On War by Carl von Clausewitz is arguably the most influential Western treatise on the subject of war. Clausewitz was a Prussian general who fought in the Napoleonic wars in the early 1800s, and he wrote extensively about military philosophy, strategy, and tactics.
The book consists of a large collection of essays. The author expressed an intent to develop them into a comprehensive textbook for military officers, politicians, and others who needed to understand the subject of war. However, he died before finishing this project, so his writings were published in their original form.
In this guide, we’ll first consider Clausewitz’s key philosophical ideas about war. Then, we’ll describe the chronology of a hypothetical war as he envisioned it and examine his tactical and strategic advice as it would apply to that situation. We’ll compare his advice to that of other military strategists, such as Sun Tzu, who wrote The Art of War (arguably the most influential Eastern treatise on war). We’ll also consider the broader implications and applications of his ideas to other areas of life besides military conflict.
We’ve grouped Clausewitz’s philosophical principles into three categories. First, we’ll discuss his perspectives on why war exists and the purpose it serves. Then, we’ll examine his views on what war really is—its essential nature. Finally, we’ll consider his ideas on the academic study of war and the criteria that any theory of war must meet.
According to Clausewitz, war is nothing but a tool of politics. When different nations or groups have conflicting political interests, one way to make the other side accommodate your interests is to compel them by means of military force. This, then, is the purpose of war: to force the enemy to comply with some kind of political demand. For example, maybe one country demands control of a region currently controlled by another country and invades that region if the other country refuses to cede it. Or perhaps an interest group within a country demands governmental reform and starts a revolutionary war if the government doesn’t reform.
(Shortform note: Robert Greene turns this definition of war around and uses it as the basis of his book The 33 Strategies of War. Where Clausewitz says the purpose of war is to compel someone (typically the leader of a rival nation) to yield to political demands, Greene says that any attempt to compel or control someone is itself an act of war. As such, he argues that you can apply strategies developed for military operations in any area of life where people may try to control you, such as work and business.)
As Clausewitz points out, his definition of the purpose of war implies that, as counterintuitive as it sounds, war is generally caused by defenders, not aggressors. This is because aggressors don’t directly make war; they only make political demands and perhaps send troops to enforce their demands. If the defender gives in to their demands without a fight, then the war doesn’t happen.
Fighting Back
It may be more intuitive to rephrase this principle as “bullies prefer victims who won’t fight back.” Fighting back is the cost of preventing the aggressor from getting their way, whether the aggressor is a foreign nation invading your sovereign territory or a burglar invading your home.
Is defying the aggressor’s intentions worth the cost? Some have argued that it isn’t. For example, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued that non-resistance to aggression is morally preferable.
However, others such as self-defense trainer and former US Army Ranger John Lovell argue that the moral and psychological cost of allowing someone to commit a horrible crime is far greater than the cost of fighting back. It seems safe to assume that Clausewitz would agree with this perspective, both in the case of individuals and nations.
Of course, war is not the only tool for advancing political interests. Clausewitz would probably agree that you shouldn’t resort to war if you can achieve your political purpose by other, less extreme measures. He does point out that, while war is a tool of politics, politicians don’t always use it correctly. Sometimes they start wars that achieve the opposite of what they wanted to achieve.
(Shortform note: Some experts argue that war and a combative mindset are usually counterproductive because they provoke others to resist you. In The Anatomy of Peace, the Arbinger Institute argues this point and proposes a strategy for getting others to accommodate your interests or demands without resistance by first building a relationship with them based on a cooperative mindset. They develop this strategy mostly in the context of interpersonal relationships, but some elements of their strategy could apply to international relations as well.)
Clausewitz also argues that letting military interests shape political policy or giving the military latitude to take action outside of political policy is ridiculous because war is a tool of politics, not the other way around.
(Shortform note: This is a point of disagreement between Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, who asserts that a military commander should adapt to the events of a war and do whatever it takes to win the war and protect the people of the nation, even if it means violating political policy.)
As we’ve discussed, war is a tool for advancing political interests, but that is its purpose, not its essence. What differentiates war from other means of pursuing a political objective? According to Clausewitz, it’s violence. Combat is the essence of war: When two nations or factions are at war with each other, their respective soldiers are trying to kill each other. If they’re trying to achieve a political objective by any means other than killing each other, then war is not the tool that they’re using.
Consequently, Clausewitz completely dismisses the idea of trying to make war less violent. Since war is violence, any attempt to make it less violent is delusional. By all means, find non-violent ways of achieving your objectives if you can, but if you must resort to war, then you must resort to violence.
He goes on to point out that even a “bloodless victory,” where the enemy retreats without firing a shot, still depends on your willingness and ability to engage in combat: Your enemy only withdraws because he has no hope of winning, or because the cost of winning would be unacceptably high. Either way, your capacity for violence is what drives your enemy to seek peace.
