The fact of war

Robert Kaplan:

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If a glimpse of the future is possible, it must come from an intimacy with the present clarified by the great works of the past. For over four years now I have been traveling much of the world in the company of U.S. soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen. Upon a halt in my travels, I re-read both The Art of War by the 6th-century BCE Chinese court minister Sun-Tzu and On War by the early 19th-century Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz. What struck me straight away, thanks to my recent travels-in-arms, was not what either author said, but what both assumed. Both Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz believe—in their states, their sovereigns, their homelands. Because they believe, they are willing to fight. This is so clear that they never need to state it, and they never do.

What is obvious, however, is left unstated not because it is insignificant, but because it is too significant: War is a fact of the human social condition neither man wishes were so. Sun-Tzu, concerned with war on the highest strategic level, affirms that the greatest warrior is one who calculates so well that he never needs to fight. Clausewitz, interested more in the operational level, allows that war takes precedence only after other forms of politics have failed. Both oppose militarism, but accept the reality of war, and from that acceptance reason that any policy lacking martial vigor—any policy that fails to communicate a warrior spirit—only makes war more likely. That is why Sun-Tzu only respects a leader “who plans and calculates like a hungry man”, who sanctions every manner of deceit provided it is necessary to gain strategic advantage, who is never swayed by public opinion, and “who advances without any thought of winning personal fame and withdraws in spite of certain punishment” if he judges it to be in the interest of his army and his state.¹1. See The Book of War, comprising Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War, translated by Roger T. Ames (1993), and Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, translated by O.J. Matthijs Jolles (1943) (Modern Library, 2000). See also, Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (Random House, 2001), Chapter IV. Clausewitz is no less committed:

In affairs so dangerous as war, false ideas proceeding from kindness of heart are precisely the worst. . . . The fact that slaughter is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity. Sooner or later someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our arms.

The logic of both men is grounded in patriotic commitment and the personal experience of what that commitment does to men and nations. Sun-Tzu was likely a court minister during the chaos of the Warring States 2,300 years ago, prior to the relative stability of Han rule. (Sun-Tzu may never have existed, however, and his book may represent the accumulated wisdom of many people.) Clausewitz was a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who served with both the Prussian and Russian armies against the French. What stands out in The Art of War and On War, even more than the incisiveness of their analyses, is the character of the writers themselves: Both would avoid war if they could, but become warriors because they cannot.

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This is a very brief excerpt of a long essay. I have absorbed bot of the books he discusses above and they have keen insights into warfare and how it should be conducted. One of the biggest problems in this country today is that too many people remain willfully ignorant of those insights and through wishful thinking believe they can avoid the consequences of war. They are wrong and they will force the consequences of losing a war, which is far worse than fighting and winning.