Too school for cool

Everything you need and want to know about Karl von Clausewitz

supposedtorot:

orderfromchaos:

supposedtorot:

Can someone help me to undestand Carl von Clausewitz, please?

Like the whole thing or specific concepts because you tagged him under realism and it would take a mad long time to explain the whole works of one of only comprehensive writers on the study of war and Clausewitzs methodology isn’t realist at all

You’re maybe right, because I’m still on the very first semester of my course and still didn’t get the whole idea about the classic realism nor neorealism. In fact, I’ve only read Martin Wight’s “Power Politics”

Firstly, sorry for being a dick earlier I’ve been up all night and I tend to get aggressive on the International Relations tag.

So firstly, Clausewitz’s methodology.  Realism/Neorealism are both positivistic methodologies, meaning that they use the sciences as their model for how they look at the world.  They try to find universal laws and then try to predict the events of the world based on what they think they’ve found.

Clausewitz’ methodology was historicist, that is he used the historical method as a way of teaching students to better understand reality.  Instead of looking at a general’s decision and saying that it was right or wrong, Clausewitz said that we should go into the head of the general and ask why he made that decision.  Instead of teaching rights and wrongs Clausewitz argued that we should try to understand the decision making abilities ofothers.  This makes us better at predicting the moves of an opponent and helps with panicking (more on that later).

Secondly, Clausewitz broke war up into two types, absolute war and real war.  Absolute war is well imagine a nuclear war.  It is a single blow which completely incapacitates the enemy at a massive cost to ourselves.  Now while Clausewitz believed that absolute war was what war was when you really boiled it down, in reality there are a huge number of factors which prevent absolute war from happening.  There are time issues—you can’t strike with all your forces at the exact same time.  There are military concerns—you want to save stuff for later.  There are economic concerns—nuclear war would suck.  There are humanitarian concerns etc.  This is where we get ‘real war’, which is the kind of limited wars we have and have had.  However war has an escalating logic which leads to ever increasing acts of violence, meaning that the longer a war goes on the closer it gets to ‘absolute war’.

Clausewitz saw this coming the the advantage of the defender: the defender simply had more stakes in the game and was thus more willing to escalate the conflict than the invaders.  Also, despite people saying that Clausewitz doesn’t understand modern war, Clausewitz was a huge proponent for guerrilla warfare, both in On War and during the Napoleonic Wars.  He saw the full mobilization of the populace (IE the draft) and guerrilla warfare as steps on the path towards absolute war.

Another reason which Clausewitz gives for the superiority of the defense over the offense is what he calls friction.  Say you take a trip through the city.  You have a slow person standing in front of you on the escalator so you miss the subway.  You get on the next one but then it stops once.  Then there’s a red light when you get out.  None of these things are stuff you write home about but these minor, ‘unseen’ (that is unseen by the eye of history) variables have caused you to lose ten minutes.  Now apply that to a ten thousand man army.  Friction is all the little things that you just can’t account for which lead to bigger problems.  Friction is why Clausewitz argues for a historical mode of thinking rather than a scientific one (someone taught using an abstracted system will be unjustifiably secure in their abilities and will thus be tripped up when something goes off that they weren’t taught about.  Someone who is trained to deal with uncertainty won’t panic as much), and is another reason that the defensive is stronger than the offensive (friction hits the attacking side more because there is more risk involved in going into enemy territory).

Those are the big 3 takeaways, though there are more.  If you’re really interested I would recommend checking out Understanding Clausewitz by Sumida as a primer.  It’s a tough read but jesus god On War is a slog to get through.

That horrifying realization

That we’ve treated North Korea, a murderous, belligerent dictatorship, as a joke for years

The following realization that had prewar Nazi Germany existed now we’d probably treat it as a memetic joke too

Heads up

If you search around tumblr you’re going to be getting people saying that the United States instigated this war via their war game which featured two strategic bombers dropping dummy munitions off a South Korean island.

This is a wargame which happens annually in the case of a North Korean invasion of South Korea because North Korea has been threatening Seoul since the 50s.

Just to inform ya

Also no great power would start a nuclear war to defend North Korea’s crazy ass this isn’t going to be WW3

I really wish I was more psyched about my org theory class.  I was psyched when I registered for it, and I’ll likely be psyched after the first class happens, but this break has been too long and my brain feels like mush

Linearism and the Asian Century

30 years ago, Japan was inevitably going to become the world’s superpower.  Japanese people were hugely efficient, their firms were worldwide competitors, Japan was growing at TEN PERCENT GDP PER YEAR.  We ignored Japan’s poor public policy, we ignored the messed up aspects of Japanese culture, we ignored the really low reproduction rate in Japan, all of those things were swept under the inevitability of Japanese growth.

