morale.

    Mao repeatedly demonstrates thinking in interdependent opposites, which can be understood as a military adaptation of the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang. His precise analyses demonstrate dialectical reversals; thus he can show that in strength is hidden weakness and in weakness is hidden strength. According to this thinking, in every disadvantage an advantage can be found, and in every disadvantage an advantage. An example of this is his explanation of the dispersion of forces: while conventional strategies proclaim the concentration of forces (as does Clausewitz, Clausewitz 1991, 468), Mao relies on dispersion. This approach confuses the opponent and creates the illusion of the omnipresence of his opponent.

    Mao understands confrontations as reciprocal interactions and, from this perspective, is able to weigh the relationship between concentration and dispersion differently: “Performing a mock maneuver in the East, but undertaking the attack in the West” (Mao 1970, 372) means to bind the attention of the opponent, but at the same time to become active where the opponent least expects it. Mao’s method of dialectically seeking out weakness in strength and strength in weakness leads him to the flexibility that is indispensable for confronting a stronger opponent.

    Finally, it is the ruthless analysis of one’s own mistakes that bring Mao to his guiding principles; from a series of sensitive defeats, he concluded, “The aim of war consists in nothing other than ‘self-preservation and the destruction of the enemy’ (to destroy the enemy means to disarm him or ‘deprive him of his power of resistance,’ but not to physically destroy him to the last man)” (Mao 1970, 349). On this point, Mao Tse Tung is in complete agreement with Clausewitz. Mao also clarifies this core proposition by defining the concept of self-preservation dialectically – namely, as an amalgamation of opposites: “Sacrifice and self-preservation are opposites that condition each other. For such sacrifices are not only necessary in order to preserve one’s own forces-a partial and temporary failure to preserve oneself (the sacrifice or payment of the price) is indispensable if the whole is to be preserved for the long run” (Mao 1970, 175).

    Sun Tzu problems

    Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” as well as the theorists of network-centric warfare and 4th and 5th generation warfare focus on military success but miss the political dimension with regard to the post-war situation. They underestimate the process of transforming military success into real victory (Macan 2003, Peters 2003, Echevarria 2005). The three core elements of Sun Tzu’s strategy could not be easily applied in our time: Deceiving the opponent in general risks deceiving one’s own population as well, which would be problematic for any democracy. An indirect strategy in general would weaken deterrence against an adversary who can act quickly and decisively. Focusing on influencing the will and mind of the adversary may enable him to avoid a fight and merely resume it at a later time under more favorable conditions.

    Sun Tzu is probably more likely to win battles and even campaigns than Clausewitz, but it is difficult to win a war by following his principles. The reason is that Sun Tzu was never interested in shaping the political conditions after the war, because he lived in a time of seemingly never-ending civil wars. The only imperative for him was to survive while paying the lowest possible price and avoiding fighting, because even a successful battle against one enemy could leave you weaker when the moment came to fight the next. As always in history, when people want to emphasize the differences with Clausewitz, the similarities between the two approaches are neglected. For example, the approach in Sun Tzu’s chapter on “Swift Action to Overcome Resistance” would be quite similar to the approach advocated by Clausewitz and practiced by Napoleon. The main problem, however, is that Sun Tzu neglects the strategic perspective of shaping postwar political-social relations and their impact “by calculation” (Clausewitz 1991, 196) on the conduct of the war. As mentioned earlier, this was not a serious issue for Sun Tzu and his contemporaries, but it is one of the most important aspects of warfare in our time (Echevarria 2005¸ Lonsdale 2004).

    Finally, one must take into account that Sun Tzu’s strategy is likely to be successful against opponents with a very weak order of forces or associated community, such as warlord systems and dictatorships, which were common opponents in his time. His book is full of cases where relatively simple actions against the order of the opposing army or its community lead to disorder on the part of the opponent until they are disbanded or lose their will to fight altogether. Such an approach can obviously be successful with opponents who have weak armed forces and a weak social base but is likely to prove problematic with more entrenched opponents.

    Here, the Ukraine war could be a cautionary example. Apparently, the Russian military leadership and the political circle around Putin were convinced that this war, like the intervention in Crimea, would end quickly, because neither the resistance of the Ukrainian population nor its army was expected, nor the will of the Western states to support Ukraine militarily. To put it pointedly, one could say that in the second Iraq war, Sun Tzu triumphed over Clausewitz, but in the Ukraine war Clausewitz triumphed over Sun Tzu. This also shows that while wars in an era of hybrid globalization (Herberg-Rothe 2020) necessarily also take on a hybrid character, it is much more difficult to successfully practice hybrid warfare-such a conflation of opposites is strategically at odds with those writings of Clausewitz in which he generalizes the principles of Napoleonic warfare, though not with his determination of defense. The Ukraine war can even be seen as evidence of the greater strength of defense as postulated by Clausewitz (Herberg-Rothe 2007).

    And Clausewitz?

    At first glance, Clausewitz’s position is not compatible with that of Sun Tzu. In his world-famous formula of the continuation of war by other means (Clausewitz 1991, 210), Clausewitz takes a hierarchical position, with politics determining the superior end. Immediately before this formula, however, he writes that politics will pervade the entire warlike act, but only insofar as the nature of the forces exploding within it permits (Clausewitz 1991, ibid.). By this statement, he relativizes the heading of the 24th chapter, which contains the world-famous formula. In addition, all headings of the first chapter, with the exception of the result for the theory, the final conclusion of the first chapter, were written in the handwriting of Marie von Clausewitz, while only the actual text was written by Clausewitz (Herberg-Rothe 2023, on the discovery of the manuscript by Paul Donker).

    The tension only implicit in the formula becomes even clearer in the “wondrous trinity,” Clausewitz’s “result for the theory” of war. Here he writes that war is not only a true chameleon, because it changes its nature somewhat in each concrete case, but a wondrous trinity. This is composed of the original violence of war, hatred, and enmity, which can be seen as a blind natural instinct, the game of probabilities and chance, and war as an instrument of politics, whereby war falls prey to mere reason. Violence, hatred, and enmity like a blind natural instinct on the one side, and mere understanding on the other, this is the decisive contrast in Clausewitz’s wondrous trinity. For Clausewitz, all three tendencies of the wondrous trinity are inherent in every war; their different composition is what makes wars different (Clausewitz 1991, 213, Herberg-Rothe 2009).

    While Clausewitz formulates a clear hierarchy between the end, aim, and means of war in the initial definition and the world-famous formula, the wondrous trinity is characterized by a principled equivalence of the three tendencies of war’s violence, the inherent struggle and its instrumentality. At its core, Clausewitz’s wondrous trinity is a hybrid determination of war, which is why the term “paradoxical trinity” is more often used in English versions. In his determination of the three interactions to the extreme, made at the beginning of the book, Clausewitz emphasizes the problematic nature of the escalation of violence in the war due to its becoming independent, because the use of force develops its own dynamics (Clausewitz 1991, 192-193, Herberg-Rothe 2007 and 2017). The three interactions have often been misunderstood as mere guides to action, but they are more likely to be considered as escalation dynamics in any war. This is particularly evident in escalation sovereignty in war – the side gains an advantage that can outbid the use of force. However, this outbidding of the adversary (Herberg-Rothe 2001) brings with it the problem of violence taking on a life of its own. This creates a dilemma, which Clausewitz expresses in the wondrous trinity.

    This dilemma between the danger of violence becoming independent and its rational application gives rise to the problem formulated at the outset, namely that there cannot be a single strategy applicable to all cases, but that a balance of opposites is required (Herberg-Rothe 2014). In it, the primacy of politics is emphasized, but at the same time, this primacy is constructed as only one of three opposites of equal rank. Thus, Clausewitz’s conception of the wondrous trinity is also to be understood as a paradox, a dilemma, and a hybrid.

    As already observed in ethics, there are different ways to deal with such dilemmas (Herberg-Rothe 2011). One is to make a hierarchy between opposites. Here, particular mention should be made of the conception of trinitarian war, which was wrongly attributed to Clausewitz by Harry Summers and Martin van Creveld and was one of the causes of Clausewitz being considered obsolete by Mary Kaldor regarding the “New Wars.” For in the conception of trinitarian war, the balance of three equal tendencies emphasized by Clausewitz is explicitly transformed into a hierarchy of government, army, and people/population. Even if it should be noted that this interpretation was favored by a faulty translation in which Clausewitz’s notion of “mere reason” was transformed into the phrase “belongs to reason alone” (Clausewitz 1984), the problem is systematically conditioned. For one possible way of dealing with action dilemmas is such a hierarchization or what Niklas Luhmann called “functional differentiation”. We find a corresponding functional differentiation in all modern armies – Clausewitz himself had developed such a differentiation in his conception of the “Small War”, which was not understood as an opposition to the “Great War”, but as its supporting element. In contrast, Clausewitz developed the contrast to the “Great War” between states in the “People’s War” (Herberg-Rothe 2007).