Debate Over the Essence of War
Just as Clausewitz and Sun Tzu disagree on the relationship of war to political policy, they also disagree on the essence of war. Clausewitz says the essence of war is violence, while Sun Tzu argues that violence is not the most essential element of war.
Sun Tzu doesn’t explicitly say what he considers the essence of war, but he does discuss several things he considers more important than killing the enemy. One of them is creating dissension or other forms of instability within the enemy army and nation. This is because, in his view, killing enemy soldiers only provides a means of immediate survival, while destabilizing the enemy provides a means of winning the whole war. This is presumably because an army or nation that loses its internal cohesion or resolve isn’t capable of fighting a war, or at least not of fighting effectively.
In addition to discussing the purpose and essence of war, Clausewitz frequently comments on the academic study and theory of war. He expresses dissatisfaction with common theories of his day, asserting that they didn’t provide an accurate model of real war, and he identifies three key shortcomings that tend to undermine their accuracy. He admits that these factors are difficult for a theory to predict and clarifies his discourse on war is not intended to provide a comprehensive model of war.
As we discussed, war is a political tool, so the political motives behind any given war will shape the events of the war. Thus, a theory cannot model war accurately if it treats it as a self-contained phenomenon, independent of the cause or purpose of the war.
Psychological resources like the motivation, resolve, and emotional strength of an army play an even more significant role in winning battles than physical resources like the number of soldiers and the supply of ammunition.
Furthermore, war is intensely personal for those involved: Even if the war was started for the purpose of advancing an impersonal political cause, once the soldiers have seen a few of their friends killed in action, they inevitably come to hate the enemy at a personal level. Thus, a theory cannot accurately model war if it treats soldiers and commanders as impersonal or perfectly rational beings.
In a real war, you never have complete information about your enemy’s strength, position, or plans, and the information you have is usually wrong. It may be outdated or distorted by human biases of the people who gathered or relayed the information. In particular, people tend to over-report bad news and under-report good news, so your enemy is often a lot weaker than the latest intel indicates.
When you command an army, even the actions of your own troops are subject to a measure of uncertainty because your orders can be misinterpreted as they’re passed down the chain of command. Then there’s always an element of luck involved in carrying them out. Any number of unpredictable factors beyond your control can affect the success or speed of your operations: Maybe some of your gun carriages get stuck in the mud and that delays getting your artillery into position. Maybe a fog bank rolls in, and you can’t see important landmarks that you were using to plot the course of a march. Maybe there’s an outbreak of sickness in your camp.
Thus, a theory that assumes both sides have perfect information and can predict each other's actions and maneuvers, or even their own, with reasonable precision cannot provide an accurate model of war.
Evaluating The Art of War Against Clausewitz’s Three Factors
Clausewitz generally doesn’t call out the theories or theorists that he disagrees with by name, but since Sun Tzu’s The Art of War has influenced many military theorists, let’s evaluate The Art of War against Clausewitz’s three factors.
Politics: Sun Tzu doesn’t really discuss the interplay between politics and war, and, as we said before, he advises military commanders to disregard political policy if necessary in order to adapt to battlefield conditions. This arguably sets a precedent for viewing war in isolation from politics. Clausewitz argues that this precedent is unwarranted because war isn’t isolated from politics—it’s driven by politics.
Human Factors: Like Clausewitz, Sun Tzu emphasizes the significance of psychological issues in war. And, more so than Clausewitz, Sun Tzu provides guidance on how to read your enemy’s mental state and manipulate your enemy to gain a psychological advantage. For example, he advises feigning weakness in the face of a strong enemy to lure them into complacency. He also says that if enemy sentries signal each other more often than usual or necessary during the night watch, it means they’re afraid—they’re contacting each other for moral support.
Uncertainty: Sun Tzu doesn’t take complete information for granted, but he does seem to think it’s possible and indeed crucial to a successful war effort. This is because, in his view, good strategy is what wins the war, and you need thorough knowledge of your enemy to develop a good strategy. He discusses espionage at length because spies provide you with information about your enemy. He notes that, to motivate faithful service, you should reward spies who provide you with good information and kill spies who provide you with faulty information.
Sun Tzu focuses on getting the best information possible so that you can predict your enemy’s behavior as accurately as possible, and he doesn’t address the inherent limitations on your ability to know or predict anything with precision. As such, Clausewitz would probably say that Sun Tzu’s writings provide, at best, an ideal of intelligence to strive for, but not a complete model of real-life warfare.
Now that we understand Clausewitz’s views on what war is, what it’s for, and the difficulty of developing theories that are faithful to the reality of war, we can consider his practical advice on tactics and strategy from his viewpoint.
