Clausewitz’s Thoughts on Creating Guidelines for Military Conduct
Even if the committee working on a new field manual omitted Clausewitz, the short memorandum captured his thoughts on the ways to create guidelines for conduct in the field. Although published in the 1990 volume containing Clausewitz’s manuscripts and correspondence, the document has never been extensively studied, nor translated into English. This article offers its first English translation.
Clausewitz’s memorandum was sent to his close friend and former commander, Field Marshall August Neidhardt von Gneisenau.[7] Serving as the chief of staff for Blücher, Gneisenau was largely responsible for the planning of the Allied campaigns against Napoleon in 1813-1815. In the post-1819 period, the so-called Restoration Era, when Prussian politics took a reactionary turn, Gneisenau was awarded many honors but, as a suspected liberal, was kept away from active service. He and Clausewitz continuously exchanged ideas, and Gneisenau encouraged Clausewitz’s work on a general theory of war. It remains unclear whether Clausewitz expected that his friend would pass along the 1825 memorandum to other leading features in the Prussian military or used the occasion to simply clarify his thoughts on the subject.
A booklet capturing the conduct of armies in the field, a Feldmanual or field manual, was called to close a gap in Prussia’s military documentation. As part of the efforts to restructure and modernize the Prussian army after its disastrous defeat at the hands of Napoleon in the Jena-Auerstedt Campaign (1806), the reform circle led by Gerhard von Scharnhorst created an exercise manual in 1812.[8] The document aimed at introducing contemporary tactics, unifying the Prussian army’s conduct, and rebuilding it as a force able to face Napoleon’s troops. Following his mentor Scharnhorst’s instructions, as a General Staff major, Clausewitz served on the committee that compiled the infantry exercise manual. The booklet was considered a comprehensive guide for training troops that, with some changes, remained in use until 1843.[9]
Yet the realities of prolonged campaigning and mass warfare in the 1813-1815 period also revealed its limits. The exercise manual required extensive periods of training and long and systematic development of officers and non-commissioned officers able to lead troops. However, in the Wars of German Liberation, Prussia increasingly relied on newly drafted soldiers and the Landwehr (territorial reserve). For its officer corps, the Landwehr selected schoolteachers, civil servants, and prominent members of the society; although enthusiastic, they were far from military professionals. In general, the drafted Prussian troops and their leadership arrived at the war theater with four months of service on average. Without extensive training, newly commissioned and non-commissioned officers often lacked knowledge and experience leading to poor performance in the field.[10] They needed practical guidance for their conduct in combat.
As a reaction to this experience in the Wars of German Liberation, Clausewitz considered writing a field manual in 1816. His request for institutional support for the project was met with little enthusiasm from the war ministry; instead, Clausewitz devoted his energy to writing war theory.[11] Nonetheless, the need for a new manual guiding and unifying the army’s conduct on the field became hard to overlook, leading the Prussian military to plan the maneuvers of 1825 as the basis for the creation of such document.
Clausewitz’s memorandum displays his disdain for habitual committee work. As he stated, the emphasis on consensus from early on and attempts to please every expectation tended to steer the process in the wrong direction: “From the very first moment, everything is taken into account and agreement is sought too early.” Instead, Clausewitz suggested a group of experienced and knowledgeable officers with diverse expertise should reflect and write their proposals separately; only after these rough drafts were prepared should the committee meet and discuss which requirements and ideas should be captured in the manual. This process, Clausewitz implied, would “safeguard against one-sidedness” and could produce a valuable product.
This careful reflection on military instructions promised to also bridge the gap between theory and practice. Clausewitz criticized the notion that a field manual should be based on the experience from such a limited event as a fourteen-day exercise: “It seems to me implausible that we will learn in a fourteen-day-long exercise what has not been learned while experiencing a four-year-long war.” Instead, the creation of a manual had to be a deliberate and thoughtful process: “It is more a question of capturing, through careful and persistent reflection, what needs to be prescribed and can be prescribed.”
A military manual, Clausewitz argued, should be written in clear language and aim to capture the majority of cases. Arguing that no guide could offer instructions for every occasion—nor should it attempt to do it—Clausewitz emphasized the need for reliance on “common sense.” He also took a jab at the military profession and its love for elaborate paperwork, “which some find the service’s particular dignity.”
The practical field manual, he concluded, had to unify the force’s performance. Clausewitz argued further that practical guidance for combat, military education, and war theory ought to be in constant dialog. To describe this theoretical and normative unification of conduct, Clausewitz used the term Methodismus or mode of procedure. The latter, not coincidently, was also a chapter in his treatise On War.
