School of War - Ep 78: Hew Strachan on Clausewitz (New Makers of Modern Strategy #7)

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

Hew Strachan, Bishop Wardlaw Professor at the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews and a contributor to New Makers of Modern Strategy, joins the show to talk about Carl von Clausewitz. ▪️ Times      •    02:10 Introduction      •    04:31 Serious-minded     •    09:43 On War      •    11:54 Deconstruct to construct     •    15:19 Distinctions in war      •    24:07 The American embrace of Clausewitz     •    28:00 Context is everything     •    32:14 Politics by other means     •    36:24 Clausewitz the Marxist     •    40:05 Absolute and Total Follow along on Instagram

The European wars that followed the French Revolution, truly a global conflagration, largely known now by the shorthand, the Napoleonic Wars, seemed to inaugurate a new era of warfighting with innovations both national popular mobilization and tactical, Napoleon's system of battlefield divisions and cores in his approach to combined arms, for example. One of the great commentators on war at any time served as an officer for Prussia in these years and spent the rest of his life trying to understand what he had witnessed and participated in, both what was new about it and what was eternal. Carl von Klaus Fitz's On War, the product of his ruminations, has been used, abused, misunderstood, and variantly interpreted ever since. Today, and somewhat overdue for a podcast

that seeks to understand the nature of war, we talk about Klaus Fitz and his legacy with the one and only Hugh Strawn. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of the way. 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We have people who are not these buildings. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds.

We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, photos, and more School of War content, follow along on Instagram at School of War. Just tap the link in the show notes and subscribe. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. Delighted to be joined today by Professor Sir Hugh Strawn,

currently Professor of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. Before that, many accomplishments and affiliations to include services the Chichley Professor of War at Oxford University, Fellow of All Souls, author of numerous books, The History of the First World War, books on strategy, books on Klaus Fits. And that leads us to the subject of our conversation today, which is Sir Hugh's contribution to the new makers of modern strategy, its chapter on Klaus Fitts.

Sir, thank you so much for joining the show. It's a pleasure. So I guess start with a bit of a personal question, which is when you receive the invitation to contribute the chapter, not just any chapter, but the chapter on Klaus Fitts to new makers of modern strategy, what was, I wonder if you didn't have a thought, well, what more is there, really, in the year 2023 to say? What was your reaction to the invitation?

Well, the reaction was, well, let's get rolled back because Hal Brown said to me, what would I like to write on? I see. Okay. He'd drawn up. And I said, I'd like to do Clousfitt. So I volunteered for that and Howe was happy for me to do it. The reason I wanted to do it is that, like many people who work on Cloussvitz, I had been brought up with the Michael Howard and Peter Bray translation, the translation of 1976. And increasingly I was unhappy with that translation.

But I owed a great personal debt to both of them, to Michael Howard especially, but also to Peter Paray. I mean, I was in contact with Peter Paray just towards the end of his life up until the last week of his life. And he was still thinking and talking about Klausvitz. So I knew how much he cared about Klausvitz and his interpretation of it. So I sort of wanted to hold back from expressing my reservations two directions. I did write some things in both their lifetimes that were critical. But I wanted to hold back until they had both died, and therefore I could do so without offending them directly.

So it was a moment. And that doesn't mean this is a hatchet job. It doesn't mean that this is a chapter and directed at their translation specifically. But I think it was important when we look at Klausvitz, as he is understood today, particularly in the United States, then actually what people do is they read how it important. break. They don't be Clausvitz. And that was really the departure point for what I wanted to write. Well, I propose that we come to this issue in due course, but that we began by stepping back and

just talking a bit about Clausfitz himself, the man, this strange military officer who, you know, anyone who's been in a fight, let alone in a battle, it seems an odd thing to then conclude that one needs to devise a theory of it. It would seem like a challenge. So tell us a bit about, who Klaus Fitz was and why he came to this task? Well, in the way your question sort of begs the answer, which is he's a sort of geek, isn't he? He's not an obvious young infantry officer and too serious-minded, too politically interested, too passionate about many of the issues he thought about. But crucially, the sort of guy, you know, who spent his leisure time and he had a lot