To understand his advice, it’s also helpful to picture the context in which he meant it to be applied. Documenting the normal operations of the military in his day was not Clausewitz’s primary purpose in writing, but he mentions many aspects of these operations in passing. And since the normal operations of armies in the Napoleonic era are no longer common knowledge (as they would have been to Clausewitz’s original audience), we’ve used the information that he provided in passing to describe a hypothetical war, which should furnish the necessary context.
However, before we dive into our hypothetical war story and use it to present Clausewitz’s ideas about tactics and strategy, we need to clarify what he meant by “tactics” and “strategy.”
Throughout the book, Clausewitz is careful to differentiate between strategy and tactics. Strategy is about picking your battles to achieve the ultimate objective of the war. Tactics are about winning any particular battle, given the troops you’ve got to work with, the terrain, your enemy’s position, and so on.
However, despite Clausewitz’s efforts to continually distinguish between the two, his discussion makes it clear that tactics and strategy are not independent of each other. Tactical considerations such as the type of terrain and which troops can make better use of it affect the likelihood of winning a given battle, which in turn affects your strategy: You would probably try to avoid a battle if tactical factors favor your opponent. And the strategic purpose of a battle may affect your tactics. For example, you’ll use different tactics if your goal is to defend a key position with minimal losses than if your goal is to wipe out a particular enemy force at any cost.
Because tactics and strategy are actually interwoven in war, Clausewitz’s insistence on distinguishing between them may, at times, be more distracting than useful. As such, we will present his tactical and strategic advice largely without differentiating between the two.
For the remainder of this guide, imagine that it is the early 1800s. You are in command of the army of Country A, and Clausewitz is your advisor. Neighboring Country B recently broke off political negotiations on an issue of vital importance to your country, and war has been declared.
Your mission is to defeat B’s army and occupy their capital. As Clausewitz explains, every nation’s strength revolves around something—usually either their government or their military. So, by defeating their army and taking over the seat of their government, you’ll most likely render Country B powerless to refuse the political terms that would secure your nation’s interests.
(Shortform note: A similar principle is commonly used in “hardball” business strategies for dealing with competitors. Just as a nation’s strength typically comes from a few key sources, every company has certain products or services that net them most of their profits. Identifying your competitors’ most profitable products allows you to compete more effectively, whether by taking a share of a particularly profitable market or tacitly agreeing to stay out of their market as long as they stay out of yours.)
Your army consists of infantry armed with muskets, cavalry armed with sabers, and muzzleloading cannons for artillery. On Clausewitz’s advice, you organize your troops into eight groups, with units of infantry, cavalry, and artillery in each group. This gives you maximum flexibility by giving each group all the capabilities it needs to fight independently from the other groups if needed.
(Shortform note: Clausewitz assumes a centralized command structure and advises fully equipping each group to give the commander maximum flexibility. But some modern-day military commanders, such as US Navy Captain David Marquet, advocate not only giving troops more capability to carry out orders but empowering them with the authority to respond to situations as needed without waiting for orders.)
This strategy also keeps the hierarchy of command as flat as possible. The fewer people who have to pass on your orders before they get to the individual soldiers, the less chance of them being distorted or misunderstood. But according to Clausewitz, eight to 10 subordinate commanders reporting to you directly is about the most that you can realistically keep track of.
(Shortform note: Modern business writers echo Clausewitz’s admonition to keep organizational structures relatively flat for better communication between all levels of the organization. Interestingly, management experts like Andrew Grove (former CEO of Intel), also agree that eight direct reports is about the most that you can really manage, despite the vastly different circumstances of managing a technology company in the 21st century versus commanding an army in the 19th century.)
As you move your army toward B’s border, you spend about half of each day marching and the other half dealing with supply issues. You purchase most of the food and other common supplies for your army from the local people as you move through your country or collect it from local government officials who’ve purchased it for you. You lodge your troops in whatever dwellings happen to be nearest to your route. As Clausewitz explains, these practices save considerable time and effort relative to sourcing all your supplies through military supply lines and setting up campsites all along the route of your march. Besides, in your own country, the local people should consider it part of their civic duty to feed and house soldiers passing through.
(Shortform note: While housing troops in civilian homes along their route may have been convenient for the military, even in Clausewitz’s day, some people viewed it as an invasion of privacy and a burden on the civilian population. This sentiment is reflected in law: The English parliament prohibited housing troops in civilian homes without the voluntary consent of the homeowner in the 1680s. And the Third Amendment of the US Constitution similarly restricts quartering soldiers in civilian homes.)
Once you cross the border into Country B, you need to adjust your routine. You still get most of your supplies from the locals, but now you do so by sending soldiers to the local officials and demanding that they give you what you need. Clausewitz notes that this is not only the most efficient way of sourcing food and common supplies, but it also has the added benefit of weakening your enemy since you’re now feeding your troops on B’s resources instead of your own.
