Strachan on Clausewitz: Setting Standards for Research and Study

Introduction

Hew Strachan’s achievements in the field of Clausewitz scholarship consist in more than the presentation of arguments and insights: its main importance lies in setting standards for research on and the study of Carl von Clausewitz’s life and oeuvre. The Prussian general’s legacy in the field of strategic theory and strategic studies is difficult to access and to decode, owing to a variety of factors: he published only a minority of the texts he wrote during his lifetime. His opus magnum, On War, was edited and published by his widow, Marie, with the help of her brother, Friedrich von Brühl, and a former officer colleague of Clausewitz, Major O’Etzel. While Werner Hahlweg’s 1980 edition of On War went some way towards providing a critical edition of the text, there is still no critical edition of Clausewitz’s opus in its entirety. ¹ Rather, texts are scattered in various collections of his writings and letters. Problems that pertain to the texts in their German original are amplified in the context of existing English Clausewitz translations, if they are at all available. The problems of sources, texts and translations are unlikely to be addressed in the near future: in many German academic quarters, Clausewitz is regarded suspiciously as an acquired taste. At the same time, the Anglo-Saxon academic context provides hardly any incentives for its scholars to embark upon time-consuming critical translated editions.

In this context, it is all the more important that the study of Carl von Clausewitz proceeds with care and awareness of particular intellectual and methodological standards. Strachan’s achievement lies in making these standards explicit and to encourage fellow scholars to apply them. This move opens the debate rather than closing it. Strachan’s engagement with Clausewitz has always been partly a collective and open-ended endeavour to shed light on the puzzle Clausewitz from a number of different disciplinary and national perspectives. The aim is not to arrive at a final interpretation that sets in stone what Clausewitz meant to say; rather it is a continued exchange about questions ranging from broad contemporary relevance to detailed textual problems.

Conversely, Strachan’s work on Clausewitz also sets intellectual and programmatic standards for the field of strategic studies, its role in contemporary academia and its broader political and societal responsibilities. The programmatic principles that Strachan formulates with Clausewitz in mind point to the need for strategic studies to embrace a historical perspective and to be aware of historiography. ‘History’ in this context covers more than military history understood in the traditional sense of accounts of battles and manoeuvres. Strachan’s – and Clausewitz’s, for that matter – historical panorama includes political, social and cultural history as well as intellectual history. The result is a sustained critique of an ossified understanding of the concept of ‘civil-military relations’ and a move towards a Clausewitz-inspired, more complex and more comprehensive notion of the societal and political processes that shape war as much as they are sometimes shaped by it. On the one hand, this means questioning the Huntingtonian mantra of ‘objective control’ – a theme that has already driven Strachan’s early research. On the other, it implies opening up the dualism of ‘civil-military relations’ to the trinity of the government, the military and the people. Strachan reminds us that tackling difficult questions of war and democracy is one of the key tasks of strategic studies.

This article is structured as follows: the next section will ask the question ‘why Clausewitz?’. This question arises from the slightly trite, but none the less pertinent, observation that Clausewitz is often quoted but rarely read. Clausewitz, one could argue, has been harnessed to so many incompatible theories of war and strategy that his legacy has become virtually meaningless. Strachan’s position on this issue could be paraphrased as the recognition that Clausewitz is an ‘essentially contested thinker’ ² whose legacy has to be unearthed rather than ignored. More importantly, just as much as studying Clausewitz requires a historical perspective, it also forces us to look at strategy through a historical lens. The second part traces the standards that Strachan sets for the study of Clausewitz: historical contextualization, the need for a fine-tuned philological approach to texts and editions, and, finally, for everyone who intends to produce original research on Clausewitz, access to his works in the German original. The third section outlines the way in which Strachan relies on Clausewitz to formulate a programmatic vision for strategic studies. Given that the Cold War interpretation of Clausewitz as the liberal apologist of civilian control over war and the military was a central pillar of Western strategic thought under the conditions of the bipolar nuclear confrontation, a reinterpretation of Clausewitz opens up the possibility to address the deficiencies which strategic studies has inherited from that era and to usher it into new ground.

Why Clausewitz?