    A second way of dealing with dilemmas of action is to draw a line up to which one principle applies and above which the other applies – that is, different principles would apply to state warfare than to “people’s war,” guerrilla warfare, the war against terrorists, warlords, wars of intervention in general. This was, for example, the proposal of Martin van Creveld and Robert Kaplan, who argued that in war against non-state groups, the laws of the jungle must apply, not those of “civilized” state war (van Creveld 1998, Kaplan 2002). In contrast, there are also approaches that derive the uniformity of war from the ends, aims, means relation, arguing that every war, whether state war or people’s war, has these three elements and that wars differ only in which ends are to be realized by which opponents with which means (I assume that this is the position of the Clausewitz-orthodoxy). It must be conceded that Clausewitz is probably inferior to Sun Tzu in practical terms with regard to the “art of warfare” – because in parts of his work, he gave the word to a one-sided absolutization of Napoleon’s warfare – while only in the book on defense did he develop a more differentiated strategy (Herberg-Rothe 2007, Herberg-Rothe 2014). Perhaps one could say that Sun Tzu is more relevant to tactics, whereas Clausewitz has the upper hand in strategy (Herberg-Rothe 2014).

    Summary

    If we return to the beginning, Clausewitz is the (practical) philosopher of war (Herberg-Rothe 2022), while Sun Tzu focuses on the “art of warfare”. As is evident in the hybrid war of the present, due to technological developments and the process I have labeled hybrid globalization (Herberg-Rothe 2020), every war can be characterized as a hybrid. However, as is currently evident in the Ukraine War, the designation of war as a hybrid is different from successful hybrid warfare. This is because hybrid warfare necessarily combines irreconcilable opposites. This mediation of opposites (Herberg-Rothe 2005) requires political prudence as well as the skill of the art of war. The ideal-typical opposition of both is correct in itself, if we provide these opposites with a “more” in each case, not an exclusive “or”.

    Clausewitz’s conception is “more” related to

    “politics, one’s own material possibilities and those of the opponent, a direct strategy, and that of the late Clausewitz on a relative symmetry of the combatants and the determination of war as an instrument. This can be illustrated with a boxing match in which certain blows are allowed or forbidden (conventions of war), the battlefield and the time of fighting remain delimited (declaration of war, conclusion of peace)”.

    Sun Tzu’s conception, on the other hand, refers to more

    “directly on the military opponent, his thinking and “nervous system” (Liddel-Heart), an indirect strategy (because a direct strategy in his time would have resulted in a weakening of one’s own position even if successful), and a relative asymmetry of forms of combat”.

    Despite this ideal-typical construction, every war is characterized by a combination of these opposites. Consequently, the question is neither about an “either-or” nor a pure “both-and,” but involves the question of which strategy is the appropriate one in a concrete situation. To some extent, we must also distinguish in Clausewitz’s conception of politics between a purely hierarchical understanding and a holistic construction. Put simply, the former conception is addressed in the relationship between political and military leadership; in the latter, any violent action by communities is per se a political one (Echevarria 2005, Herberg-Rothe 2009). From a purely hierarchical perspective, it poses no problem to emphasize the primacy of politics in a de-bounded, globalized world with Clausewitz. If, on the other hand, in a holistic perspective all warlike actions are direct expressions of politics, the insoluble problem arises of how limited warfare could be possible in a de-bounded world.

    This raises the question of which of the two, Clausewitz or Sun Tzu, will be referred to more in the strategic debates of the future. In my view, this depends on the role that information technologies, quantum computers, artificial intelligence, drones, and the development of autonomous robotic systems will play in the future – in simple terms, the role that thought and the “soul” will play in comparison to material realities in a globalized world. The Ukraine war arguably shows an overestimation of the influence of thought and soul (identity) on a community like Ukraine, but with respect to autocratic states like Russia and China, possibly an underestimation, at least temporarily, of the possibilities of manipulating the population through the new technologies. Regardless of the outcome of the war, the argument about Clausewitz and/or Sun Tzu will continue as an endless story – but this should not proceed as a mere repetition of dogmatic arguments, but rather answer the question of which of the two is the better approach can be taken in which concrete situation.

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  • Liquid Globalization and Intercultural Practical Philosophy

    Liquid Globalization and Intercultural Practical Philosophy

    This essay is based on a lecture given by the author at the German Jordanian University in Amman on the 18th of November 2021.

    Abstract

    We are witnessing the birth pains of a new global order. The previous order based on the hegemony of the Western states is in tatters and the newly industrialized nations are no longer seeking to imitate Western modernity but to rely on their own civilizational achievements. They are trying to combine a kind of modernity with an identity of their own. Nevertheless, opposing the declining West is not enough to initiate a global order, which is surpassing the previous one. The most successful challengers of Western modernity are relying on authoritarian or even totalitarian (IS, Taliban) conceptions of identity. But the alternative to the (neo-)liberal world order should not be an illiberal order. In order to design such an alternative, we need to conduct a discourse of the civilizational foundations of our different approaches by further developing intercultural philosophy. Intercultural philosophy has had already its height after the demise of the USSR but remained mainly a theoretical enterprise; it is of paramount importance in the conflicts about the new world order.   Assuming that we are witnessing a new phase of globalization, which can be characterized by the simultaneous processes of the rise (Zakaria) as well as the demise of the other (Herberg-Rothe), intercultural philosophy is becoming a practical philosophy designated to mitigate conflicts about interests.

    Intercultural Philosophy as a Practical Approach

    The Western model of society is viewed to be in crisis and for many people, nations and civilizations it is no longer an attractive role model.

    Intercultural philosophy has had already its height after the end of the Cold War but was mainly a theoretical enterprise. Assuming that we are witnessing a new phase of globalization, which can be characterized by the simultaneous processes of the rise (Zakaria, 2008) as well as the demise of the other (Herberg-Rothe and Foerstle, 2020), intercultural philosophy is becoming a practical philosophy designated to mitigate conflicts about interests and culture to cope with this process. The current phase of globalization, which in the footsteps of Zygmunt Bauman could be labelled hybrid globalization (Bauman, 2000), is accompanied by emotions (Moisi, 2010) like insecurity, uncertainty and dissolution of identities. Hybrid globalization is characterized by the ongoing process of globalization and local resistance against it. The Western model of society is viewed to be in crisis and for many people, nations and civilizations it is no longer an attractive role model. But all nations and civilizations need to find a balance between their civilizational traditions and coping with hybrid globalization. Mutual recognition of the civilizational foundations of the Western and Non-Western world may be a possible means to cope with this process. I’m assuming that the alternative to Western modernity and the global order which is based on it should not be illiberalism or even authoritarian rule but a new balance of the normative foundations of all civilizations (Katzenstein, 2009).

    What we need, therefore, is to initiate a virtuous circle as follows:

    1. Research on the subject of how conflicts are articulated in terms of culture and religion.
    2. Relating these concepts to different understandings of civilization.
    3. Mutual recognition of the civilizational foundations of Islam and Western thinking.
    4. Self-recognition is not only as religion or culture but as a civilization.
    5. Self-binding to civilizational norms in order to be recognized as equally valued civilization.

    Based on our interpretation of Clausewitz (Herberg-Rothe, 2007) we think that mutual recognition among the great civilizations of the earth is the prerequisite of settling disputes over diverging interests. 

    What we need, therefore, is the initiative of a discourse of mutual recognition of the great civilizations on earth and even a discourse, where the diverse understandings of central concepts like order, self-determination, emancipation, identity, dignity and so forth differ. At the same time, a closer look at the civilizations’ common grounds is essential, to eventually provide a basis for a meaningful dialogue. We think that we must find a balance between the Western model of the billiard game and the Eastern model of the concentric circles (Qin, 2016 and Yan, 2011).

    Additionally, most countries of the Non-Western world are no longer seeing the Western world as a role model they must follow but are seeking to find their own identity as a balance of their traditions and civilizational achievements – be it the Chinese dream of Xi Jinping, Hindu nationalism in India, and the revival of Confucianism in East Asia.

    We assume that there is a close linkage of struggles for recognition, the question of identity and increasing radicalization (Herberg-Rothe and Foerstle, 2020). The fundamental problem existed in the assumption that the uprooted, redundant, and excluded members of society would come to terms with their destiny on an individual level. We assume that these excluded are forming violent groups, in which they find a kind of stable identity through recognition by exercising violence. Only by recognizing the contributions of the civilizations of the world to the heritage of mankind, it is possible to enable a stable identity contrary to violent actions (Herberg-Rothe and Son, 2018). Additionally, most countries of the Non-Western world are no longer seeing the Western world as a role model they must follow but are seeking to find their own identity as a balance of their traditions and civilizational achievements – be it the Chinese dream of Xi Jinping, Hindu nationalism in India, and the revival of Confucianism in East Asia. Especially in China, the concept of harmony in Confucianism serves the purpose of balancing the other two C’s, communism and capitalism (Herberg-Rothe and Son, 2018).

    The denial of recognition versus mutual recognition

    The denial of recognition and the struggle for recognition play an ever-increasing role in intra-state conflicts in a globalized world as well as the international sphere, which is characterized by the “Rise of the Other” (Zakaria, 2008). We live in an increasingly globalized world, in which we assume that difficulties concerning recognition (between individuals, groups, ethnos, religious communities, nations or even civilizations) are a major source for radicalization. If mutual recognition is non-existent or cannot be built, conflicting interests are much more likely to escalate. There is a broad consensus (in the field of socialization research and increasingly also within social sciences in general) that the urge for recognition is the important factor for forming and stabilizing identity (personal, group, national, and civilizational) (Daase, 2015)

    Samuel P. Huntington was widely criticized for his assumption that we are facing a clash of civilizations (Huntington, 1996). What the liberal critics of Huntington were highlighting was that there should not be a clash of civilizations, but even more important that there could not be a clash of civilizations because in their view there was only one civilization, the Western one. The others were in their view religions or cultures, but no civilizations, because they did not undergo the process of secularization, which is in the Western discourse a dogma (Katzenstein, 2009).

