Why are Clausewitzs ideas so controversial?
Clausewitz’s views inspire a lot of antagonism. A cynical—but entirely accurate—explanation for much of this antagonism is simply that Clausewitz’s famous book is very long and quite difficult to read. Many of Clausewitz’s attackers have clearly never read it, basing their understanding on secondary and tertiary works, on rumor, or simply on the assumption that any book “on war” (especially one written by a German) must be essentially evil. Most of Clausewitz’s most strident recent critics—Bruce Fleming, Tony Corn, Phillip Meilinger, Mary Kaldor—aren’t really attacking Clausewitz at all: Essentially, they see his name as a symbol of a broad style of conventional, industrialized, technology-intensive, bureaucratized, Western warfare. They may have some good ideas concerning that kind of warfare, and it is true that Clausewitz’s name has sometimes been invoked by its advocates. Nonetheless, such warfare is not “based on” the ideas of the pre-industrial Clausewitz, who largely ignored tec