In her 2017 Reith lectures, Hilary Mantel gave two reasons for the importance of history for the present: First, she argued, we have to study history because ‘our enemies will know our history’. ³ In other words, history is inherently contested. Even if we were to think that the past is irrelevant, we cannot escape the fight over the variety of narratives that link the past to the present and the future. Not engaging in these debate leaves the field to others. And even the declaration that history as ‘the past’ is irrelevant constructs a certain historical narrative: one in which a radical break took place that has created an unbridgeable divide between the present and the future on the one hand and the past on the other. ⁴ Secondly, Mantel explained that history reminds us of the possibility, indeed the likelihood, of change. ⁵ Historical awareness warns us that we cannot project the present into the future. If the past is only recognizable as such because it is different from the present, then the future will hold change too.

Both arguments apply as much to Tudor England, the focus of Mantel’s historical fiction, as they do to the field of strategic thought. Both are explicit in Strachan’s work on Clausewitz. The ‘case for Clausewitz’, according to Strachan, is partly that Clausewitz’s name is ubiquitous in discussions about war and strategy. ⁶ It has served as a marker in debates over US failure in Vietnam as well as in the formulation of policy ‘doctrines’ such as the 1984 Weinberger doctrine and its successor, the Powell doctrine of the 1990s. ⁷ Even those who are adamant that Clausewitz is no longer relevant because war has changed beyond recognition since his lifetime have at times, paradoxically, elevated his status by referring to the contemporary era as ‘post-Clausewitzian’.

One could describe Clausewitz as an ‘essentially contested thinker’ – a notion based on W. B. Gallie’s and William E. Connolly’s idea of ‘essentially contested concepts’. ⁸ According to Gallie and Connolly ‘essentially contested concepts’ are nodal points in the political discourse that attract widely diverging definitions, such as the notion of democracy. By providing a shorthand for a position in a more complex web of political meanings, they endow those who invoke them with a particular identity and power. Invoking a particular Clausewitz interpretation works in the same way: in so doing, scholars and practitioners call upon a witness not only of their own expertise and erudition, but also often for the validity of their entire worldview. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the field of strategic studies is deeply structured by various takes on Clausewitz – a process in which even those who declare Clausewitz to be irrelevant participate. Put simply, the existence of a variety of Clausewitz interpretations is not only a fact, but also a factor in strategic studies and, crucially, has a tendency to spill over and inform strategic practice. Clausewitz cannot be ignored.

More substantially, Clausewitz can widen our perspective on change in war, strategy and strategic thought. Far from the portrayal of the ‘modern’ era of military history as a homogeneous and continual period of ‘old wars’ that the new wars thesis peddles, Clausewitz’s lifetime was a time of profound change in war and all its political, social and cultural implications.

The experience of change was reflected in Clausewitz’s intellectual interests, which are, like Strachan’s, first historical, and only then theoretical. The academic discipline of history only slowly established itself during Clausewitz’s lifetime as equivalent in importance to philosophy, to which it had so far catered to as an auxiliary discipline, ‘eine Hilfswissenschaft’. It was Clausewitz’s contemporary and friend Wilhelm von Humboldt who sketched a programmatic rationale and justification for history as an academic discipline on a par with, or even superior to, philosophy: In 1821, he delivered an address to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, entitled ‘The Task of the Historian’. In it, Humboldt elevated the historian above the philosopher, because the historian had to accommodate the reality and the flow of history into his study of ideas and concepts. ⁹ Clausewitz echoed these arguments in his consideration of the relationship between theory and history: a ‘philosophical enquiry’ into strategy would fail, because war was not subject to ‘logical necessity’. Studying war and strategy was hence based on ‘experience and directs its analysis to those combinations that are already to be found in the history of war’. ¹⁰ Clausewitz not only embraced history as the starting point of the analysis of war and strategy, he also aspired to a historical perspective that was ahead of his own time. He left behind both the dogmatic approach to history that used historical examples in order to illustrate transhistorical principles and the individualism of neo-classicists such as F. A. Wolf, according to whom historical periods such as ancient Greece had to be studied strictly in their own context. ¹¹ Clausewitz, in contrast, was much more interested in a historical perspective that was neither random and dogmatic nor judgemental in the sense of elevating a certain ‘golden age’ above all other periods. If he had any hope of understanding war, it was through the study of the myriad of its historical instances. Clausewitz’s programme of analysis remained in many instances an aspiration: his historical studies often reveal a lack of access to sources as well as a partly unabashed tendency to read his own conclusions into history. ¹² Yet, the fact that Clausewitz often fell short does not diminish his aspiration as such. And this is precisely where Clausewitz’s continued relevance lies:

The use of history for strategic theory was not so much to stress continuity but to assess and assimilate change: to provide the context that enabled the most recent experiences of war to be understood, to sort out what reinforced existing thinking and what did not and therefore demanded that strategic thinking adapt. This was, and is, why strategic thought is rooted in history. ¹³

Strachan is, of course, aware of the historical limits of Clausewitz’s own perspective. Indeed, understanding Clausewitz’s historical context is a precondition for understanding his work, Strachan argues (on which more in the next section). But he also uses the historically specific terms and definitions that Clausewitz relied on to elucidate how strategy and war have changed since the beginning of the modern era. Clausewitz’s narrow definition of strategy as the ‘use of the engagement for the purpose of the war’, for instance, is an indication of the historical distance and the change that has occurred in strategic thought over the past two centuries. ¹⁴ While Clausewitz’s programmatic aspirations regarding the relationship between history and theory are still relevant today, he is not the source of a timeless definition of strategy: ‘We have to approach […] Clausewitz’s discussion of the relationship between war and policy recognising that he was a product of Napoleonic Europe and not the nuclear age.’ ¹⁵ From this perspective, the history of strategic thought turns into genealogy in the sense of an enquiry into how notions of strategy have evolved over time. Unsurprisingly, this is not a narrative of progress towards ever more rational forms of military planning. Strachan shares Clausewitz’s critique of the false promise of an overrationalized, ‘scientific’ approach to strategy. His intention and method is critical: he invokes Clausewitz in order to interrogate the unquestioned assumptions of Cold War strategic theory, in particular, and the lingering effects that they continued to have after the end of the Cold War.

Reading On War – and More: Standards for Studying Clausewitz

The start of Strachan’s focused engagement with Clausewitz coincided with the creation of the Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War at Oxford University in 2003. Clausewitz had a programmatic impact on the direction of the programme: its focus on war in relation to social and political processes rather than technological developments and its dialectical perspective that maintained the creative tension between theory and history. ¹⁶

Drafted between 2003 and 2006, Strachan’s Carl von Clausewitz’s On War: A Biography was published in 2007. The monograph’s intention is not to extract timeless wisdom from Clausewitz. Rather, the gist of its argument is to consider Clausewitz’s political, social and intellectual context: ‘To comprehend On War, it […] has to be placed in the context in which it was written. It is first and foremost a response to one man’s experience and to wars through which he lived.’ ¹⁷ To complicate things further, the reader will also have to take into account the tensions between Clausewitz’s broader historical context on the one hand and his individual biography on the other. Much of Clausewitz’s life was unusual, not only because he lived through times of great historical change, but also because his social and cultural context had not fully pre-determined his vita. Clausewitz had not been predestined to finish his military career (about which he none the less had many misgivings) at the rank of Major General. Events such as his encounter with Gerhard von Scharnhorst in 1801, who was Clausewitz’s teacher at the Allgemeine Kriegsschule in Berlin, provided windows of opportunity for the young Clausewitz, which he eagerly pursued. His engagement and marriage to Marie von Brühl, whose family’s social status far outranked Clausewitz’s, deepened his connections with the Prussian court. While this did not eventually save Clausewitz from the ire of Frederick William III and his conservative advisors, he found in both Scharnhorst and in his close friend and fellow officer August von Gneisenau mentors who advanced his career whenever they could. Some of Clausewitz’s most deeply held convictions, such as the hope for a more meritocratic military and social structure, can only be understood against the backdrop of the tension between Clausewitz’s historical context and his individual biography.

Both Clausewitz’s historical context and his individual biography impacted on his intellectual development. Tracing this intellectual development holds the key to reading On War. Reading On War requires considering Clausewitz’s intellectual journey during the process of writing it. Since On War was published only after Clausewitz’s death in 1831 by Carl’s widow Marie, the integrity of the text is often problematic. In her own preface to the original edition Marie explained that she had published the manuscript of On War – along with the rest of Carl’s writings, ten volumes all in all (1832–37) – as she had found it and without additions or omission. None the less, she admitted that there had been ‘much work to do and much to sort through’. ¹⁸ We cannot be sure what editorial decisions Marie and her supporters made, as most parts of the original manuscript have been lost.