    So, my first proposition for the mutual recognition of the civilizations of the earth is that most are based on religion, not in opposition to or separation from their related religions. For example, the Han dynasty created Confucianism as a civilization three centuries after Confucius, similarly Buddhist culture and civilization was constructed and expanded on a worldwide scale by Emperor Ashoka in India, nearly three centuries after Buddha. 

    Through the achievement of mutual recognition, the rapidly growing radicalization tendencies are supposed to be reduced and in the long run, peaceful coexistence is more likely. However, recognition requires awareness for differences and communalities (ontological perspective) or is otherwise produced within a process (epistemological approach). The outlook is thus the development of a third way in between universalization of only one culture or civilization (in the form of “We against the Rest”; Herberg-Rothe and Son, 2018), be it eurocentrism or any other kind of ethnocentrism and cultural relativism to stimulate peaceful cooperation and to limit the dramatic tendencies of radicalization throughout the world (Herberg-Rothe and Foerstle, 2020).

    Given the absence or non-maturity of Chinese, Russian, African, Islamic, or Indian IRTs, the mainstream IRT originated almost exclusively from the Anglo-Saxon world, for example, realism, neo-realism, neo-conservatism, liberal institutionalism, and theories of democratic peace (although in connection to Kant).

    In the wake of globalization, many pundits articulated whether the theoretical concepts developed from the era of nation-states (Beck, 1992) are still tenable for the portrayal of twenty-first century international relations. Furthermore, many concepts regarded as central in the IRT came to be perceived as a mere form of American political science (Acharya, 2000 and 2014). Given the absence or non-maturity of Chinese, Russian, African, Islamic, or Indian IRTs, the mainstream IRT originated almost exclusively from the Anglo-Saxon world, for example, realism, neo-realism, neo-conservatism, liberal institutionalism, and theories of democratic peace (although in connection to Kant). The reason is that in most Non-Western countries’ societies, cultures and civilizations are more important than the state, whereas in the Western understanding the state is the most important institution.

    My second proposition for the mutual recognition of the civilizations of the earth is, therefore, to be aware that in the Western world the state has the dominant role – international relations are relations between states – whereas in the Non-Western world the state is a variable of society, culture. In the process of globalization this separation between the Western World and all other civilizations is dissolving (Herberg-Rothe and Son,  2018)

    The problem of identity in a globalized world

    One’s identity is shaped through a difficult and open-ended interplay and mutual interdependency of personal performance and societal consideration. Recognition is thus the result of an exchange, during which the failure of a human being is feasible. No given script through societal framing is existent anymore, whereby risk and insecurity increase significantly. It is not necessarily the need for recognition that is “new” and for this reason just generated through modernity, rather the conditions are new in this context. An unsatisfactory identity-building leads to rage and an imminent loss of identity leads to fear – both hold enormously destructive potentials. The paradox of all rebellious attempts to create an identity is thereby that a conspicuous or provocative behaviour of young persons is often, citing Erik Erikson, just a “request for brotherly recognition” (Herberg-Rothe and Son, 2018). Although I share the critique of identity politics put forward by Francis Fukuyama in general, in which identity is related to a fixed core, my consequence is to conceptualize identity as a balance of conflicting tendencies within individuals, societies and communities (Herberg-Rothe, 2007; Herberg-Rothe and Son, 2018 and  Fukuyama, 2018)

    Through the social change in rendering globalization, the individual, as well as collectives, face increasing societal pressure. Zygmunt Bauman speaks of the transition from a “solid” into a “fluid” modernity (Bauman, 2000). Former stable identities (determined through solid social and spatial borders which offer, despite quite critical aspects of these borders, still a secured room for identity shaping) become insecure, if not destructed (Beck, 1992). The outcome of this is a high demand on individuals as well as collectives to cope with the obstacles of identity building in constant active work. The continually transforming social, cultural and political spaces and contexts hinder this process additionally. If the obstacles appear to be insuperable or if no realistic options for action exist, societies with a multiplicity of fragmented identities develop. 

    To sum up, the big identity question has such importance because radicalization drifts are an increasing phenomenon in heterogeneous societies.

    To sum up, the big identity question has such importance because radicalization drifts are an increasing phenomenon in heterogeneous societies. Globalization represents profound structural changes that are accompanied by momentous crises (Moisi, 2010). Anyway, existing social inequalities become more and more intensified and find expression in intra-societal tensions. Adjustment processes appear almost impossible, as the promises based on modernity are broadly seen as unrealistic or not reasonable. According to this, an alternative to cope with the rapidly changing transformation must be discovered (Herberg-Rothe and Son, 2018)

    The developments and assumptions regarding identity, recognition and radicalization serve as the basis for our research project. To enable unstable individuals or collectives to recover their identity, it is necessary, by focusing on the macro level, to foster mutual recognition between the world’s civilizations. Dialogue and with it an associated discourse of mutual recognition is supposed to contribute as a crucial component of avoidance of radicalization. The aim is to establish dialogues and to find practical approaches for inter-civilizational agreement. Under the overall scheme of mutual recognition versus radicalization, it is, for now, the purpose to elaborate differences and similarities of the world’s civilizations. The focus lies on the understanding of societal and international relations in order to initiate a dialogue in which the denial of recognition does not transform conflicts about interests into struggles for recognition, which are again the main source for radicalization processes (Herberg-Rothe and Foerstle, 2020).

    One can view this kind of balancing and harmonizing as a form of limited plurality or as articulated by Hannah Arendt, unity of multiplicity and multiplicity within unity.

    According to this, the focus lies on mutual understanding and recognition as powerful tools to prevent vanished and unstable identities in the globalized world, to see the last resort in radical thinking and acting. Yet the question arises, how much plurality and variety in thinking and acting is really desirable, respectively rated as positive in principle. It is therefore also an important element of our research, to find a way in between the fundamental contrast, on the one side of the universalism of values of just one civilization and cultural relativism on the other. Amitav Acharya’s concept of “universal pluralism” is in this respect ground-breaking, but still insufficient in our eyes (Acharya 2000 and 2014). We advocate the development of a process, in which the concepts of Clausewitz’s “floating balance” (Clausewitz, 1976), Confucian’s “harmony”, and Hegel’s “mutual recognition” are examined closely (Herberg-Rothe and Son, 2018). One can view this kind of balancing and harmonizing as a form of limited plurality or as articulated by Hannah Arendt, unity of multiplicity and multiplicity within unity. In this way, we aim to devise ways to effectively cope with or govern differences and contrasts facing the international society of the twenty-first century. All in all, we seek to adopt a harmonious mutual recognition of Western and East Asian thoughts and devise a better set of theories and methodologies to analyse the contemporary world.  It is our deepest conviction that the Western and like-minded states could only hold on to such values as freedom, equality, emancipation, and human rights if these could be harmoniously balanced with the contributions of other civilizations (Zhang, 2012) and cultures.

    Intercultural philosophy as a foundational approach for mutual recognition

    Intercultural philosophy can play an important role in this process of the mutual recognition of the civilizations of the earth. Since Karl Jaspers, the godfather of intercultural philosophy acknowledged the existence of four different civilizations, immense progress has been made concerning understanding of the different approaches (Katzenstein, 2009). Nevertheless, I strongly believe that all civilizations have posed the same question but did find different answers. So, intercultural philosophy is in my view possible beyond the acknowledgement of a mere multiplicity of philosophies, because we as humans are posing the same questions. For example, concerning being born, living and dying, between immanence and transcendence, between the individual and community, between our limited abilities and the desire for eternity, the relation of us as being to some degree animals and ethics which constitutes us as humans – our ethical convictions may be different, but all civilizations have an ethical foundation. I would even argue that it is ethics, which distinguishes us from animals, not our intellect. We might get aware of the full realization of this proposition when relating it to the development of artificial intelligence.

    Although I’m advocating the development of intercultural philosophy as a part of transnational governance and the mutual recognition of the civilizations of the earth, I would like to highlight the main problem, at least in my view.

    Aristotle already posed the decisive question, whether the whole is more than the sum of its parts? If I understand with my very limited knowledge of Islamic philosophy rightly it is based on the assumption that the whole is more than the sum of its parts – we might label this position a holistic approach. On the contrary Western thinking is characterized by the approach of exchanging the whole exactly through the sum of its parts. We might label this an atomistic approach – atoms are just differentiated by the number of electrons, neutrons and so on. Concerning holism, I would argue that the task might be how to distinguish the whole from mere hierarchies – concerning the concept of harmony in Confucianism I would argue that true harmony is related to a balance of hierarchical and symmetrical societal and international relations. Instead of the false assumption in Western approaches that we could transform all hierarchical relations into symmetrical ones, I think that we need to construct a balance between both (Herberg-Rothe and Foerstle, 2020). If I’m not misguided there is also a concept in Islam that might be comparable to that of balance and harmony. Harmony is not sameness but implies a lot of tensions: to be clear: harmony can be characterized by “unity with difference and difference with unity” (Herberg-Rothe and Son, 2018). I compare this perspective sometimes with a water wave in a sea: If there are no waves at all, the sea is dying, if the waves are Tsunamis, they are destructive for society.