between 1795 and 1806, you know, because Prussia's not at war in that time. But a man who in that time wants to read and improve himself, educate himself. He'd entered the Army age 12, saw combat for the first time when he was 13. So he had quite a lot of reading to catch up on, particularly given the circles which he was increasingly to move into. And that exercise in self-education and in a way of self-promotion is obviously deeply serious. So that's what he does. I think the other thing which has become increasingly evident

and actually I suppose was staring us in the face all the time was or is the importance of his relationship to marry von Brul I mean partly because Clousfich is a man without aristocratic background

in a country where that matters his father had been an officer in the seven years war but he wasn't von Klauswitz he acquires the von in his own lifetime His father wasn't a Narasocrat, whereas his wife's family were very well connected and well-informed and well-educated. And she was a very powerful figure in his life. And it's thanks to her alone, really, that we have on war because, as is well-known, when he died, he hadn't delivered it.

So she did. And she understood well enough what he was about, what he was interested in to get that right. and to see its importance. She was that sort of wife. And when they were separated, which they frequently were during the Napoleonic Wars, they write to each other not only very intimately, but also full of commentary on the things that are going on random. I mean, we can only judge that.

I don't think we've got much of any of Mary von Brul's letters, but we've got Klauswitz's letters. And that exchange is, you know, it's one of the great love stories in a way, and one of the early editions of the correspondence, was precisely presented as this fundamental relationship between the two. This is the late 19th century. So before any recognition of feminism, if you like, as a way of approaching this. So she's important.

And the other person who is very, very important in his life, and a recognition of influence which has been established much more fully is his debt to Shanhoz, to the great Prussian military reformer, whom he actually described as a father figure. And it shanhors that tells him, you can't just understand war by theory, nor do you understand it just by experience. Theory because, for all the reasons, Klauswitz eventually says himself, reality is different.

You use theory the better to understand reality, but reality, especially on the battlefield. And you made the point yourself, and you said, it's a logical thing to produce a theory out of being on the battlefield. You can't just do that. So Sean Horses effectively says that to him, but also your own experience is not going to be great enough to encompass a broad understanding of war. So what do you do? And the answer is you read a lot of military history.

That's the way in. And that's a sort of point for our times too. I mean, when I was writing the chapter for the makes of modern strategy book, I don't know if I necessarily put enough stress on this. But the way in which we approach the study of strategy today, although military history remains very, important to it. It is in a second-order position compared with where it stood in his day, where it was essentially the only disciplinary approach. It didn't stop him reading political philosophy, didn't stop him reading books about engineering, mathematics, other ways of thinking about it. But military history is the core discipline. And there are both problems and

positives in that approach. But he writes more military history. than he ever wrote theory. And we need to remember that, and it's particularly difficult to remember that, when so few of the works that he wrote in military history have been translated. I mean, Nick Murray is putting that right at this moment, but that's the case.

So looking at at On War, one has the impression of that its author was sort of literarily tortured. This is a document, as you point out, assembled in some ways, are put together in its final form by his widow, he states essentially outright that he's not fully achieved the task that he had set himself, that he sort of gestured in its direction. If it's so incomplete and insufficient in its author's view, why is it that, you know, 200 years

on it dominates discussion of war? Well, first thing, don't be conned by Klausvitz. I mean, he may say both those things, and it's not inaccurate to say he said both of those things. But secondly, he's pretty confident of his own judgments. He's very ready to be dismissive of others. He didn't distrust his own judgments. If he was being self-critical at times or he was self-critical at times about what he had done, he aspired to do more. And the second thing, I think, to say, and it's something I often say to my students,

it sounds flippant. But if he was still alive, he'd still be writing. He'd still be working on this because there will be fresh inputs the whole time to the way in which he approached a theory of war. And we know that more directly than he does because in his day, technology was not changing war from the bottom up with the rapidity with which it does today. So, I mean, there are, he was focused on economic and social changes, economic and political changes and perhaps I shouldn't stress the economic, but social and political changes.

