War: Living or Original Intent?
[by Lynn C. Rees]
Der erste, der großartigste, der entschiedenste Akt des Urteils nun, welchen der Staatsmann und Feldherr ausübt, ist der, daß er den Krieg, welchen er unternimmt, in dieser Beziehung richtig erkenne, ihn nicht für etwas nehme oder zu etwas machen wolle, was er der Natur der Verhältnisse nach nicht sein kann.
– Carl von Clausewitz
Vom Krieg, Erstes Buch, Über die Natur des Krieges
Does the measure of victory depend on the original intent of a war’s founders? Or is picking winners and losers subject to constantly shifting goal posts since war, once embarked, is a living thing?
War is a three-way tug of envy, opportunity, and design. Design sees war as a tool. Envy sees it as an emotionally-satisfying reckoning. Opportunity happens. Yet they slime together nonetheless, a brood of vipers.
The tugs of war are fueled by politics, the constant and ongoing division of relative strength. Envy, that fear that others in your face have more power than you, fuels politics. And the cure for envy?
- Design how to knock the other guy down six pegs or so.
- Look for opportunities to use the design to acquire a more satisfying political shift.
War is a controlled burn. You can design how and what it will burn, even down to the last dried blade of grass if you wish. But, once lit, fire is an agent unto itself. Sudden wind may gust, sudden rain may fall, sudden tinder may emerge, or the unplanned may wander into the target zone. Even then, fire may keep within the original planned course. But there’s always the threat that it will jump its firebreaks and go where it wills.
In plausibility, the original burn plan is only just a little lower than a fairytale for children. And that’s before the fire’s lit. Afterward, the original burn plan is merely tinder for political struggle, documenting how many fathered victory or how few fathered defeat. Contestants only care about a war’s original intent if they are weaponizing history to club the driver from the commanding heights of the backseat. Otherwise, everyone believes in living war if they’re the poor sucker driving.
There is no original intent in foxholes. War Year I and its discontents may be irrelevant to the concerns of War Year VI. Concerns of politics always change. While it’s convenient to see war and politics as distinct, inconveniently they’re no: they’re one writhing brood of vipers and vipers all the way down. Any boundary between politics and war is arbitrary, nominal, porous, and futile.
Strategy is a postwar massage of ad hoc reconciliations of means, motive, and opportunity into one politically useful fable. Outside that questionable exercise, who mourns original intent? It’s a dead letter. War is a living imperative. The first, the greatest, and most decisive question that politicians in and out of uniform must ask of war is what have you done for me lately?
August 20th, 2013 at 4:38 am
Excellent post Lynn.
.
“Strategy is a postwar massage of ad hoc reconciliations of means, motive, and opportunity into one politically useful fable. Outside that questionable exercise, who mourns original intent? It’s a dead letter. War is a living imperative
.
Our friend Seydlitz89 likes to stress the retrospective nature of strategic theory, and particularly with long wars it is easy for our pattern-recognition machine minds to reconstruct calculation and design out of serendipity and disaster. But there are also short and sweet wars that go as according to plan as any war can and are ended by statesmen who govern with foresight and restraint.
.
The perspective of history, weaponized or not, shifts as second and third order effects unfold. Some victories look hollow and some defeats, calamitous in their time look minor and not just “look” so but strategically “evolve” in meaning. Within a generation of crushing the glittering empire of the Athenians, the Spartans were themselves crushed by Thebes. And unlike the Athenians, who rose again in a modest way, Sparta remained crushed forever, their storied agoge becoming a carnival attraction for the Roman tourists. Meiji Japan’s crushing victory over Tsarist Russia in 1905 laid the groundwork for Imperial Germany’s subsequent victory over Russia in 1917 to transform Russia for a brief time into a global menace and for Japan to be consumed by ambitions beyond it’s strength. How much better for the world if Nicholas the Unlucky had eked out a slight victory in 1905 that would have left him chary of foreign adventures
August 20th, 2013 at 7:05 pm
Greetings gentlemen-
.
Lynn’s original quote is from Section 27, Chapter 1, Book 1. There are two elements in play here regarding this “greatest and most decisive act of judgement”. The first being war as a political instrument/part of political intercourse and the second war arising from specific political relations, existing in a specific political context. So, the first includes the timeless concept of the military instrument while at the same time how domestic politics can influence war simultaneously (also “timeless” or effecting all wars theoretically). This assumes that the political purpose is achievable through military means. Duration and how it affects passion/hostile intentions were already mentioned in Section 3, and we see here how that can effect the instrumentality of the conflict in question, which goes in line with zen’s comment on “short and sweet wars”. So the quicker the war is finished with the political purpose achieved via the military aim, the more likely the instrumental rationality of the whole endeavor . . .
.
But, we still have the second element to contend with, which is the specific political context of the times, that is, the specific point in time that the two or more political communities in conflict find themselves. This being of course a potentially tragic product of their combined past histories . . . Lincoln talked about this aspect in his Second Inaugural:
.
. . . Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.