#apaches

All we have of freedom, all we use or know - This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.

- Rudyard Kipling, The Old Issue

If you ever go into the military as an officer you will be hard pressed not to confront Carl von Clausewitz, the great Napoleonic era military strategic thinker and some would say philosopher of war. At Sandhurst I read his works voraciously and I sometimes re-read him during quieter moments from the Afghan battlefield after flying combat missions.

But is he passé or still relevant in our paidly changing high tech battlefield? Like many I would answer with a resounding yes. Clausewitz’s conceptualisation of war is based on a philosophical dialectic between a nature of war (Wesen) and changing forms of war (Formen). In that sense he will always be the conceptual lens through which we see ourselves as a society when it decides to wage war. 

Few would argue that the tools and methods used to wage war change with the times, but students of Clausewitz are skeptical about supposed changes in what we believe to be war’s enduring nature. According to the Prussian, war’s nature does not change - only its character. The way we use these words today can seem to render such a distinction meaningless, but careful attention to semantics can reveal real problems in how we think about war, society, and the future.

The nature of war describes its unchanging essence: that is, those things that differentiate war (as a type of phenomenon) from other things. War’s nature is violent, interactive, and fundamentally political. Absent any of these elements, what you’re talking about is not war but something else.

The character of war describes the changing way that war as a phenomenon manifests in the real world. As war is a political act that takes place in and among societies, its specific character will be shaped by those politics and those societies - by what Clausewitz called the “spirit of the age.” War’s conduct is undoubtedly influenced by technology, law, ethics, culture, methods of social, political, and military organisation, and other factors that change across time and place.

Even more fundamentally for Clausewitzians, the character of a specific war is defined by the variable relationship between the three elements of the trinity: passion and primordial violence, chance and uncertainty, and purpose (or the controlling hand of policy).

There is something of a feedback cycle in play: social, political, and technological change impact the way wars are fought, and those wars often influence the way society and politics are organised. But war is always a subset of politics, of human society.

It’s important to be aware of the changing character of war, yes, and it’s true that the state will likely change as warfare does. But a self-confident modern democracy should seek to shape the character of war - and specifically, to shape its own forms of warfare – to its politics and society, rather than presuming that the future of our politics should be moulded to the imperatives of technology and military adaptation.