That said, Clausewitz also stresses that it’s important to move quickly through enemy territory because your army will exhaust all the local food supplies if you stay in one place too long. And if you run out of local supplies, bringing them all the way from your home base in wagons is risky and expensive.
To allow for unforeseen delays or emergencies, he recommends having every soldier carry four days’ rations in his own pack and keeping another four days worth of food for the whole army in supply wagons that move with the army. That way, if the need arises, you can travel or fight for up to eight days without any new supplies.
Living Off the Land
We could generalize the essence of Clausewitz’s advice about supplies in foreign territory by saying, “Travel light, so you can focus on your mission.” This general principle applies whether your mission is a military invasion, a business trip, or an extended vacation. As author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss points out in The 4-Hour Work Week, the less luggage you have to carry and store on a trip, the better your travel experience will be.
If you’re traveling to another country for business or pleasure, you probably wouldn’t even think of bringing your own food with you—you’ll just buy food from local shops or restaurants. Just contemplating the hassle of bringing your own food drives home Clausewitz’s point about the challenge of shipping supplies from home, especially when you multiply your daily needs by tens or hundreds of thousands of men in an army.
Of course, when you travel for business or pleasure, the locals aren’t your enemies. But just as commandeering food from the locals in enemy territory contributes to a military goal of weakening the enemy, shopping locally while traveling contributes to your mutual benefit by supporting the local economy.
And the principle of relying on local supplies so you can travel light applies to more than just food. Instead of bringing everything you think you might need on a trip, Ferriss recommends just bringing some extra money to buy anything you find you actually need once you get there, like insect repellant or a raincoat. This cash reserve loosely corresponds to the limited supply of rations that Clausewitz advises having soldiers carry for emergencies because it allows you to deal with unforeseen needs as they arise.
Ferriss also recommends borrowing things from people who already have them. For example, if you want to go whitewater rafting, you don’t need a raft—you need a friend who already has a raft.
Clausewitz says that if you’re confident that Country B’s army is too far away to threaten you with a sudden attack, you can still quarter your troops in local housing on foreign soil. This is an efficient way of living off the enemy’s resources.
(Shortform note: In business, an analogous tactic is making use of your competitors’ services to get people to use your product—initially in addition to your competitor’s product, and eventually instead of it. For example, as a startup, Airbnb made use of Craigslist (a competitor in peer-to-peer property listings) both to identify prospective hosts and to cross-advertise listings.)
However, as the likelihood of encountering B’s armed forces increases, he says you should transition to making camp each night. In camp, the army remains together instead of spreading out to shelter in different houses. This provides better security, since your night watchmen don’t have to patrol as large an area, and your soldiers can assemble for battle more quickly.
That said, even when you’re planning on making camp, Clausewitz advises against bringing tents for the soldiers to sleep in. This is because it takes many horses to carry enough tents for an army, and those horses could serve you better in the cavalry than in the supply train. He assures you that bivouacking (camping in the open air) won’t degrade your troops’ health or fighting ability.
Recreational Bivouacking
Today, bivouacking is gaining popularity with some recreational campers. Even with modern, lightweight tents that humans can easily carry, by eliminating the tent, bivouacking saves weight, bulk, and cost on camping trips.
It also allows you to make better use of natural shelter, such as overhanging rocks: You can sleep at the base of the rock, but you probably wouldn’t be able to pitch a tent there. Similarly, bivouacking gives you more options when camping in rough terrain. In steep, rocky, or densely forested areas, it’s easier to find a clear, flat spot just large enough to roll out your sleeping bag than it is to find a clear, flat area large enough to pitch a tent in.
There is also less evidence of your presence because tents are more visible than people sleeping on the ground, and tents often require driving tent stakes into the ground, leaving minor disturbances even after the tent is taken down. Clausewitz would probably be quick to point out that less visibility is great for added security if you’re camping in enemy territory. It also aligns well with the “leave no trace” ethic practiced by many modern outdoor recreationalists.
Of course, the downside to bivouacking is that it provides less shelter in the event of inclement weather. You can minimize this downside by checking the weather forecast and only camping out when the weather conditions are expected to be favorable. In Clausewitz’s day, most armies only fought during the summer months, probably at least partly for this reason.
Let’s say the first resistance you encounter is a chain of outposts guarding a river that you must cross on your way to B’s capital. As Clausewitz points out, the river limits how fast you can move your troops into position to attack the enemy forces because it takes time to build a bridge or ferry your troops across the river. This gives B’s defending forces an advantage.
However, he also says that, in this case, it’s not a major problem because your army significantly outnumbers the enemy force. Strength in numbers is more consequential than the advantage or disadvantage that terrain features like this afford. In particular, Clausewitz assures you that outnumbering your enemy by at least two-to-one practically guarantees victory in most cases.
