Page "On War" Paragraph 31

Clausewitz and his proponents have been severely criticized, perhaps quite unfairly, by competing theorists -- Antoine-Henri Jomini in the 19th century, B. H. Liddell Hart in the mid-20th century, and Martin van Creveld and John Keegan more recently.

On War is a work rooted solely in the world of the nation state, says historian Martin Van Creveld, who alleges that Clausewitz takes the state " almost for granted " as he rarely looks at anything previous to Westphalia.

He alleges that Clausewitz does not address any form of intra / supra-state conflict, such as rebellion and revolution, because he could not theoretically account for warfare before the existence of the state.

Previous kinds of conflict were demoted to criminal activities without legitimacy and not worthy of the label " war.

" Van Creveld argues that " Clausewitzian war " requires the state to act in conjunction with the people and the army, the state becoming a massive engine built to exert military force against an identical opponent.

He supports this statement by pointing to the conventional armies in existence throughout the 20th century.

This view ignores, among many other things, the facts that Clausewitz died in the early 19th century, that Prussia itself was not a " nation-state ," and that the Napoleonic Wars included many non-conventional conflicts of which Clausewitz was well aware.

In any case, revolutionaries like Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong had no trouble adapting Clausewitz's concepts to their own purposes.

Nor did conservatives like the Elder Moltke and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Much of Clausewitz's thinking was based on his experience as a Prussian war planner concerned with how to use popular forces in an insurrectionary struggle against the much-superior French forces which occupied Prussia after 1806 — how, in short, to wage a " Spanish War in Germany.