A Prussian general fights today’s wars

Dead nearly two centuries, Carl von Clausewitz still has the last word on Syria and Iraq.

Born in 1780, Carl von Clausewitz was a career officer in the Prussian army, an experience that kept him at the front line up until 1808. After having served as director of the Prussian War Academy for two decades, in 1830 he once again led troops on the ground and was assigned to protect the Eastern border, in charge of setting up a cordon sanitaire to prevent cholera spreading to Prussia after an outbreak in Poland. He ended up contracting the illness himself and died from it at age 51 in 1831.

Clausewitz’s intense career as an officer led him to collect his thoughts on the nature of war in a vast number of manuscripts. His wife Maria patiently edited them after his death and a first part of his papers was published in a volume entitled “On War” in 1832.

It might seem that there would be little room today for an eight-volume manuscript covering topics that include Prussian accounts of “Night Fighting” (Book IV) and “Fortresses” (Book VI). But it would be a grave error to dismiss On War as out of date merely because we now find ourselves in an era when the technology of death has moved on to drones, to intercontinental missiles and to cyber-warfare.

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