Moreover, this situation actually amplifies your numerical advantage, because the defending force is strung out over a long stretch of river. They don’t know where you’ll try to cross the river, so they have to guard its whole length. But you can bring your whole force across at one place. This way, you’re using your whole force against a small portion of theirs.
Sun Tzu’s Perspective on Numbers and Terrain
Clausewitz and Sun Tzu agree that having more troops gives you an advantage in war, but Sun Tzu takes a more conservative stance on how big the difference should be. He prefers to have 10 times as many soldiers as his enemy so that he can completely surround them. If you have two to five times more troops than your enemy, he advises trying to draw the enemy into an ambush. And if you only have the same number of troops as your enemy, he says you should avoid battle.
By contrast, Clausewitz generally feels confident of victory with at least twice as many soldiers as the enemy. If he saw any additional advantages to outnumbering the enemy more than two-to-one, he doesn’t discuss them. And he seems perfectly comfortable engaging in battle with equal numbers or even being slightly outnumbered if he has other advantages that make up the difference, such as better equipment or better morale.
Like Clausewitz, Sun Tzu observes that terrain features such as water can provide an advantage to one side. In the case of rivers, he corroborates Clausewitz’s observation that crossing a river slows down an army. Sun Tzu goes on to advise that you can use this to your advantage by waiting for the enemy to cross and then attacking them with your whole force when only half of their force has crossed, effectively doubling your numerical advantage.
Let’s say you ferry enough infantry across the river in boats to hold a position on the far bank while your army builds a makeshift bridge. The bridge allows you to bring the bulk of your force across the bridge before B’s whole defending force can converge on your location.
But, on Clausewitz’s advice, you don’t send all your troops into battle at once. Instead, you send just a few more than the enemy appears to be fielding and keep the rest far enough back to be out of the battle. Clausewitz calls the troops that you don’t initially send into battle your “reserve force,” and it can serve a number of functions. For one thing, there’s always some uncertainty about how a battle will unfold, so it’s good to have troops ready that you can send in to counter the enemy’s unforeseen moves.
Moreover, you can use them to reinforce and refocus your troops in combat: Clausewitz observes that battles often open with focused, coordinated fighting but quickly devolve into disorganized, reactive fighting because soldiers easily forget their plans and orders under the stress of combat. If you send in fresh troops after the fighting has become disorganized, they can help all your forces refocus on their battle objectives. If the enemy forces have become disorganized by this point as well (and don’t similarly refocus their forces with fresh troops), this gives you a huge advantage and usually results in a decisive victory.
(Shortform note: Sun Tzu also suggests holding back a few of your troops to counter your enemy’s unforeseen moves or exploit enemy weaknesses that become apparent later in the battle. And he discusses the importance of psychological factors in battle. But he doesn’t combine the two as Clausewitz does when he recommends sending in reserve troops to refocus your attack.)
Finally, when you win a battle, you can use your fresh troops to pursue the enemy.
The Einstellung Effect
Even when you’re not involved in a literal battle, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture and stop making progress because of the way your brain works.
In A Mind for Numbers, educator Barbara Oakley explains that your brain normally alternates between two modes of operation: In focused mode, your mind is filled with one particular task or problem, and your synapses (neural connections that make up thoughts in your brain) are concentrated in a particular region of your brain. This mode is important for solving problems and executing tasks because it facilitates processing information in detail, and you have to keep track of details to implement a solution.
In diffuse mode, your mind is more relaxed, and your synapses more readily span different parts of the brain. This is also important for solving problems because it facilitates connecting diverse ideas, allowing you to see the big picture or come up with creative solutions. But it only processes abstract concepts, not detailed information, so to solve most problems, you have to alternate between the two modes.
Your brain will alternate between the two modes naturally, but if you focus intensely on a particular task or problem for a long period of time (like a couple of hours), your brain can get stuck in focused mode, preventing you from progressing beyond a certain point because in focused mode, it can’t see the big picture. This is known as the Einstellung effect.
The Einstellung effect could explain the behavior that Clausewitz observed in his troops: They would go into battle focused on a particular assignment, and the mental stress of carrying out their initial orders under fire would prevent their brains from ever relaxing enough to reassess the big picture. It wasn’t that they’d lost their original focus, but rather that they were unable to shift their focus as the battle progressed, at least not without help from fresh reserves.
As you work on tasks and solve problems at work, at school, or at home, you may not have the luxury of calling in a fresh replacement whenever you fall victim to the Einstellung effect, but the good news is you don’t need to. There are other ways of breaking out of the Einstellung effect so that you can refocus and start making progress again. According to Oakley, all you have to do is deliberately switch your brain into diffuse mode for a while. You can do this by taking a break from the task at hand and going for a walk, taking a nap, or tending to chores that don’t require much thought. As soon as the problem that you were stuck on has been cleared out of your conscious mind, you can re-attack it with a fresh perspective.