And that, of course, is why we should continue to read it, because we can very easily drop that consideration because we elevate new inventions, new technologies. We elevate AI or cyber or drones or whatever. And what Klausvitz does is root us back in things that are more of long-lasting, but are also shaped the way we use all those new technologies and how we adapt to them. So he provides the rootedness which we don't always possess. So one of the things I very much enjoyed about your chapters, you taking some of these key, generally quite well-known, Klaus Fitsian concepts, and then tracing their reception. And, you know, in some ways, their occasional distortion in the couple of centuries that have followed. And perhaps we can just take a couple and you can walk us

through how they have been transformed. In some ways, I was thinking, as I read your essay, that it's a bit that Klaus Fitch's reception amongst those who think about and write about and perform strategy. It's a bit like Aristotle's reception in the sense that, you know, on some level, every serious person at a certain point was an Aristotelian of a sort. But what that meant may not exactly have been exactly what Aristotle would have thought it meant. And isn't that, you know, it's one of the hazards of the positives of being an important thinker. That, you know, people will take away things that you don't think are terribly important, but give them fresh life in a way. You know, and if I have a reservation about the chapter,

And I sort of, you know, one of the problems that was worrying me when I was approaching this and still does worry me is that in some ways it's more a chapter about Cloussvitz's reception, especially since the Second World War, than it's a study of Clouzitz himself. The intellectual reason for doing that, or the rationalization for doing that, is that we read Cloudsvitz through the prism of our own times. And so it was necessary in a way to deconstruct that reintroduct that rebuttal. in order to construct something else. But much of what I'm doing is deconstruction rather than construction. I remember my father when I was young. I just read R.H. Torni's piece on the rise of the entrepreneur bourgeoisie and so on one in the 17th century.

And he's been attacked by HR Trevor Roper. He said it's a typical Trevor Roper piece because it's destroying rather than constructing anything. Somebody constructs an argument and what you do is demolish you. but of course it's what all academics do a lot of the time so maybe I've just fallen into the trap so that that was my concern but what that means is that you're going to have to take on for a start what is the relationship between war and policy because for so many people that's the crucial thing about Klausvitz and I think the other big thing I want to take on is the

assumption that Klausvitz is always rational always thinking about war utilitarian and of course it is a more rational Klauswitz that writes on war because when he's writing that it's peace in Prussia he's he's doing it from home he's he's at in Berlin at the Kreuz Academy he's got time to do that but when he forms his ideas it's in the passion of war itself and a war for prussia's survival and a great deal of hatred of strong emotion and and of nationalism German nationalism, rather than Prussian nationalism, comes through. So this is a cloud switch, which is not so attractive to many liberals, but was, of course, attractive to the national socialists.

Well, perhaps we should start. I want to come to war as a continuation of policy, but before that, you spend a fair amount of time discussing this distinction, which I now realize the words I'm about to use are Howard Perrette words, but this distinction between limited war in total war, which we get in Klaus Fits and then which becomes important, in particular during the Cold War, among strategic thinkers. But tell us what Klaus Fitts meant by this distinction and perhaps what better words are that we might use and then about its legacy as a distinction.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a very important question because, of course, it's important, not just in the Cold War, but this distinction becomes important to, becomes important to Hansdale-Brook when he's writing about, Klauswitz at the end of the 19th century becomes important to Julian Corbett when he thinks about it at the beginning of the 20th century, when he uses Klauswitz. My reading is, and it's not a very original reading, I'm dependent on others for much of this, but my reading is when Klauswitz sits down to write on war, which he declares as an intention in 1816, when he writes to Nis, now another man very important in his life, and says that's

what he's going to do, that what he's concerned with is what he's. he's experienced, the war he knows. How does he make a theory out of that? How does he think about war in the light of that experience? So I suspect the easy bit for Clauses was writing what we would now regard as the sort of middle chunk of on war, the book four on battle, for example, which is absolutely the battles that he served in. Or Borodino and he was present at least in the campaign of Waterloo and so on. That that is, that's what what he's reflecting. But then he confronts a problem because he wants to write a theory that's applicable across generations that isn't simply reflective of Napoleonic warfare.

