War From the Ground Up Read Free Page B

war’s animating idea.
    There is perhaps a temptation, particularly for liberal powers, to see war as an instrument of policy which is used ‘rationally’ for legitimate ends. Clausewitz’s point is that all war has some kind of rationale (‘policy’) because it is a human phenomenon, but that rationale need not be ‘rational’ in the liberal sense. Indeed Clausewitz lived at the juncture of the Enlightenment, with its advocacy of reason, and Romanticism, with its penchant for emotional instinct. However one defines policy within the conception of war as a political instrument, the essential point is that war’s justification, and thus its basic logic, lies beyond itself. This was famously summarised by Clausewitz: ‘war…is a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means’. 5
    Two concepts are contained within the term ‘means’ in this dictum. The first concept is that war can be understood to be the phenomenon by which the clash of organised violence in time and space is identified. Clausewitz himself understood the essence of war to be the violent clash: ‘essentially war is fighting’. 6 Ultimately wars are phenomena which are external to everyone; that is, wars go beyond the boundaries of any individual experience because they are defined by the aggregated activity of a multitude of people. However, what unifies individual experiences into ‘war’ is their association with the clash of organised violence. In this sense, while policy intentions of either side will shape war, war has its own independent existence, formed through reciprocal violent clash.
    Even within a war, soldiers may feel well removed from ‘the war’, when pulled back from the line, where the violence is. There is a striking moment of self-realisation in
Quartered Safe Out Here
(1992) by George MacDonald Fraser, his autobiographical account of his experience as a soldier in the Burma campaign during the Second World War. 7 He is told by his Platoon Sergeant that he is the point man of his Platoon, which is at the head of the Battalion, which is itself the point Battalion of the point Division leading the 14 th Army on its advance towards Rangoon; at this point the war seems far more immediate to Fraser than it would to a soldier marching in a column to the rear! Indeed for soldiers it is the experience of violence which tends to be the aspect of war most firmly imprinted on the mind.
    Even for civilian leaders, who usually do not experience actual violence, the responsibility of the direction of violence through war invests war with a particular significance. While military preparations and diplomatic activity may anticipate a conflict, a war is typically understoodto have ‘started’ when troops cross their line of departure in the expectation of combat. The opening stage of the Second World War for Britain illustrates the popular association of war and violence; it has come to be known as the ‘Phoney War’ because of the absence of serious violence.
    The ‘means’ referred to in Clausewitz’s dictum that war is an extension of policy by other means can therefore be understood in this first sense as the organised violence itself, typically the use of armed force.
    The second sense in which the ‘means’ in Clausewitz’s dictum can be understood is less obvious, but equally important. It relates to the notion that war itself as a phenomenon is a political instrument, not just the actual use of force within war. For example, British strategy in 1939–40 envisaged a long-haul strategy in which maritime economic blockade would play a central role, which was the policy adopted from the outset. To see the early period of Britain’s part in the war as ‘phoney’ thus exemplifies both the fixation of associating war with violence on land and the analytical limitations of such a narrow conception of war.