As soon as the enemy begins to retreat from the battlefield, Clausewitz urges you to pursue them. Take possession of any cannons or supply wagons that they abandon in their haste to get away, take any stragglers prisoner, and keep the retreating army under fire so they never have a chance to rest and regroup.
Ideally, he says your army should follow B’s retreating force until they try to make camp for the night and then attack their camp, forcing them to retreat again. Then, your army can make camp and get a good night’s rest while B’s army marches through the night, unable to see if you’re still on their heels. If you can catch up with them and attack their camp again the next day, then they'll have to march through the night again, and so on.
(Shortform note: Modern science supports the effectiveness of weaponizing sleep deprivation as Clausewitz advises. As Bill Bryson notes in The Body: A Guide for Occupants, studies have shown that sleep deprivation can be fatal. Lab rats that are prevented from sleeping die within a month, and in humans, genetic disorders that make sleep impossible also lead to death. Thus, in principle, Clausewitz’s tactic of preventing the enemy from sleeping by attacking their camp each night could directly inflict massive casualties if you kept it up long enough.)
Making the Most of Engineering Victories
Clausewitz points out that you can benefit a lot more from winning a battle if you exploit your victory by pursuing the enemy. Similarly, in high-tech business sectors, successfully developing a new product that provides new or substantially improved capabilities can be a major engineering victory. But it won’t do your company’s bottom line any good unless you exploit it by pursuing customers through marketing and effective distribution. And, just as Clausewitz captured enemy supplies, artillery, and soldiers by pursuing his retreating enemy, effective marketing is what allows you to capture market share.
Along these lines, in Perennial Seller, Ryan Holiday emphasizes that you can’t make a product so good that people will automatically want to buy it—you have to show them why it’s worth buying through marketing. He then offers tips on how to market a product effectively, like building relationships with key influencers and giving away free samples of your product to spark interest.
You continue to chase the remnant of B’s retreating army until they reach a garrisoned fortress and take refuge there. On Clausewitz’s advice, you split your forces, leaving some troops to keep the fortress under siege, while the larger portion of your force continues toward B’s capital.
Splitting your forces is generally not a good idea, because it reduces your strength in numbers. But in this case, it’s warranted because the siege will take time, and the longer it takes you to reach B’s capital, the more time they’ll have to raise additional troops and prepare their defenses: Time is on their side.
Clausewitz explains that invasions such as this often reach a turning point because time is on the side of the defender, while both time and distance are working against the attacker. The longer your army is out in the field, the more your force will get worn down: You lose men in battle, even when you win the battle. You also lose men while marching, as some of them won’t be able to keep up due to illness, injury, or fatigue. Finally, you lose wagons or artillery when they break down in the field or are damaged in battle. And the farther you go into enemy territory, the more troops you have to divert to protect couriers and convoys on the routes that you use to communicate with your home country.
So the longer you continue your attack, the weaker you become while your enemy becomes stronger. As Clausewitz points out, this doesn’t matter if you completely defeat your enemy while you’re strong enough to do so, which is what you’re trying to do in this case.
But if you wait too long, or if you weren’t strong enough to begin with, then you’ll reach a point where the enemy can match your military strength. Ideally, just before you reach that point, you would break off your attack and switch to building up your defenses in the territory you’ve conquered. Then, time begins to work in your favor. But Clausewitz opines that it’s almost impossible to know exactly when you’re going to reach that turning point. He observes that most commanders either halt their attack prematurely or else press the attack until they’re badly overmatched and can’t defend what they conquered.
Turning Time and Distance Against Your Enemy
As he describes how an attacking army becomes weaker the farther it travels, Clausewitz largely takes for granted that this is a disadvantage to the attacker and thus an advantage to the defender. By contrast, when Sun Tzu writes about the same principle, he presents it as an advantage that can go to whichever side makes better use of it.
Sun Tzu advises forcing your opponent to travel as far as possible while you travel as little as possible so that their army wears down faster than yours. He says that, even as the attacker, you can do this by moving a little way toward a vulnerable city, sacred shrine, or other asset that your enemy will then have to move his army to defend. Then, you change course for a different target, and so on, forcing him to march his army all over the place. As long as your enemy is wearing down his army faster than you are wearing down yours, time is on your side.
As you approach Country B’s capital, you finally meet the main body of B’s army. To your surprise, you’re outnumbered by about two to three. As we’ve discussed, there is always some uncertainty in war. Clausewitz points out that other military theorists put a lot of emphasis on gaining an advantage by deceiving the enemy or attacking quickly, in the hopes of catching the enemy by surprise.
