4 ms·

It's time to read some Clausewitz. That book outlines the philosophy of how most western states think about war. The short version I would say is that war is a

It's time to read some Clausewitz. That book outlines the philosophy of how most western states think about war. The short version I would say is that war is a tool of politics, so if there is no political goal, there will be no war, regardless of how bad the supposed Causus Belli is. Shooting down a drone usually doesn't do it partly because of the political implications: it would be deeply unpopular to put "boots on the ground" over a shot-down drone.

Kilenaitor 3y ago
Any specific book of his you recommend? "On War" seems to be the one that popped up on a search but wanted to confirm. Sounds like an interesting topic.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  On War is the book.
snek_case 3y ago
Seems to me that trigger events for wars are often about finding a justification for a war that people in power were already wanting to start. America doesn't want to go to war with Russia because we know it could be incredibly destructive, given that they have nukes. So, it would probably take a lot to start a war between the US and Russia. They would have to attack or be clearly planning to attack a NATO ally. It's possible that even if Russia intentionally downed a US jet, it would not immediately trigger a war. The US would likely add more sanctions, but they would probably show incredible restraint as well.
- pydry 3y ago
  In this case the Houthis have been the ones not reacting for many years: https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/21/us-war-crimes-yemen-stop-looking-other-way https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/21/us-war-crimes-yemen-stop...
  - tga_d 3y ago
    "Not reacting" how? There's been an ongoing war for almost a decade now.
    - pydry 3y ago
      When was the last time they attacked US shipping?
      - tga_d 3y ago
        That seems like an extremely narrow definition of "reacting," but even then, pretty regularly over many years, actually. In addition to the attacks earlier last month linked in TFA, here's a couple articles showing that this has been an ongoing thing: https://news.usni.org/2016/10/11/uss-mason-fired-3-missiles-to-defend-from-yemen-cruise-missiles-attack https://news.usni.org/2016/10/11/uss-mason-fired-3-missiles-... https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2020/03/houthis-increase-use-of-suicide-drone-boats-in-recent-weeks.php https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2020/03/houthis-incr... This isn't to dispute evidence of US war crimes, to be clear, but claiming the Houthis have just been doing nothing in response does not line up with the overwhelming evidence.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > a war that people in power were already wanting to start This is synonymous with a political goal. War is politics by other means. The dirty secret under that being most wars democracies engage in are publicly supported, at least at the outset.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  > They would have to attack or be clearly planning to attack a NATO ally. Somehow I doubt a war would start if a NATO ally would be attacked. Perhaps if invaded but not if attacked. And it’s not the US i don’t trust, it’s continental western europe. It lacks the military and the economy to carry out a war against any country with a bit of power. Continental Western Europe has already proven a lack of will and capacity. Wars in eastern europe are cataclismic events and the only country that can survive and potentially win is the US and the countries in the region if well armed and properly motivated. Therefore, as soon as a NATO country is attacked, west europe will claim tough luck, pull back and appease. The US won’t want to do it alone - and rightfully so. Putin knows this and is marching on. The cost of invasion for him and Russia is negligible - if anything it’s a net positive, as he now knows what his army lacks and it exposed those in his ranks that need replacement.
smegsicle 3y ago
meme contraexample of course being the gulf of tonkin incident where us warning fire on vietnamese vessels in vietnamese waters being responded to with actual fire was taken as grounds for war, because war was desired
- vidarh 3y ago
  It's worse than that: The US intentionally provoked the incident with sabotage and hit and runs, and then "faked" the second incident (they had bad data, fired on nothing, and then used skewed intelligence reports to back up a false claim of an attack) which was used as the final excuse (the latter was long suspected, but admitted to by McNamara in 2003, and by NSA records declassified in 2005).
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    Yeah, this is not a counterexample to the Clausewitzian view of war, but an example of it, because the converse of what I said is also true: If there is a political will to war, there will be a causus belli, no matter how weak. In the case of the Vietnam war, it does appear that the US military and the CIA basically manufactured that causus belli. A lot of cold war conflicts had the same sort of thing happen.
drewcoo 3y ago
The exact thing I was thinking in response to the GP. Worth noting is that Clausewitz lived in a world where wars were events that were declared between states. Today a major difference is insurgency/counterinsurgency. And our state likes to wage wars without formal declaration. Not to mention its wars against abstract concepts instead of foreign states.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  > And our state likes to wage wars without formal declaration. Not to mention its wars against abstract concepts instead of foreign states. This really well fits what Russian gov does (as someone from there). I actually think every offensive war is explained by concepts because people don't want to just kill people, they need a higher explanation to risk death and sleep at night after some murdering. It is in the name of religion or unification or against Nazism or against rotting capitalism. Only true defence doesn't need explanation.