And he doesn't have a way of making what he has experienced universal. I mean, there's a point of a very rare reflective point where he says, we really don't know what war in the future will be like. Will it be absolute war? which is how he seized Napoleonic warfare to have been a phrase which in the 1970s you'd be tempted to equate with total war, but it's not what he's thinking about. But will it be that or will it be something lesser? And his argument is essentially having experienced something as complete as absolute war, we're unlikely to roll back from it.

That's likely to be the future. But if you read that, for example, in the 1850s, when there had just been the, the 1848 revolutions in Europe, which had caused wars, but wars which have been contained and limited, which led onto the Crimean War, which we tend to see as a limited war, then you would have said, well, actually, no, powers have learned to use war with restraint, and that argument might hold up until 1914. So he asked that question, but he asked that question because he, what he does is look back when he's confronted with this problem, not look forward. He doesn't know what's coming. And he looks back to the 18th century, which he is one of the principal, he's one of the

principal authors among those who classify the 18th century as a war of limited war. He sees this as a period when Europe does not mobilize the whole of its society for the purposes of war, where what you do is determined by monarchs rather than by the whole people, rather than by the nation, and where there is the possibility of negotiating. at the end of the conflict rather than outright defeat and a dictated peace. So he sets up this theoretical premise in the introductory note, which is the one of the two introductory notes we have. Crucially, this one is dated to the 10th of July, 1827, so we know when he wrote it.

And we know from things he wrote to Maria von Klausitz in the same year, Barry von Brul, that he was, that he was, this was a moment of crisis in his life anyway, whether he was just really depressed or whether he thought he lost direction in relation to the writing of the book, is unclear, but it could well be the latter, because he's realizing he can't write an account of von War, which simply rests on a Napoleonic War, that he has to recognize other forms of war for it to be a complete theory,

but he doesn't know how to set about it. Because what he does in this, he say there are two types of war, type of war. So it's not a complete theory. And he then says in the next paragraph, well, policy is what war is about. But he doesn't necessarily say as explicitly as he might at that point, that it's policy that determines whether this war will be a limited war, a war, a for a negotiated settlement, or a war for a dictated peace, an absolute war, a major war. But that clearly becomes perfected by the end of the year. Peter Paray published, and they were known before,

but he published two notes which Cloudsvitz wrote in response to an exercise the Prussian general staff was doing on the sort of war it might fight. And he wrote back saying, how can you ask me to judge whether this is an appropriate plan or not, unless you tell me what you're fighting for? What's the political context? And that's where it becomes absolutely clear that the relationship between war and policy has now become central to his thinking. So that note is very important, and it does provide inspiration for others who then wish to look at war as being of two types, that war can be fought as a limited war. War can be fought as an existential conflict, as a war of annihilation.

Dong of course is the verbal that he used, or Veynuchner is the noun, rather that he uses to explain that. I think the big challenge here is that that is entirely a theoretical distinction. You know, so you can begin, I mean, let's take the war in Ukraine right now. It's a war of national survival for Ukraine. It could become a war of national survival for Russia. It's not entirely clear, but Putin's reputation and survival as a president might be on the line as a result of this war and his relative lack of success so far.

On the other hand, it is limited in the sense that it's been confined to Ukraine, limited in the sense that it hasn't escalated to nuclear weapons, and to that extent can be seen as a contained war. So if we were to describe the war in Ukraine as limited at the moment, that doesn't mean it couldn't become a much greater war, which is precisely why the president is concerned about the dangers of escalation. And Clauses doesn't really address that problem. He hints at it in the note. He says, you know, the condition can change. And equally, a war that begins in big terms can end up in small terms. After 9-11 attacks, when the Bush administration decided on the global war on terror, he'd also said, you know, there'll be no compromise to the Taliban,

refused to allow the inclusion of the Taliban in Hamid Qarzai's provisional government in Afghanistan. on. In the end, of course, the United States does a deal with the Taliban and gets out. So war can move from being one thing to another. It doesn't remain constantly whatever it might have been intended to be from the outset. And that's just, it's partly the consequence of time, but it's also part of the consequence of war and other crucial classic standpoint. War is a reciprocal act. It depends on the other side. You don't have the sole decision. I suppose this is something that comes to the fore when one is actually reading Clausefits carefully or learning about Clausefits from a scholar such as yourself, which is its sort of essential fluidity and sort of openness to the complicated nature of the phenomenon that he is discussing, as opposed to sort of caricature Clause Fits, which just to pick one example, and if I'm either too hard or too soft here and my attempt to channel your criticism, feel free to correct me. but you have an interesting riff on Colin Powell and the way in which the post-Vietnam era

