Recommended Reading

Michigan War Studies Review John Shy – Review of Hew Strachan, Clausewitz’s On War: A Biography

…. In 1976, Sir Michael Howard and Peter Paret published the definitive English translation of On War.[1] Strachan admires their work, but takes issue with it in important ways. The nub of his critique concerns the degree to which Clausewitz changed his mind over two decades. Strachan believes that Howard and Paret, by the very consistency of their translation, have exaggerated the continuity of his thought, and that Paret as biographer has done the same, finding traces of every major idea in On War as early as Clausewitz’s writings of 1806. Strachan instead emphasizes that the scope of Clausewitz’s theoretical inquiry shifted with time from an overriding concern with the strategy of near-absolute war as waged by Napoleon to a broader search for a general theory of war. This search culminated late in the author’s life with a unifying stress on policy, Politik, the guiding intention of war itself, whatever particular form the war might take, whether the limited warfare of the eighteenth century or wars of national resistance–the guerrilla war as waged in Spain and as explored for Prussia against France by the younger Clausewitz in a series of lectures in 1810 at the Allgemeine Kriegsschule in Berlin.

Wow! Talk about inside academic baseball! Not only would a reader have to be intimately familiar with the strategic arguments of On War, to evaluate Strachan’s thesis, they would also have to be linguists fluent in formal and colloquial Low German of the early 19th century. Good freaking Lord, was this book written for Moltke the Elder?

Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon – The Agricultural Paradigm

Alvin Toffler would like this post.

Democracy Journal – America 2021: The Military and the World

Some short term defense futurism from the Left, meriting inclusion on the strength of P.W. Singer’s observations. Hat tip to Russ Wellen:

PWS: We don’t seem to understand that strategy is not about identifying priorities, but setting them. In World War II, strategy was setting the priority of Europe first, saying Japan can wait, so we’re going to put more resources into Europe. The current QDR, however, says something like: Europe’s a problem and Japan’s a problem. The same lack of priority-setting happens within areas like personnel and acquisitions. Within the military structure, for example, the problem with the budget is that prices are going up in each acquisition program, which in turn is making acquisitions determine the strategy you’ll have at the end. Costs are driving strategy and doctrine out, which is the opposite of the way it’s supposed to be.

That’s it!

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