German strategist Carl von Clausewitz stated that " the employment of battles ... to achieve the object of war " was the essence of strategy.

Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz (; July 1, 1780 – November 16, 1831 ) was a Prussian soldier and military theorist who stressed the moral ( in modern terms, " psychological ") and political aspects of war.

Clausewitz was born on June 1, 1780 in Burg bei Magdeburg, Kingdom of Prussia, the fourth and youngest son of a middle-class family.

Clausewitz's family claimed descent from the Barons of Clausewitz in Upper Silesia, which was eventually confirmed, but now is doubted by scholars.

Clausewitz was held prisoner in France from 1807 to 1808.

In 1815, the Russo-German Legion was integrated into the Prussian Army and Clausewitz re-entered Prussian service.

Clausewitz was promoted to Major-General in 1818 and appointed director of the Kriegsakademie, where he served until 1830.

Clausewitz was appointed chief of staff of the only army Prussia was able to mobilize, which was sent to the Polish border.

Clausewitz was a professional soldier who was involved in numerous military campaigns, but he is famous primarily as a military theorist interested in the examination of war.

Clausewitz constantly sought to revise the text, particularly between 1827 and his departure on his last field assignment, to include more material on " people's war " and forms of war other than between states, but little of this material was included in the book.

While Clausewitz was intensely aware of the value of intelligence at all levels, he was also very skeptical of the accuracy of much military intelligence: " Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory ; even more are false, and most are uncertain ....

Clausewitz was well educated and had strong interests in art, history, science, and education.

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.

Clausewitz himself never saw the 20th-century states and armies to which Creveld refers — the states with which he himself was familiar were quite different.

This military revolution was described and codified by Clausewitz.

He suggested that this was primarily so because as Clausewitz suggested, " unlike in any other science or art, in war the object reacts ".

The book's significance is attested to by the fact that until the middle of 2008, it was included on the list of required reading for United States Army officers, and ( with Sun Tzu and Clausewitz ) the third non-American entry on the list.

Boyd's critique of Clausewitz was that while Clausewitz saw the " fog of war " as producing difficulties and sought to reduce friction so as to fight the enemy more effectively, Sun Tzu actively sought to increase friction and confusion among opposing forces.

Soldiers before this time had written treatises on various military subjects, but none had undertaken a great philosophical examination of war on the scale of those written by Clausewitz and Leo Tolstoy, both of which were inspired by the events of the Napoleonic Era.

Clausewitz defined the ‘ order of battle ’ as “ that division and formation of the different arms into separate parts, or sections, of the whole Army, and that form of general position or disposition of those parts which is to be the norm throughout the whole campaign or war .”

In any case, the names of many cities, including Berlin ( meaning ' little swamp '), and some surnames, most notably those of ' typically Prussian ' nature like ' von Clausewitz ' or ' Virchow ', still reflect the Slavic roots of this part of Germany.

German military history had previously been influenced by Carl von Clausewitz, Alfred von Schlieffen and von Moltke the Elder, who were proponents of maneuver, mass, and envelopment.

Clausewitz had many aphorisms, of which the most famous is that " War is the continuation of Politik by other means " ( Politik being variously translated as ' policy ' or ' politics ,' terms with very different implications ), a description that has won wide acceptance.

Lynn Montross, writing on that topic in War Through the Ages ( 1960 ), said ; " This outcome ... may be explained by the fact that Jomini produced a system of war, Clausewitz a philosophy.

While previous wars were fought for social, religious, even cultural reasons, Clausewitz taught that war is merely " a continuation of politics by other means.

Vom Kriege () is a book on war and military strategy by Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz ( 1780 – 1831 ), written mostly after the Napoleonic wars, between 1816 and 1830, and published posthumously by his wife in 1832.

Modern perception of war are based on the concepts Clausewitz put forth in On War, though these have been very diversely interpreted by various leaders ( e. g., Moltke, Vladimir Lenin, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mao Zedong, etc.

