As previously mentioned, I am working from the Modern Library edition, which contains a forward titled “The Seeker and the Sage” by Ralph Peters (LTC (Ret.), US Army). This gives some necessary background for who Clausewitz was, the time he was writing in, and his influences. I’ll be pulling in some info from other sources as appropriate.
As you may guess, Peters suggests that Clausewitz was the seeker. He was a person who was concerned with improving himself and the people around him. In fact, Clausewitz “used the act of writing to force himself to a deeper understanding.” Something I hear often among Infosec practitioners is the best way to ensure you have a solid understanding of something is to try to teach someone else; this is why we place so much value on being active on Twitter and having a quasi-professional blog. This also very neatly encapsulates my goals for this project: through writing about what I have read, I will force myself to process it more than just by reading it. If any of this analysis ends up being useful to other people, all the better.
It is worth remembering that Clausewitz lived in a time before Twitter and blog posts, where in order to communicate with people across the country, or even across the globe, one had to write letters. This led to letter writing being considered something of an art form. As someone who was not of the upper crust, Carl did not learn this art as part of his upbringing. He had to study it. He had to work very hard, through his letters, to impress not only his lady love, Marie, but her family (as she would not have been allowed to marry him without her family’s consent).
Marie was way out Carl’s league. She absolutely was part of the aristocracy, and so learned such skills as letter writing as part of her general training in being a proper lady. We should all be extremely grateful that Carl managed not only to woo such an accomplished woman, but to get her family’s permission to marry her, as it was she who served as his editor and, posthumously, got Carl’s work published. Behind every great man is an even more remarkable woman, indeed.
As Carl’s career went on, and he angered some people by joining a different country’s military in order to have better odds of overthrowing the big bad Napoleon, he ended up serving in a wide variety of positions. This was a point of frustration for Clausewitz as he felt he wasn’t being used to the best of his abilities. Talent management continues to be a problem today – do you get the best person for the job, the best job for the person, or throw anyone ostensibly qualified at the job with the assumption that they are trainable? In any case, for Clausewitz, “the variety of experiences proved beneficial to the military theorist.”
It can be hard for us to remember that the benefits of a position aren’t always immediately apparent. Sometimes what appears useless is useless, but sometimes an experience plants a seeds that grows into a key piece of knowledge 10 years later that none of your peers have. Sometimes it is the particular combinations of experiences that having an atypical career path brings that makes you particularly suited for a role… though it sure didn’t seem like it when you were off doing weird jobs.
Additionally, in Carl’s case, being ostracized meant he was more deeply embedded in operational units than he would have been if he were at his preferred level of staff. This gave him an amazing amount of operational context that he never would have been exposed to otherwise. Staff officers need time in the field to understand the pieces that they’re moving around the map – this is precisely why modern personnel management tries to alternate between operational assignments and “other” assignments (staff, institutional, broadening…). All the smarts that books and schools give you don’t help if you don’t have a true understanding of what is happening out in the real world.
Similarly, Cyber folks need to rotate out into the operational force to understand the needs of the warfighter, and how they actually fight, in order to provide them with useful services (both offensive and defensive). The current segmentation of the US’s Cyber Mission Force into a very small section of units, where there is no opportunity for the personnel to be on a Brigade staff and learn what commanders’ priorities actually are is very concerning to me. Honestly, this is my biggest argument against a separate Cyber Force at this time.
Back to Carl. As an ambitious staff officer, someone who was marrying up, and as an officer of the time, Clausewitz was fairly well read. He borrowed quite a bit from the writers of his day: Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegl, Novalis, Herder… (I’ve never heard of any of these people. Future research?)
Between his own military contacts, and those of his wife’s social circles, Clausewitz was reasonably well-connected. As he was well-read and well-written, both he and Marie moved in intellectual circles, attending lectures and the like. He fully bought into the Romantic era notion of the “cult of genius” (hi there, seeds of “Infosec Rock Stars”!). Which is probably a contributing factor to this assessment: “He enjoyed a remarkably happy marriage and wrote a work so rich it may never be surpassed, yet he suffered disappointment and feared himself a failure.” Guy that wrote one of the cornerstones of modern military doctrine had imposter syndrome. Yeesh.
Peters moves on to the sage: Sun Tzu. I’m just going to touch on a couple of points, particular how he and Clausewitz compare to each other.
The biggest difference that you’ll notice between the two is that Sun Tzu wasn’t writing a piece of martial philosophy; he was writing a piece of propaganda. His goal was to directly influence the behavior of his prince, so his writing is much more memorable, to the point, and makes for better quotations when taken out of context. This significantly contrasts with Clausewitz’s dialectical style, which can take a while to get to the point, but the conclusion means nothing without having read the entire section. Thus, his quotes are much less useful when taken out of context. As such, I shall endeavor to use direct quotations, but where those get unwieldy I shall resort to paraphrasing.
Another large difference is that Sun Tzu seems to have a better grasp of the use of the covert, and of intelligence, than Clausewitz. For all his intellectual leanings, as Carl was primarily a fighter this actually makes a fair bit of sense. As such, it is entirely possible that, given Cyber’s intel ties, Clausewitz’s work is far less applicable than Sun Tzu’s (but we shall see as analysis progresses).
One trait that is problematic for Sun Tzu that isn’t a problem for Clausewitz is that there absolutely is an original authenticated German that we could reference, if we so chose, to sort out any issues with the translation. As there are multiple Chinese variants, none of which is definitively the original, there is much more potential distortion of what was originally said. In fact, this edition uses as its source material a version of The Art of Warfare that was excavated in 1972 that appears to be much older than what has previously been used as a source document. It can be hard to trust the words you are using when they can change at any time.
Hopefully this provides some necessary context for Clausewitz and his writings.