One of the core problems in tracing Clausewitz’s intellectual development revolves around the two notes that, according to Marie, Major O’Etzel had found with the manuscript of On War. The first was dated 10 July 1827, the second was undated, but Marie conveyed that ‘it appears to haven been written at a very recent date’. ¹⁹ In the dated note, Clausewitz announced that he had finally come to terms with an intellectual dilemma. His solution was the insight that war was of a dual nature and that the variation in this nature was due to the fact that war was a continuation of Staatspolitik by other means. This new insight required him to revise the first six books of his oeuvre, which had already been written, and to elaborate further book VII and book VIII, of which draft chapters existed. The undated note had a much more downbeat tone: the manuscript of On War was ‘nothing more than a collection of drafts’ and ‘book six was a mere sketch’ which he would rewrite in its entirety if he could. Chapter 1 of book I was the only one that Clausewitz considered complete. ²⁰ If Marie were right and Clausewitz had written the undated note shortly before his death in 1831, this would mean that book I, chapter 1 is Clausewitz’s legacy, whereas the rest of On War is a collection of unfinished drafts. This is certainly the impression that Michael Howard and Peter Paret gave in their 1976 translation of On War, which introduced the undated note as ‘Unfinished Note, Presumably Written in 1830’. ²¹

Strachan is not the first to argue that the undated note was more likely written before the one dated 10 July 1827. Azar Gat had already included a lengthy discussion of the disputed dating of the notes in his History of Military Thought in which he criticized Howard and Paret’s dating as erroneous. ²² The picture that emerged was that in the undated note, Clausewitz confessed an intellectual crisis; in the subsequent one, he announced the solution and drew up a plan for revisions. Moreover, if both notes were written in 1827 – more than three years before his death – Clausewitz would have had considerable time to carry out the envisaged revisions.

However, Strachan is much clearer than Gat in drawing the conclusions from the actual sequence of the notes. Gat assumes that after the resolution of his crisis in July 1827, Clausewitz went on to complete both book VII and book VIII, without, however, preparing a clean copy. Gat’s argument is that Clausewitz had intended to produce clean copies of book VII and book VIII after he had revised all previous books. He began revisions but was interrupted in 1830 with the onset of the Polish crisis, when he had only revised chapters 1 and 2 of book I. Even though Gat explicitly does not regard any single part of On War as Clausewitz’s legacy, his assumption that book I, chapter 1 and 2 marked intellectual progress on book VIII, his final assessment seems to come close to Howard and Paret’s argument regarding book I, chapter 1 as Clausewitz’s final legacy. In contrast, Strachan focuses his attention on book VIII, which he reads as a more advanced treatment of the relationship between war and policy than Clausewitz presented in both the note of 10 July 1827 and in book I chapter 1 of On War. In both latter texts, Clausewitz’s notion of war as the ‘continuation’ of Politik has a strongly rationalist and instrumentalist ring, which is exacerbated further in Howard and Paret’s translation, who render Politik as policy rather than taking into account the dual meaning of the German word, which covers both policy and politics. In book VIII, Clausewitz is much more ambivalent about the relation between war and Politik and considers both the option that Politik could limit war through limiting political interests as well as the possibility that it could drive war’s escalation, in particular if it was entangled with lively popular passions. The more war resembled absolute war, the more likely it was that the relationship between war and policy was flipped on its head – and war drove policy more than the other way around. ²³

Strachan reads book VIII of On War as an important elaboration and qualification of book I’s notion of war as the continuation of Politik. The result is twofold: first, he rebalances the relationship between war and Politik from an instrumentalist understanding that subordinates war to rational policy to a more nuanced and complex picture in which war can drive policy as much as the other way around. This provides the basis for a sustained critique of the Cold War Clausewitz interpretation. Secondly, it gives more prominence to Clausewitz’s earlier work and his treatment of war in its existential form; war, in other words, that could spill over and become entangled with social and political revolution. If the mature Clausewitz did not believe that the relationship between Politik and war was a one-way street in which the former directed the latter towards rational aims, then Clausewitz’s explorations of people’s war need to be taken much more seriously than the Cold War Clausewitz scholarship did: ‘The crisis in his [Clausewitz’s] thinking which his undated note and the note of 1827 reveal was prompted in part by his awareness that there was much more to war than ‘major war’, and that might be more true, not less so, in the future.’ ²⁴

