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.

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 among those intrigued by the manner in which the leaders of the French Revolution, especially Napoleon, had changed the conduct of war through their ability to motivate the populace and to gain access to the full resources of the state ; thus unleashing war on a greater scale than had previously been seen in Europe.

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.

His works, however, were not translated into English for some time, hence the reputation of him held by professional military theorists in English-speaking countries has not reached the significance of Clausewitz, for example.

As wars cannot run themselves, and require politics and society to exist, Clausewitz held absolute war to be impossible, as it could not avoid these influences.

Clausewitz served in the Rhine Campaigns ( 1793 – 1794 ) including the Siege of Mainz, when the Prussian army invaded France during the French Revolution, and served in the Napoleonic Wars from 1806 to 1815.

Clausewitz acknowledges that friction creates enormous difficulties for the realization of any plan, and the fog of war hinders commanders from knowing what is happening.

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.

Indeed, Clausewitz too complained about Toll's dispositions being so narrow and deep that needless losses were incurred from artillery fire.

* For translations of excerpts of both the Essai général de la Tactique and De la force publique into modern English, see Beatrice Heuser, The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz ( Santa Monica, CA: Greenwood / Praeger, 2010 ), ISBN 978-0-275-99826-4, pp. 147 – 170.

The concept arose from Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote:

He made a distinction between two possible strategies in war: attrition and annihilation ( in German, Ermattungsstrategie and Niederwerfungsstrategie, respectively ), derived from Clausewitz's distinctions between strategies seeking limited objectives and strategies aimed at rendering one's opponent militarily helpless, the latter often confused with the concept of " Total War " ( a term Clausewitz did not use ) advocated by Ludendorff and rejected by Delbrück during WWI.

Drawing from the influences of Baron de Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz, Corbett was instrumental in attempting to apply the existing theories of land warfare for war at sea.

Under Henderson he absorbed the principles, derived from Jomini, Clausewitz, and Edward Hamley ’ s Operations of War ( 1866 ), of concentration of physical and moral force and the destruction of the main enemy army.

Clausewitz correctly analyzed the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras to give posterity a thorough and complete theory of war that emphasized struggles between nations occurring everywhere, from the battlefield to the legislative assemblies, and to the very way that people think.

* For a translation into modern English of his Theórica y prática de guerra ( Madrid: Pedro Madigal, 1595 ), Beatrice Heuser: The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz ( Santa Monica, CA: Greenwood / Praeger, 2010 ), pp. 87 – 102.

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.

This interpretation was later mis-accredited to the more renowned Carl von Clausewitz, initially by Helmuth von Moltke the Elder who supported arguments for strategies of annihilation with quotes from Clausewitz.

Clausewitz on the other hand argues that a commander has a foggy idea of what is going on anyway and that creating some sort of false appearance, particularly on a large scale, is costly and can only be acceptable from a cost-benefit-analysis point of view under special circumstances.

Clausewitz, Hermann von Boyen ( 1771 – 1848 ) and Karl von Grolman ( 1777 – 1843 ) were Scharnhorst's primary allies in his efforts to reform the Prussian army between 1807 and 1814.

Yet, as a theoretician, his devotion to ground and caution led his contemporary, Carl von Clausewitz, to criticize his rigidity and adherence to geographic strategy.

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 espoused a romantic conception of warfare, though he also had at least one foot planted firmly in the more rationalist ideas of the European Enlightenment.

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.

Clausewitz entered the Prussian military service at the age of twelve as a Lance-Corporal, eventually attaining the rank of Major-General.

Clausewitz served during the Jena Campaign as aide-de-camp to Prince August.

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.

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.

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.

Clausewitz did, providing a number of definitions.

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

Clausewitz introduced systematic philosophical contemplation into Western military thinking, with powerful implications not only for historical and analytical writing but also for practical policy, military instruction, and operational planning.

In On War, Clausewitz sees all wars as the sum of decisions, actions, and reactions in an uncertain and dangerous context, and also as a socio-political phenomenon.