McNair Paper Number 52, Chapter 3, October 1996

3.

SCHARNHORST'S CLARITY ABOUT WAR AS IT ACTUALLY IS (Eigentliche Krieg)

Today Clausewitz is widely credited with having introduced the notion of Friktion to refer to the impediments encountered in war. It is probably fair to say that he was the first to explore both the positive and negative aspects of general friction as a theoretical device for mediating the differences between war in theory and war in practice. Nonetheless, the concept has roots in the thinking of Clausewitz's mentor Gerhard von Scharnhorst. As with On War as a whole, it was Scharnhorst who "first showed him the right course."(Note 1) This section will explore Scharnhorst's influence on Clausewitz's notion of general friction.

Scharnhorst began his military career with the Hanoverian army. Early recognition of his potential as a teacher resulted in his first 15 years of service with Hanover being largely devoted to the teaching of officers and military scholarship. (Note 2) By the early 1790s, he had "established a reputation throughout the armies of central Europe as a knowledgeable and prolific writer on military subjects, inventor of improvements in gunnery, and editor of several military periodicals." (Note 3)

During the campaigns of 1793-95, which were part of the War of the First Coalition against the First French Republic (1792-1797), he quickly proved his competence under fire while serving with the armies of the allied monarchies that opposed France's expansion into Flanders and Holland. (Note 4) At the battle of Hondschoote, in September 1793, Scharnhorst took control of several weakened Hanoverian units fleeing the battlefield and turned the impending rout into an orderly rear-guard action that helped to preserve the entire corps. (Note 5) The following year, when the Hanoverian general Rudolf von Hammerstein was ordered to occupy the town of Menin in southern Belgium, Scharnhorst served as Hammerstein's principal staff officer. At Menin, Scharnhorst improvised a system of ditches and barricades that enabled the garrison of 2,400 men to repel several French assaults following encirclement by 20,000 troops under Jean-Victor Moreau. After rejecting a French offer of honorable capitulation, Hammerstein decided to save his force by breaking through the siege. Scharnhorst took command of a part of the corps to make the attempt and, on the night of 30 April 1794, succeeded against strong French opposition. Though Menin was lost as expected, the deliverance of "the garrison was seen by the Allies as a moral victory and became a feat of arms famous in the military chronicle of those years" in which Scharnhorst's contributions were fully recognized. (Note 6)

After the campaigns of 1793-95, Scharnhorst returned to Hanover and began to use "his recent experience to clarify his ideas about the revolution in warfare that was obviously taking place in Europe." (Note 7) The changes in warfare to which Scharnhorst now began to seek a response were well summarized by Clausewitz in the final book of On War. From the emergence of modern standing armies during the period 1560-1660(Note 8) to the French Revolution in 1789, European wars had been fought mostly for the aims of the monarch by professional armies whose officers were drawn from the nobility, while their ranks were filled with conscripted peasants, press-ganged "volunteers," or mercenaries. (Note 9) In the "diplomatic type of warfare" that came to dominate the pre-1789 era, the aggressor's usual plan was to seize an enemy province or two during the summer campaign season while the defender tried to prevent him from doing so; no battle was ever sought, or fought, unless it served to further the moderate or limited ends of one side or the other within the European balance of power; being primarily the concern of the government, such wars were estranged from the interests of the people. (Note 10) When battles were waged, the focus of pre-revolutionary armies on delivering the greatest possible concentration of firepower "produced linear tactics, the deployment of troops in long, thin lines blazing away at each other at point-blank range, which turned pitched battles into murderous set-pieces that commanders of expensive regular forces avoided if they possibly could." (Note 11) Beginning in 1793, however, this age of diplomatic wars waged by professional armies for limited ends came to an abrupt end with the emergence of the French nation-in-arms. (Note 12) As Clausewitz wrote:

Suddenly war again became the business of the people, a people of thirty millions [in the case of revolutionary France], all of whom considered themselves to be citizens. . . . The people therefore became a participant in war; instead of governments and armies as heretofore, the full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance. The resources and efforts now available for use surpassed all conventional limits; nothing now impeded the vigor with which war could be waged, and consequently the opponents of France faced the utmost peril. (Note 13)