The implications of Strachan’s revisionist interpretation of Clausewitz are clear: neither scholars nor lay readers can restrict themselves any longer to a reading of On War that reduces its importance to book I, chapter 1 and discards the rest as fragments. At the very least, they have to read book VIII in conjunction with book I, chapter 1, as an antidote to an overly instrumentalist understanding of the relationship between Politik and war. But book VI on defence then becomes important too, as it is where Clausewitz develops his thoughts on how political dynamics strengthen the position of the defensive. The arguments that Clausewitz develops book VI and book VIII also point to the importance of his historical writings – his studies of the 1812 and the 1815 campaigns and his writings on the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in particular. ²⁵ Lastly the writings of the young Clausewitz are relevant in this regard too: the Bekenntnisdenkschrift – the confession memorandum – and Clausewitz’s lectures on small war illustrate Clausewitz’s thinking on war in its existential, rather than its instrumental, form. ²⁶

A further requirement for the serious study of Clausewitz that Strachan highlights is a philological approach that reads Clausewitz’s texts against the backdrop of their historical situatedness. This would partly be the task of a critical edition, but the lack thereof places the onus on the reader to be extra-careful. As mentioned above, Hahlweg’s edition of On War and of parts of Clausewitz’s writings and letters is the closest available to a critical edition. But problems are exacerbated in the Howard and Paret translation. Besides the debate about the undated note, Strachan’s critique of the Howard and Paret translation is that it is often anachronistic and misleading. This is most visible in the translation of the German Politik into policy, which drops the ambivalence of the German original. This is in line with what Strachan describes as a general tendency of the Howard and Paret translation to sanitize and rationalize Clausewitz’s language and to marginalize central notions such as passion and emotion that run counter to the rationalist Cold War Clausewitz interpretation. Howard and Paret’s translation is equally oblivious to the transformation of small war in the sense of partisan warfare into people’s war that was in many respects at the heart of Clausewitz’s lifetime experience of war. ²⁷ Again, the implications should be clear: those who wish to pursue original Clausewitz research have to access his texts in the German original. Everyone who wants to read Clausewitz has to approach the Howard and Paret translation – which is in many respects more readable than the German original – with a high level of awareness of the problems associated with it, and should at least read it against the backdrop of the Jolles translation. ²⁸

In sum, in the course of and partly as a result of his Clausewitz scholarship, Strachan develops three ‘benchmarks’ for serious Clausewitz research: First, it has to be sufficiently historically informed to understand Clausewitz against the background of his historical context. Secondly, it has to venture beyond the focus on book I, chapter 1 as Clausewitz’s final legacy. And thirdly, it has to approach the texts from a critical perspective in order to remedy the lack of a critical edition and, more fundamentally, the issues of translations.

These benchmarks are demanding. The trouble one has to take in reading Clausewitz is clearly what has put many readers off and has led to the impression that Clausewitz is more often quoted than read. Strachan’s guidance on how to interpret him goes some way to remedy the Cold War caricature (and others) of his thoughts. But Strachan is more interested in encouraging debate and new research rather than in proclaiming the final interpretation of Clausewitz:

Every generation looked at what Clausewitz wrote in the light of its own preoccupations, but in using his thoughts in this way is always in danger of treating the text selectively. That in itself is neither illegitimate nor inappropriate, but by the same token no one school can claim the monopoly of wisdom in its interpretation of Clausewitz’s work. Freezing his thought at any stage of its development, even the allegedly sacrosanct one represented by Book 1, chapter 1, creates both that the very richness of the author’s mind will be lost, and that On War itself will be consigned to premature oblivion. ²⁹

It is thus unsurprising that the publication of his monograph on Clausewitz coincided with the publication of an edited volume, Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century, that reflects a collective effort to interpret Clausewitz. ³⁰ The book is evidence that the standards that Strachan sets for interpreting Clausewitz are inclusive rather than exclusive: they broaden the range of voices being heard in the context of the English-speaking Clausewitz scholarship to a variety of authors from different nationalities and disciplinary backgrounds. Yet the spirit of openness of debate and of the perception of Clausewitz scholarship as an ongoing process pervades even Strachan’s ‘biography’ of On War, one of the implicit conclusions of which is that the field of Clausewitz research is still wide open – precisely because it emerges from the limits of a narrow and reductionist reading of Clausewitz that dominated the Cold War strategic discourse in the West.