    My colleague Peng Lu from Fujian university made the following proposition: In the 19th century, the Europeans conquered the whole world, in the twentieth century the defeated nations and civilizations needed to live with the victorious West, in the twenty-first century the civilizations of the earth finally need to learn to live with one another.  This is the task of the century.

    References: 

    Acharya, Amitav. The End of American World Order. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014.

    Acharya, Amitav, The Quest for Identity: International Relations of Southeast Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

    Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.

    Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity. Thousand Oaks: Sage publications, 1992.

    Clausewitz, Carl von, On War. Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1976

    Daase, Christopher et. al. (eds.), Recognition in International Relations. Rethinking a Political Concept in a Global Context. New York: Palgrave, 2015.

    Fukuyama, Francis (2018), Against Identity Politics. The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy. In: Foreign Affairs, Sept./Oct. Retrieved from: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/americas/2018-08-14/against-identity-politics-tribalism-francis-fukuyama; last access, 3.10.2018, 10.21.

    Herberg-Rothe, Andreas, Clausewitz‘s puzzle. The political theory of war. OUP: Oxford 2007.

    Herberg-Rothe, Andreas und Son, Key-young, Order wars and floating balance. How the rising powers are reshaping our world view in the twenty-first century. Routledge: New York 2018.

    Herberg-Rothe, Andreas und Foerstle, Miriam, The dissolution of identities in liquid globalization and the emergence of violent uprisings. In: African Journal of Terrorism and Insurgency Research – Volume 1 Number 1, April 2020 b, pp. 11-32.

    Huntington, Samuel. The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

    Katzenstein, Peter J, Civilizations in world politics. Plural and pluralistic perspectives. Routledge: New York 2009.

    Moisi, Dominique, The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World, New York: Doubleday, 2010.

    Qin, Yaqing. “A Relational Theory of World Politics.” International Studies Review 18 (2016): 33-47.

    Yan, Xuetong. Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

    Zakaria, Fareed, The Post-American World, New York/London: W. W. Norton, 2008.

    Zhang, Wei-Wei, The China Wave: Rise of A Civilizational State. Hackensack: World Century Publishing Corporation, 2012.

    Feature Image Credit: Harvard Business Review

  • The Democratic Warrior – Countering Unrestricted Violence with Clausewitz

    The Democratic Warrior – Countering Unrestricted Violence with Clausewitz

    This research paper was originally published in the “African Journal of Terrorism and Insurgency Research (AJoTIR)”, Volume 2, Number 1, April 2021. Pp. 89-106.

     

    Abstract

    We often find the application of indistinctive, brutal and extraordinary violence by all fighters and soldiers in terrorist, insurgency, and counter-insurgency acts in Africa. This article argues that we need a code of honour for those bearing arms to limit these unrestricted acts of violence, a code of honour that combines military duties with the demands of civil society in the model democratic warrior. The changes to the global system that followed the end of the Cold War are widely regarded as requiring a different kind of soldier for democratic societies. A number of writers have proposed that the new model should be that of the “warrior,” a concept that highlights the psychological and social distinctiveness of those who bear arms. Such men and (rarely) women are often conceived as operating according to a distinctive code of honour that sets them apart from civil society, usually in a positive way. But we know that the concept of honour may also lead to a terrible escalation. So, the task is to reconnect the concepts—warrior and honour—to civil society to de-escalate the ongoing brutal violence in civil wars. There is no honour in killing innocent people. On the contrary, it is perhaps the most egregious act against one’s honour and dignity to torture, violate, or kill the innocent. The concept of the democratic warrior seeks to reinstate honour and dignity to those bearing arms.Keywords: democracy, warrior, civil society, civil war, honour, dignity, terrorism, Clausewitz, wondrous trinity, containing violence.

    Introduction

    At first glance, the concept of the democratic warrior appears contradictory. Indeed, it combines seemingly conflicting value systems in a single concept. Like a magnet or Clausewitz’s favoured model of the unity of polar opposition between attack and defence, a methodology can be formulated to explain how this type of conflicted unity is not necessarily a logical opposition and can be a dynamic interrelationship on a continuum. At one end of the continuum is democratic equality and non-violent conflict resolution, while at the other end is the threat of (and sometimes) violently enforced limitation of war and violence; at one end is a civilized society, while at the other is a subsystem of society whose identity is defined by martial honour.

    The decisive bond that can link the two poles of this dynamic relationship, without eliminating their opposition, is the classical republican virtues, which can lay claim to relative validity in both spheres. Since Plato, the classical virtues have been prudence (wisdom), justice, fortitude, and temperance. Without a specific ethos aimed at the political functioning of the polity, a state can sustain itself only under the conditions of a dictatorship. If republican virtue, which is oriented toward the polity, cannot be directly reconciled with liberal democracy and its focus on the individual, it can take on a completely new significance as a bond linking a democratic society to democratic warriors. For Machiavelli, republican virtue already guarantees both external and internal freedom. In this respect, the necessary though not yet adequate condition of the democratic warrior is to also be a republican soldier. Add to this the limitation of war and violence in a global society to make democratic societies possible. A renewal of the republican virtue is the link between a liberal-democratic society and a warrior ethos.

    The “warrior” is by definition someone who chooses to bear arms and is proficient in their use. In this sense, whatever the distinctive characteristics of the warrior ethos, its institutionalization reflects the same preferences for professionalism, expertise, and individualism that are characteristic of modern society as a whole. Contemporary conditions, it is argued, no longer call for armed masses, but for experts whose willingness to serve in uniform will allow others the freedom not to serve.

    It must be admitted, however, that the concept of the warrior does not call forth associations with modernity, but rather of the “archaic combatant” (Röhl 2005), whose ethos, skills, and experiences set him apart from normal society and in opposition to its basic values, of which the most cherished is, of course, peace. The fact the warrior freely chooses his profession may be consistent with democratic values, but the existence of a “warrior class” uniquely skilled in the use of force, whose values are not those of society as a whole, is scarcely consistent with democratic interests. It is also true that those who serve in today’s democratic armies are called upon to do a great deal more than fight. Although phrases like “armed social worker” undervalue and denigrate the martial qualities that remain foundational to military life, it is true that only a small percentage of men and women in uniform actually fight, and that their duties entail a wide range of activities in which violence plays no part. To those who wish to uphold the warrior spirit, the diverse requirements of modern military missions are liable to hold scant appeal, which may undermine the sense of purpose and identity that drew them to the profession in the first place.

    The discussion that follows seeks to build a bridge between the distinctive ethos of the warrior and the moral and political requirements of democratic societies, using the concept of the “democratic warrior.” It seeks to do justice to the self-image of those who bear arms (a morally distinctive task) while connecting it to the various goals and practices of democratic societies, and the diverse uses to which they put their armed forces. We may begin by noting that a warrior, even in the most traditional terms, is not merely a combatant—a fighter—but has always performed and embodied a range of social, military, and political roles. Our starting point for considering what those roles must be is Clausewitz’s concept of the trinity, a metaphor intended to encompass all types of war, which, by extension, can provide a lens through which the ideal range of characteristics required of the democratic warrior can be envisioned. War itself, as Clausewitz avers, is compounded of primordial passions, an irreducible element of chance, and what he called an element of “subordination” to reason, by which its instrumental character is revealed. When Clausewitz set forth his trinity, he posited that the chief concern of the warrior must be the mastery of chance through intelligence and creativity; and so it remains. Yet there is no reason to suppose that such mastery means that war’s social and political requirements should be ignored. On the contrary, unless they too are mastered, the warriors sent forth by democratic societies cannot represent the values and interests of the communities that depend on them, and of which they remain apart (Herberg-Rothe 2007).

    Soldiers and Warriors

    In both German and English, the word “soldier” (soldat) originally referred to a paid man-at-arms. The term became common in early modern Europe and distinguished those who were paid to fight— primarily in the service of the increasingly powerful territorial states that were then coming to dominate the continent—from members of militias, criminal gangs, volunteer constabulary and local self-defence forces, and other forms of vernacular military organizations. The rise of the soldier was linked to the rise of the state. This connection distinguished him from the “mercenary,” who also fought for pay, but as a private entrepreneur, what we would today call a “contractor.” Standing armies comprised of soldiers were different from and militarily superior to, the feudal hosts of the past, whose fighters served out of customary social obligation and generally possessed neither the discipline nor the martial proficiency that the soldier embodied. Clausewitz highlights these developments briefly in the last book of On War, and portrays them as an advance in political organization and military efficiency (Clausewitz 1984, 587-91).

    The absolute monarchies that made the paid soldier the standard of military excellence in early modern Europe were generally indifferent to the social and political identities of those they paid to fight, though not always. Frederick the Great, for instance, lamented his reliance on foreign troops and believed that his own subjects made better soldiers. “With such troops,” he wrote, “one might defeat the entire world, were not victories as fatal to them as to their enemies” (quoted in Moran 2003, 49). It was, however, only with the French Revolution that a firm expectation was established that a soldier bore arms not merely for pay, but out of personal loyalty to the state, an identity that was in turn supposed to improve his performance on the battlefield. This connection, needless to say, was largely mythical. Most of the men who fought in the armies of the Revolution, and all major European wars since then, are conscripts who would not have chosen to bear arms on behalf of the state if the law had not compelled them to do so. Nevertheless, submission to conscription was itself regarded as an expression of the ideal of citizenship, a concept that, like honour, depends upon the internalization and subjective acceptance by individuals of norms arising within the larger society.

