本帖是迈克尔·霍华德所著《克劳塞维茨》一书的第四章。可惜没有找到中文版。本章中对战争的有限性论述十分有启发性,在此将英文原文转帖给大家。
Chapter 4 Limited and absolute war
The distinction which Clausewitz drew between ‘limited’ and ‘absolute’ (or ‘total’) war, and which twentieth-century political and strategic thinkers have found so significant, did not emerge as the result of any long and profound thought. He was, as we have already seen, only 24 when he first stated that wars could be of two kinds, those fought for the elimination of the opponent’s political independence (seine Staatenexistenz aufzuheben) and those fought to obtain favourable terms of peace. There is no indication that either he or anyone else at the time saw anything remarkable in the idea. But in a note written in 1827, twenty-three years later, when he had been at work on On War for a dozen years and had drafted three-quarters of the book, Clausewitz wrote that it was now necessary for him to go over the whole thing again to ‘bring out the two types of war with greater clarity at every point’ (p. 69). So although the distinction between the two must have always been in his mind, as for anyone who had experienced both the wars of the eighteenth century and those of Bonaparte, the fundamental importance of this dichotomy for his theory only struck him as he was writing. To be precise, it seems to have struck him halfway through the sixth book of On War, that on Defence, when he realized that here more than anywhere else the commander needed to know whether he was fighting ‘the kind of war that is completely governed and saturated by the urge for a decision’, or one that approximated rather to ‘a war of observation’ (pp. 488–9). Why this distinction was particularly important in planning a defensive campaign we shall see later in this chapter.
Clausewitz considered it necessary for his reader not only to appreciate that there were two types of war, but to understand exactly why this should be so. In fact he provided three distinct explanations: one historical, or sociological; one metaphysical; and one empirical. Each occurs in a different section of On War, and is set out with little relation to the other two. They were not indeed entirely mutually compatible.
Historically, Clausewitz pointed out, all wars were the products of the societies that fought them. Like all other institutions war was shaped by the ideas, the emotions, and conditions prevailing at the time. How this had affected the development of warfare he explained in what must have been the earliest survey of the sociology of war from the earliest times to his own day. Having described how war was made and supported by the Tatar hordes, the republics of antiquity, the Roman Empire, the political authorities of the Middle Ages, and the condottieri of the early modern period, he focused on the development of the sovereign states of eighteenth-century Europe. By then, he showed, monarchs had obtained such effective political and economic control over the peoples they ruled that they were able to create war machines distinct and separate from the rest of society, regular armies with their own sources of finance and supply which monarchs controlled so completely that they were able to behave ‘as if they were themselves the State’. But these resources were finite.
Their means of waging war came to consist of the money in their coffers and of such idle vagabonds as they could lay their hands on either at home or abroad . . . If the army was pulverised, he could not raise another, and behind the army there was nothing. That enjoined the greatest prudence in all operations . . . Armies, with their fortresses and prepared positions, came to form a state within a state, in which violence gradually faded away. (pp. 589–90)
The development of civilized social mores and of a political system so closely integrated that ‘no cannon could be fired in Europe without every government feeling its interest affected’ further enforced the limitations on both the means of conducting war and the objectives for which it was fought. But the French Revolution changed everything. ‘Suddenly war again became the business of the people – a people of thirty millions, all of whom considered themselves to be citizens’ (p. 592).
War, untrammelled by any conventional restraints, had broken loose in all its elemental fury. This was due to the peoples’ new share in these great affairs of state; and their participation, in its turn, resulted partly from the impact that the Revolution had on the internal conditions of every state and partly from the danger that France posed to everyone. (p. 593)
Whether this transformation was likely to be permanent Clausewitz was too cautious, and perhaps too politically shrewd, to say; though he warned that ‘once barriers – which in a sense consist only of man’s ignorance of what is possible – are torn down, they are not easily set up again’. The important point for his theory was that ‘each age had in its own kind of war, its own limiting conditions, and its own peculiar preconceptions’. It was these cultural circumstances that determined whether war would be total or limited, and what the limits would be.
When he started to revise On War, however, Clausewitz adopted a different approach. In the first chapter of the first book, which may in fact have been the last complete chapter that he wrote and was certainly the only one with which he professed himself satisfied, Clausewitz presented the concept of ‘absolute war’ not as something culturally conditioned but as a Platonic ideal, to which most wars in reality were imperfect approximations. It was ‘ideal’, that is, in the sense not of being ‘good’, but of being logical and (in the Aristotelian sense) ‘natural’. The intrinsic nature of war, that is, was total. It was ‘an act of force, and there is no logical limit to an act of force’ (p. 77). This statement Clausewitz justified by the concept of what he called ‘reciprocal action’ and which today we would term ‘escalation’. The object in war is to impose your will on the enemy – it is ‘an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will’ (p. 75). You cannot do this unless you destroy the enemy’s power to resist; for if you do not render him powerless, he will try to render you powerless in his turn. So long as he has any capacity for resistance left, therefore, you are logically bound, in self-defence, to try to destroy it: there is no stopping-place short of the extreme.
That this rarely if ever happened in reality was due, according to Clausewitz, to a host of factors extraneous to the war itself. War was never a self-contained activity, consisting of a single decisive act or a series of simultaneous acts occurring in a political vacuum, unrelated to the events that had led up to it or to the situation it was intended to produce. The intentions of the belligerents and the course of the war were shaped by such considerations as the international environment, the pre-war relationship of the belligerent powers, the characteristics of the armed forces, the terrain of the theatre of war, and perceptions of the new situation that it was hoped the war would produce. These, far more than any requirements of military logic, determined how the war should be fought. Clausewitz denied indeed that war could have its own logic; it could only, he said, have its own grammar.
War came about, Clausewitz insisted, because of a political situation. ‘The occasion is always due to some political object’, he wrote: ‘War is therefore an act of policy’ (p. 607). Policy was the guiding intelligence, war only the instrument. But even this was a misleading analogy. War could not be considered as existing distinct from policy, however subordinate it might be to it. It was part of policy, a mode of it, a continuation of political intercourse (Verkehr) with the addition of other means.
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