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.

The concept is extended by some authors back as far as Clausewitz ’ s classic work On War as " absoluter Krieg " ( however, the relevant passages have been interpreted in diverging ways by different authors ), and to the French " guerre à outrance " during the Franco-Prussian War.

A widely accepted definition is that given by Clausewitz, with war being " the continuation of politics by other means ".

The breakthrough of sorts made by Clausewitz in suggesting eight principles on which such methods can be based, in Europe, for the first time presented an opportunity to largely remove the element of chance and error from command decision making process.

Only the misplacement of Russian forces by Kutuzov over both Bagration's and Barclay's protest prevented the ruin of the French army that day, both the Prussian Staff Officer Karl von Clausewitz, the historian and future author of On War, and Alexander I of Russia noting that the poor positioning of troops in particular had hobbled the defense.

Clausewitz also noted that the order of battle depends on the effective span of control by a commander.

In 1960, as Cold War tensions were near their peak following the Sputnik crisis and amidst talk of a widening " missile gap " between the U. S. and the Soviets, Kahn published On Thermonuclear War, the title of which clearly alluded to the classic 19th-century treatise on military strategy, On War, by German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz.

In this treatise of military theory, van Creveld develops what he calls the non-trinitarian theory of warfare, which he juxtaposes to the famous work by Clausewitz, On War

Military strategy books like The Art of War by Sun Tzu, On War by von Clausewitz, and The Little Red Book by Mao Zedong became business classics.

In the service of the Russian Empire, Clausewitz helped negotiate the Convention of Tauroggen ( 1812 ), which prepared the way for the coalition of Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom that ultimately defeated Napoleon and his allies.

The degree to which Clausewitz managed to revise his manuscript to reflect that synthesis is the subject of much debate.

Nonetheless, Clausewitz conceived of war as a political, social, and military phenomenon which might — depending on circumstances — involve the entire population of a nation at war.

In fact, the words people, army, and government appear nowhere in the paragraph in which Clausewitz defines his famous Trinity.

This is badly dated ( based on the 1873 Graham translation ), severely abridged ( leaving out, for instance, Book Six on defense — which Clausewitz considered to be the stronger form of warfare ), and badly biased ( because of its Vietnam War era and the editor's hostility to " neo-Clausewitzian " Henry Kissinger ).

Manuel de Landa, in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines ( 1991 ), argued that the Prussian army now favoured the Jominian theory, which gave preeminence to the Army and to its autonomy, compared to the civilian control advocated by Clausewitz.

However, Corbett was interested in the diplomatic alliance systems and coalitions formed before and during a war, and he was concerned with the economic and financial dimensions of waging war as well as with the technological and material aspects of war, which were of no interest to Clausewitz.

Between the World Wars the Germans again reviewed their doctrine and completely revised their approach again, perhaps getting back to some of the von Clausewitz ideas which were now enabled by motor transport.

To further understand concepts used by the German military in World War II, upon which maneuver warfare is largely based, Boyd studied Clausewitz, Jomini and the Napoleonic era.

For Foucault this was the exact opposite because after the Second World War, the war machine that was unleashed was due to the fact that the system of economic rationality had completely broken down and the organisational network of world trade ( world trade starting period 1870 ) and its accompanied trade settlement system had completely become untenable in which trust in the final payment settlement system had completely vanished, settlements of payment of trade were never met ; they were simply not paid, therefore initiating the military machine and the Carl von Clausewitz dream " War is the continuation of politics by other means " precipitating the systematic slaughtering of millions.

In his book On War, Carl von Clausewitz defines the term as one that :" Denotes properly such a portion of the space over which war prevails as has its boundaries protected, and thus possesses a kind of independence.

Excellence in this case is derived in part from the tradition of Gerhard von Scharnhorst, Carl von Clausewitz and Helmuth von Moltke and was based upon the premise that hard-and-fast rules had no place in the environment of war, which was the realm of human emotion, friction, chance and uncertainty.