    The French Republic never referred to its soldiers as conscripts, always as volunteers. The success of its armies and those of Napoleon, although transient, insured that “defence of the Fatherland [became] the foundation myth of modern armies”(Sikora 2002). The myth of voluntary sacrifice by the “citizen-soldier” to defend the community proved central to the legitimization of conscript armies, even in societies where democratic values were slow to emerge. In the middle of the nineteenth century, as Frederick Engels observed, conscription was Prussia’s only democratic institution (Frevert 1997, 21).

    It had been introduced in reaction to Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon, whose triumph was owed to the fact that the resources of the entire French nation were at his disposal. The aim of the Prussian military reforms was to accomplish a similar mobilization of social energy for war, but without inciting the revolutionary transformation of society that had made such mobilization possible in France. Prussia was no sovereign nation of citizens, and while the reform of its armed forces helped it to regain its position among the leading states of Europe, their political effect was limited.

    Many of those who promoted reform, including Clausewitz, hoped conscription would contribute to the democratization of Prussia’s armed forces, and, indirectly, of society as a whole. But the moral influence could as easily run the other way, and, as Friedrich Meinecke observed, measures designed to bind army and society together had the effect, in Prussia, of militarizing society instead. Even the Great War did not fully succeed in stripping war of its moral glamour. The supposedly heroic massacre of German troops attacking the British at Langemarck (1914), for instance, remained a staple of right-wing mythology until the end of the Third Reich, by which “our grief for the bold dead is so splendidly surpassed by the pride in how well they knew how to fight and die (Hüppauf, 1993, 56). Alongside this kind of blood-drenched nostalgia, the industrialized warfare exemplified by battles like Verdun (1916) also asserted themselves. Under these circumstances, fighting and dying well acquired some of the aspects of industrialized labour, in which a soldier’s duty expresses itself, not through the mastery of chance as Clausewitz proposed, but through submission to what Ernst Jüngercalled “the storm of steel.”

    It was only after World War II that German soldiers became authentically democratic citizens in uniform. According to Wilfried von Bredow, the creation of the Bundeswehr in 1956 was “one of the Federal Republic of Germany’s most innovative and creative political reforms, fully comparable in its significance to the conception of the social market economy” (Bredow 2000). Its evolution as an integral part of German society has embodied a calculated break with the German past, one that has become even more apparent since the demise of the Soviet Union has shifted the mission of the German army away from national defence and toward expeditionary operations calculated to help maintain regional and global order. As the conscript armies of the past have given way to the professional and volunteer armies of the present, in Germany and elsewhere, the model of the democratic “citizen in uniform” has once again been required to adapt to new conditions.

    It is perhaps slightly paradoxical that as wars have become smaller and more marginal in relation to society as a whole, the ideal of the warrior as an apolitical professional fighter has regained some of its old prominences. Such individuals are thought to embody values different than those of society as a whole, to the point where their loyalties, like their special capabilities in battle, are thought to spring solely from their organization and mutual affiliation. John Keegan, a proponent of the new warrior, explains the rejection of the values of civil society in terms of the psychological impact of violence on those who experience and employ it. War, Keegan argues, reaches into the most secret depths of the human heart, where the ego eliminates rational goals, where pride reigns, where emotions have the upper hand, and instinct rules. One of Keegan’s models of the warrior is the Roman centurion. These officers were soldiers through and through. They entertained no expectation of rising to the governing class, their ambitions were entirely limited to those of success within what could be perceived, for the first time in history, as an esteemed and self-sufficient profession. The values of the Romans professional soldier have not diminished with the passage of time: pride in a distinctly masculine way of life, the good opinion of comrades, satisfaction in the tokens of professional success, and the expectation of an honourable discharge and retirement remain the benchmarks of the warrior’s life (Keegan 1995, 389-391).

    The enthusiasm of Keegan and others for the revival of the warrior ethos is the belief that “honour” can play an important role in limiting violence, far more effective than the proliferation of legal norms that lack the binding psychological validity required to stay the hand of those who actually take life and risk their own. Warriors use force within a customary framework of mutual respect for one another. This is part of what has always been meant by “conventional warfare”, a form of fighting that necessarily includes a dissociation from combatants considered to be illegitimate. How and whether these kinds of customary restraints can be successfully reasserted under contemporary conditions is one of the central problems with which the concept of the democratic warrior must contend. In opposition to Keegan, I think, that the warriors’ code of honour must be related back to civil society, although this is a task which requires bridging a gap and remains a kind of hybrid.

    Old and New Wars

    To judge what kind of “weapon carrier” will be needed in the twenty-first century, we must begin by looking at developments since the end of the East-West conflict. It has proven, broadly speaking, to be a period of rapid social, political, and economic development whose outstanding characteristics are marked by the decline or disappearance of familiar frameworks and inherited values. Thus, one speaks of denationalization, de-politicization, de-militarization, de-civilization, de-territorialization, and delimitation.

    Unsurprisingly, these changes are also supposed to be marked by “new” wars, characterized by the decline of statehood, the rise of privatized violence, the development of civil war economies, and the reappearance of types of combatants thought to be long gone— mercenaries, child soldiers, warlords, and so on. The new types of combatants are in turn associated with rising incidences of suicide bombing, massacre, and other forms of atavistic and irrational violence(Kaldor 1999, Münkler 2004).

    Political and academic discourses have produced a range of new concepts designed to capture these conditions, including privatized war, asymmetrical warfare, small wars, wild wars, low-intensity conflict, post-national wars; wars of globalization on the one hand, and of “global fragmentation” on the other. It is apparent, however, that each of these terms describes only one segment of a complex reality. To some extent, a new type of war is being discovered with each new war. At the same time, these different terms share a common assumption that war now consists mainly of conflicts involving non-state actors on at least one side, and, by extension, that the motivation and goals of such belligerents are likely to prove unfathomable in political terms. The result for some is an approaching anarchy (Kaplan 1994), whose remedy is a revived liberal interventionism, the only principle that seems able to guarantee a modicum of global order (Münkler 2007).

    It is possible, however, that the contemporary diffusion of conflict beyond the confines of the state system is no more than a transitional phase, with particular strong links to those parts of the world—Africa and Central Asia above all—where the challenges of post-imperial social and political adaptation are still especially pronounced. Neither does the fact that the parties to war are non-state actors necessarily mean that such wars lack a political or ideological basis. Such wars may not represent a clash between order and anarchy but between competing conceptions of order (Münkler 2004). While a revived interventionism may indeed be a suitable antidote to anarchy, it is unlikely to do more than aggravate indigenous conflicts over the politics of order – and as it seems at present, it is contributing to the escalation of violence throughout the world. Now, as in the past, violence is not simply a source of disorder. It is also a means of shaping order and providing the basis for community formation.

    It is possible to wonder, in other words, how new the “new wars” actually are. Widespread atavistic and vernacular violence were already prominent features of the Chinese civil war, the Russian civil war, the Armenian genocide, and many other episodes of “old wars”. Those who favour the concept note a number of formal changes that resulted from the disappearance of Soviet-American rivalry, above all a decline in external assistance. The proxy wars of the past have become the civil wars of the present, conducted by parties that must rely on their own efforts to obtain the necessary resources, including illegal trafficking in diamonds, drugs, and women; brutal exploitation of the population; extreme violence as a way of attracting humanitarian assistance that can then be plundered; and the violent acquisition of particularly valuable resources (robber capitalism). These changes may well amplify the social consequences of violence, but do not necessarily deprive it of its instrumental and political character (Schlichte 2006).

    The point of departure for the study by Isabelle Duyvesteyn, for example, is a very broad definition of politics based on Robert Dahl: “any persistent pattern of human relationship that involves, to a significant extent, power, rule or authority” (Duyvesteyn 2005, 9). Duyvesteyn refers especially to the fact that in the fast-developing states she has studied, the differences between economics and politics are not as clear cut as Westerners expect. Struggles that seem to be about the acquisition of resources can be motivated by power politics to obtain a separate constituency. Because the position of power in these conflicts is often determined by the reputation of the leader, what may appear to be personal issues can also be incorporated into a power-political context. Her hypothesis is not that economically, religiously, ethnically, or tribally defined conflicts are masks for politics, but rather that these conflicts remain embedded in a political framework that is understandable to the participants.

    It is also apparent today’s civil wars do not always trend irrevocably toward social and political fragmentation, becoming increasingly privatized until they reach the smallest possible communities, which are held together by only violence itself. The defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan, for instance, gave rise to a civil war between warlords and individual tribes that appeared to be tending in this direction for a time, only to acquire a new and recognizably ideological shape once the Taliban seized power. This new tendency was confirmed by the Talibans’ willingness to give shelter to al-Qaeda, a global and trans-national organization of almost unlimited ambition, whose attacks upon the United States have in turn embroiled Afghanistan in a conflict about the world order pitting the West against militant Islam. At present, we witness in “Sahelistan” a similar development, but this is not confined to a single state, but to the whole region.

