McNair Paper Number 52, Chapter 2, October 1996

This chapter and the next recapitulate current scholarship concerning Scharnhorst, Clausewitz, and the concept of general friction. While this recapitulation does not go appreciably beyond what can be found scattered throughout Peter Paret's Clausewitz and the State and related works pertaining to the origins, development, conceptualization, and theoretical aspects of this concept, it is important to pull the main threads of the story together in one place to provide a baseline understanding of Clausewitzian friction on which to build.

Once again, Clausewitz's earliest known use of the term "friction" occurred in a 29 September 1806 letter to his future wife. Written while in the field with the Prussian Prince August's grenadier battalion, Clausewitz invoked Friktion to voice his growing anxiety over the resistance Scharnhorst (1755-1813) was encountering to any all-out, bold, or well-conceived employment of Prussia's full military potential against the French under Napoleon Bonaparte. (Note 1) As Clausewitz observed to Marie von Brhhl, the Prussian army at that time had "three commanders-in-chief and two chiefs of staff," a situation that provoked him to lament: "How much must the effectiveness of a gifted man [Scharnhorst] be reduced when he is constantly confronted by obstacles of convenience and tradition, when he is paralyzed by constant friction with the opinions of others." (Note 2)

In hindsight, Clausewitz's anxiety was warranted. Prussia's defeats at the twin battles of Jena and Auerstadt destroyed the Prussian army created by Frederick the Great (1712-1786), and, after the remnants were defeated at the battle of Friedland in June 1807, led to the reduction to a mere satellite of the French empire of the independent state that Frederick had managed to thrust into the first rank of European powers. (Note 3)

When Clausewitz first used Friktion in the 1806 letter to Marie, he could only guess, despite his forebodings, how the campaign would actually turn out. Thus, to read this first known reference to friction in its actual historical context, the term was introduced to refer to the powerful resistance to sound decisions and effective action that had developed within the Prussian army itself before the outcome of the war was known.

Over the next 6 years Clausewitz expanded this original notion, incrementally identifying other sources of the vast differences that he and Scharnhorst saw between theory, plans, and intentions in war and war as it actually is (eigentliche Krieg). (Note 4) By 1811, Clausewitz's summary lecture at the Berlin war college on the use of detachments mentioned two distinct sources of what he termed "the friction of the whole machinery": (1) "the numerous chance events, which touch everything"; (2) "the numerous difficulties that inhibit accurate execution of the precise plans that theory tends to formulate." (Note 5) The second source, internal resistance to precise plans, recalls the type of frictional impediment in Clausewitz's 1806 letter to Marie. The first, the play of chance, represents a significant expansion of the original notion through the addition of a second major category of friction.

By April of the following year, shortly before Clausewitz resigned his Prussian commission to switch sides and oppose both his king (Frederick William III) and the French in Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia, he had pushed the concept even further. In an essay Clausewitz sent to the Prussian crown prince (later Frederick William IV), whom he had been tutoring in addition to his duties on the war academy faculty, Clausewitz listed eight major sources of the "tremendous friction" that makes even the simplest plans and actions so difficult to execute in war:

1. Insufficient knowledge of the enemy

2. Rumors (information gained by remote observation or spies)

3. Uncertainty about one's own strength and position

4. The uncertainties that cause friendly troops to tend to exaggerate their own difficulties 5. Differences between expectations and reality

6. The fact that one's own army is never as strong as it appears on paper

7. The difficulties in keeping an army supplied

8. The tendency to change or abandon well-thought-out plans when confronted with the vivid physical images and perceptions of the battlefield. (Note 6)

This taxonomy exhibits some overlap, if not redundancy. It also lacks the conceptual clarity exhibited by Clausewitz's discussion of the unified concept of a general friction (Gesamtbegriff einer allgemeinen Friktion) in the final chapters of On War's first book. Nevertheless, this expanded formulation goes well beyond the letter of 1806 and, according to Peter Paret, constitutes Clausewitz's first systematic development of friction, including its positive as well as its negative aspects. (Note 7)