A Clausewitzian programme for strategic studies

Strachan’s closer intellectual engagement with Clausewitz not only coincided with the creation of the Changing Character of War programme, it also came at a time when he increasingly took on advisory roles, in line with the public profile that the Chichele Chair in the History of War grants its holders. I imagine that Clausewitz became increasingly important for Strachan at this time, not least because Clausewitz himself had to bridge the gap between his roles as scholar on the one hand and as an advisor and practitioner on the other at various point during his own lifetime. Partly as a result of the fact that Clausewitz was forced to switch from ‘philosopher of war’ to military planner often on a daily basis, he had an acute sense that ‘theory’ had be applicable to the real world in order to be useful. In this vein, he wrote in the preface to On War:

The scientific form [of the book] consists in an attempt to enquire into the essence of the phenomena of war, to elucidate the relationship between the nature of these phenomena and the things that constitute them. Nowhere did the author avoid philosophical conclusions, but whenever the thread became too thin, he preferred to break it off and to tie it in with the relevant phenomena of experience; because just as many plants bear fruit only if they don’t grow too high, in the practical arts the theoretical leaves and flowers must be pruned and kept close to their proper soil: experience. ³¹

In cases of a lack of personal experience, history was Clausewitz’s substitute of choice, even though he had some reservations about the dogmatic way in which many of his contemporaries used military history. ³² In other words, history was what had to counteract the tendency of theory to shoot up to heights that were so distant from the basis of experience that they had no impact on the practical world anymore. This is a clear point of convergence between Strachan and Clausewitz. It is hence no surprise that two of the chronologically earliest chapters of the 2015 edition of essays entitled The Direction of War take Clausewitz as a starting point to engage with questions of contemporary strategy. ³³ They illustrate a cross-fertilization between history and contemporary strategy and between academia and the practitioner world.

But a Clausewitzian perspective is also visible in the later chapters of The Direction of War, especially ‘Strategy and Contingency’ and ‘Strategy: Change and Continuity’, thus framing the middle chapters of the book. ³⁴ The later chapters return the focus to the importance of change for the study of strategy:

Strategy occupies the space between a desired outcome, presumably shaped by the national interest, and contingency, and it directs the outcome of a battle or of another major event to fit with the objectives of policy as best it can. It also recognises that strategy may itself have to bend in response to events. Essential here is the need for flexibility and adaptability. ³⁵

If strategic theory operates in a vacuum that is oblivious to change, and hence to history, it is bound to ossify into the proclamation of timeless, ‘Jominian’ principles that are self-defeating precisely because they cannot accommodate change. Strachan’s argument parallels Clausewitz’s critique of Jomini: Napoleon had not found a formula for winning wars, as Jomini asserted. Rather, he had created an offensive and imperialist template that was driven as much by domestic concerns as it was by military requirements and that eventually evolved into a fatal operational straightjacket in Russia in 1812:

When Clausewitz hit a methodological problem he went back to military history, of which he wrote alongside and at the same time as he was developing the arguments of On War; this was not a separate creative process but integral to it. The use of history for strategic theory was not so much to stress continuity but to access and assimilate change: to provide the context that enabled the most recent experiences of war to be understood, to sort out what reinforced existing thinking and what did not and therefore demanded that strategic thinking adapt. This was, and is, why strategic thought is rooted in history. ³⁶

The proclamation of transhistorical ‘principles of war’ in the vein of Jomini has always been attractive to military practitioners. Indeed, the latest US Joint Chiefs of Staff publication, Joint Publication 3–0: Joint Operations, outlines twelve ‘principles’ for joint operations. They range from ‘Offensive’ and ‘Mass’, which were part of the traditional nine-principle canon, to ‘Restraint’, ‘Perseverance’ and ‘Legitimacy’. ³⁷ The fact that the latter three had been added, first as ‘additional principles’ in the 2006 publication of JP 3–0 and then as full principles in 2011, shows that the Joint Chiefs of Staff do not perceive the ‘principles of war’ as timeless, but in need of adaptation. However, they remain silent about how to address potential tensions between the principles of ‘Offensive’ and ‘Mass’ on the one hand, and ‘Restraint’ on the other, for instance.