    At a minimum, it seems clear that the new wars, to the extent that they are new, are not all new in the same way. In some, violence does indeed appear to gravitate downwards towards privatized war; in others, however, the movement is upwards, towards supra-state wars of world order. Although these trends are linked in practice, analytically they are distinct. States do still wage wars, but for the most part, they are now doing so not in pursuit of their own particular interests but for reasons related to world order. This is what accounts for the new interest in an American empire and hegemony (Walzer 2003). Nor is America the only state capable of seeking and exercising global influence.

    Russia, China, India and Europe (whose superficial fragmentation masks its concerted economic, regulatory and power-political influence) are all capable of challenging American influence in particular spheres of activity; and one day they may do so in all spheres (Zakaria 2009). In any event, the use of force by strong states in pursuit of world order, whether cooperatively or competitively, is likely to remain the dominant strategic reality for some time to come; a fact that should not be obscured by the simultaneous proliferation of privatized violence on the periphery of the world system.

    Clausewitz’s Trinity as a Coordinate System

    The argument about the newness of new wars is also an argument about the continuing salience of Clausewitz’s understanding of war as, in his words, a “wondrous trinity,” by which primordial violence and the exigencies of combat may finally be subjugated to reason and politics. It is apparent, however, that while the proportions of these three elements may vary, a good deal nowadays, perhaps more so than in some periods in the past, they do not escape the theoretical framework that Clausewitz established. At the same time, his trinity points us towards the essential characteristics of the “democratic warrior,” whose success requires that he masters the multiple sources of tensions that Clausewitz detected in the nature of war itself.

    Clausewitz’s trinity present war as embodying three elements in constant tension with each other: primordial violence, the fuel on which war feeds; the fight between two or more opponents, by which violence is given military effective form; and the community, whose interests, as represented by policy, give war its purpose, and whose existence provides the soldier with his essential identity: as one who fights for something larger than himself. The shifting proportions among these elements that modern war continues to display would not have surprised Clausewitz. On the contrary, he knew that all three would always be present in every war and that a “theory that ignores any one of them . . . would conflict with reality to such an extent that for this reason alone it would be totally useless” (Clausewitz, On War, 1984, 89; see Herberg-Rothe 2007). Each requires exploration if the characteristics of the democratic warrior are to be understood.

    Violence and force

    The most crucial polarity in Clausewitz’s trinity is between the instrumentality of war and the autonomy of violence. Clausewitz noted the tendency of violence to become absolute, and therefore an end in itself, a tendency that was restrained both by the instrumental rationality of policy and, less obviously perhaps, by the skill of the combatants. Clausewitz also notes the paradoxical influences that can attend the use of force at a distance. If combatants are separated from each other in space and time, it may promote relative rationality in the use of force; or it may not, since it introduces the disinhibiting influence of impersonal killing, in which the humanity of the opponent is no longer perceived. Fighting “face-to-face” demands personal aggressiveness and even hatred, which can lead to increasing ferocity in the use of force. At the same time, however, it may make it easier to perceive the opponent as human. A similarly paradoxical logic may arise from the use of expensive weapons versus simple ones. Expensive weapons systems and the highly trained combatants required to use them can lead to a certain limitation of war because these cannot be so easily risked (as was the case, he argued, in the wars of the 18th century). In contrast, wars waged by relatively unskilled combatants employing cheap and simple weapons may be more likely to escalate – as is evident from many of the civil wars in Africa, particularly with child soldiers.

    The Fight

    The most basic reason that the violence of war is prone to escalate is that combatants share a common interest in not being destroyed. In most other respects, however, their interaction is asymmetrical, most profoundly so, as Clausewitz says, in the contrasting aims and methods of attack and defence, which he avers are two very different things. The shape of combat is also influenced by whether war is directed against the opposing will (in effect, a war to change the adversary’s mind)or if it aims at his “destruction.” Clausewitz specifies that by the destruction of the opposing armed forces, he simply means reducing them to such a condition that they can no longer continue the fight. Nevertheless, Clausewitz long favoredNapoleon’s approach to warfare, which emphasized direct attack against the main forces of the enemy. Other forms of fighting are also possible, however, whose aim is to exhaust the enemy’s patience or resources indirectly, rather than confront and defeat his armed forces in the field. The real war, in Clausewitz’s days and in ours, is generally a combination of direct and indirect methods, whose proportions will vary with the interests at stake and the resources available.

    Warring Communities

    When referring to warring communities, we must first differentiate between relatively new communities and those of long-standing. This is because in newly constructed communities, recourse to fighting is liable to play a greater relative role in its relations with adversaries; whereas, in the case of long-standing communities, additional factors come into play. Clausewitz argues that the length of time a group of communities has existed significantly reduces the tendency for escalation because their long-standing interactions will include elements other than war, and each party envision the other’s continued existence once peace is made, a consideration that may moderate the use of force.

    War’s character will also vary depending on whether it aims to preserve the existence of a community or, as in revolutionary crises, to form a new one; whether war is waged in the pursuit of interests, or to maintain and spread the values, norms, and ideals of the particular community (see Herberg-Rothe 2007). Closely related to this contrast, although not exactly congruent with it, is the question of whether the purpose of war lies outside itself or, especially in warring cultures, whether the violence of the fight has independent cultural significance. The social composition of each society and the formal composition of its armed forces (regular armies, conscripts, mercenaries, militias, etc), play an important role here. Summarizing these fundamental differences yields the coordinate system of war and violence shown in the diagram.

     

    Every war is accordingly defined in terms of its three essential dimensions: violence, combat, and the affiliation of the combatants with a community on whose behalf the combatants act. Historically, these three tendencies within the “wondrous trinity” display almost infinite combinations and multiple, cross-cutting tensions since every war is waged differently. Thus, every war has symmetrical and asymmetrical tendencies, for instance, even when it may appear that only one of these tendencies comes to the fore (Herberg-Rothe 2007).

    The tension between the coordinates of Clausewitz’s trinity may also be heightened by different forms of military organization. Those that feature strict hierarchies of command are perhaps most conducive to the transmission of political guidance to operating forces; whereas what is today called network-centric warfare is characterized by loose and diffuse organizational structures, in which the community’s political will and mandate can no longer be so readily imposed on combatants directly engaged with the enemy. As in the warfare of partisans, networked military organizations place a high value on the political understanding of the individual soldier. It is because of the relative independence of soldiers in network-centric warfare that this type of warfare does not require an “archaic combatant,” but a democratic warrior who has fully internalized the norms of the community for which he fights.

    The Democratic Warrior in the Twenty-first Century

    Even in Clausewitz’s day, war was not the only instrument of policy that state’s possessed, though it was undoubtedly the most central. Today, its centrality is less obvious, even as the complexity of its connections to other forms of state power has increased (Thiele 2009). Combining the different perspectives afforded by foreign, economic, developmental, judicial, domestic, and defence policy permits a global approach to conflict resolution while making the considerations surrounding the use of force more complicated than ever. States now pursue their security through many avenues at once, and all the agencies involved must consciously coordinate, connect, and systematically integrate their goals, processes, structures, and capabilities.

    Given the continuing expansion of the concept of security in recent years, a democratic army needs a specific task and function since its essential purpose—the use of force—can not be dispensed with. There have been those who thought it might be. When the East-West conflict ended, Francis Fukuyama announced the “end of history,” meaning an end to the practice of war and violence (Fukuyama 1992). The triumphant advance of democracy and free markets seemed unstoppable, to the point where it appeared as if the twenty-first century would be an age defined by economics and thus, to a large extent, by peace. These expectations have now been decisively overturned by ongoing massacres and genocide in Africa; by the return of war in Europe (as happened in the former Yugoslavia); by the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and, the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the war between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia in 2008, the civil war in Syria and Iraq and finally the prospect of war to suppress Iran’s nuclear program (itself a profoundly dangerous and destabilizing step, should it become reality).

    In a complete reversal of Fukuyama’s thesis, a struggle against a new brand of Islamic totalitarianism appears to have begun, in which violence has become “unbounded”—because terrorist attacks are potentially ever-present because no end to them is in sight and there is no reason to assume there is any limit to the scale of violence terrorists might employ, including the use of nuclear weapons should they come to possess them. These processes of growing disinhibition must be countered by a new containment policy that limits the expansion of war and violence in the world.

    Two basic assumptions underlie this conception. The first is that the escalation of violence in world society is so multifaceted and differentiated that a single counter-strategy will not suffice. Rather, an overarching perspective is required to decide which measures are suitable in individual cases—without being able to exclude the possibility of terrible errors and miscalculations. The second assumption is that in today’s global society—as has been the case throughout history—many contrary processes are at work. Thus, regard for only one counter-strategy can have paradoxical, unanticipated consequences.

    This can be clarified using the example of democratization. If a general effort at worldwide democratization was the only counter-strategy against the disinhibition of violence and war, the results would almost certainly be counterproductive, not least because the spreading of democracy might itself be a violent process. A one-sided demand for democratic reform without regard for local conditions might, in individual cases, contribute to the creation of anti-democratic movements. The historical experience bears this out. After the First World War, nearly all of the defeated states underwent an initial process of democratization under the tutelage and supervision of the victors. Yet, almost all ended in authoritarian or even totalitarian regimes.

