On On War

Introduction

I recently finished reading On War, by Carl Von Clausewitz. I feel like I learned a lot and learning even just the basics of military theory significantly changed the way I think about politics and history, but I've had a hard time recommending the book to others because it is 800 pages long and does not need to be, and is also excessively infected with German Idealist writing style. So this will be an attempt to summarize what the book has to offer a 21st-century audience, along with some extra info on pre-Napoleonic and Napoleonic war that I looked up while reading for context, and some basic Marxist-style materialism (take those parts with a grain of salt because i haven't read German Ideology yet).

Why Can't We All Just Get Along

If you're not an edgy 13-year-old who plays too much CoD, you probably think war is bad, and peace is better. Most people agree, so why does war keep happening? The most famous line from On War explains:

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.

A more straightforward (but less universal) way to say this is that wars are started with the goal of signing of peace treaty containing certain specific terms of (the other guy's) surrender. Advocating for "peace" when a war is happening is, in this view, rather incoherent - a "peace" is a political process, where specific terms are negotiated and bargained for. Wars don't end when the guys on both armies get tired of all this crap and decide to put down their guns - they end when the political leadership of both sides find peace terms they can agree on. The question is not "war or peace" but whose peace shall prevail. In fact, often the defender is the one to begin open violence, as Clausewitz explains (emphasis mine):

War serves the purpose of the defense more than that of the aggressor. It is only aggression that calls forth defense, and war along with it. The aggressor is always peace-loving (as Bonaparte always claimed to be); he would prefer to take over our country unopposed. To prevent his doing so one must be willing to make war and be prepared for it. In other words it is the weak, those likely to need defense, who should always be armed in order not to be overwhelmed.

We can see this in action perfectly in the case of settler colonialism: The settlers can achieve their political aims, of building houses and carrying out their preferred form of agriculture, by just doing them directly. They (initially) have no need for violence. But the indigenous people of the area cannot achieve their political goal of "making those white people stop clear-cutting the forest to make corn farms" with direct action - they must negotiate for it politically. Should peaceful negotiation with the settlers fail to stop the settlements, the indigenous leaders are forced to attack, to begin a war, in the hopes of forcing the settlers into a peace treaty that includes the terms "no more settlements." We can see from this example that judging the morality of a war by "who started it" is nonsense - you should be looking at the political goals driving the war, and if any side has a goal that aligns with your politics (often this will not happen!), then you support that side.

Viewing war as intimately tied to a specific negotiation process, we can think of military victories as giving the winning side something to "stack" on the scales of the negotiation. The winning side wants to trade their military advantage in for political advantage. The November 24th-December 1st truce in the Israel-Palestine war is a good example of this - Hamas had been offering a "ceasefire so we can do a trade of women and children prisoners" deal since day 1 of the war, but "Israel" had been refusing. We can see from "Israel"'s initial refusal alone that this deal was politically beneficial for Hamas (my hypotheses as to why: the 3:1 ratio, "Israel" making any deal legitimates Hamas, the deal makes the politicians who agree to it seem "weak" to bloodthirsty Zionist right-wingers). So why did "Israel" eventually agree to it? Because the ground invasion was going poorly and they were running out of supplies, so now the time offered by a ceasefire for them to restock and come up with a new strategy was an advantage that was worth the political loss of negotiating with Hamas. So, "Israel" traded a political disadvantage for a military advantage, and Hamas cashed in on their military advantage in order to secure a political win.

Political aims are also how we judge victory in war - while victory is very obvious in cases where one side is totally eliminated (you can tell the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary lost WW1 because they don't exist now), in cases where the war is resolved by a peace treaty, whichever side came closer to achieving their political goals is the side that wins, regardless of deaths, expenses, etc. In this view, we can see that the US unambiguously lost the Vietnam War (called the Resistance War against America in Vietnam) because the US's stated political goal was to stop Vietnam from becoming communist, and North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam had the goal of creating a unified communist Vietnam free from western control.

