Steven Den Beste hasn’t posted to his USS Clueless blog in years, but since I was recently reminded of an old post of his I decided to go back a re-read some of his classics, like this post, which explains how he got interested in military history — by playing Napoleonic war games, then going out and reading the great works on war:
Of course, I was intensely interested in trying to learn more about this so as to try to become better at it, and I heard, somewhere or other, about Clausewitz. He was one of the top commanders in the Prussian Army and was a protogé of Scharnhorst, the genius who led the group of people who redesigned the Prussian Army after the disaster of 1806. He was chief of staff of the Prussian Second Corps in the Waterloo campaign (which is to say that he was one of the ten top ranking officers in the Prussian field army). In the 1820′s he wrote (but didn’t complete) On War, and not knowing much about it, it occurred to me that it might be a great source of information about how the Prussian Army should be fought in our games. How wrong I was.Clausewitz was writing for the ages. His book is rightfully recognized as a classic of political and military science, because he was able to recognize and ignore those aspects of warfare which were local to his place and time, and concentrate on those aspects of war which were universal and timeless. Like most translations from German, it’s a difficult book to read, but it was a revelation. And I started reading.
I read The Age of Napoleon by Will Durant — and discovered that history was fascinating. I had always hated history in grade school and high school, and hadn’t take any history courses at all in college. But it isn’t that history is awful, but rather that it is so badly taught (at least in the schools I attended) and also that I wasn’t yet mature enough to appreciate it. I’ve been hooked on history ever since, and the more I read, the more I wanted to read. About ten years ago I largely stopped reading fiction because it was keeping me from all those fascinating history books.
After I read the novel Shogun, I then read the classic book The Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, and got hooked on Japanese culture. When I got involved in a group which played Thirty Years War (1618-1648, the first major war were infantry firearms were broadly and effectively used) the dramatic differences between it and the Napoleonic era got me fascinated in the technology of weapons. (More study.) And always, always, the issue that Clausewitz raised of how warfare was affected by the politics of the time. Durant’s Caesar and Christ got me interested in the Roman Empire, and I read The Twelve Caesars and Caesar’s history of the Roman Civil War (which apparently wasn’t actually written by him).
The question ceased to be “How did they fight” and changed to “Why did they fight and how and why did they win?” War is very revealing; no nation reveals its true nature more completely than when it is in a war. For example, there can be no greater contrast in World War II than between how the United States and Japan treated POWs and people in occupied territories. (There is also no greater argument against moral equivalence.)
Before I began this learning process, I thought that war was both straightforward (it’s just people shooting at each other) and invariably wrong, something to be avoided at all cost. The more I learned about it, the more complicated it became. There’s a famous quote from Jefferson: “Your education is complete when you realize how little you know.” That certainly applies here: with all my study, I now know how little I actually know about war, even though I probalby know more about it now than 99% of my peers, having studied it off and on for more than twenty years. And even more strange, I’m no longer convinced that it is always wrong, or always something that should be avoided.
It’s not that I want war; no sane man wants a war. But it is not always the worst alternative. There are cases where war must be chosen because all the alternatives are worse. And in a war it is necessary to do many evil things — but ethically speaking you don’t compare those against peace time and brotherhood and bunnyrabbits dancing among daisies in the sun; you compare those evil acts against how awful things would have been if you’d avoided the war and let your enemy do unmolested what he wants to (which is rarely to let bunnyrabbits dance in the sun). There should be an economy to war: you use exactly as much force and exactly the tactics which let you win, without doing any more evil than is absolutely necessary (though when there is any doubt, you err on the side of winning). But you cannot avoid all evil in war. Though war is never good, it is sometimes ethically correct.
But it all began for me with Clausewitz. Clausewitz is to military science what Darwin is to biology, or Newton to physics; he’s the one who tied it all together, and changed it from a collection of observations into a unified field. He provided the framework into which everything else fit. He made sense of it all. If you read no other book about war, let it be Clausewitz.