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On War by Carl von Clausewitz has been the most influential book on strategy and war of all time.

We can say this because On War is the standard by which all other works of strategy are measured and only a few compared – notably Sun Tzu’s Art of War and The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. The odd thing is that we can say this despite the fact that On War is more frequently shelved, cited or understood secondhand rather than read, even by military professionals. And furthermore, within the narrow demographic that reads Clausewitz seriously and critically, there can be heated dispute over what he meant, due to the difficulty of the text. Then there are the secondary effects, historical and military, of Clausewitz having been misunderstood, forgotten, ignored or at times, his strategic philosphy consciously rejected.

The shadow cast by On War is all the more remarkable given it’s circumstances of publication. Clausewitz died in 1831, at fifty-one, of cholera, having finally risen to a military post his talents merited. He had been writing On War since 1816 and it was far from completed or refined to his satisfaction and it is highly unlikely, in my view, that Clausewitz would have consented to it’s publication in the condition in which he left it. His determined and intellectually formidible widow, Marie von Clausewitz, further shaped the manuscript of On War, guided by her intimate knowledge of her husband’s ideas and was likely the best editor Clausewitz could have posthumously had.

Nevertheless, to my mind On War remains a magnificent unfinished symphony.

What would On War have looked like if Clausewitz had lived another twenty-five or thirty some years? Assuming continued good health, Clausewitz would have seen, perhaps commanded in, the First Schleswig War and at least studied the Crimean War from afar. He would have had another quarter-century of reading and mature reflection on his subject. Clausewitz, who had a keen understanding of history, would have also witnessed the grand European upheaval of liberal revolution in 1848 that rocked the Hohenzollern monarchy to it’s core. What new insights might Clausewitz have gleaned or expanded upon? Would his later chapters On War have evolved to equal the first?

Having outlived Marie (who died in 1836), would Clausewitz have become a deeply changed man?

What I find it difficult to believe is that Clausewitz, with his creatively driven and philosophically exacting mind,  would have been content to let the manuscript of On War rest where it stood in 1831. Or that we read today what Carl von Clausewitz ultimately intended.

The Profession by Steven Pressfield

We should begin this review with “Full Disclosure“:

I just finished reading The Profession by Steven Pressfield, which I enjoyed a great deal. Steve sent me an earlier draft doc of the book and I consider Steve a friend. Furthermore, in an extremely gracious gesture, Steve granted me (or at least zenpundit.com) the novelist’s equivalent to a walk-on cameo appearance in his book. Therefore, if you the reader believe that I cannot review this book objectively…well….you are right. It’s not possible 🙂 . Here are some other reviews by Shlok Vaidya, Greyhawk of Mudville Gazette and Kirkus if you want greater impartiality.

Nor am I going to delve into the mechanics of the plot structure and action sequence in The Profession. For one, I think too much of the story in a review of a work of fiction spoils the enjoyment for the group of readers who would be most interested. And you can get the blow by blow elsewhere.

Instead, I would like to draw your attention to how Pressfield has written this novel differently. And why that matters.

There is plenty of action in The Profession and the book really moves. It is violent, but not at a Blood Meridian level of cruelty and the murky political intrigue that surrounds the hero, the mercenary’s mercenary and “pure warrior” Gilbert “Gent” Gentilhomme, is a nice counterpoint to physical combat and technical military details. Many people will enjoy the novel on this level and The Profession would make for an exciting action film. Or perhaps a series of films along the lines of The Bourne Identity or those Tom Clancy movies with Harrison Ford. All well and good. But that is not why The Profession is worth reading – that’s merely why it is fun to read.

What surprised me initially about The Profession was how unlike Killing Rommel it was. Killing Rommel also had war and adventure, but it was a deep study in the character development of Chap, the protagonist, who had enough of a textural, cultural, authenticity as a young gentry class British officer of the WWII period as to make Killing Rommel seem semi-biographical. As a reader, I didn’t much care if Chap and his men succeeded in killing Rommel, only that I would be able to continue to see the story unfold from Chap’s perspective. Many artists believe characters and character interaction are the most important element in a story, from Saul Bellow to Quentin Tarantino. Their stories are captivating even though their narratives are not always particularly logical or centered on a grand conflict.

The Profession is not like that at all. In my view, Pressfield turned his creative energies, his knowledge for military affairs and his formidible ear for history away from character development and toward theme. This difference may or may not explain his own reports of difficulty in wrestling with this novel.

Reaching back to the lessons learned from late Republican Rome, Thucydides, Xenophon and seasoning it liberally with Machiavelli, Pressfield’s 2032 near-future is also jarringly allegorical with America of 2012. Like Rome of the 1st century BC or Athens after it’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War, America in The Profession is strategically paralyzed, politically polarized and teetering on the precipice of decay and decline. These historical inspirations have been mashed up with a dystopian 4GW world, filled with mercenary PMCs like Force Insertion and The Legion, terrorists, drones, tribes, criminal corporations and and a devious and cowardly global financial elite. A future more evenly distributed from the present.

The antagonist against whom the plot is structured is not the story’s nominal villain terrorist, but Gent’s Homeric father-figure, former Lieutenant General James Salter, USMC,  “the crawling man” who was martyred, disgraced, exiled and redeemed as the new master of Force Insertion’s Mideast deployed “armatures” (combined arms divisions) and the book’s geopolitical apex predator, who boasted:

” I was obeying a more ancient law” 

This marks a drastic shift in Pressfield’s use of characters from people existing in themselves with humanistic nuances to their use as philosophical archetypes to better express the theme, more like the technique of Fyodor Dostoyevskii, Victor Hugo or Ayn Rand.

