McNair Paper Number 52, Chapter 4, Notes, October 1996

1. Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, ed. Werner Hahlweg (Bonn: Dhmmler, 1980 and 1991), 237; Carl von Clauzewitz, On War, trans. Peter Paret and Michael Howard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 104.

2. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 265; On War, 122.

3. Clausewitz, On War, 114, 115, 117, and 119.

4. See Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young (New York: Random House, 1992); and, Avigdor Kahalani, The Heights of Courage: A Tank Leader's War on the Golan (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984).

5. Clausewitz, On War, 117.

6. Ibid., 84-85.

7. Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State: The Man, His Theories, and His Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 373.

8. John G. Hines and Daniel Calingaert, "Soviet Strategic Intentions, 1973-1985: " Preliminary Review of U.S. Interpretations," RAND working draft WD-6305-NA, December 1992, 4-7.

9. Clausewitz, On War, 139 and 149.

10. Ibid., 605-608.

11. Scharnhorst, "Entwicklung der allgemeinen Ursachen des Gl(cks der Franzosen," quoted in Charles Edward White, "The Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorst and the Milit(rische Gesellschaft in Berlin, 1801-1805," Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1986, 43-44.

12. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983), 17.

13. The author included a fairly similar reconstruction of general friction in the backup material for a lecture last given to the Air War College in the fall of 1992. See Barry D. Watts, "U.S. Doctrine for Strategic Air Attack in World War II," lecture slides, Air War College, Maxwell AFB, AL, September 1992, Backup Slide 27B ("General Friction: A Reconstruction").

14. For a recent historian's explication of friction in the tradition of Peter Paret, see Christopher Bassford, Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America: 1815-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 25-26. For an interpretation that connects friction with nonlinearity (as well as with the increasing degradation toward randomness that is the essence of entropy), see Alan Beyerchen, "Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War," International Security (Winter 1992/93): 75-77. While Beyerchen's essay clearly invites readers to reconsider Clausewitzian concepts in light of modern fields like nonlinear dynamics, it does not specifically attempt a wholesale reconstruction of Clausewitz's unified concept of a general friction.

15. Clausewitz, On War, 100-103 and 122.

16. Ibid., 17, 167, 198, 407-408, and 560. John Boyd has long criticized Clausewitz for focusing almost exclusively on reducing one's own (internal) friction, and failing to explore the rich possibilities for "magnifying [the] adversary's friction/uncertainty" (John R. Boyd, "Patterns of Conflict," briefing dated April/June/July 1979, Slide 24; in the December 1986 version of this briefing, see Slide 41). Boyd is right. Granted, in a few places the mostly unfinished manuscript that Clausewitz's widow published as Vom Kriege does raise friction's positive potential to influence outcomes by increasing its magnitude on the enemy's side (Paret, "The Genesis of On War" in Clausewitz, On War, 17). Nonetheless, Boyd and Paret are correct in noting that "Clausewitz never sufficiently explored the various ways in which one side influences the other" (Paret, "The Genesis of On War," in Clausewitz, On War, 25).

17The proposition that for every action there is always opposed-and-equal reaction was one of Newton's three principles of motion [Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, in Robert Maynard Hutchins, ed., Great Books of the Western World, vol. 34, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 14].

18. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1929), 55-58. As Kant remarked, since a pure science of nature, meaning Newton's astonishingly effective mathematical formulation of physics, existed, it is quite proper to ask how such a science is possible (ibid., 56).

19. Clausewitz, On War, 119 and 120. Note that virtually these same words occurred in Clausewitz's historical account of the 1812 campaign in Russia ["From The Campaign of 1812 in Russia," Historical and Political Writings, trans. and eds. Peter Paret and Daniel Moran (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 165-167].