Carl von Clausewitz: Friction, Fog and the Unfinished On War

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Carl von Clausewitz entered the Prussian army in 1792 at 12 years old as a lance corporal and saw combat in the Rhine campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars before his teens. At the Military Academy in Berlin from 1801 he became a protégé of Gerhard von Scharnhorst and read Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, ideas that later fed his notion of the fog of war. The catastrophe at Jena-Auerstedt in 1806 left him a prisoner in France for over a year and convinced him that Napoleon's mass armies had ended the old cabinet wars. In 1810 he married Countess Marie von Brühl, and in 1812 he resigned rather than serve alongside the French, joining the Russian army.

In 1815 he was a chief of staff at Wavre, where about 17,000 Prussians held off more than 30,000 French and kept them away from Waterloo. After years running the Berlin academy, he died of cholera in 1831 at 51 while organizing a quarantine line on the Polish border, leaving an unfinished manuscript. Marie edited and published On War in 1832. The episode explains his dialectical method, the trinity of emotion, chance, and reason, and how his ideas reached Moltke, Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Eisenhower.

• King Frederick William III never fully forgave Clausewitz for leaving to fight with Russia in 1812.
• Wavre was a tactical defeat for his unit but helped secure the strategic victory that ended Napoleon's reign.
• The famous line that war is a continuation of policy by other means is the antithesis in his argument, not his final conclusion.
• Friction, in his words, means everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.
• Eisenhower drew on the concept of absolute war to shape Cold War nuclear deterrence and massive retaliation.