    Thus, the concept of the democratic warrior is not based on imposing democracy by force, but on limiting war and violence to enable the organic development of democratic self-determination. A differentiated counter-strategy of curbing war and violence in the world, with a view to fostering good governance (as a first step toward democratic governance), is the common element shared by humanitarian intervention and the development of a culture of civil conflict management. To this must be added measures to limit the causes of war and violence, such as poverty, oppression, and ignorance. Last but not least, this new form of containment requires effective restraint not just in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, but also of small arms, which continue to kill far more people than any other kind of arms.

    The containment of violence does not mean there will be entirely non-violent societies, much less a non-violent world society, in the foreseeable future. All else aside, the goal of completely eliminating violent conflict would ignore the fact that historically speaking, conflicts and their resolution have often furthered human development toward free and democratic ideals—as per the American struggle for independence and the French Revolution. The primary task of politics in the twenty-first century is therefore to radically limit violence and war so that non-violent structures and the mechanisms of the “social world” can have an impact. In this context, democratic warriors have a unique role to play; not as those who impose democracy by force, but as those who make diverse forms of culturally authentic self-determination possible, by curbing and containing war and violence.

    Conclusion

    It must be repeated, the concept of the democratic warrior appears to be contradictory. Indeed, it combines contradictory value systems in a single concept. Nevertheless, to adopt the metaphor favoured by Clausewitz (Herberg-Rothe 2007), the elements of tension in the democratic warrior’s identity can be conceived as the poles of a magnet, whose mutual opposition is not an illusion but is nevertheless a means to a larger, unitary end. It is what creates the magnet: the north pole of a magnet cannot exist alone. At one end of the continuum of the democratic warrior’s identity lies the values of democratic equality and non-violent conflict resolution; at the other, the realization that force itself may sometimes be necessary to limit war. At one end, is a civilized society, and at the other a subsystem of that same society, whose identity is defined by traditional concepts of honour and martial valour.

    As observed at the beginning of this essay, the bonds that link the two poles of this relationship, without eliminating their opposition, are the classical republican virtues, which lay claim to validity in both spheres. It was Plato who defined the classical virtues as intelligence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, which is also are characteristics in the Confucian tradition (Piper 1998 concerning Plato). Without them, a state can sustain itself only under dictatorship. With them, both external and internal freedoms are possible (Llanque 2008). They are the keys to the democratic warrior’s identity, providing the crucial link between the values of liberal-democratic society and those other values—courage, loyalty, self-sacrifice—that have always set the warrior apart.

     

     

    References

    Bredow, Wilfried von (2000), Demokratie und Streitkräfte (Wiesbaden: VS publishers, 2000).

    Clausewitz, Carl von (1984), On War. Ed. by Peter Paret and Michael Howard (Oxford: OUP).

    Duyvesteyn, Isabelle (2005), Clausewitz and African War (London: Routledge).

    Frevert, Ute (1997), Die kasernierte Nation (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001).

    Frevert, Ute(ed.), (1997), Militär und Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert

    (Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta).

    Fukuyama Francis (1992), The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press).

    Herberg-Rothe, Andreas (2007), Clausewitz’s puzzle (Oxford: OUP). Herberg-Rothe, Andreas (2017), Der Krieg. 2.Edition. (Frankfurt:

    Campus).

    Herberg-Rothe, Andreas and Son, Key-young (2019), Order wars and floating balance. How the rising powers are reshaping our world view in the twenty-first century (New York: Routledge).

    Hüppauf, Bernd (1993), “Schlachtenmythen und die Konstruktion des ‘Neuen Menschen’,” in Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch . . . : Erlebnis und Wirkung des ersten Weltkrieges, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld, et al. (Essen: Klartext, 1993).

    Llanque, Marcus (2008) Politische Ideengeschichte. Ein Gewebe politischer Diskurse (Munich: Oldenbourg.

    Kaldor, Mary (1999), New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era

    (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

    Kaplan, Robert (1994), “The Coming Anarchy.”In: Atlantic Monthly no.

    273, 44–76.

    Keegan, John (1995), Kultur des Krieges (Berlin: Rowohlt).

    Kuemmel, Gerhard (2005), Streitkräfte im Einsatz: Zur Soziologie militärischer Interventionen (Baden-Baden: Nomos).

    Moran, Daniel (2003), “Arms and the Concert: The Nation in Arms and the Dilemmas of German Liberalism,” in The People in Arms: Military Myth and National Mobilization since the French Revolution, ed. Daniel Moran and Arthur Waldron(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

    Münkler, Herfried (2004), The New Wars (New York: Policy). Münkler, Herfried (2007), Empires (Cambridge:Polity Press).

    Pieper, Josef (1998), Das Viergespann—Klugheit, Gerechtigkeit, Tapferkeit, Maß (Munich: Kösel).

    Röhl, Wolfgang (2005), “Soldat sein mit Leib und Seele. Der Kämpfer als existenzielles Leitbild einer Berufsarmee in EinJob wie jeder andere. Zum Selbst- und Berufsverständnis von Soldaten, ed. Sabine Collmer and Gerhard Kümmel (Baden-Baden:Nomos, 2005) 9–21.

    Schlichte, Klaus (2006), “Staatsbildung oder Staatszerfall. Zum Formwandel kriegerischer Gewalt in der Weltgesellschaft,In: ”Politische Vierteljahresschrift 47, no. 4.

    Sikora, Michael (2003), “Der Söldner,” in Grenzverletzer. Figuren politischer Subversion, ed. Eva Horn, Stefan Kaufmann, and Ulrich Bröckling (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2002).

    Thiele, Ralph (2009), “Trendforschung in der Bundeswehr”. In: Zeitschrift für Sicherheits- und Außenpolitik 2, 1–11.

    Walzer, Michael (2003), “Is there an American Empire?” In: Dissent Magazine 1 (2003), URL; http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/archives/2003/fa03/walzer.htm  last accessed 16. 4. 2020.

    Zakaria, Faared (2009), The Post-American World (New York: W. W. Norton).

     

  • Clausewitz or Sun Tzu: Re-Claiming the primacy of policy

    Clausewitz or Sun Tzu: Re-Claiming the primacy of policy

    World War I teaches the lesson that a limited conflict can escalate into a nightmare of millions of deaths and unspeakable suffering for which no rational explanation could be found. Military aims and strategies gained priority over meaningful political goals. Although the generals of the German Empire believed that they were relying on Clausewitz’s theory, they actually perverted it. Tactics replaced strategy, strategy replaced politics, politics replaced policy, and policy was militarized.

    The same occurred in the interval between the first and second wars in Iraq (1991 and 2003), which have seen a remarkable shift from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu in the discourse about contemporary warfare. Clausewitz enjoyed an undreamed-of renaissance in the USA after the Vietnam War and seemed to have attained the status of master thinker. On War enabled many theorists to recognise the causes of America’s traumatic defeat in Southeast Asia, as well as the conditions for gaining victory in the future. More recently, however, he has very nearly been outlawed. The reason for this change can be found in two separate developments. First of all, there has been an unleashing of war and violence in the ongoing civil wars and massacres, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, in the secessionist wars in the former Yugoslavia, in Syria and Yemen and in the persistence of inter-communal violence along the fringes of Europe’s former empires. These developments seemed to indicate a departure from interstate wars, for which Clausewitz’s theory appeared to be designed, and the advent of a new era of civil wars, non-state wars, and social anarchy. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War seemed to offer a better understanding of these kinds of war, because he lived in an era of never ending civil wars.

    The second reason for the change from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu is connected with the ‘Revolution in military affairs’ (RMA). The concepts of Strategic Information Warfare (SIW) and 4th generation warfare have made wide use of Sun Tzu’s thought to explain and illustrate their position. The ‘real father’ of ‘shock and awe’ in the Iraq war of 2003 was Sun Tzu, argued one commentator. Some pundits even claimed triumphantly that Sun Tzu had defeated Clausewitz in this war, because the US army seemed to have conducted the campaign in accordance with principles of Sun Tzu, whereas the Russian advisers of the Iraqi army had relied on Clausewitz and the Russian defence against Napoleon’s army in his Russian campaign of 1812. The triumphant attitude has long been abandoned, since it is now apparent that there is much to be done before a comprehensive approach of the Iraq War will be possible. Yet it seems fair enough to say that, if Sun Tzu’s principles are seen to have been of some importance for the conduct of the war, he must also share responsibility for the problems that have arisen afterwards.

    Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, as well as the theoreticians of Strategic Information Warfare, network centric warfare and 4th generation warfare, lack the political dimension with respect to the situation after the war. They concentrate too much on purely military success and undervalue the process of transforming military success into true victory.

    And this is exactly the problem. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, as well as the theoreticians of Strategic Information Warfare, network centric warfare and 4th generation warfare, lack the political dimension with respect to the situation after the war. They concentrate too much on purely military success and undervalue the process of transforming military success into true victory. The three core elements of Sun Tzu’s strategy could not easily be applied in our times: a general attitude to deception of the enemy runs the risk of deceiving one’s own population, which would be problematic for any democracy. An indirect strategy in general would weaken deterrence against an adversary who could act quickly and with determination. Concentration on influencing the will and mind of the enemy may merely enable him to avoid fighting at a disadvantageous time and place, and make it possible for him to choose a better opportunity as long as he is in possession of the necessary means – weapons and armed forces.

