Carl Philipp Gottfried (or Gottlieb) von Clausewitz[note 1] (/ˈklaʊzəvɪts/ KLOW-zə-vits, German: [ˈkaʁl fɔn ˈklaʊzəvɪts] ⓘ; 1 July 1780 – 16 November 1831)[1] was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the "moral" (in modern terms meaning psychological) and political aspects of waging war.

He spelled his own given name with a "C" in order to identify with the classical Western tradition; writers who use "Karl" are often seeking to emphasize their German (rather than European) identity.

Clausewitz's father, once a lieutenant in the army of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, held a minor post in the Prussian internal-revenue service.

Clausewitz entered the Prussian military service at the age of twelve as a lance corporal, eventually attaining the rank of major general.

[6] Clausewitz served in the Rhine campaigns (1793–1794) including the siege of Mainz, when the Prussian Army invaded France during the French Revolution, and fought in the Napoleonic Wars from 1806 to 1815.

He entered the Kriegsakademie (also cited as "The German War School", the "Military Academy in Berlin", and the "Prussian Military Academy," later the "War College") in Berlin in 1801 (aged 21), probably studied the writings of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and/or Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schleiermacher and won the regard of General Gerhard von Scharnhorst, the future first chief-of-staff of the newly reformed Prussian Army (appointed 1809).

For an English translation of the letter see Carl von Clausewitz Historical and Political Writings Edited by: Peter Paret and D. Moran (1992).

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.

An army led personally by Napoleon defeated the Prussians at Ligny (south of Mont-Saint-Jean and the village of Waterloo) on 16 June 1815, but they withdrew in good order.

The sequence and precise character of that evolution is a source of much debate as to the exact meaning behind some seemingly contradictory observations in discussions pertinent to the tactical, operational and strategic levels of war, for example (though many of these apparent contradictions are simply the result of his dialectical method).

[19]: viii  Clausewitz, according to Azar Gat, expressed in the field of military theory the main themes of the Romantic reaction against the worldview of the Enlightenment, rejecting universal principles and stressing historical diversity and the forces of the human spirit.

His conclusions were influenced by his experiences in the Prussian Army, which was often in an intelligence fog due partly to the superior abilities of Napoleon's system but even more simply to the nature of war.

[28]As described by Christopher Bassford, then-professor of strategy at the National War College of the United States: One of the main sources of confusion about Clausewitz's approach lies in his dialectical method of presentation.

It is the antithesis in a dialectical argument whose thesis is the point—made earlier in the analysis—that "war is nothing but a duel [or wrestling match, the extended metaphor in which that discussion was embedded] on a larger scale."

This synthesis lies in his "fascinating trinity" [wunderliche Dreifaltigkeit]: a dynamic, inherently unstable interaction of the forces of violent emotion, chance, and rational calculation.

[29] In what he called a "logical fantasy," war cannot be waged in a limited way: the rules of competition will force participants to use all means at their disposal to achieve victory.

Accordingly, Clausewitz disparaged the significance of the maneuver, surprise, and cunning in war, as distracting from the centrality of battle,[31] and argued that defense was legitimate only if and as long as one was weaker than the enemy.

Gat further argues the readers’ miscomprehension of the theory in On War as complete and dialectical, rather than a draft undergoing a radical change of mind, has thus generated a range of reactions.

Bernard Brodie's A Guide to the Reading of "On War," in the 1976 Princeton translation, expressed his interpretations of the Prussian's theories and provided students with an influential synopsis of this vital work.

With some interesting exceptions (e.g., John McAuley Palmer, Robert M. Johnston, Hoffman Nickerson), Clausewitz had little influence on American military thought before 1945 other than via British writers, though Generals Eisenhower and Patton were avid readers of English translations.

He did influence Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky,[36] : 233–260  Võ Nguyên Giáp,[37] Ferdinand Foch,[38] and Mao Zedong, and thus the Communist Soviet and Chinese traditions, as Lenin emphasized the inevitability of wars among capitalist states in the age of imperialism and presented the armed struggle of the working class as the only path toward the eventual elimination of war.

"[40] The American mathematician Anatol Rapoport wrote in 1968 that Clausewitz as interpreted by Lenin formed the basis of all Soviet military thinking since 1917, and quoted the remarks by Marshal V.D.

[42] The idea that war involves inherent "friction" that distorts, to a greater or lesser degree, all prior arrangements, has become common currency in fields such as business strategy and sport.

In U.S. military doctrine, "center of gravity" refers to the basis of an opponent's power at the operational, strategic, or political level, though this is only one aspect of Clausewitz's use of the term.

Eisenhower was greatly impressed by Clausewitz's example of a theoretical, idealized "absolute war" in Vom Kriege as a way of demonstrating how absurd it would be to attempt such a strategy in practice.

[45] ...Philanthropists may easily imagine there is a skillful method of disarming and overcoming an enemy without causing great bloodshed, and that this is the proper tendency of the art of War.

As the use of physical power to the utmost extent by no means excludes the co-operation of the intelligence, it follows that he who uses force unsparingly, without reference to the quantity of bloodshed, must obtain a superiority if his adversary does not act likewise.

By such means the former dictates the law to the latter, and both proceed to extremities, to which the only limitations are those imposed by the amount of counteracting force on each side.After 1970, some theorists claimed that nuclear proliferation made Clausewitzian concepts obsolete after the 20th-century period in which they dominated the world.

[46] John E. Sheppard Jr., argues that by developing nuclear weapons, state-based conventional armies simultaneously both perfected their original purpose, to destroy a mirror image of themselves, and made themselves obsolete.

In any case, their failure to read the actual wording of the theory they so vociferously attack, and to grasp its deep relevance to the phenomena they describe, is hard to credit.