  - bananapub 3y ago
    > This really well fits what Russian gov does (as someone from there). ok but I am pretty sure the OP was talking about the US's politically-motivated forever wars on nouns, the "War on Some Drugs" and the "War on Terror But Not The Causes Of Or Allies Hosting Terror".
- Perceval 3y ago
  > Clausewitz lived in a world where wars were events that were declared between states Sort of. Born 1780, died 1831, the main wars in his life were the Napoleonic Wars. But he would not have been unfamiliar with the Wars of Religion that convulsed Europe for 150 years following Luther's Protestant Reformation and culminated in the Peace of Westphalia. These we not regular state-on-state wars, but were a series of internationalized civil wars, caused by Protestant and Catholic low-level violence, coups, usurpations, overthrows, assassinations, and other civil conflicts. These low-level conflicts caused by non-state actors who were part of a transnational religious/ideological movement were not unlike the religious/ideological insurgencies we see today. Clausewitz would also have seen wars of colonization/imperialism and decolonization in the New World. These were also wars of states against irregular non-state combatants. Especially after the Napoleonic Wars, when the Concert of Europe was keeping stability in Europe, the main form of warfare Clausewitz would have been observing would have been wars of colonization/decolonization.
lovelyviking 3y ago
>Shooting down a drone usually doesn't do it partly because of the political implications: it would be deeply unpopular to put "boots on the ground" over a shot-down drone. Supposedly there are political implications for not responding to the shooting down the drone too. How are those taken into account I wander? It seems that there is a deep believe in the US that if they wouldn’t “provoke” then russia would not attack as it would not have a reason to do it. While I understand the logic it is still a very serious and dangerous miscalculation because “provocation” happens within russian head independently of the reality. russia can simply claim it was provoked/attacked by NATO so I really do not understand how “trying not to escalate to avoid provoking” works as deterrence. From what I observed it doesn’t and only gives green light message to russian aggression and this could be hardly seen as a desirable political goal for US as I understand.
- jemmyw 3y ago
  I don't think the downing of that drone increased Russian aggression. Russia doesn't want a war with the US but seems to want to push boundaries as far as possible and win it's war in Ukraine. The US response of giving weapons to Ukraine and putting Russia under sanctions is pretty aggressive, it's about as far as the US can go without actually fighting in Ukraine. It's probably serving the west well politically to ignore Russian probing as much as possible. Russia wants to provoke some kind of instability to wedge between western allies.
  - fennecfoxy 3y ago
    America can help Ukraine (I'm not from either place) with their side of the war all they want, imo. If Russia wants to treat gay men like me as second class citizens/animals, along with all of the other atrocities they perpetuate then I fully support whoever is on the other side of that mess. But yes, Russia seems to use this "poking" tactic quite often, trying to provoke a response.
  - m4rtink 3y ago
    Well, US could (and should!) send much more weapons than it did so far - a lot of really useful surplus kit still laying around in warehouses all around the US.
badpun 3y ago
Russian-backed forces shot down Netherlands' airliner, murdering over 200 people. There was no response either. Countries don't go to war if they don't see it paying off.
psunavy03 3y ago
War being “the continuation of politics by other means” is the most common misreading of Clausewitz out there. This is only one of three aspects of war which he identifies. The political goal of a war is one part, which the governments are trying to achieve. But once the bullets start flying, there is also the anger, rage, and passions of the people as their relatives come home dead, maimed, or hurt. And finally there is the interplay of chance and luck, which the military leadership has to leverage through skilled command. To Clausewitz, war is a trinity of these things, not “the continuation of politics by other means.” He does also go into the “cost of the object.” Whereby not every war goal is necessarily worth mobilizing the entire society and fighting an existential fight. And when the cost of achieving the goal exceeds its worth, nations will come to the table and negotiate peace.
Perceval 3y ago
If you spend time with officers in the U.S. military, fewer than you might expect have been assigned Clausewitz in their professional military education or read it on their own (even just the first chapter). Many just know the soundbite, "war is an extension of politics with other means." > if there is no political goal, there will be no war In Clausewitz, this is more of a normative statement than a rule about war in reality. One of the things he's trying to caution against is the escalatory dynamic that he views as inherent to purely military logic – that war (in a vacuum, so to speak) will always increase in intensity. But in reality, certain factors can and should ameliorate this inexorable escalation – political goals, "friction," and the "fog of war" are examples. War without the control of a political goal will be ceaselessly increasing destruction to the point of purposelessness. This is one reason why we insist on civilian control of the military, because we do not wish for an independent general staff to be prosecuting a war according solely to war's inner logic.