Vietnam is also a good example for how politics ends wars - specifically, domestic politics. As wars drag on, as they take more money from programs that help people's lives, as they kill more citizens, as more and more land is desolated by the impacts of war, they get less and less popular. This is especially true if you're not even making any military gains. In a democracy, the unpopularity of a war can translate directly to its end, as people simply vote for whatever anti-war party or candidate there is, but even undemocratic leaders need to pay attention to the will of the people - see Russia, 1917 for a very good example of what can happen when you keep forcing the commoners into an unpopular war. I personally theorize that wars are more likely to lead to revolution than other unpopular policies because death is already on the table - consider difference between the choices of "paying more taxes this year vs dying in The Revolution" and "dying in the trenches vs dying in The Revolution." Leaders are aware of this risk, and therefore generally agree to disadvantageous peace terms to prevent an anti-war revolution.

The question of how popular a war is in the first place brings us to our next topic...

Morale

Clausewitz was (partially) inspired to write On War by Napoleon kicking his ass at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt (fun fact: Hegel finished writing The Phenomenology of Spirit, in Jena, during this battle). The answer to why Napoleon was so successful, both in that battle and across Europe, lies less in his battle plans and more in the French Revolution 17 years prior.

To see why, let's back up even further, and think about how your average serf felt about the wars their king was fighting. If the war was near your village, it was a calamity - the army would take all your food to feed themselves, and their absurd number of horses would eat the grass down to nothing but dirt for miles around. It didn't matter if it was "your army" or not - any army passing through was terrible for you. Also, whether your king won or lost made very little difference to you, and even if the land you live on traded hands during the war, all that really changed in your life was what coat-of-arms your tax collector wore (and indeed, the kings just waged war in order to capture territory and the tax revenue that came with it). For every person the king conscripted into war, that represented one fewer pair of hands working the field, with no decrease in the number of mouths to feed (the army is fed by the crops collected from you as taxes, after all). Both the political structure of feudalism and the economic facts of pre-industrial life (there's not much surplus to feed an army with!) mean that armies are small and unpopular. Your life gets worse from the fighting, and you don't care if "your side" wins.

However, in post-Revolution France things were different. First, the material conditions had changed - the spread of new agricultural technologies meant there was more surplus food, in fact so much that now the non-farmers represented a real, sizable proportion of the population. This meant armies could be much bigger. Second, France now had liberté, égalité, and fraternité (while still having slavery-based colonies of course). This meant three important things:

  1. Way more people could now expect to gain some things from winning a war - the government would fight wars with political aims in the interest of the bourgeoisie, a much larger class than the aristocracy that had previously owned the spoils.
  2. Almost everyone in France (except the deposed aristocrats) now had something to lose by losing a war - since almost every other government in Europe was feudal, a foreign conquest of France would mean a return to feudalism, to inequality under the law and high taxes.
  3. There was now a French nation, which the people of France cared about. The tricolor was the flag of the people, and French people now had an emotional connection to the government of France - it was their government, and they wanted it to win. Basically, patriotism!

Napoleon's strategic genius consisted of figuring out how to use this new type of army - an army bigger than any before (in Europe - the Song dynasty had assembled a million-man army centuries ago), whose soldiers were patriotic and loyal to their nation instead of just in it for the pay, and who were supported by a patriotic civilian population.

Now, why does patriotism matter? Because morale matters. The most important thing for an army to function is that your soldiers follow orders. For soldiers, following orders means risking your life, and most people don't wanna die. For some specific orders, it's even worse - somebody has to lead the charge, but whoever does will almost certainly die. Armies do a lot of things to make sure soldiers follow orders even in the face of death: shooting deserters, having a cause worth dying for, building a culture of worship around warriors who die in combat (I always think of the War Boys from Mad Max), offering very good medical care/life insurance, or recently, having robots do the dangerous jobs while you sit in air-conditioned room with an xbox controller.