But Japan’s public policy, and its society, ended up hurting its growth hugely.  Japan ended up suffering a decade of 0 growth, and even now is still struggling with an aging population, with poor policies, and with unworkable politics.

Now we say the same things of China, ignoring the same problems!

And in a decade or two we will say the same thing of some other country.  This linearism ignores the failures in China/Japan in favor this scary story about how we’re no longer going to be top dog.

Academic blogs I read now (that you should read too)

Because some of you might be interested by them

International Relations

Duck of Minerva:  While they used to write about the interactions between nerd culture and IR (which is where I started reading them; particularly an article detailing the parallels between NATO and SHIELD), the blog has become more of an International Relations blog with some discussion of academia in general.  Also, they have an interview with Barry Buzan!  =D =D =D

The Disorder of Things: More ‘critical’, they recently had a seminar on The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics.  Don’t have much more to say, I’ve been following them for only a month

Strategic Studies/War Studies

Kings of War—A blog made by professors/phd’s at King’s College.  Tends to focus on the implications of technological change on the practice of war (but has a historical perspective that says that the nature of war doesn’t change that much).  Had a really interesting article recently supporting ‘critical theory’ in Strategic Studies and advocating for revolutionary change in the way we look at war.

Small Wars Journal—Specifically goes into tactics and the way that our security apperatuses work as institutions.  Hosted a ‘disruptive leaders’ series about the new kind of thinking that we need in our military institutions.

Sociology/Media, Society, & the Arts

Understanding Society—Probably the most po mo or whatever the hell, Understanding Society features articles comparing Latour’s philosophy to a visual essay, discussing the effects of sponsorship on our intellectual environment (did Wittgenstein succeed only because of his great thinking, or because of his ability to create connections within British intellectual society?) and the affects of neighborhoods on sociological theory

2nd Reaction to ‘The opposite of thinking’

Rothkopf takes a group of salient points—overspending on defense, the ‘war on terror’, and an obsession on certain weapons system, and makes the argument that we need more creativity in our foreign policymaking.  I agree with this.

However, his more general conclusion is that policy is ‘the opposite of thinking’.  This is an idiotic conclusion which suggests a clear split between thought and action that wouldn’t hold up in any philosophical discussion.  The idea that no thinking happens in policy implementation flies in the face of the huge amount of literature on public policy, organizational theory, and most international relations theory.  

It’s an arrogant suggestion (yes, I suppose all the thinking comes from intellectuals and not the idiotic practitioners) and in the end he offers no suggestions towards solving the problems he is presenting.  Instead he confines himself to gloating over a series of ‘common sense’ policies that aren’t being implemented because POLICYMAKERS ARE DUMB.  Never mind the complexity of the situation, never mind the HUGE ISSUES that come when you actually try to solve ‘the big problems’ rather than talking about how they aren’t being solved.

It’s disgusting that someone with this level of arrogance and this amount of ignorance is writing in one of the most popular academic journals in international relations.  It’s especially disgusting considering the intellectual vacuity of Foreign Policy.

School

marinemindset:

Just registered for my text term.

Contemporary American Foreign Policy

National Security Policy

Oh the life of a grad student.

Yo registering for only 2 classes with the knowledge that they’re still going to kick my ass is freaking weird

My issue with Afghanization (condensed)

I think that Afghanization/Vietnamization/whatever can work!  Crazy!  But I don’t think that it works as a withdrawal strategy.

Clausewitz argued that, as war goes on, the limiting factors of war (rational goals, material limitations, the want to get back to normal) begin to fade away, and limited war begins to look more and more like Ideal War, which is a constant bloodshed.  We can see this most strongly in civil wars.  I would argue that as civil wars go on, the local institutions which once acted as limiting factors begin to disappear and the logic of war begins to take over.  We saw this in Yugoslavia, where women’s groups and pan-slavic groups began to disappear and were replaced by nationalist groups.

So what does this have to do with Afghanization?

This disintegration of limiting factors leads me to this conclusion: If you are going to pursue peacekeeping through local forces, it is best to do it early.  Because as time goes on, the ability of a local army to act like a police force disappears.  The logics of war would destroy any institution’s ability to be a peaceful arbiter, least of all a military institution.  Instead, it becomes more likely that a local army would act as a praetorian force (see Vietnam and Afghanistan—twice!).  

Furthermore, it isn’t likely that a population which has lived through an extensive and painful civil war is going to trust an army backed by one of the sides of that civil war (see the long and painful counterinsurgency campaign in the American South after the Civil War, which the North ended up losing and wiping their hands of by giving up the Reconstruction project)