    One can win battles and even campaigns with Sun Tzu, but it is difficult to win a war by following his principles. The reason for this is that Sun Tzu was never interested in shaping the political conditions, because he lived in an era of seemingly never-ending civil wars. The only imperative for him was to survive while paying the lowest possible price and avoiding fighting, because even a successful battle against one foe might leave one weaker when the moment came to fight the next one. As always in history, if one wishes to highlight the differences to Clausewitz, the similarities between the two approaches are neglected. For example, the approach in Sun Tzu’s chapter about ‘Moving swiftly to overcome Resistance’ would be quite similar to one endorsed by Clausewitz and was practised by Napoleon.

    But the main problem is that Sun Tzu is neglecting the strategic perspective of shaping the political-social conditions after the war and their impact ‘by calculation’ on the conduct of war. As mentioned before, this was not a serious matter for Sun Tzu and his contemporaries, but it is one of the most important aspects of warfare of our own times.
    Finally, one has to take into account the fact that Sun Tzu’s strategy is presumably successful against adversaries with a very weak order of the armed forces or the related community, such as warlord-systems and dictatorships, which were the usual adversaries in his times. His book is full of cases in which relatively simple actions against the order of the adversary’s army or its community lead to disorder on the side of the adversary, to the point where these are dissolved or lose their will to fight entirely. Such an approach can obviously be successful against adversaries with weak armed forces and a tenuous social base, but they are likely to prove problematic against more firmly situated adversaries.

    Clausewitz: a new Interpretation

    Nearly all previous interpretations have drawn attention to the importance of Napoleon’s successful campaigns for Clausewitz’s thinking. In contrast, I wish to argue that not only Napoleon’s successes but also the limitations of his strategy, as revealed in Russia and in his final defeat at Waterloo, enabled Clausewitz to develop a general theory of war. Clausewitz’s main problem in his lifelong preoccupation with the analysis of war was that the same principles and strategies that were the decisive foundation of Napoleon’s initial successes proved inadequate in the special situation of the Russian campaign and eventually contributed to his final defeat at Waterloo. Although Clausewitz was an admirer of Napoleon for most of his life, in his final years he recognised the theoretical significance that arose from the different historical outcomes that followed from the application of a consistent, but nevertheless single military strategy. He finally tried desperately to find a resolution that could reconcile the extremes symbolised by Napoleon’s success at Jena and Auerstedt, the limitations of the primacy of force revealed by the Russian campaign, and Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo.

    Therefore there can be found four fundamental contrasts between the early and later Clausewitz that need to be emphasised, because they remain central to contemporary debates about his work:

    a.   The primacy of military force versus the primacy of politics.
    b.   Existential warfare, or rather warfare related to one’s own identity, which engaged
    Clausewitz most strongly in his early years, as against the instrumental view of war that
    prevails in his later work.
    c.   The pursuit of military success through unlimited violence embodying ‘the principle
    of destruction’, versus the primacy of limited war and the limitation of violence in war,
    which loom increasingly large in Clausewitz’s later years.
    d.   The primacy of defence as the stronger form of war, versus the promise of decisive
    results that was embodied in the seizure of offensive initiative.

    Clausewitz’s final approach is condensed in his Trinity, which comes at the end of the first chapter of book I. The Trinity, with all its problems by its own, is the real legacy of Clausewitz and the real beginning of his theory, as he emphasised himself: ‘At any rate, the (…) concept of war [the Trinity, AH-R] which we have formulated casts a first ray of light on the basic structure of theory and enables us to make an initial differentiation and identification of its major components.’
    Clausewitz describes the trinity as follows: ‘War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case. As a total phenomenon its dominant tendencies always make war a paradoxical Trinity – composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason.’

    The first chapter of On War, and the Trinity as Clausewitz’s result for theory at its end, are an attempt to summarise these quite different war experiences, and to analyse and describe a general theory of war on the basis of Napoleon’s successes, the limitations of his strategy, and his final defeat.

    Although Summers referred to Clausewitz’s concept of the Trinity in his very influential book about the war in Vietnam, he falsified Clausewitz’s idea fundamentally. 

    Clausewitz’s Trinity is quite different from so-called ‘trinitarian war’. This concept is not derived from Clausewitz himself but from the work of Harry G. Summers Jr. Although Summers referred to Clausewitz’s concept of the Trinity in his very influential book about the war in Vietnam, he falsified Clausewitz’s idea fundamentally. Clausewitz explains in his paragraph about the Trinity that the first of its three tendencies mainly concerns the people, the second mainly concerns the commander and his army, and the third mainly concerns the government. On the basis of this ‘mehr’ (mainly), we cannot conclude that ‘trinitarian war’ with its three components of people, army, and government is Clausewitz’s categorical conceptualisation of how the three underlying elements of his Trinity may be embodied.

    Since Summers put forward this conception it has been repeated frequently, most influentially by Martin van Creveld. On the contrary, it must be concluded that these three components of ‘trinitarian war’ are only examples of the use of the more fundamental Trinity for Clausewitz. These examples of its use can be applied meaningfully to some historical and political situations, as Summers demonstrated for the case of the war in Vietnam with the unbridgeable gap between the people, the army and the government of the USA. Notwithstanding the possibility of applying these examples of use, there can be no doubt that Clausewitz defined the Trinity differently and in a much broader, less contingent and more conceptual sense.

    Looking more closely at his formula, we can see that he describes war as a continuation of politics, but with other means than those that belong to politics itself.

    Clausewitz’s concept of the Trinity is explicitly differentiated from his famous formula of war, described as a continuation of policy by other means. Although Clausewitz seems at first glance to repeat his formula in the Trinity, this is here only one of three tendencies which all have to be considered if one does not want to contradict reality immediately, as Clausewitz emphasised. Looking more closely at his formula, we can see that he describes war as a continuation of politics, but with other means than those that belong to politics itself. These two parts of his statement constitute two extremes: war described either as a continuation of politics, or as something that mainly belongs to the military sphere. Clausewitz emphasises that policy uses other, non-political means. This creates an implicit tension, between war’s status as a continuation of policy, and the distinctive nature of its ‘other’ means.

    In the present discourse on the new forms of war Clausewitz stands representatively for the “old form” of war. One of the most common criticisms is that Clausewitz’s theory only applies to state-to-state wars. Antulio Echevarria, to the contrary, stated that “Clausewitz’s theory of war will remain valid as long as warlords, drug barons, international terrorists, racial or religious communities will wage war.” In order to harmonize this position with Clausewitz’s very few statements concerning state policy, his concept of politics must be stretched a long way. In this interpretation, it must mean something like the political-social constitution of a community. This interpretation is based on an often-neglected chapter in On War, in which Clausewitz deals with the warfare of the “semi barbarous Tartars, the republics of antiquity, the feudal lords and trading cities of the Middle Ages, 18th Century kings and the rulers and peoples of the 19th Century.” All these communities conducted war “in their own particular way, using different methods and pursuing different aims”. Despite this variability, Clausewitz stresses that war is also in these cases a continuation of their policy by other means.

    However, this makes it impossible to express the difference between the policy of states and the values, intentions and aims of the various communities waging war. Therefore, it would make sense to supplement the primacy of politics as a general category by the affiliation of the belligerents to a warring community. If these communities are states, one can speak of politics in the modern sense; if they are racial, religious or other communities, the value systems and goals of these communities (i.e. their “culture”) are the more important factors. Based upon this proposal, we could replace Clausewitz’s meaning of state with the notion of it being that of the intentions, aims or values of the “warring community,” thus remaining much more faithful to his understanding of what a state embodies. Otherwise, we would implicitly express a modern understanding of Clausewitz’s concept of state.

    Whereas Sun Tzu was generalising strategic principles for use against weak adversaries, which may lead to success in particular circumstances, Clausewitz developed a wide-ranging political theory of war by reflecting on the success, the limitations, and the failure of Napoleon’s way of waging war. 

    Taken into account this small change in understanding what Clausewitz was endorsing when speaking of “state policy” his trinity is the starting point for a general theory of war and violent conflict. Whereas Sun Tzu was generalising strategic principles for use against weak adversaries, which may lead to success in particular circumstances, Clausewitz developed a wide-ranging political theory of war by reflecting on the success, the limitations, and the failure of Napoleon’s way of waging war. Although he might have reflected merely a single strategy, he was able by taking into account its successes, limits, and failure to develop a general theory of war, which transcended a purely and historically limited military strategy.

    Clausewitz formulates also a crucial reminder. He stressed that, in his Russian campaign, Napoleon Bonaparte—who Clausewitz sarcastically called the “God of War”—won each individual battle of the war. At the end of this war, he was nevertheless the defeated one and had to return to Paris like a beggar, without his destroyed army. Altogether, in almost twenty years of war, Napoleon lost only three large battles—and nevertheless lost everything, since he provoked by the primacy of military success more resistance than his still very large army, the largest which the world at that time had seen, could fight. Despite his military genius, Napoleon was missing a fundamental characteristic: He was not a great statesman. Both qualities collected would have been necessary, in order to arrange from military strength a durable order of peace.

     

    Feature Image Credit: Battle of Jena – Wikimedia Commons

    Sun Tzu Image: Sun Tzu – The Art of War

    Clausewitz Image: historynewsnetwork.org