We can call the willingness to follow dangerous orders "morale" - if it's high, your army runs smoothly, and you can trust soldiers to do things like go out scouting alone. If it's low, that lone scout is going to run away and never come back, and there will be more "friction" in everything the army does, because soldiers have to be cajoled into obedience. If morale is really low, desertions will start happening en masse. In a battle, the worst possible outcome is a rout, which is when your soldiers all break formation and run away from the battlefield in an unplanned and unorganized way, possibly never to return. This is in contrast to an organized retreat, which will result in far fewer losses, or even a fight to the last man - because at least then you took some of the enemy out with you. A rout is the sign of rock-bottom morale, and a fight to the last is a sign of incredibly high morale (although it's still probably dumber than retreating to regroup with a larger force).

So, to tie back to the French Revolution, patriotism is a key military resource because it means your army has a higher baseline morale. However, that's just the baseline - over the course of the war, morale is gained or lost as the army wins or loses. Or, really, as the army is perceived to be winning or losing - militaries have been very interested in propaganda for a very long time, and are always lying about casualties and accomplishments (both theirs and the enemy's) in order to keep their morale high and their enemy's low. Nevertheless, the truth is hard to hide from people on the frontline, and so morale creates a sense of "momentum" in war. Clausewtiz gives a great description of the psychological impact of a loss:

The feeling of having been defeated, which on the field of battle had struck only the senior officers, now runs through the ranks down to the very privates. It is aggravated by the horrible necessity of having to abandon to the enemy so many worthy comrades, whom one had come to appreciate especially in the heat of battle. Worse still is the growing loss of confidence in the high command, which is held more or less responsible by every subordinate for his own wasted efforts. What is worse, the sense of being beaten is not a mere nightmare that may pass; it has become a palpable fact that the enemy is stronger. It is a fact for which the reasons may have lain too deep to be predictable at the outset, but it emerges clearly and convincingly in the end. One may have been aware of it all along, but for the lack of more solid alternatives this awareness was countered by one's trust in chance, good luck, Providence, and in one's own audacity and courage. All this has now turned out to have been insufficient, and one is harshly and inexorably confronted by the terrible truth.

I like the emphasis on learning that the enemy is stronger. This holds more true the bigger the battle - if your side summoned as much strength as they could and were still overpowered, what's left to do but surrender? This is the rational basis for all morale - your subconscious is constantly running the numbers on what the expected outcome for you from this war is: on the one hand, glory and riches for yourself and your country, on the other hand, death, on the third hand, inglorious desertion or surrender.

The fact that surrender is a component of the morale calculation is actually a reason to feel hopeful about the possibility of a better world. It means it's a good idea, purely rationally, to treat your prisoners of war well, and to be kind to the people in territories you capture. Generalplan Ost, while politically necessary for the Nazis, was a horrible military disadvantage. If they're going to kill you either way, any Soviet soldier would choose to go down fighting instead of surrendering (which means bigger costs for the Nazis even when they win battles), and if you're going to get killed as civilian too, then everyone of military age might as well enlist. Revolutionary and anticolonial armies benefit from a similar advantage to morale - the occupied people are willing to suffer greatly and fight against tremendous odds, because the alternative is returning to a life of misery ("Better even die free, than to live slaves"), while the occupiers are fighting for some vague abstract idea of "freedom," or in actuality, for gas to be $2.00 a gallon ("Yankee go home" is a very reasonable demand, and the yankee soldier in question possibly even wants to).

Kermit 'Ima Keep It Real With U Chief' meme edited to say 'Ima Keep It Real With U United States Military, I'm not fucking dying for an oil company
Pictured: The major limitation on global imperialist power

A minor historical side-note from this is that while anti-war movements may be the direct cause of a country agreeing to make peace, or to withdraw from an occupation, anti-war movements can only gain political prominence because of a loss of morale, and morale decreases because of battlefield losses. Antiwar movements are how you lose overseas wars, not why you lose them. Basically I'm tired of seeing people say that the US withdrew from Vietnam because of hippies and protest signs, instead of because the National Liberation Front killed so many US troops that even a nation as warmongering as the USA become hesitant about military intervention for a few years.