Clinging to ‘principles of war’ is appealing for an organization such as the US military, which operates in an institutional environment that declares ‘objective control’ and the subordination of the military to the civilian government as its core ideal. ‘Principles of war’ target the operational level of war and are thus comfortably removed from the question of the relationship between strategy and policy. They play into the military’s sense of professionalism. Yet, Strachan is adamant that latching on to a Jominian search for timeless ‘principles of war’ is futile. In order to be truly useful to practitioners and decision-makers, strategic studies has to be based in history.

For Clausewitz, Politik and history had an inherent connection: if it was Politik that made war change its character over time, then Politik was the driving force behind both war and change. But that did not mean that the process arrived at the rational aims that Politik as policy determined. The relationship between war, Politik and change was more complex and chaotic than an instrumentalist understanding of war would admit. To the extent that war could drive Politik, it could effect revolutionary change rather than operate as a means for incremental adjustments in a balance-of-power system. According to Strachan, this is the crucial argument that the Cold War Clausewitz interpretation had missed. By interpreting the relationship of Politik and war as a one-way street in which the former determined the latter, it had taken the factor of change out of the equation and had effectively dehistoricized questions of strategy.

The twin pull on the focus of strategic studies – towards the operational level of war on the one hand, epitomized in the search for ‘principles of war’, and towards the equation of strategy with policy on the other, as embodied in the Cold War Clausewitz reception, left the genuine level of strategy – related to both policy and operations, but different from them – unoccupied. If historical awareness and study is the remedy for the dehistoricized Cold War approach to strategic studies, Strachan invokes Clausewitz to broaden the perspective of strategic studies beyond the operational level of war. While Clausewitz’s definition of strategy as ‘the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war’ points overwhelmingly to what we today would define as the operational level of war, his trinity offers a much broader array of factors that impact on, and are potentially impacted upon by, war. ‘The original violence of its [war’s] element, hatred and enmity’, the ‘play of chance and probability’ and war’s ‘nature as a political tool, which makes it fall victim to pure reason’ are loosely, but not exclusively, attributed to the people, the military and government respectively. ³⁸ The Cold War interpretation had overemphasized the attribution of ‘pure reason’ to the government, and it had neglected the third corner of the triangle: passion and the people. The trinity had been reduced to a mechanical relationship between two of its elements.

Strachan’s concern in this respect is twofold. First, and this goes back to the themes of Strachan’s early critique of Huntingon’s model of civil-military relations, the contemporary notion of ‘civil-military relations’ as a field of inquiry in strategic studies directly reflects the reduction of the trinity to the relationship between the military and government in which policy aims determine war and strategy: ‘The effect of Huntington’s pronouncements – and even more of his continuing influence – was to elevate norm over reality’. ³⁹ Secondly, the third element of the trinity, the people, the way in which their lives are impacted by war, and the way in which the social structure itself affects war, as well as their relationship to the military and the government, remain marginal to this perspective. At first glance, the marginalization of the ‘people’ from the perspective of strategic studies could be seen as a reflection of the fact that in twenty-first century Western democracies, the impact of war on the people (and conversely their interest in war) is minimal. ⁴⁰ However, Strachan argues, the people in Western democracies play a much more complex role in today’s wars than this perspective would suggest.

The current distribution of power and the democratic process relating to questions of war and strategy in most Western democracies lends itself to a dynamic in which multiple paradoxes clash. Policy-makers are sending contrasting messages to various publics – the domestic public, their allies, their opponents, and the population in the area of military operations. Owing to increasingly decentralized access to media reporting and accelerated information processes, these contrasting messages often quickly merge into a cacophony of competing loyalties and perspectives rather than a coherent strategic narrative. Western publics demand decisive action from their governments in the face of international crises and conflicts, but at the same time they are adamant that war has lost its utility. ⁴¹ While they show support for the armed forces as such, they tend to be either disinterested or sceptical about the military missions that they perform. Scepticism and criticism are easily permutated into a narrative that sees soldiers and officers as ‘victims’ of their government’s misguided policies. Conversely, while the armed forces reject the public projection of them as ‘victims’, they have been clearly frustrated about being underresourced while at the same time being overtasked with ‘comprehensive’ stabilization missions in Iraq and, in particular, Afghanistan. ⁴² It is the task and the responsibility of the strategic studies scholar to point out and, where possible, to help disentangle these paradoxes by confronting them in open debate. But, and herein lies the limitation of strategic studies, this cannot be the preserve of the scholar alone: it is of vital interest to the citizen too: ‘Strategy […] is not just a matter for historians. It concerns us all.’ ⁴³

