mechanized land warfare? Can air power win the next great war on its own? And so forth.
The list of questions, each of enormous significance at a particular time, is of quite
inordinate length. This book cannot possibly deal with all of them, but it does treat the
most important in every period in its historical context. The succession of strategic
questions of the period and the variety of answers provided all share an essential unity,
notwithstanding their apparent diversity. They all are governed by the higher lore of war
and strategy that was developed by Clausewitz.
There is scope for argument over the extent to which Clausewitz managed in his
writings to transcend the imprint of his times, his personal experience and his culture and
circumstances. On Waris a book written by a Continental-minded army officer devoted
to the security of his native Prussia. He abhorred, yet deeply admired, Napoleon and
France, and he was very much influenced by the German Romantic movement of the
era. That was by way of some contrast to the more rational focus of the Enlightenment
thought that had dominated the theory of war in the eighteenth century. He was also much
shaken by the trauma of national defeat at the Battle of Jena–Auerstädt on 14 October
18 06. His subsequent labours on behalf of the reform of the Prussian Army as an assistant
to the brilliant and energetic Gerd von Scharnhorst reflected his recognition of the
necessity for radical change. No book on the theory of war, not even On War, can help
but bear some stamp of its author and his life and times. However, to date at least, the
occasional claim that Clausewitz’s theory is unduly culture-specific, and hence of limited
domain, has not been advanced convincingly. On Waris far from perfect, as the author
himself was the first to recognize: not all of its more intriguing ideas are well thought
through, for example. But the test for greatness, for true classic status, is not the impos-
sible standard of perfection. It is sufficient that Clausewitz would seem to have been right,
or right enough, about the major issues that bear upon the nature and changing character
of war.
In sharp contrast to On War, the huge library of writings over the past 200 years that
one might categorize generously as strategic thinking bears more than merely the stamp
of contemporaneity. Recalling what Aron and Brodie had to say about the stimulus of
events to strategic thought, strategic ideas, and, more accurately, the military ideas that
had strategic implications, have followed the sound of the guns. While there have been
occasional exceptions, as always, as a general rule strategic thought is a reactive, not an
anticipatory, activity. The early theorists of air power probably are a valid example of just
such an exception. But it is highly unusual for a body of advanced strategic thinkers to
develop ideas that stimulate strategic behaviour in the forms of weapon development and
notions for the proper use of new weapons. Instead, as Aron claimed, strategic ideas are
invented, or perhaps dusted off and refurbished, when the world of political and military
decision and action is in need of answers that might work well enough to enable security
communities to cope with novel strategic challenges. In the mid-nineteenth century,
dramatic improvements in the range and accuracy, and hence the lethality, of infantry
small arms caused a tactical crisis. In World War I the latest version of that tactical crisis
imposed a tactical and operational paralysis that, again, begged for practicable solutions.
And in the Cold War era the atomic (then the hydrogen) bomb, soon to be empowered as
an instrument of swift mass destruction by long-range ballistic missiles, again demanded
intellectual control by strategic ideas that would work well enough as policy and as
doctrine.
18 War, peace and international relations