The Goal Is To Destroy The Enemy

I feel like before I read Clausewitz I had the vague idea that war was about capturing territory, and that the more territory you captured, the more you were winning. Textbooks and newspapers and documentaries are full of those maps with the lines showing the front of battle and the areas each army controls colored in their flag colors and whenever an army wins the line would move and their colored area would get bigger, so winning is moving the line, yeah?

No. Capturing an enemy's capital can be a big bargaining chip in negotiations, and line move forwards is correlated with what wins wars, but the thing Clausewitz says is the actual goal of fighting is to destroy the enemy's capacity to fight (in most cases, by destroying their army). If you swoop in and occupy a big stretch of the opponent's territory while their army is off on the other side of country, it's obvious this doesn't really matter that much - and certainly the occupied land won't be worth much at the bargaining table - because their army might kick your ass once they get there. "Just wait till mom gets home!!" on a big scale. Even if you take the capital, if their army is still ready to fight and thinks they can win, there's no reason to negotiate with you yet. This unfortunately means that wars - serious wars - don't end without a lot of death on one side or the other.

Obviously capturing territory from the opponent has long-term advantages - the land and the people who live there work for you now, and so you've taken some of the enemy's strength. But that's often so long-term that the war's over by the time it starts to matter! It also has short-term disadvantages, especially if the people are patriotic and loyal to the country you're fighting. They're gonna sabotage your vehicles when you're asleep, give you wrong directions, act as eyes and ears everywhere for the enemy, and maybe even start some riots or something that you'll have to devote troops to putting down. So, normally armies get weaker the further they advance - but you gotta advance to get to where the enemy is, so you can kick their ass, so their president or whoever will sign a piece of paper that says whatever you want.

As a corollary of the fact that "defeating the enemy forces" is a precondition for achieving any other goals, "stay alive" is the minimum goal your army can have. Focusing on pure self-defense (for the army - not the country's borders!) is the defining characteristic of guerrilla warfare. This is expressed well by Henry Kissinger (may he rot in hell forever): "The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose." The operations of a guerrilla force are focused almost purely on resupplying themselves, except for the occasional attack of opportunity against a small enemy force when you can run away before their reinforcements arrive.

I Guess We Should Talk About What A Military Is Too

A military is a specific type of armed group, and specifically it's not a militia. A militia is pretty much just a bunch of people in one spot with guns and some sort of shared goal (typically defending their land). Militias have little to no training, and certainly no training in how to move or work as group. They don't really have any sort of command structure, and can't execute orders more complicated than "go to this place and shoot the guys in the blue outfits." In contrast, a military should have trained together, should have a strict chain of command which is obeyed without question, and should be organized in a hierarchical manner, so a military is made up of armies are made up of corps are made up of divisions are made up of brigades are made up of battalions are made up of companies are made up of platoons are made up of sections are made up of squads are made up of like 10 guys. In this way a group of any size can be called to do some task, and have a command structure for it already in place.

Militaries are far more powerful than equivalently sized and armed militas - teamwork really does make the dream work. I like the metaphor of a human being vs a 65-kg lump of bacteria. Admittedly, an army is a bit less well-organized than a body: one of Clausewitz's main pieces of advice to commanders is KISS, so that orders pass smoothly and quickly down the chain of command with no room for misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Armies frequently aim to break down each other's systems of communication, reducing the other side to basically a militia.

An interesting way to do this historically was by fighting on rough terrain - in the mountains or in a thick wood, large groups of soldiers couldn't stick together in formation because there just wasn't enough room. Because communication had to be done via voice or courier, this was also impossible, and so soldiers were cut off from their communication networks as well. Mountain or forest fighting just devolved into a 100,000 separate 1v1 duels, instead of a 100,000 vs 100,000 battle. For this reason, mountains and forests have always been preferred by militias and guerrilla fighters - any less-trained force - and countries like Switzerland that are covered in forested mountains tend to make more use of militias in their strategies for national defense. Also, the converse of this is that well-trained forces prefer open plains and the like - which is why major battles in this period often took the form of one big army marching towards another on a wide open plain.