Kilenaitor 3y ago

Any specific book of his you recommend? "On War" seems to be the one that popped up on a search but wanted to confirm. Sounds like an interesting topic.

pclmulqdq 3y ago
On War is the book.

snek_case 3y ago

Seems to me that trigger events for wars are often about finding a justification for a war that people in power were already wanting to start. America doesn't want to go to war with Russia because we know it could be incredibly destructive, given that they have nukes. So, it would probably take a lot to start a war between the US and Russia. They would have to attack or be clearly planning to attack a NATO ally. It's possible that even if Russia intentionally downed a US jet, it would not immediately trigger a war. The US would likely add more sanctions, but they would probably show incredible restraint as well.

pydry 3y ago
In this case the Houthis have been the ones not reacting for many years: https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/21/us-war-crimes-yemen-stop-looking-other-way https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/21/us-war-crimes-yemen-stop...
- tga_d 3y ago
  "Not reacting" how? There's been an ongoing war for almost a decade now.
  - pydry 3y ago
    When was the last time they attacked US shipping?
    - tga_d 3y ago
      That seems like an extremely narrow definition of "reacting," but even then, pretty regularly over many years, actually. In addition to the attacks earlier last month linked in TFA, here's a couple articles showing that this has been an ongoing thing: https://news.usni.org/2016/10/11/uss-mason-fired-3-missiles-to-defend-from-yemen-cruise-missiles-attack https://news.usni.org/2016/10/11/uss-mason-fired-3-missiles-... https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2020/03/houthis-increase-use-of-suicide-drone-boats-in-recent-weeks.php https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2020/03/houthis-incr... This isn't to dispute evidence of US war crimes, to be clear, but claiming the Houthis have just been doing nothing in response does not line up with the overwhelming evidence.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> a war that people in power were already wanting to start This is synonymous with a political goal. War is politics by other means. The dirty secret under that being most wars democracies engage in are publicly supported, at least at the outset.
gumballindie 3y ago
> They would have to attack or be clearly planning to attack a NATO ally. Somehow I doubt a war would start if a NATO ally would be attacked. Perhaps if invaded but not if attacked. And it’s not the US i don’t trust, it’s continental western europe. It lacks the military and the economy to carry out a war against any country with a bit of power. Continental Western Europe has already proven a lack of will and capacity. Wars in eastern europe are cataclismic events and the only country that can survive and potentially win is the US and the countries in the region if well armed and properly motivated. Therefore, as soon as a NATO country is attacked, west europe will claim tough luck, pull back and appease. The US won’t want to do it alone - and rightfully so. Putin knows this and is marching on. The cost of invasion for him and Russia is negligible - if anything it’s a net positive, as he now knows what his army lacks and it exposed those in his ranks that need replacement.

smegsicle 3y ago

meme contraexample of course being the gulf of tonkin incident where us warning fire on vietnamese vessels in vietnamese waters being responded to with actual fire was taken as grounds for war, because war was desired

vidarh 3y ago
It's worse than that: The US intentionally provoked the incident with sabotage and hit and runs, and then "faked" the second incident (they had bad data, fired on nothing, and then used skewed intelligence reports to back up a false claim of an attack) which was used as the final excuse (the latter was long suspected, but admitted to by McNamara in 2003, and by NSA records declassified in 2005).
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Yeah, this is not a counterexample to the Clausewitzian view of war, but an example of it, because the converse of what I said is also true: If there is a political will to war, there will be a causus belli, no matter how weak. In the case of the Vietnam war, it does appear that the US military and the CIA basically manufactured that causus belli. A lot of cold war conflicts had the same sort of thing happen.

drewcoo 3y ago

The exact thing I was thinking in response to the GP. Worth noting is that Clausewitz lived in a world where wars were events that were declared between states. Today a major difference is insurgency/counterinsurgency. And our state likes to wage wars without formal declaration. Not to mention its wars against abstract concepts instead of foreign states.

