ABSTRACT
Strategic history offers a catalogue of horrors of the utmost diversity, but those grisly events are all, without exception, explicable according to a single theory of war and strategy. The theory available to us is largely the product of the Prussian soldier Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831). Of course, one can find some individual elements characteristic of his thinking in the writings of earlier theorists, but the total edifice of ideas that he constructed was monumentally original. In his unfinished work On War, Clausewitz explained the essential nature of war, how it endures through time and circumstance, even as its character is ever changing. He emphasized the effective, logical unity between politics and war, and he laid stress upon war’s moral dimension. Clausewitz insisted that war has to be a duel between competing wills, that it is subject to the many frustrations of what he termed, collectively, ‘friction’; and he insisted that war was the realm of chance, risk and uncertainty. He is not beyond criticism, naturally, but most scholars and soldiers agree that his great achievement was to draft a general theory of war and strategy that was good enough to be both highly plausible and superior to the theories of all his rivals.
