War Essay Research Paper WarWar is nothing

War Essay, Research Paper

War

War is nothing but the continuation of political intercourse with the intermixing of other means (Clauswitz). This dictum, so many times quoted, is from the most famous book on war called On War written by Carl Von Clauswitz, a Prussian veteran of the Napoleonic wars. Its simplicity gave many civilized leaders the much-needed justification to send millions to their deaths to further their political and social objectives. Looking at mankind s history, one must come to the conclusion that this is what WAR IS NOT.

Clauswitz, in his dictum, implies the existence of state, state interests, and rational calculation analyzing war. Yet war antedates the state, diplomacy and strategy by many years. Warfare is almost as old as mankind, and reaches into the most secret places of the human heart. Places where self dissolves rational thinking, where pride reigns, where emotions are paramount, and where instinct is king. Clauswitz does not dare confront the thought that man is a thinking animal in whom the intellect directs the urge to hunt and the ability to kill.

This is not an idea easy for the modern man to confront. Our moral values remain those of the great monotheistic religions, which condemn the killing of other people. Although psychoanalysis tries to convince us that the savage in all of us lurks not far below the skin, we prefer, nonetheless, to recognize human nature as we find it displayed in the everyday behavior of the civilized majority in the modern world.

As John Keegan states in his book The History of Warfare, history s lessons remind us that the modern life, that is the states in which we live in, our institutions, and our laws have come to us through conflict, often of the most bloodthirsty sort. Our daily diets of news bring to us reports of the shedding of blood, in regions quite close to us. Yet we succeed in camouflaging these lessons to a category of otherness , while calling the use of violence by our own institutions of state civilized warfare .

Clauswitz does not acknowledge the idea of pacifism, yet he does distinguish sharply between the lawful and unlawful bearer of arms. His dictum presupposes a high level of military discipline and an awesome degree of obedience. It expect that war will take certain narrowly definable forms siege, pitched battle, skirmish, raid, reconnaissance, patrol and outpost duties each of which has its own recognized conventions. It assumes that wars have a beginning and an end.

War is the continuation of policy does not allow for pre-state people rebellions, a type of warfare in which there is no distinction between lawful and unlawful bearers of arms. This form of warfare prevailed during long periods of mankind history and was utilized by the civilized states many times. During the eighteenth century many regular, civilized armies employed such forces, making names such as the Cossacks, Highlanders, and Hussars part of the military jargon. The civilized employers ignored these irregular warriors habits of loot, pillage, rape, murder, kidnap, extortion, and systematic vandalism. The civilized employers averted their gaze from the unlawful, uncivilized, and barbaric methods of fighting; yet without the services these unlawful warriors offered, the over drilled armies, in which Clauswitz and his kin had been raised, would have scarcely been able to keep the battlefield. That it was an older and more widespread form of warfare than that which they themselves practiced they preferred not to admit. War is the continuation of policy – Once Clauswitz had formulated the thought, proved to offer the thinking officer a convenient philosophical bolthole from contemplation of the older, darker, and fundamental aspect of his profession.

However Clauswitz did see, with half an eye, that war was not what he claimed it to be. In his book he raises the question if the wars of the civilized people are less cruel and destructive than those of savages. Although he never answers this burning query, a short glimpse at one part of his life may provide the answer.

As part of the forces opposing Napoleon in his Russia campaign of 1812, Clauswitz saw Moscow burning as the result of the Cossacks acts. The Cossacks were soldiers of the tsar. The story of their origin has been called a myth, yet the essence of the myth is both simple and true. Cossacks – the name derived from the Turkic word for freeman were fugitives from Poland, Lithuania, and Russia, who preferred to live in freedom in the rich but lawless surface of the great Central Asian steppe.

By the time Clauswitz came to know the Cossacks, they were regarded by the tsar as freestanding warriors societies, responsible for supplying regiments for war in return for their freedom. They were much nearer to the freebooting murderers of original Cossackdom than the dashing rovers whom Tolstoy was later to romanticize in his early novels, and their burning of the outskirts of Moscow in 1812, which led to the conflagration of the whole capital, was wholly in character. The Cossacks showed how cruel they could be when the long columns of Napoleon s grand army that straggled knee-deep through the snow toward the hope of safety were stalked just out of musket-shot by their waiting squadrons. When a group was succumbed it was ridden down and wiped out; and when the Cossacks caught the remnants of the F