Okay I Know What War Is, Now How Do I Win One

A broadly useful distinction from war theory is the separation of "strategy" and "tactics." Despite common usage, these words do NOT mean the same thing! Strategy is large-scale planning - how to win wars, mapped out on country maps, with markers representing entire armies. Tactics is how to win battles, and it's mapped on city- or town- sized maps (if it's even mapped out at all) with each marker representing anywhere from a few hundred people down to a single person. Also, the word "battle" has connotations of scale that are going to be annoying going forward, so we will use "engagement" most of the time - an engagement is any encounter between enemy forces. Strategy is planning out where, when, and with what forces you will fight engagements, and tactics is how to win an engagement. Your strategy can only work if you win your engagements, but bad strategy can mean you win battles while losing the war.

The best approach, for both strategy and tactics, is to outnumber the other guy. You can do this by being better at agriculture, being a more popular government so you can conscript a bigger proportion of your population, or just by having a bigger population. Having airplanes & stuff when the other guy doesn't is also a good idea, although Clausewitz was writing during a time of remarkable technological parity and so he doesn't really have much to say about that.

Outnumbering is also one of the main ways to get an advantage even after the war has started and you have a fixed total army size. Defeat in detail is the notion that if your opponent splits up their forces, you can then attack their smaller, split-up part with your whole army, achieving local numerical superiority. This same concept can be applied all the way down to the smallest tactical scale, by lining up your guys in a formation known as the oblique order of battle:

gif showing the oblique order of battle, a tactic where you stack a lot of guys on one side of a line of battle.
by Eric Gaba, from wikimedia. sorry for the french.

Other things you can do as a commander are useful, but nothing really makes up for numbers: Clausewitz points out that there's almost no modern (for him) examples of forces winning when they're outnumbered 2:1. I think this is less true in contemporary war because of technology gaps, but I imagine it would still be true in great-power wars. Contemporary great-power wars also don't really allow for larger-scale "defeat in detail" approaches because concentrating your forces in a point probably just gets them bombed. We can think of the "maximum effective soldier density" as a parameter of war that changes as technology advances, and right now that density is very low, so "concentrating forces" is less of a thing. It is still a very good idea to defeat in detail at the strategic level - this is an issue that I think plagues leftist organizing in the US, where even though "they can't arrest all of us," cops can certainly go around and arrest (or assassinate) small groups and isolated organizers one by one. Defeat in detail is generally a massive weakness of anarchism and other "decentralized" methods of organizing - you need to have some way to coordinate your entire movement to decide on and stick to one specific strategy, so you're confronting the US government as a single millions-strong force, instead of as a thousand little affinity groups that can be picked apart one-by-one.

Moving on to non-numerical factors, surprising the enemy is a good idea. The term "surprise" probably brings to mind a sneak attack in the dead of night, shooting down the enemy before they can even draw their guns - but that sort of surprise only works at a very small scale. A group of 10,000 people can't sneak up on another group of 10,000 people. Rather, surprise means doing everything you can to keep your opponent from knowing your plans. The oblique order of battle shown above can be thought of as "surprise" if you're able to conceal that your forces are distributed in that lopsided way. Concealing your total troop numbers can be a form of surprise as well. The general concept is to give your opponent as little information as possible, so that they have to consider an enormous number possibilities for what you could be doing. Strategic surprise is then possible if they screw up and fail to consider one of your options as possible - when you then take that option, they'll be without a plan for what to do, and also suffer morale losses from the panic and confusion of something unexpected happening.

Another good thing to try to do as a commander is flanking (i.e. attacking the opponent from the side or back). This is probably a thing you've heard of because in movies when they want to make a guy seem like a smart commander they'll have them suggest flanking. This is a bit silly because flanking is the oldest and simplest trick in the commanding book and is probably the first thing anyone would think of. Anyways, Clausewitz distinguishes tactical and strategic flanking. Tactical flanking has value as a type of surprise attack - think of the time the opponent will need to turn their formation to face the correct direction, and that doing this under fire means it won't be done well and so their formation will be sloppy - but also for a simple geometrical reason that gun-using soldiers are arranged in thin lines, and so shooting "down the line" (called enfilading fire) means you're more likely to hit someone.