The Consequences for On War
In the 1990s, the eminent German scholar Werner Hahlweg briefly commented on the similarities between the 1825 Memorandum and the chapter in Book II, Chapter 4 (translated by Peter Paret and Michael Howard as “Method and Routine”).[12] Contrary to the popular perception that the entirety of Clausewitz’s manuscripts had been lost in World War II, some of the early drafts are preserved in the German archives and provide clues on the development of his thought. The early version of Methodismus is one of those preserved.[13] Famously, as captured in the Note of 1827 published as the preface of On War, Clausewitz envisioned comprehensive revisions in the drafts, a plan never to be fulfilled due to his unexpected death in 1831.[14] The preservation of the earlier manuscripts allow us to study the development of Clausewitz’s thought and particularly the influence of the 1825 events and the memorandum on his revisions of On War.
In its early version, the chapter offered a rather short discussion, merely two pages in print, on the place of guidance in the study of war and the role routine and patterns could play in military conduct. As Clausewitz wrote in the draft, with its complex enactment and ever-changing conditions, war may appear as a human activity the least amendable to rules, guidance, and routine. However, when considering that commanders usually worked with imperfect information and without the ability to oversee and control the execution of every order, basing disposition “on the general and probable” was often the case. (The paragraph was partially preserved in the mature version of On War).[15] Thus, the question Clausewitz raised in the early draft—but failed to answer—was how this methodical procedure should be devised to facilitate military performance on the field without becoming a stiff routine that shackled conduct and blinded commanders to the singular challenges they faced in combat.
The 1825 Memorandum helped Clausewitz to refine his thinking on the matter. The chapter in On War we read today is an extended meditation on the role guidance, regulations, and routine should and could play in the conduct of war. Echoing the memorandum, Clausewitz argued that a “method” or “mode of procedure” is a constantly recurring procedure “that has been selected from several possibilities.” Despite its seeming uniformity, it could not describe all eventualities but “should be designed to meet the most probable cases. Routine is not based on definite individual premises, but rather on the average probability of analogous cases. Its aim is to postulate an average truth, which, when applied evenly and constantly, will soon acquire some of the nature of a mechanical skill.”[16] Clausewitz also found an answer to the question he posed in the early draft, namely, how to create practical but undogmatic guidance for conduct on the field: “As such [routines] may well have a place in the theory of the conduct of war, provided they are not falsely represented as absolute, binding frameworks for action (systems); rather they are the best of the general forms, short cuts, and options that may be substituted for individual decisions.”[17] In other words, they had to be understood for what they are—general guidelines and heuristics; thus, if keeping in mind their limitations, modes of procedure had their place. However, if they were seen as rules to be continuously followed, the guidelines would become counterproductive and even dangerous.
Additionally, as in the memorandum, Clausewitz saw procedures and routines in perpetual discourse with war theory; the latter, as he stated in the same chapter, was the “intelligent analysis of conduct of war.”[18] While unified methods and routines are typical and acceptable on a tactical level, Clausewitz commented that, at the higher levels of war, some imitation of previously successful approaches, application of ready-made solutions, or preferences dictated by the fashion of the day was also unavoidable. The danger came, however, when people failed to recognize these routines on an operational and strategic level for what they were, a “style, developed out of a single case.” As an antidote, war theory and its study, according to Clausewitz, are called to provide context and reveal when a method had outlived its time while simultaneously empowering leaders to seek and develop new approaches.[19]
Understanding Clausewitz’s Experience
The discovery of the 1825 portrait and an understanding of its larger context reveals how little we still know about the military theorist’s life and writing process. Although his war experience is extensively studied, Clausewitz’s tangible achievements as a military reformer on the eve of the Wars of German Liberation and afterwards are not yet fully appreciated.[20] The process of creation of On War remains, too, largely unexplored, a circumstance particularly vexing given the treatise’s unfinished nature. In fact, due to its complex language, the chapter on Methodismus discussed in this article is seldom read or debated in professional military seminars, despite its valuable insight into the business of war. By studying the roots of Clausewitz’s ideas and their gradual development, we can better understand their meaning while broadening our modern interpretation of his thought.
Most of all, for today’s national security practitioners exploring Clausewitz’s thought process brings reassurance and encouragement. The Prussian general continuously reflected on practical challenges he encountered in war and peace—and strove to capture these reflections in a general theory transcending the constraints of early nineteenth-century warfare. Thus, his treatise is an homage and empowerment of those enlightened professionals who constantly study the business of war and strive to conduct it in an informed and effective manner.