U.S. military sort of embraces this very crisp notion of the role of government-making policy, the role of the military and setting policy objectives for military operations, the role of the military and carried that out, the requirement in this theory of the case that the military have and be given decisive means that this is sort of the way to do war It ought to be done this way, not in any other way, not like that mess we just had in, you know, Indochina. And by the way, this is what Klaus Fitz prescribes. Is that fair as sort of the basic thinking of the 80s and 90s?

And in what ways is it, why did you highlight this example as a sort of interesting reception of Clausvitz? Because it really captures the moment when the U.S. embraces Klaus Fitts. You know, I think it's important to recognize in the context of America. American strategy, how important, not Klaus Fitz, but Jomili remains until very late in US strategic thinking. You know, the argument that Jomli is very important in the education of Civil War generals is well rehearsed and that Dennis Harkman, you know, taught Jomali to West Point cadets before

1861, and that's what they all thought about before as they went off to war. But as Bruno Colson has shown in a book on Germany, an American strategy, the Jomenean approach remains pretty central to U.S. thought right up until the Cold War, because what it emphasized is planning and planning with a view to victory. I mean, what you're doing is taking the stages through in a fairly sequential way on the basis that there are certain principles you can apply. The U.S. is not, you know, alone in this. other countries and other professional military education systems and other staff colleges,

war colleges, teach the subjects in very similar terms. And in a way, it's right and proper because the function of armed forces is to plan and then toast to give those plans and to hope that you win as a result of doing so. But what Closwitz is doing is something very different from Schombly because Cloussvitz is encouraging you to think, to ask questions, to understand, because that's what he's doing the whole time. I mean, he constantly wants to come out with principles. He constantly wants to come to solutions. His criticism of Jean-Marie is deeply unfair in the sense that he was as reliant on

Jean-I as many others of his contemporaries were. But what he does is challenge those assumptions the whole time. And that's a different way of doing strategy and thinking about strategy. And what happened after 1976 with the translation of it. It shouldn't begin then, so I should just roll back a bit. I mean, Clausis is very important to Sam Huntingson, is very important to Osgood when he writes about limited war. And he's very important to Henry Kissinger when he writes about foreign policy and nuclear weapons.

I mean, he figures for all of them, and I think I refer to all of them. But it's 1976 when people actually sit down and read this text properly and piles one of them. And Harry Summers is another when he writes on strategy after the Vietnam War. But what they do, of course, is do a geometry on him. That is to say, they say, there have to be rules that come out of this. And these are the rules. And Powell gets them into the Weinberger Doctrine. And if he then gets them into the Powell Doctrine, too.

So they resonate. And in a way you have, you know, this is at one level, not just the academic, sorry, the American versus the Prussian. It is actually the academic versus the general. I mean, because the general has to act, you know, piles in a position of responsibility. He needs to give concrete advice. He needs to say how you should do things,

whether he's chairman of the joint chiefs or whether he's his secretary of state. Klausvitz, in a way, is a very atypical general. And it's significant, I think he never held command. He was always a chief of staff. And he therefore could weigh up the pros and cons, weigh up the imponderables, and leave it to somebody else to take the decision. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, because I think he'd love to have commanded, but I'm not sure

you've been very good at it. Can I ask you, if you're willing to sort of channel Class Fitts a bit, and we've confronted by this 70s, 80s sort of how-to for war, which is derived in some way from his own work, which is, you know, for the record, like, very defensible. I mean, it's not an insane way to think about the conduct of war at all. What would he actually say? If he were briefed, this is how the United States is going to do war. And thank you, sir, for teaching us how.