Enfilade and defilade positions, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enfilade_and_defilade.svg

Strategic flanking is not about surprise or enfilading fire - it's assumed the enemy army will have turned to face you by the time you arrive at the battlefield - but rather about lines of retreat and communication. Armies need a constant flow of supplies - food, ammunition, spare parts - and they normally plan that if they need to make an organized retreat, they'll do so along the same routes they use for supplying (especially for an invading army in hostile territory). Imagine an army not as a big rectangle that's facing in some direction, but as a ball of string leaving a path of thread behind it. The "front" of the army is not determined by which way soldiers happen to be facing at any given moment, but by the line of string, which is what defines the "back." So, at the strategic scale, flanking means attacking the enemy in a way that threatens to cut off their route of retreat and supply. However, doing so always places your lines in danger as well (at least compared to a head-on collision). Also, it's rare for strategic flanking to actually happen - it's more that the threat of it shapes how war goes. It's why you can't just go around the other guy's army if you don't want to fight - doing so exposes your flank.

Bonus Section

Okay we've pretty much wrapped up the core ideas I wanted to share, but there's some other stuff that I found interesting/helped me understand history better so here it is!

Some Specifics on Napoleonic Warfare

Napoleonic armies consisted of 3 types of troops - infantry (guys with guns), cavalry (people on horses with swords), and artillery (cannons and people in charge of loading and aiming them). Interestingly, these three corresponded to different economic sectors: infantry to the population (and therefore agriculture), cavalry to animal husbandry, and artillery to metalworking industry. Guns, both cannons and infantry muskets, didn't change much from 1500 to 1800. Cannons were cannons, and muskets were shittier than you think. They loaded from the muzzle end (the part you point at the enemy) and so took a while to reload, the musket ball didn't fit completely snug in the barrel so it would bounce around side-to-side while being shot (making muskets very inaccurate), and they used an older form of gunpowder called black powder, which is less powerful than modern gunpowder, produces far more smoke, and quickly builds up a layer of corrosive soot inside the barrel. These disadvantages are why cavalry stuck to swords for the most part. This is a very good video showing how infantry were arranged to compensate for the weaknesses of muskets, and how they dealt with cavalry and artillery.

The way battles went during this time, according to Clausewitz, is that both sides would be shooting at each other, trying to do tactical maneuvering, etc., until one side ran out of fresh reserve troops to bring in to battle, and therefore had to initiate a retreat (because sending in exhausted soldiers against a fresh, well-rested enemy is suicide). Up until that point in the battle, casualties on both sides were probably about even - but once the enemy started to retreat, you would send your cavalry to chase them, harass them, and pick off stragglers. This was where the winning side got to reap the rewards and cause more casualties than they received.

There's also some technology differences that you know about but probably don't consider the full implications of. The biggest one is marching - there's never enough horses or wagons for everyone (and wagons aren't exactly all-terrain vehicles), so to get from one place to another, the entire army had to walk there, carrying heavy packs, through any weather. 15 miles in a day was standard, and forced marches could go up to 30, but only at the cost of leaving behind a lot of stragglers and exhausting the troops, which makes them not only less battle-ready but also more susceptible to disease. marching sucked

The other major technology differences are in mapping - we take having satellite imagery and full-detail maps of the entire world in our pockets for granted but this was of course not the case 200 years ago. Sometimes accurate maps of a certain area wouldn't even exist, giving a massive advantage to a defender who was entrenched there because they could scout out the local terrain ahead of time and use it to create tactical surprises. And of course, even with a map, you still need to know where you are on it - no GPS in 1832. Both of these factors weighed heavily in favor of an army defending their territory - for any given area, you probably had a few recruits in your 100,000-person army who grew up there and could act as a guide.

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