throwaway290 3y ago
> And our state likes to wage wars without formal declaration. Not to mention its wars against abstract concepts instead of foreign states. This really well fits what Russian gov does (as someone from there). I actually think every offensive war is explained by concepts because people don't want to just kill people, they need a higher explanation to risk death and sleep at night after some murdering. It is in the name of religion or unification or against Nazism or against rotting capitalism. Only true defence doesn't need explanation.
- bananapub 3y ago
  > This really well fits what Russian gov does (as someone from there). ok but I am pretty sure the OP was talking about the US's politically-motivated forever wars on nouns, the "War on Some Drugs" and the "War on Terror But Not The Causes Of Or Allies Hosting Terror".
Perceval 3y ago
> Clausewitz lived in a world where wars were events that were declared between states Sort of. Born 1780, died 1831, the main wars in his life were the Napoleonic Wars. But he would not have been unfamiliar with the Wars of Religion that convulsed Europe for 150 years following Luther's Protestant Reformation and culminated in the Peace of Westphalia. These we not regular state-on-state wars, but were a series of internationalized civil wars, caused by Protestant and Catholic low-level violence, coups, usurpations, overthrows, assassinations, and other civil conflicts. These low-level conflicts caused by non-state actors who were part of a transnational religious/ideological movement were not unlike the religious/ideological insurgencies we see today. Clausewitz would also have seen wars of colonization/imperialism and decolonization in the New World. These were also wars of states against irregular non-state combatants. Especially after the Napoleonic Wars, when the Concert of Europe was keeping stability in Europe, the main form of warfare Clausewitz would have been observing would have been wars of colonization/decolonization.

lovelyviking 3y ago

>Shooting down a drone usually doesn't do it partly because of the political implications: it would be deeply unpopular to put "boots on the ground" over a shot-down drone. Supposedly there are political implications for not responding to the shooting down the drone too. How are those taken into account I wander? It seems that there is a deep believe in the US that if they wouldn’t “provoke” then russia would not attack as it would not have a reason to do it. While I understand the logic it is still a very serious and dangerous miscalculation because “provocation” happens within russian head independently of the reality. russia can simply claim it was provoked/attacked by NATO so I really do not understand how “trying not to escalate to avoid provoking” works as deterrence. From what I observed it doesn’t and only gives green light message to russian aggression and this could be hardly seen as a desirable political goal for US as I understand.

jemmyw 3y ago
I don't think the downing of that drone increased Russian aggression. Russia doesn't want a war with the US but seems to want to push boundaries as far as possible and win it's war in Ukraine. The US response of giving weapons to Ukraine and putting Russia under sanctions is pretty aggressive, it's about as far as the US can go without actually fighting in Ukraine. It's probably serving the west well politically to ignore Russian probing as much as possible. Russia wants to provoke some kind of instability to wedge between western allies.
- fennecfoxy 3y ago
  America can help Ukraine (I'm not from either place) with their side of the war all they want, imo. If Russia wants to treat gay men like me as second class citizens/animals, along with all of the other atrocities they perpetuate then I fully support whoever is on the other side of that mess. But yes, Russia seems to use this "poking" tactic quite often, trying to provoke a response.
- m4rtink 3y ago
  Well, US could (and should!) send much more weapons than it did so far - a lot of really useful surplus kit still laying around in warehouses all around the US.

badpun 3y ago

Russian-backed forces shot down Netherlands' airliner, murdering over 200 people. There was no response either. Countries don't go to war if they don't see it paying off.

psunavy03 3y ago

War being “the continuation of politics by other means” is the most common misreading of Clausewitz out there. This is only one of three aspects of war which he identifies. The political goal of a war is one part, which the governments are trying to achieve. But once the bullets start flying, there is also the anger, rage, and passions of the people as their relatives come home dead, maimed, or hurt. And finally there is the interplay of chance and luck, which the military leadership has to leverage through skilled command. To Clausewitz, war is a trinity of these things, not “the continuation of politics by other means.” He does also go into the “cost of the object.” Whereby not every war goal is necessarily worth mobilizing the entire society and fighting an existential fight. And when the cost of achieving the goal exceeds its worth, nations will come to the table and negotiate peace.

Perceval 3y ago

If you spend time with officers in the U.S. military, fewer than you might expect have been assigned Clausewitz in their professional military education or read it on their own (even just the first chapter). Many just know the soundbite, "war is an extension of politics with other means." > if there is no political goal, there will be no war In Clausewitz, this is more of a normative statement than a rule about war in reality. One of the things he's trying to caution against is the escalatory dynamic that he views as inherent to purely military logic – that war (in a vacuum, so to speak) will always increase in intensity. But in reality, certain factors can and should ameliorate this inexorable escalation – political goals, "friction," and the "fog of war" are examples. War without the control of a political goal will be ceaselessly increasing destruction to the point of purposelessness. This is one reason why we insist on civilian control of the military, because we do not wish for an independent general staff to be prosecuting a war according solely to war's inner logic.