What would his response be? I think his response would be that context is everything. The Madeline Albrow problem, you know, that when she said to Powell, you know, can't we use this military, she spent so much time saying has to be used in only certain ways. Can't we use it in the circumstances with which we are actually confronted? And I think that will be close to this is immediate response. He would also say the US might want to fight in a certain sort of way, but the enemy might not even fight in that sort of way.

So you need to get inside that problem. I think one of the big challenge that comes at the end of the 20th century, rather more than in the 70s and 80s, is the challenge of intelligence. If you actually know much more, or think you know much more about the enemy's intentions than clouds that could ever be confident of, then, of course, you could be more certain that your solution is right.

It doesn't make it right, as we now know, but that could still be the conclusion. Yeah. I was working as a Senate staffer in the summer of 2019 when the Islamic Republic was getting up to all sorts of mischief in the Persian Gulf, and there was this debate, which my boss was a part about what to do about it. And he had me go back and research the tanker wars in the 80s,

and it struck me that the debate that we were having in the summer of 2019 was so similar to the debate prior to Reagan really getting serious in 1980s, where you have the Chiefs of Staff and the Pentagon broadly occupying a very similar position as it did, you know, what, 30 years later, we have this big military, but we needed to fight this war against the Soviet Union, which, by the way, we don't intend to fight. We hope never to fight it. We can't, we don't, it's, it's going to be a waste of resources. It's, it's going to be messy. It's not what we want to do. In the end, Reagan, of course, compelled them to do it on some level. And I have to say there are multiple cases of that.

I think the Cold War encouraged that mentality. The British equivalent in 2006, when Richard Danick became Chief of the General Staff, he said more than once in my hearing, the army is running red hot. We have a much smaller army, obviously, than the U.S. Army. but the strains of Iraq are effectively destroying it and the problem with that is Iraq's the war you've got so how did you resolve the problem

I mean the answer of course the British sadly gave was well we'll be like to go to Afghanistan so it wasn't so it hadn't necessarily thought through quite what the right response was in those circumstances but what it does mean too and it's an important issue is that what Klausis is not about

is about how you get into this war, it's about how you wage this war, because actually you need to adapt. So you may think this is going to be a certain sort of war on the terms which you have to be ready for or for which you've planned. It's an old truism. The war will turn out to be something different,

or the enemy will do something different, or certainly you're going to have to adapt and learn to go long. And armies, I think, particularly after the Cold War, when they trained in certain ways for a long time and used that as their validation, didn't find that easy. Something that I really took away from your chapter, and I'm curious to know if you think this is a fair thing to take away,

is that I had had in mind before reading it a sort of caricatured view of Klaus Fitz based on limited reading that I did as part of my own professional military education some years ago. As a man who was very, a thinker who was very Western and who saw clear distinctions between war and peace, I will rehearse all the elements for you. As opposed to more, you know, you can describe this in a number of ways. You know, sort of Eastern or you might say revolutionary, two to very different things, but they sort of interplay way of thinking about war where actually the struggle is constant. Like politics is struggle and occasionally it gets violent and it's all sort of part of the warp and woof of politics. politics is war by other means in some ways. And from your chapter, I actually, I think that I've been, my caricatured view of

Claus Fitz is unfair, that his view of things is sufficiently supple to kind of capture that. Is that fair? Would you go that far? Yeah, I think what he, I mean, when, if you think the formative years of Clauelswitz is his life, He's born in 1780, from 1792 to 1815, with significant breaks for Prussia in particular, but with significant breaks, Europe is at war, and it's dealing with a revolutionary state, with a radical understanding, not just with its own internal structure, but of the implications of that for the rest of Europe, and with a determination under Napoleon to conquer much of the rest of Europe,

rather than to seek negotiated settlements that might last, which seems to have been the prevailing patent before. So war and politics are much more closely intertwined than for a Western Democratic state, post-1945, used to the presumption that most of the time were at peace, even if, you know, if you're experiencing, if you're serving the military, it may not seem like that, but for most of society, it seems like that. So these questions are much closer to the heart of how Prussia defines itself, how society defines itself. And there is very little in there about what a world without war is it