The great peril posed by revolutionary France from 1793 to 1815 did not lie fundamentally in advanced weaponry or military technique, although the French armies of the period were second to none in artillery and "made ingenious use of the new flexible and dispersed infantry formations, " which had been in development even before 1789. (Note 14) The issue that came to occupy Scharnhorst by 1795 was more fundamental: "How was it that this rabble, untrained, undisciplined, under-officered, its generals as often as not jumped-up NCOs [noncommissioned officers], with no adequate supply system, let alone any serious administrative structure, how did it come about that these . . . forces could not only hold their own against the professional soldiers of the European powers but actually defeat them?" (Note 15) In response, Scharnhorst took full note of the advantages in strategic position, numbers, unified political and military command, and incentive that France had enjoyed over the allies of the First Coalition; he also delineated with objectivity and precision the superior effectiveness of French organization and tactics. (Note 16) But beyond these military considerations he discerned a deeper reason for French success: the greater strength possessed by a freer nation, a condition that was closely connected with the transformation of French society stemming from the revolution and the emergence of the idea of a French nation. (Note 17) By revolutionizing society, the French state "set in motion new means and new forces" that enabled the energies of society to be exploited for war "as never before." (Note 18) As Michael Howard has explained:

For manpower they depended not on highly trained and expensive regular troops but on patriotic volunteers and, later, conscripts in apparently unlimited quantities whose services were virtually free. The French troops foraged for themselves, and if they deserted there were plenty more to take their place. Insufficiently trained for linear tactics in battle, they substituted a combination of free-firing skirmishers and dense columns of attack, first to wear down and then to overwhelm a defence that was in any case likely to be badly outnumbered. And to these hordes of self-sacrificing infantry Bonaparte was to add artillery in ever increasing proportions, and cavalry trained in merciless pursuit. (Note 19)

The upshot of Scharnhorst's analysis of the deeper reasons for French success, first published in 1797, was clear recognition of a revolution in military affairs driven primarily by social and political changes. Granted, as Jean Colin argued in 1900, this revolution was not without any technological component: the latter half of the 18th century saw improvements in artillery, road building, and cartography that undoubtedly abetted the rise of a new kind of warfare after 1789. (Note 20) Still, on the whole modern scholars agree with Scharnhorst and Clausewitz that the primary changes were sociopolitical. If so, then the military revolution of the 1793-1815 period is quite different from the contemporary hypothesis that, in coming decades, ongoing advances in microelectronics, information technologies and software, satellite communications, advanced sensors, and low-observable technologies will give rise to a technologically driven revolution in warfare akin to the development of mobile, armored warfare (Blitzkrieg) or strategic bombing between 1918-1939. (Note 21) It is the strong technological component of the emerging military revolution that has given rise to the further conjecture that American commanders will be liberated from the tyranny of Clausewitzian friction in future wars.

Armed with a clear understanding of the sociopolitical basis of French military power after 1789, the next question for Scharnhorst was, How could monarchies like Hanover or Prussia deal with the challenge of the French nation-in-arms? If the wellspring of France's military prowess was the emergence of the French nation, went Scharnhorst's answer, then the monarchies, too, had to turn themselves into nations. But "was it possible to create a Nation except, as the French had done, by the overthrow of monarchical institutions and the creation of a plebiscitary dictatorship ruling by terror?" (Note 22) Scharnhorst's solution was to propose the modernization of Hanover's military institutions. He advocated better education of officers and NCOs, promotion to lieutenant by examination, the abolition of nepotism and favoritism, more sensible application of military justice, expansion and re-equipment of the artillery, transformation of infantry tactics along French lines, institution of a permanent general staff, reorganization of the army into all-arms divisions, and the introduction of conscription to diminish the mercenary character of the army. (Note 23)

These reforms clearly entailed important political changes in Hanoverian society. In this sense, the revolution in military affairs that confronted Scharnhorst was a greater challenge than the technologically driven changes in how wars are fought that confronted militaries around the globe between 1918 and 1939. The requirement of monarchies like Prussia to reform their societies as well as their armies suggests that counters to the Napoleonic revolution demanded more fundamental adaptations than the technology-driven changes in warfare that the American military may face in the decades ahead.

As compelling as Scharnhorst's analysis of the challenge posed by the revolutionary France may appear to us today, he found little support in Hanover. The Hanoverian military was not persuaded of the need for fundamental reform in the military sphere, and no one in the government of George III was willing to test the willingness of the Hanoverian aristocracy and to defend their long-standing privileges. Instead, "Scharnhorst was disregarded as a visionary or ambitious troublemaker, and vacancies in the higher ranks continued to be filled with men who were no match for him." (Note 24)

It was this turn of events that brought Scharnhorst to Berlin in the late spring of 1801. Though he had turned down the original offer to enter Prussian service, he subsequently reopened negotiations, and when Frederick William III met his terms, Scharnhorst resigned his Hanoverian commission and accepted appointment as a lieutenant colonel in the Prussian artillery. Stationed in Berlin, he set about trying to enact his reforms in the army created by Frederick the Great.

