No.499393
1
>The view that the movement of war has laws and that the laws of war can be known is the result of the long development of human understanding. The great ancient Chinese military man Sun Wu, with his simple materialist-dialectical viewpoint, explicitly affirmed that "victory can be known," "victory can be made," and "know the enemy and know yourself, and in a hundred battles you will not be imperiled." The bourgeois military theorist Clausewitz, although he exaggerated the uncertainty of war, holding that "war, whether in its objective nature or in its subjective nature, resembles gambling," and that in war "everything often appears as in a fog and under moonlight, the outlines greatly enlarged and the shapes becoming strange and peculiar" (On War, vol. 1, pp. 41, 121), nevertheless, by analyzing a large number of war events in the history of war, drew many conclusions of lawfulness about the contradictory movement of war and the methods of guiding war, and especially, on the question of the relation between war and politics, attained a cognition of lawfulness that his predecessors had not attained. It can be seen that the laws of war can be known.
Clausewitz posits that war is unknowable. That's damning fall from science into idealism.
2
>War is the continuation of political intercourse by another means, and this political intercourse is not interrupted by the outbreak of war. Politics is the whole, and war is only a part of this whole. Because war serves politics, and because political factors have a decisive influence on the formulation of war plans and campaign plans, the military viewpoint must therefore be subordinate to the political viewpoint, and the political viewpoint is the supreme viewpoint for determining the main line of war and guiding war. These views of Clausewitz are correct. Lenin repeatedly quoted the sentence that war is the continuation of politics, and pointed out that Marx and Engels approved of this view. However, Clausewitz's understanding of politics differed from that of Marxists. Marxism holds that in class society politics deals with the relations among classes, is class struggle, and is the concentrated expression of the economy. Clausewitz, however, held that politics is the representative of all the interests of the whole society, and that it concentrates and coordinates all individual interests. This is incorrect.
Clausewitz grasps that war is politics, yet fails to grasp what politics is.
3. An issue I personally have with clausewitz is he devalues deception, positing "deception is for the weak." Wrong. All warfare based on deception, no matter how limited bounds of deception were in Napoleonic era.