“…many roads lead to success…they range from the destruction of the enemy’s forces, the conquest of his territory, to a temporary occupation or invasion, to projects with an immediate political purpose, and finally to passively awaiting the enemy’s attack4”
Success however is not victory – maybe this is because Clausewitz thought “In war the result is never final5”. If success is never final, there can be no victory.
Further, in Chapter Four of Book Eight, he discusses defeat, but this discussion of the “the acts we consider most important for the defeat of the enemy6”, does not give us a definition of when exactly this defeat of one side, and victory for the other, has come, for the mere completion of his ‘acts’ does not necessarily mean the achievement of ones object.
Clausewitz is most famously quoted for having written that “War is nothing but the continuation of policy by other means7”. Politics and policy shapes war, as it must, for “War is never and isolated act8”. “Policy is the guiding intelligence and war only the instrument and not vice versa9” Those who would study or engage in war must accept that the political aims of the belligerents influence the way the war is fought and the way the war is won. The reason Clausewitz never defined victory, is that each victory is different. If war is a mere extension of policy, winning it must also be subsumed to the aims and objects not just of war but of policy. War, then, is won by achieving a situation where the goals of the policy it is an extension of can be met. Clausewitz writes that the “aim takes the place of the object10”. Further, the aims of the policy must be in keeping with the environment. Paret, in his introduction to On War quotes Clausewitz as having written:
“The aims of a belligerent adopts and the resources he employs must be governed by the particular characteristics of his own position”
There is, then, no absolute definition of victory, as each victory is different from the other, as the aims and objectives are different.
However, Clausewitz does say that “War is…an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will11”. He must be put “in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the sacrifice you call him to make12”. Clausewitz is here referring to whatever ‘sacrifice’ policy demands of the opponent, that by victory, the war will have made possible to be exacted. That forcing the enemy to do one’s will is the ultimate goal of warfare seems simple and self-explanatory. The Greeks at Troy fought in order to force the Trojans to return Helen to them; William at Hastings to force Harold to cede him the throne of England; and the British in the Seven Years War for dominance of the North American Continent. The maxim that wars are fought to coerce the enemy into doing one’s will holds true even for the side who is being actively coerced. The Scots at Bannockburn in 1314 fought in order to force the English to stop, as it were, trying to force the Scots to submit to their will; the French Republic to force the European Monarchies to stop forcing it to accept their will in the restitution of the ancien regime; and I more modern times, the Poles in 1939 fought their war to coerce the Germans into no longer coercing them.
One of Clausewitz’s key concepts not yet mentioned was that of the pure form of war, it’s “absolute Gestalt13”, in the realm of the conceptual, rather than the actual reality of the world, in which there could never be ‘pure war’. Clausewitz held that the study of real war must relate itself to the pure form, but not be governed by it. Relating the absolute form of war to it’s successful prosecution, Clausewitz writes in Chapter Three of Book Eight that “there is only one result that counts: final victory”14.
So wars are fought primarily to force the enemy to do one’s will, and this holds true for offensive and defensive wars. And “final victory” must then consist of forcing the enemy to do one’s will.
We can attempt to reconcile these two ideas – that there can be no definition of victory that always holds true and the idea that victory is forcing your enemy to do your will, thus giving it a clear definition – by the agency of the analytical concept of ‘Absolute’ or ‘Pure’ war. In ‘pure’ war, final victory is the only relevant goal, and one that consists of forcing the enemy to do all one wills them to, but in the real world, among the forms that war takes, victory can be considered to be any number of desirable outcomes.
Clausewitz identifies fundamentally two dualistic aims of real war, as opposed to absolute war’s aim of ‘final victory’ – “The Defeat of the Enemy” and “Limited Aims15”.
The first of these, “The Defeat of the Enemy”, is, to an extent, similar the ‘final victory’ of absolute war. ‘Final victory’ implies the complete destruction of the enemies forces, the reduction of his fortresses, and the possession of his lands. Clausewitz however claims that this is not necessary to defeat the enemy. If any one of these things can cause the defeat of the enemy, all of them are not always required:
“The conquest of the whole of the enemy’s territory is not always necessary16”.