He says that in reality, the element of surprise is overrated. The only “surprise” that really makes a difference is finding enemy troops where you didn’t expect to find them, or in greater numbers than you expected, and these kinds of surprises are usually more a matter of chance than deliberate deception.
Is Secrecy Overrated in Business, Too?
As we discussed earlier, Sun Tzu advocates making extensive use of secrecy and deception to gain advantages over the enemy through the element of surprise, unlike Clausewitz, so there is a difference of opinion between military strategists on the relative value of secrecy. There is a similar difference of opinion among business strategists on the value of secrecy and legal protections when it comes to technical information and intellectual property.
Some argue that when you’re developing a new product, it’s important to keep all the details a secret until you can secure patent protection so that someone else doesn’t steal your idea and the profits you would have made on it. They advise that nondisclosure agreements can help ensure that your secrets don’t get out, and provisional patent applications can give you a head start on securing patent protection.
Others argue that patent protection (and the secrecy that goes along with keeping an invention patentable) is seldom worth it because obtaining a patent is a long, expensive process. In some cases, by the time your patent is granted, your invention may already have become obsolete. If you tried to keep it a secret all that time, then you missed out on the opportunity to sell it while it would have been profitable.
You meet the enemy in battle, but it soon becomes clear that you’re not going to win, or at least not win a decisive victory that would allow you to achieve your political objective of crushing B’s army and occupying their capital. Clausewitz advises you to execute an orderly retreat while you can still do so with your fighting force intact.
To do this, you assemble a rear guard from your best remaining troops and use them to defend a series of defensive lines. Their orders are to hold each line for a certain amount of time and then fall back to the next line, such that B’s army is continually under fire as they pursue you.
As Clausewitz explains, this provides two major advantages, one physical and the other psychological. The physical advantage is that delaying any pursuit allows your army to retreat slowly enough that you don’t have to abandon supplies, artillery, wounded soldiers, or others who wouldn’t be able to keep up with a fast march.
The psychological advantage is that, as the rear guard succeeds in holding off your pursuers, these little victories help to rebuild your troops’ confidence after it was shattered by losing a battle and having to retreat.
That said, Clausewitz also cautions that after losing a major battle, it’s almost impossible for an army to fully recover its confidence and morale without outside help. Usually, this outside help takes the form of fresh reinforcements: The additional troops increase the physical strength of your army, and, perhaps more importantly, this gives your army tangible reason to believe they’re no longer inferior to the enemy.
In this case, let’s say that you make it back to the fortress that you besieged and rejoin the forces conducting the siege. Meanwhile, B’s army has been weakened by the long chase and the casualties that your rear guard inflicted. Now you’re potentially able to match their strength again.
Dealing With Defeat
Most people will never lose a major military battle because most people aren’t high-ranking military commanders, but everyone experiences failure in some area of life at some point. We can extract a number of universal principles for dealing with failure from Clausewitz’s advice on military retreat, which other authors have applied to dealing with other types of failure.
1. When you fail, admit it. If a military commander refuses to admit that he can’t win a particular battle, he’ll get all his soldiers killed and thereby preclude any future victories. As Clausewitz says, it’s better to retreat while your army is still intact. Similarly, as Ryan Holiday discusses in Ego Is the Enemy, you can waste a lot of resources trying to salvage your failed endeavors when you refuse to admit failure. Refusing to admit failures also prevents you from learning from them, which may doom your future endeavors.
2. Retreat without giving up. Clausewitz insists on making the enemy fight for every inch of ground as they pursue your retreating army, citing both physical and psychological benefits. Similarly, in Make Your Bed, retired Navy SEAL William McRaven insists that when you fail at something, it should motivate you to try again and try harder, not to give up. So even as you retreat from one failure, keep fighting to prepare for your next attempt. What your “fight” looks like depends on the nature of your endeavor. For example, if you’re competing in sports and lose a match, maybe you fight your way out of failure by adopting a more rigorous training routine.
3. Make changes for the better. Clausewitz asserts that an army needs external assistance, such as fresh reinforcements, to recover from a defeat. Similarly, to have any rational hope of succeeding where you failed before, you have to learn from the failure and make changes that will prevent it from recurring. In Think Like a Rocket Scientist, Ozan Varol discusses learning from failures and emphasizes the importance of addressing the real cause of the failure, not just the superficial symptoms.
By this point, you’ve done a lot of marching, crossed a river under fire, defeated some of Country B’s forces, divided your army to lay siege to a fortress, lost a battle against B’s main army, retreated from defeat, and regrouped your main fighting force. However, instead of culminating in a decisive battle between your main army and B’s main army, the war now devolves into a stalemate: It has become apparent that, at present, you don’t have the military strength to achieve your original political objective (crush B’s army completely and occupy their capital). Yet any of B’s territory that you can occupy gives your country more to bargain with in negotiations. Meanwhile, B’s army doesn’t have the strength to crush yours with a decisive counterattack, or at least B’s commander isn’t confident that they do and isn’t willing to risk losing a decisive battle with their main force.
