Military Strategy

War," which has been the bible of many soldiers since Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke attributed its guidance to his victories in the wars of German unification. American soldiers and military thinkers have been attracted by his ideas; George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower were extremely interested in his thoughts (Bassford, 1994, 7).

The acceptability of Clausewitz in the wake of Vietnam is not difficult to account for; among the major military theorists only Clausewitz seriously dealt with the sort of dilemma that the American military faced in the aftermath of defeat. Clausewitz's analysis could not have been more relevant:

"The more powerful and inspiring the motives for war the more closely will the military aims and the political objects of war coincide, and the more military and less political will war appear to be. On the other hand, the less intense the motives, the less will the military element's natural tendency to violence coincide with political directives. As a result, war will be driven further from its natural course, the political object will be more and more at variance with the aim of ideal war, and the conflict will seem increasingly polit

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at length; his discussion of "bloodless struggle" refers to political and psychological matters rather than actual war. If there is any fundamental difference between the two, it can be traced to their different views of the balance of power mechanism (Griffith, 1963, 26). Sun Tzu accepted the traditional Chinese ideal of uniting "all under heaven," despite the fact that the China of his era was split into warring states in many respects as unique as those of modern Europe; the Warring States period ended, in fact, in the unification of China. On the other hand, Clausewitz thought the idea of unifying Europe's diverse peoples absurd, as one might expect in an opponent of Napoleon (Bassford, 1994, 76). Is Strategy an Art or Science? To Clausewitz, war was neither an art nor a science. Those two terms often mark the parameters of theoretical debate on the subject, however, and Clausewitz's most ardent critics are those who treated war as a science. Clausewitz argued that the object of science is knowledge and certainty, while the object of art is creative ability. While all art involves some science and good science always involves creativity, Clausewitz saw that tactics were more scientific in character , while strategy was so
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Approximate Word count = 1340
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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