Clausewitz gives the example of the early war against the French Republic waged by the reactionary monarchies17. Had Kellerman’s sans-culottes not stood firm against the Prussian cannonade at Valmy in September of 179218, Clausewitz opines, merely the capture of Paris would have won the war:
“If Paris had been taken in 1792, the war against the Revolution would almost certainly for the time being have been brought to an end19”
In 1805, however, the fact that the French controlled most of the Austrian Empire did not bring about victory – for that, Buonaparte’s victory at Austerlitz was required20. Here, and earlier, in the more orthodox military section of the book, when Clausewitz writes that “only major engagements involving all forces lead to major success21”, we see that he is an adherent to Buonaparte’s maxim of the concentration of forces and the decisive battle. While he usually shies of prescribing laws and maxims, he does write that “there is not higher law of strategy than that of keeping one’s forces concentrated22”
In Russia, Buonaparte did not get such a decisive battle, even after having taken Moscow – and this was the root of his defeat there.
So while it is not always necessary to defeat the enemy’s forces, Clausewitz says that when it is, it is the highest tenet of strategy – “the acts we consider most important for the defeat of the enemy are…destruction of his army, if it is at all significant23”. Further, the decisive battle is the only real instrument of doing so.
A war of “Limited Aims”, however, is different. It is fought not to defeat the enemy, but, depending on whether it is offensive or defensive, to certain limited aims to ensure success. As Clausewitz states many times, the nature of war is thus that its prime objective should be ‘final victory’, so “limited” wars are only fought when this is not possible. Further, ‘possible’ in this case encompasses political concerns, and should not be “a matter for purely military opinion24”. War, then, is limited by the political factors involved, and when the conjunction of political factors and military ones make the destruction of the enemy as a sole objective unfeasible, yet war itself unavoidable, a “Limited War” is fought.
‘Victory’ or ‘success’ in a limited war is even harder to define that in an unlimited one. It cannot be the complete and utter destruction of the enemy, for then it would not be a limited war.
Limited war is primarily fought with a negotiated peace in mind. If offensive, the aim is “the occupation of part of his territory”, which in turn means “at peace negotiations…we will have a concrete asset in hand”25; if it is a defensive limited war, then the objective is to stop the offensive belligerent from occupying territory and having an asset in hand. Success and Victory then, is subjective in Limited War.
In this dichotomy between Offensive Limited War, Defensive Limited war, Limited War and Destructive War, Real and Absolute War, we glimpse the fundamental principle of Clausewitz’s work, which he did not have the time to refine before his death. In one of his notes on the revision of On War, he wrote that “should an early death terminate my work, what I have written so far [is] a shapeless mass of ideas26”. Indeed, the only part of On War that Clausewitz considered complete was the first chapter of book one. This fundamental principle, the dual nature of war27, means that Clausewitz cannot easily give a definition of victory.
In summation, then there is no clear idea of victory in Clausewitz’s works. Clausewitz, Gallie says,
“will lay down some principle which immediately commends itself to common sense…but he thereupon proceeds to show how some other principle…interferes with it, to modify or even cancel its authority28”.
And we see this to be true in his discussions on when a war can be judged a success. In one chapter, he will opine on the complete destruction of the enemy’s forces, and in the next he will claim it is not necessary; he will claim that only the complete subjection of the enemy is success, the next that enough bargaining power gained is success. “War is an instrument of policy29”, he writes – victory then, is suborned to the needs of policy. If policy is satisfied, there is victory.
But when he says that “the result in war is never final30”, he comes his closest to divining the true nature of victory, namely that it is an impermanent thing, subject to changes in the political landscape, as much as the military one. The allies had won ‘victory’ in 181431, but Buonaparte returned from his exile in 1815, and fought the Hundred Days campaign as if Marmont’s treason, the fall of Paris, the farewell to the Garde and his Elban exile were merely wisps of smoke blown away in the wind.
In 1919, the Central powers were defeated. But within 20 years, Germany had risen again and was again bestriding the continent of Europe, more of a colossus than she had been a generation before.
Victory is fleeting, and defined by politics. Clausewitz saw this, and his main argument is that policy influences all ways of war. It is policy that shapes the world, not war. War is merely its implement, and victory its way of proclaiming its power – but only for a moment.
Bibliography
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Clausewitz, On War, eds. trans. Howard and Paret (Princeton, Princeton University Press 1984)
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Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, (Bonn, Duemmlers, 1951)
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Gallie, ‘Clausewitz on the Nature of War’, in Gallie, ed., Philosophers of Peace and War, (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1978)
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MacDonnell, Napoleon and his Marshals, (London, Macmillan, 1934)
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Paret ‘On the Genesis of On War’ in On War, ed. trans. Howard and Paret (Princeton, Princeton University Press 1984)
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Taylor, How Wars End, (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1985)
