“Can Reading Clausewitz Save Us from Future Mistakes?” by Bruce Fleming, in Parameters (Spring 2004), 122 Forbes Ave., Carlisle, Pa. 17013–5238.

“No military strategist shall fail to deploy quotations from On War when engaging in verbal battle.” The author of On War, Prussian army officer Karl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), never said that, but America’s military strategists seem to revere what he left unsaid almost as much as his actual words. And why shouldn’t they? asks Fleming, an English professor at the U.S. Naval Academy. After all, Clausewitz can be used to justify almost any point of view.

Take his most famous pronouncement, popularly rendered in Eng­lish as, “War is a continuation of politics by other means.” To many commentators, the state­ment means that civilian authorities should set the goals of a war and then allow the military to determine the strategy. But other analysts, such as Bernard Brodie, author of the magisterial War and Politics (1973), reject that reading, contending that Clausewitz favored “genuine civilian control” over the conduct of the war.

In criticizing the much-publicized “shock and awe” campaign at the start of the Iraq War last year, Mackubin Thomas Owens, a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, said that such effects should not be presupposed because, as Clausewitz pointed out, “war takes place in the realm of chance and uncertainty” (what the famous theorist called “the fog of war”). On the other hand, Owens noted that Clausewitz also developed a theory of war with “universal and timeless” elements that offer “a guide for action.”

Owens is right about these contradictory aspects of Clausewitz, says Fleming. He was “as wedded to the theory, his need to see war as predictable, as he was to his admissions that it was not. The interest of the work is precisely the tension between the two.”

Which is why Fleming believes that invoking Clausewitz “at every turn is both so satisfying and ultimately so pointless”: “When war turns out according to his ‘timeless theories,’ Clausewitz told us to expect it. When it turns out otherwise, Clausewitz told us to expect that too.”

On War is a great work, Fleming concludes, but it should not be used as a rhetorical bludgeon. Rather, it should be taught “as poetry, even in the staff colleges, an expression of the intrinsic contradictions of the human condition.”