likely to be. We have two texts. I mean, one he does say at one point, you know, the end of war is peace, you know, what we're all looking for is peace. But at the same time, he also says defeat will leave a sense of resentment and therefore the war is likely to flare up again. And he knew that from Prussia's own defeat in 1806, 7. So, you know, he was pretty clear. that that was an important sense of resentment because national identity mattered in this. And I think, you know, the notion that he's an honorary Western liberal

is very much a Clavisville, is very much a Howard and Perrae legacy and a Huntington and Osgoat legacy too. I mean, it's America's handling of him that makes him an honorary, an honorary liberal. And Howard and Paray played to that narrative, partly to sort of rescue him from belonging in the pantheon of Nazi heroes,

because he does. And a point I've obviously made in the chapter. And the Klauswitz, who belongs in the pantheon of Nazi heroes, is not Klauswitz. They've not distorted him. They've chosen bits that suit him, of course. There's not much there of the sort of enlightened,

rational figure, the late 18th century polymath, that the man constantly quested, for both a sense of science as opposed to romanticism, like a man who does ultimately want peace and enjoys peace. I mean, he values peace when it comes. I think there's a good debate to be had because he's living on the cusp of the 18th and 19th centuries as to whether he is a rational figure or whether he's a romantic figure.

And it's probably a false debate because I think both. supply. I mean, he's both using his brain, reading critically, and at the same time, you know, bringing ideas in for romanticism, from a romanticism, which are very important to him. I mean, the notion that the commander is a genius, and that is how he's to be understood, is at one level of reflection of what he'd drawn from reading about art, Kanzas, say, on art, and the way in which the great artist is made, but is also clear the desire to find heroic figures who can be role models while recognizing that most commanders will not be Napoleon's.

We've touched on Klausvitz, the American Western liberal. We've touched on Klausvitz, the right-wing reactionary fascist. What about Klaus Fitts the Marxist? You spend some time covering that in the chapter, and he obviously plays a significant role amongst the revolutionaries. He absolutely did, but that's partly because they really do understand the relationship between war and policy, much more profoundly in some ways than does Western liberalism. Because, if you like, the realism inherent in Marxism recognizes the place of war more readily than Western liberals will do,

and the scale at which war might have to be fought. So, sadly, I mean, I would love to have the skills in Russian to be able to do this better than I can. I just have to use Ms. Fichin as the Soviet representative thinker in so many ways is not a representative figure, partly because, of course, he's not a paid-up Marxist himself. He's primarily a Russian nationalist who happens to have survived in 1917 and enlisted in the Red Army as, somebody who was committed to Russia and its future, but who ultimately will be a victim of the purges because of his origin as a czarist officer. But Svichin really engaged with Klausvitz as a German scholar.

I mean, he clearly read a great deal of German military theory, German read German well, and from my point of view, of course, the fact that his book on Klausvitz is translated into German as what made it accessible to me. But what's interesting there is that this is in many ways very similar to the Klauswitz as portrayed by Hans Rothfelds, for example, when he's writing about Klauswitz at the end of the First World War in Germany. So the two are close. And both of them are fundamentally concerned with this relationship between war and policy and what it means for the utility of war. And I think one of the problems when we look at the Western liberal tradition is that it finds that very difficult.

The US, you know, has fought the current limited wars, but wars which have been limited in means rather than in terms of ends. So the relationship between war and policy has actually been out of kilter because you're allocating limited means to wars which are defined. in extraordinarily open-ended terms, and therefore the means don't match the ends. It's starting the wrong way around. I don't think Marxists would ever do that. Marxists would start the other way around, to be quite clear what the objective is, and then give the means, which is why in the 1930s, the pace of Stalin's rearmament and the expansion of war industries and so on is so frenetic.

Well, they messed up in Afghanistan, too, but maybe they weren't so Marxist anymore. Well, maybe that's the problem. Yes, as far as twig as done its damage. But it's a good question. I mean, that's exactly where I wish I knew I had Russian. I mean, just what a Russian saying, let's say in the 1980s about about Clavitz. They go back to the Svechin in the 1990s, but how much do they go back to Clavsvitz? I don't know.