The interplay between the kinetic Gent and the increasingly totemic Salter elucidates a theme that is creating tectonic political shifts in America and the world; a theme which is expressed explicitly to Gent at one point by the ex-Secretary of State, Juan-Estebaun Echevarria. The ex-Secretary plays Cicero to Salter’s Caesar, but Gent is ultimately cast in the role of a very different Roman by the manipulative Salter. Pressfield, in honing the various characters, including AD, Maggie Cole, El-Masri and others, is also drawing on Alcibiades, Critias, Livy, Homer, Robert Graves, Joseph Conrad and the pattern of mythic epics. Salter is at once a pagan chieftain and a philosopher-king, a civilized Kurtz or a barbaric John Galt, who after continuous dissembling, in a brutally honest speech, gives his followers, his enemies, Gent and even himself, no opportunity to morally evade what he has become or his reasons for what he proposes to do. A speech that resonates with the negative trends we see today.

The Profession is a cautionary tale outfitted in kevlar.

[ by Charles Cameron — jihadist computing, reminiscence ]

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!!

My first computer, back in 1982, was an Osborne like the one depicted here — I have fond memories… it had no hard drive, just a 512k floppy, the CP/M operating system, WordStar word processing, green letters on a tiny black screen, no internet hookup — and I managed to co-write a book on the thing!

[ by Charles Cameron ]

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I’m taking a break from my usual Zenpundit fare this time around, and posting some poems about the ugliness and holiness I see most evenings.

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When my capacity for writing about religious violence and apocalyptic fever has abated, and I want to set my mind on pause before I go to sleep, I often watch crime-thrillers: it’s a sort of meditation for me. And because it’s a sort of meditation, I find that odd things – single shots, often the ones film-makers call “establishing shots” – catch my eye and send me into poetry mode, where what I’ve seen triggers a clearer sense of what I intuit.

The secular sacred: i

In the relative darks of early darkness
a train crosses on a raised rail above the houses
where sleeping is beginning, its
windows and windows and windows lit up
with empty interiors, here and there
a person, but windows, mainly, and their
lights passing in sequence with a rhythm like
the rhythm of breathing, of the late train.

And how to get that in poetry, how to get
what the camera sees, the slightest of slightest
parts of the daily routine, entirely secular,
where plain people have transmuted
metal to transportation system? Tta-cha,
this passing of lights, lights, lights in the night.

It goes this way: the films show me something of the scope and range of human activity, and the scope – the sheer size of numerous cities – is so huge, and the range – from the heroic, the creative and even the saintly to the crazed, the dulled, the bereft and the vicious – is so great that my sense of how wide and deep the world is gets expanded way past its limits.

And the part of me that has experienced (and continues to experience) something that I can find no words for outside the religious vocabulary — “grace” and “radiance” – the part of me that is enormously thankful now and always for the privilege of human being, of sight, friends, speech, friends, books, friends, music, travel, the internet… that part of me, precious to me, somehow must come to grips with the gritty, the grimy, the “real”.

I have no theories about heaven, no belief or creed beyond a non-verbal assent, but it’s my sense that the condition of joy we call “heaven” – much like the condition of insight we call “poetry” – reaches “down” from whatever lofty spires or Himalayas we may suppose it abides in, into the dust beneath our wheels, beneath our feet… dust that my mind, at least, could easily sweep under the carpet.

And so, watching thrillers to put my mind on pause, I have to put the films on pause to write the poems…

The secular sacred: ii

How many gravestones can a camera’s eye
pass in a single sweep, and you think
God any less able to see? The sacrament
of cinema surpasses, pushes words
into admission of strange holiness way
past the tolerances of the religious,
way and away past any sense of what sacred
might mean except only the sacred itself,

felt fully in belly and brain of the city, the
splintered, splendored city. Nor, in
these needle-strewn streets, this broken
flesh and blood, is there mercy room
beyond pity of such pettiness, the
shattered dreams — so ugly, small, so holy.

After writing those two on successive nights, I made a note for some friends…

Those two, the “secular sacred” poems, are part of something I’m working towards by watching “gritty” films most nights, and triggered in particular by helicopter long-shots of freeways intercut with goings on at street level — giving me the feeling the world is far larger (and uglier) than (my) religious imagination usually reckons, with holiness in the discarded condoms.

So I’m trying to make room conceptually for a god or emergent world or mirroring pool wide and deep enough for gritty realism in these poems…

The secular sacred: iii

Now you think of it, someone must have
wanted him to walk down those steps from
the whore’s house round the corner
into the shadow and to his car, the street
laid out just the way it happens
in the film, someone put the camera
there or the street corner, setting
up a street corner is less effort than

growing a city from scratch and gives
greater freedom, so there was some intent,
some design to his coming down
those steps at that speed and time with
that look on his face, and directors
are not necessarily lacking in street smarts.

And I’m far from sure what sort of God, mirror or emergence will emerge from all this at the end, but it’s unlikely to have curls in a beard and be supremely nice, at least not just nice…

The secular sacred iv

The fact that there’s holiness in needles
glinting in the sun and discarded condoms in
the shade, and the fact there’s often
more shade than sun, and other facts I
might mention shouldn’t dissuade us from
the glint of clinics and the shade of
discarded habits, there’s holiness there
too, in the turning around of a life, and if

grass needs to break through asphalt to
prove a metaphysical point, you can be sure
some kind of holiness is reaching up
for sky and to get our attention, which,
too, is a locus of the sacred, humming in
time with the heartbeat of world and heaven.

I accepted an offer from Dave Dilegge to join the new SWJ Monthly E-News to do a Recommended Reading column with Crispin Burke of Wings Over Iraq – sometimes we’ll both do a column….depends how much reading is worth recommending 😉

SWJ Monthly E-News

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