Insofar as Clausewitz's efforts to reach a scientifically valid (or defensible) understanding of eigentliche Krieg (war as it actually is) are concerned, friction remained an enduring theoretical concern. (Note 8) Undoubtedly the challenges and frictions he experienced both with the Russian army in 1812 and during the last three years of the Napoleonic wars (1813-1815) "strengthened his already pronounced realism," thereby reinforcing his intellectual propensity to find a comprehensive way to "distinguish real war from war on paper." (Note 9) Still, to realize how central a concern friction became for Clausewitz, we need look no further than the unfinished manuscript that his widow published after his death as Vom Kriege, a work that "almost completely" occupied the last twelve years of his life and has since overshadowed everything else that Clausewitz wrote. (Note 10) Not only is the unified concept treated at length in Chapters 5-8 of On War's first book but, as Paret has observed, it "runs throughout the entire work." (Note 11)

Paret's judgment of general friction's central role in On War can be readily confirmed by considering the overall argumentative thrust of the book's opening chapter, the only one of the manuscript's 125 chapters that Clausewitz considered finished at the time of his death. (Note 12) The chapter's title poses the question: "What Is War?" In response, Vom Kriege begins by trying to abstract the essence of war from its pure concept by establishing the properties that war must have to be what it is. (Note13) Reflection on the essence of the concept leads immediately to the conclusion that war is the use of force to compel the enemy to do our will. From this theoretical conclusion, it is a short step to the equally theoretical implication that, since war is an act of force, "there is no logical limit to the application of that force." (Note 14)

The sixth section of Chapter 1 ("6. MODIFICATIONS IN PRACTICE"), however, juxtaposes this implication of pure theory with the empirical fact that in the real world "the whole thing looks quite different." (Note 15) A series of short sections whose titles alone indicate the inadequacy of purely theoretical conclusions about war then argue the validity of this empirical modification of war's abstract essence. As the section titles declare:

7. WAR IS NEVER AN ISOLATED ACT

8. WAR DOES NOT CONSIST OF A SINGLE SHORT BLOW

9. IN WAR THE RESULT IS NEVER FINAL

10. THE PROBABILITIES OF REAL LIFE REPLACE THE EXTREME AND THE ABSOLUTE REQUIRED BY THEORY

11. THE POLITICAL OBJECT NOW COMES TO THE FORE AGAIN

12. ANY INTERRUPTION OF MILITARY ACTIVITY IS NOT EXPLAINED BY ANYTHING YET SAID

The last section introduces the problem of the suspension of activity often observed in actual war. Explaining how it can occur seemingly contrary to war's abstract essence occupies Sections 13-20. All that need be said for present purposes concerning their content is that imperfect knowledge and chance are introduced as part of the explanation. With this difficulty in hand, Clausewitz's argument concludes as follows:

If we now consider briefly the subjective nature of war, the means by which war has to be fought, it will look more than ever like a gamble .

In short, absolute, so-called mathematical factors never find a firm basis in military calculations. From the very start there is an interplay of possibilities, probabilities, good luck and bad that weaves its way throughout the length and breadth of the tapestry. In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards. (Note 16)

Clausewitz's pattern of argument in On War's opening chapter, then, is one of contrast between military theories, plans, or intentions and war as it actually is. The role of general friction in Clausewitz's theoretical writings must be understood in this context. To repeat the oft-cited definition given in Chapter 7, Book One, of On War: the unified concept of a general friction alone "more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper." (Note 17) The diverse sources of general friction are the things that render action in war "like movement in a resistant element" and "span the gap between the pure concept of war and the concrete form that, as a general rule, war assumes." (Note 18)

From Clausewitz's first use of the term friction in 1806 to his final revisions of the manuscript for On War between 1827 and 1830, friction was unquestionably among the conceptual tools he employed to understand the phenomena of war. Friction was not simply a notion that Clausewitz toyed with from time to time. Rather, the idea of 1806 grew over the course of more than two decades into a theoretical concept that lies at the very heart of his mature approach to the theory and conduct of war.