Carl von Clausewitz Quotes
In war, while everything is simple, even the simplest thing is difficult. Difficulties accumulate and produce frictions which no one can comprehend who has not seen war.
von Clausewitz, Carl. On War. Translated by J.J. Graham, N. Trübner, 1873, p. 53.
Churchill saw before many others that technology and weaponry had changed the nature of warfare. At the time the military leadership of all the major powers were pursuing 19th century tactics with 20th century weaponry including mass bayonet charges against machine guns behind barbed wire. Churchill and other civilians, although they had legal control over the military, had little de facto tactical control. As a politician he became an itinerant meddler in military tactics thereafter.
Not understanding this point has been the cause of much difficulty for military leaders from the war of 1812 through the Iraq war, the success or failure of the effort depended on a successful peace.
Clark had commanded the American and NATO forces in the Serbian War where all the military and political objectives were accomplished with heavy losses to the Serbian’s and none to the allied side—what many think was the most successful war in American History. Like Eisenhower in WWII one great challenge was the political and strategic one of keeping the coalition of all the allied governments working together. His perspective had been like Eisenhower’s which was much wider and geopolitical than most military officers.
Carl Philipp Gottfried (or Gottlieb) von Clausewitz was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the "moral" (meaning, in modern terms, psychological) and political aspects of war. His most notable work, Vom Kriege transl. On War, was unfinished at his death.