Clausewitz himself regarded the people as a factor that mattered in questions of war and strategy, both materially and morally. He had reservations about what are seen today as essential democratic structures, but he was clear that the king could not squander his state against the interest of his people, and that if such a situation arose, the king could no longer count on the loyalty of his officers. The involvement of the people was vital for the survival of the Prussian state, even if that meant an escalation of war towards people’s war. Today’s strategic context is different, not least due to the advent of weapons of mass destruction: the people’s survival is only possible when war is being prevented from escalating beyond a certain level. Bringing the people back into debates about war and strategy is just as important today as it was in Clausewitz’s lifetime, and it can be a force for limiting war. This, Strachan reminds us, is the point that the Cold War interpretation of Clausewitz had missed.

Conclusion

Strachan’s legacy in the field of Clausewitz research and scholarship has had, and will continue to have, a lasting impact. Its enduring appeal lies not so much in proclaiming timeless truths about Clausewitz and his writings, but in studying Clausewitz through a critical lens, or rather three critical lenses simultaneously: first, by approaching the text in the spirit of philological criticism and reading it against the context of the tapestry of its historical condition; secondly, by undertaking a conscious attempt at unearthing a partly lost Clausewitz under the baggage of Cold War interpretations, thereby producing a revisionist interpretation of Clausewitz; and thirdly, by taking a position similar to what Clausewitz himself referred to as his ‘critical method’: firmly linking theory with history and experience. ⁴⁴

At the same time, the perspective that Strachan develops is inclusive and potentially supportive of a variety of disciplinary and national approaches to Clausewitz. This does not mean succumbing to relativism and treating the reception of Clausewitz as a ‘history of misreadings’. Clausewitz is not easy to read, but Strachan’s sets out helpful clues for both aspiring scholars and interested practitioners. A knowledge of history, in particular Clausewitz’s historical context, is indispensable, as well as a comprehensive approach to On War in its entirety and Clausewitz’s other writings. Finally the reader has to have an awareness of the nature and the problems of textual sources, editions and translations.

Strachan maintains a delicate balance between the revisionist interpretation, the gist of which is inevitably to a certain extent to unearth the ‘original’ Clausewitz from reductionist interpretations and translations on the one hand, and the need to go beyond Clausewitz: his words are not set in stone. Strachan does this by turning the vice of the partly fragmentary and inconsistent character of On War into a virtue, by inquiring into the inconsistencies of Clausewitz’s own arguments and by tracing the tensions inherent in the book into starting points for new debates. For Strachan, in a way, reading Clausewitz is most fruitful where it is most difficult: Clausewitz’s observations of the relationship between war and Politik still speak to us today because they are both rich and vague. The trinity still appeals because it is an obscure but comprehensive sketch of a multitude of dynamics that are related to war.

Strachan shows us that when Clausewitz is not read in a dogmatic way, his arguments can become programmatic for both strategic studies and strategic practice. During the Cold War and after its end, scholarship and practice have neglected history and the likelihood of change. Moreover, the notion of ‘war amongst the people’ – ethnic conflicts and insurgencies – in the peripheries of the international system had its flipside in ‘war without the people’ in Western democracies. If the disciplines of strategic studies wishes to remain relevant to the practice of making strategy, it will need to address these two inherited short-comings.

The most important aspect of Hew’s legacy in the field of Clausewitz scholarship, however, is that it is unfinished, and constantly evolving into new observations, which lead on to new questions. As important as what Hew has published on Clausewitz are the numerous discussions with other scholars, who value Hew’s expertise and advice on Clausewitz immensely. I know from my own experience how incredibly generous Hew in this respect. The true extent of Hew’s service to our understanding of Clausewitz can only be estimated when we factor in the countless grateful acknowledgements of his time and advice in almost every work published on Clausewitz in the last two decades.