One more question. I want to be respectful of your time, but I just want to go back to something that's come up a few times, and we mentioned it explicitly, which is the way in which, Claus Fitz's notion of absolute war and the sort of Napoleonic quest for hegemony and all that it leads to at the beginning of the 19th century is really different from what American writers and strategic thinkers are talking about in the 70s. And I just want to ask you, what are the differences between absolute war and the Clausvitzian sense, total war in the Cold War sense, or maybe just even more broadly total war as experienced in the 20th century, the First World War,

First World War or second world. Clastis' understanding of war is primarily driven by the revolution of the power of the state. It is, I suppose that there are two arguments here. One is that he states that war has a capacity to escalate. Once you start using violence, then there is no logical limit. And he makes that break here in book four when he talks about battle and how it's conducted. So there's a tendency to escalate anyway. The question then is, what is the relationship between that war and policy?

And he essentially would argue that if the direction of policy is also to fight a war without limits, then the war will become increasingly extreme because the war will be moving in step with its political utility. If on the other hand, the desire is to restrain war, then there's a tension mounting between what you're doing with war in terms of what war would naturally do, and the political direction which provides it, which is why he says in book eight that, you know, policy can be like an alien element to relation to war, because he be holding it in check. So when he talks about absolute war, he both posits it as a sort of ideal which will never happen, which is the

point that Peter Perrae especially would stress, which is in book one, chapter one. And then he says, In book eight, well, actually we have seen it happen. It happened during the Napoleonic Wars, the result of the French Revolution, which liberated the powers of the state. He says, we might imagine it could never happen because actually absolute war, if it's an ideal, can never be achieved. There will always be things that prevent it being achieved, caused with rain, or people lose their way, or the intelligence is bad, or whatever else, that prevents the execution of what somebody

intends. So that's where he's coming from. And what is not determining that is a particular weapon system or the impact of technology more directly on war. And what we have confronted as a result of the 20th century wars, and particularly the two world wars and the event of nuclear weapons, is a war who is a form of war whose destructiveness is determined by the weapons we use. I mean, not only determined by that self-evidently. And he really makes no judgment on any of that. It's not there.

And the fact that, you know, that Klauzevitz talk, the Kavanaugh-Puré translated on Ganza-Krieg, an entire war, a war that is whole, i.e. a war that has escalated, does represent war in its essence as a total war simply shows that their desire to put this into vocabulary that 1970s readers would understand because it resonates with the two-world wars. it resonates with the possession of nuclear weapons. But there's no total in what Clausius is saying. When Clauswitz talks about in Ganser-Krieg, what he's talking about is something that is entire

in the sense that a stallion or a bullet's entire. It's not being castrated. It's got its raw energy within it. That's what he's talking about. And what is effectively saying, and it applies to limited wars too, is that if you fight a war, you don't fight a war with one hand behind your back

because the other side will come, as he says, very graphically, and chop your arms off. There'll be blood spilled. So you have to fight as intensely as the other side will fight. That's why the moderation will be external, will come from the direction of policy, for aiming for a negotiated peace. It won't be inherent within war itself.

There is no sense in this of that sort of sense of honor, for example, which even in relation to the Napoleonic Wars we can find, the notion that, you know, one officer from the French army surrenders to an officer from another army. They respect each other as officers. They treat each other honorably if they fought well and so on. I mean, it's not that that didn't happen, but actually it was much less likely that happens between Prussia and France than, say, France and Britain. So there isn't really a sense of restraint in relation to fighting France, in what Klausvitz is writing,

or in terms of how he understands wars to be conducted on the backfield. There's nothing there that pander us to humanitarianism, nothing there on international law, nothing there on what you should do with the wounded or how you should treat prisoners. Sir Hugh Strawn, contributor to the new makers of modern strategy on Klaus Fitts and his legacy, author of many books professor at the University of St. Andrews. This is a fascinating, kind of delightful conversation about a very grim subject. I'm grateful to you for coming on the show. Thanks very much.

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