One of the duties Scharnhorst assumed in his new role was to recast the Berlin Institute for Young Officers into a national academy. (Note 25) Because Scharnhorst himself lectured on strategy, tactics, and the duties of the general staff at the school during his initial years in Prussian service, he soon came into contact with Clausewitz. The young officer quickly attached himself to Scharnhorst as an admiring disciple, "his own ideas germinating and sprouting in the rays of that genial sun," and Scharnhorst reciprocated with an equal affection for the brilliant and receptive young man. (Note 26) When, in spring 1804, Clausewitz completed the 3-year course at the head of his class, Scharnhorst had already reported to the king, Frederick William III, that Lieutenant von Clausewitz exhibited "unusually good analysis of the whole." (Note 27)

Scharnhorst, 46 years old when he arrived in Berlin, was at the height of his powers. Despite the fact that his initial lectures at the Berlin war college still presented the traditional argument that theory should eliminate accident and chance from war, in practice, Scharnhorst, with his pronounced sense of realism, "had long given up this belief." (Note 28)

The humane, rationalist hope of late 18th-century military writers such as Henry Humphrey Evans Lloyd (1720-1783) and Dietritch Adam Heinrich von Btlow (1757-1807) was to find a set of "rational principles based on hard, quantifiable data that might reduce the conduct of war to a branch of the natural sciences . . . from which the play of chance and uncertainty" could be entirely eliminated. (Note 29) Lloyd, who held important field commands in the Austrian army during the Seven Years War (1756-1763), became well known in Europe for his criticism of Frederick II (the Great) as a strategist based on his purported application of scientific principles to the historical events of that conflict. (Note 30) Foreshadowing the mathematical approach that would later be pursued by the English automotive engineer Frederick W. Lanchester (1868-1946), (Note 31) Lloyd's enthusiasm for achieving certainty in war led him to argue that whoever understands the relevant military data stemming from tangibles like topological and geographical measurements, march tables, supply needs, and the geometrical relationship of supply lines to fighting fronts (or of armies to their bases), would be "in a position to initiate military operations with mathematical precision and to keep on waging war without ever being under the necessity of striking a blow." (Note 32) B(low, an army officer by training but without command experience, took an even more strongly quantitative position in his 1804 book Reine und angewandete Strategie [Pure and Applied Strategy]. There he claimed that the success of a military operation depended largely on the angle formed by two lines running from the extreme ends of the base of operations to the objective: If the base of the operation was suitably placed and sufficiently extended for the two lines to converge on the target at an angle of 90E or more, "victory was as certain as could reasonably be expected." (Note 33)

While Scharnhorst covered these viewpoints in lectures he gave while Lieutenant Clausewitz was a student at the Berlin institute during 1801-1804, Scharnhorst's own views about the art of war were quite different from those of Lloyd and B(low. Especially during the period 1802-1806, when Scharnhorst concentrated on teaching and building a "true military academy" in Berlin, his lectures began to address a part of the art of war that, as Clausewitz later wrote in Schnarnhorst's obituary, had been virtually ignored in Prussian "books and lecture halls: war as it actually is." (Note 34) Perhaps the best account of what Clausewitz was driving at is Peter Paret's summary of Scharnhorst's theoretical views :

No military theorist of the time was as conscious as Scharnhorst of the innate conflict between theory and reality. His elaboration of this fundamental issue, and his refusal to seek its solution in increasingly complex abstractions, constitute the most important lesson he taught Clausewitz. . . . Rather than emphasize that sound theory could eliminate accident, which was obviously sometimes the case, it might be pedagogically more productive, he [Scharnhorst] thought, and far more realistic, to stress the ability of theory to help men deal with surprise, to help them exploit the unforeseen. From there it was only a short step . . . to recognize the fortuitous not as a negative but as a positive force, an indispensable part of reality. (Note 35)

Clausewitz took this short but difficult step with the development of his unified concept of a general friction. General friction became the concept that mediated between abstract theory based on the analysis of pure concepts and the realities of 18th- and early 19th-century warfare.

The mature concept of general friction was not, therefore, Clausewitz's invention alone. Its origins also had roots in the realism and clarity of his teacher Scharnhorst about war as it actually is, the limits of pure theory, and the impossibility of eliminating chance, a powerful source of general friction, from military operations. The positive aspects of the solution to the play of chance in war deserve special emphasis. Whereas theorists like Lloyd and B(low saw impediments in chance that needed to be constrained, if not eliminated, Clausewitz came to see opportunities that able, alert commanders could exploit. (Note 36)