Carl von Clausewitz

We and our adversaries have war reserve modes where we when we actually go to war, we'll switch to do things slightly differently from the way that we did it in training.

And so all of this leads to this, you know, the fog and friction that Clausewitz warned about.

That makes me skeptical that when we get to that, you know, call it the high-end fight or the near-peer fight or whatever you want to call it, that now AI is going to be able to come in and have the decisive effect that, say, network-centric warfare had in the 1990s.

I'm just not sure.

Probably blow up hospitals a little bit more easily.

And then you have...

Then you have a machine that kind of comes into, you know, it's kind of like the machine that's Joe Biden telling the Israelis, don't make the mistake that we made after September 11th, right? So there's an interesting, apropos Clausewitz, there's an interesting political sort of element that comes into this as well, whereas in the entire history of war, the norms of war are usually relaxed in

the

Thank you very much.

Three, the Prussian version of Napoleon's military annihilation strategy, which could easily lose to restrictions imposed by adhering to the Clausewitz theory of military strategy, and indeed finally did lose them during the First World War.

Rightist political tendencies in the modern era and the partisans who cultivated and served these ideologies such that an articulation of annihilation therapy can be found within the pages of the relevant treaties and work product, including private correspondence, it features in an implicitly reactive context and was in no way tethered to an anti-Jewish commitment or imperative.

There does not exist a spontaneous rightist praxis of annihilation that exists as a conceptually independent aspect of variable in lieu of a reactive and remedial countermeasure.

And the same people who vote on it sign up and get in the Navy and start rowing their ships over there.

There's no difference between the political decision-making body, the general population, and the military, right? You know, Clausewitz calls these like a trinity or a triangle.

It's like, well, it's a dot in Thucydides.

It's the same thing.

And like, I wasn't an expert on this.

I'd never trained in military tactics other than the general stuff that everyone back in college, you know, we had to read about all of the wars of like the Romans and like we had to read Clausewitz of course and of course we've studied the campaigns of Napoleon so I knew something and I could help them a bit but I wasn't really an expert and like this is not the experience of every college grad today you could not sort of like parachute them Into an act of wars and and then do them just be like alright I know the basics of military strategy because I've read enough of the classics and like thought about what it meant so it used to be this sort of You know it conveyed that the person actually had read a bunch of difficult material and understood it quite well and now that is You know, by the time I was graduating, like, you know, 20 years ago, it meant that you were like a reasonably diligent person who could do your homework.

And today, it doesn't really seem like it even means that anymore.

But it does, like, but over this time, as the knowledge component has been getting smaller, the sort of social certification component has been getting bigger and replacing that.

You see, we understand war in the Western Hemisphere from a certain perspective.

And Carl von Clausewitz stated it well.

He's the most influential theorist on warfare in the Western Hemisphere.

War is politics by extreme measure.

Thank you very much.

Three, the Prussian version of Napoleon's military annihilation strategy, which could easily lose to restrictions imposed by adhering to the Clausewitz theory of military strategy, and indeed finally did lose them during the First World War.

Rightist political tendencies in the modern era and the partisans who cultivated and served these ideologies such that an articulation of annihilation therapy can be found within the pages of the relevant treaties and work product, including private correspondence, it features in an implicitly reactive context and was in no way tethered to an anti-Jewish commitment or imperative.

There does not exist a spontaneous rightist praxis of annihilation that exists as a conceptually independent aspect of variable in lieu of a reactive and remedial countermeasure.

I mean, the majority is wrong in this case.

You know, and I think the primary obstacle to even entertaining that possibility is what I said, that anything that seems derivative of, continental perspective philosophically or a historicist perspective is simply done away with I can't remember I think on our continental philosophy series we touched briefly on Clausewitz because Clausewitz's legacy is complicated but he you know he was sort of the he was sort of the German philosopher who stands out as abiding the rationalist perspective that we'd associate with, you know, the analytic and particularly like the Anglophone tradition, you know, and I, I think that that's why there's, um, that sort of lack of, uh, conceptual vocabulary in common between these perspectives, but, um, moving, uh, moving on, um, Yeah, I just wanted to say, too, something, just to clarify what I said at the top of this conversation.

Because I know it'll come up in the comments.

And there's one guy I know specifically who's still not being named who is going to take issue with this.

You know, like that under Hackworth, you know, his Tiger Force.

You know, and Hackworth made the point that what the Army had decided counterinsurgency was really had nothing to do with the way anybody who had a meaningful understanding of those kinds of doctrines would think of it.

And Hackworth invoked Clausewitz a lot, but he did so in an intelligent way.

And some people misunderstand me because when I criticize Clausewitz, which I have pretty vociferously, It's for ontological reasons, okay? It's not because he's always wrong or he didn't have highly developed ideas on war fighting and things.