So you both wait for the situation to change. You send out a few raiding parties to ambush B’s supply convoys, and B retaliates in kind. Your raiding parties and convoy escorts fight minor skirmishes with each other, but you both avoid major battles. Clausewitz assures you that this is normal. In fact, situations where both sides are basically just waiting for circumstances to change make up the majority of the time you’ll spend at war.
Timing Your Attack
Sun Tzu identifies waiting for the right time to strike as a key element of strategy in war. If your enemy is strong and ready for a fight, he advises avoiding battle—even if your army is even stronger. Instead, wait until your enemy demonstrates some kind of vulnerability, such as being tired and weak while your army is still strong, and then attack suddenly.
Clausewitz alludes to this element of strategy in his observations about wars dragging on without any decisive battles because both sides are relatively evenly matched and too prudent to risk defeat in a major battle. But he doesn’t discuss the strategy of waiting for the right time to strike to the extent that Sun Tzu does.
In the following questions, we’ll revisit Clausewitz’s philosophical discussion of war and give you a chance to reflect on how some of the issues he addresses apply to you.
As we discussed, Clausewitz identifies physical violence—people trying to kill each other—as the essence of war. He also makes the point that, in general, war only happens when people fight back against an aggressor instead of yielding to the aggressor's demands. Do you believe it’s ever appropriate to resort to violence in resisting someone’s demands? If so, when is it appropriate? If not, why not? Note your thoughts below.
Clausewitz makes the point that war is just a tool for achieving political goals or enforcing political policy. He also observes that politicians don’t always use war correctly: Sometimes they wage wars that are counterproductive to their political goals. Think of the tools that you use to pursue your goals in life or business. For instance, your tools might include schedules, meetings, social networking sites, vocational training, and so on. When was the last time that one of these tools ended up being counterproductive? How could you change how you use that tool to prevent the problem from recurring?
Similarly, Clausewitz observes that sometimes politicians let wars shape political policy instead of making the war conform to their political goals. Again, think of the tools that you use to achieve your goals in life or business. When was the last time you found yourself trying to conform yourself or your goals to one of your tools instead of using the tool to achieve your goals? (For example, have you ever found that instead of managing your schedule, your schedule was managing you?) What did you do to solve this problem, or, if you haven’t resolved the issue yet, what could you do to solve it?
Clausewitz makes the point that theories of war that model soldiers and commanders as impersonal, perfectly rational agents are not accurate because soldiers are human: Conflict between humans often becomes personal, even if it was started for impersonal reasons. When was the last time someone took something you did or said more personally than you expected or intended? Taking human nature into account, what could you do differently next time you’re in a similar situation?
In the following questions, we’ll revisit some of Clausewitz’s tactical and strategic advice, giving you a chance to consider how it might be applicable to your own situation.
Clausewitz stresses the importance of traveling light so that the army can move faster and focus on its main objectives, rather than devoting a lot of manpower to coordinating supply lines. A similar principle applies to travel in general: The more baggage you carry, the more energy you’ll expend lugging it around, and the less you’ll have left to focus on the purpose of your trip. Think about your most recent vacation or business trip. Did you pack any items that you never used on the trip? If so, what were they? What items did you bring along that you could have purchased or borrowed locally when you needed them?
Clausewitz observes that rivers are an obstacle to an advancing army when the river is guarded by the enemy. But he argues that the obstacle is relatively easy to overcome, provided your forces are superior to those guarding the river. Think about obstacles that you’re currently facing in your career or life, especially obstacles that might seem insurmountable at first glance. List one obstacle that you’re currently facing and describe the ‘forces’ you’d need (resources, connections, and so on) to overcome it.
Clausewitz observes that under the stress of battle, soldiers tire out, lose focus, and cease to fight effectively. He recommends keeping some reserve troops out of battle to send in later so that their energy and focus can help the whole army refocus and continue to fight effectively. Think about the last time that you—or one of your subordinates, if you’re in a management position—got tired or burned out with a project to the point where it was hard to make any further progress. In that situation, who could you call or send in to provide a fresh perspective and help get the project moving forward again? In other words, who were your reserve troops?
Clausewitz points out that when you can’t win a battle, it’s better to retreat with your army intact than to let the enemy kill or capture your entire force. But, of course, you can’t win battles if you retreat at the first sign of danger. The same principle holds true for business ventures and other projects: To succeed, you have to strike a balance between taking big risks and cutting your losses when projects begin to fail. Think about the last time you decided to pull the plug on a project or venture. What was it that convinced you it was time to sound the retreat? Or how do you determine when a project no longer has any meaningful chance of success?