He also talked about when the political and military goals were aligned, then wars were construed as “military,” but if they didn’t align, then they were considered “political wars.” This is the problem with the Iraq war. In Gulf War 1 the political and military goal was get Saddam out of Kuwait and it went off perfectly. Engendering a stable democracy is not a viable military end-state.

my take is just that you need to define very clearly what you want to achieve before going into any action, politics or war.
while politics and diplomacy mistakes are relatively easy to correct and reverse, that of war is not. therefore, it requires extreme prudence.

well, there are a lot of ideas in such a huge book.
so i think to characterize it in black and white is probably too simplistic.

from your site (comparison with sun zi):

“Sun Tzu is often offered up as the antithesis of Clausewitz, particularly on the issue of the “bloodless battle.” His admonitions that a good general gains victory without battle and that no nation ever benefitted from a long war are widely perceived as a direct contradiction to On War’s emphasis on combat. In actuality, Sun Tzu and Clausewitz are more complementary than antithetical, and there are many direct parallels.*29 Sun Tzu’s understanding of history as a dynamic process and his subordination of military to political considerations certainly parallel Clausewitz’s. Both stress destruction of the enemy’s will rather than merely of his physical forces…..

I’d recommend the Clausewitz homepage, which has some of the Clausewitz courseware for the Army War College. The “famous phrase” is really part of a dialectic. Clausewitz did not simply say that war was subordinate to a political goal, but that despite the best efforts it never would be subordinate to one. The Phrase “was not intended as a statement of fact. It is the antithesis in a dialectical argument whose thesis is the point”â��?made earlier in the analysis”â��?that “war is nothing but a duel [or wrestling match, a better translation of the German Zweikampf] on a larger scale.” His synthesis, which resolves the deficiencies of these two bald statements, says that war is neither “nothing but” an act of brute force nor “merely” a rational act of politics or policy. This synthesis lies in his “fascinating trinity” [wunderliche dreifaltigkeit]: a dynamic, inherently unstable interaction of the forces of violent emotion, chance, and rational calculation.”

To say the phrase is the foundation, Sun Bin, is really to place emphasis in the wrong place. I’d say that the Iraq war is really the opposite of your assertion; it’s totally about war as merely a political tool, without fair consideration for the realities of the battlefield. Then again, others could disagree with me and still be within his framework. That’s the great thing about Clausewitz; since he describes, as Younghusband says, a “holistic” approach to miitary thinking, he describes the tension between positions rather than taking one.

the book is a lot more than that famous phrase,
but that phrase is the foundation of the book.

without understanding the objective of ‘war’, you could lose more even if you win in the battlefield.

Iraq is the best illustration of a perfect implementation of Clausewitz SANS the famous phrase. what is the objective? is what had been done (after taking Baghdad) aligned to the objectives?

I have this huge, excellent hardcopy version and read it all the time. Full of underlined passages, it along with Kissinger’s diplomacy, could well be what I would call definitive in a non-teleological way.

(War is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means.)

And no, I’ve never read Clausewitz.