{"id":1182,"date":"2011-08-22T20:44:07","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T04:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1182"},"modified":"2011-08-22T20:44:07","modified_gmt":"2011-08-23T04:44:07","slug":"review-on-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1182","title":{"rendered":"Review: On War"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Von Clausewitz&#8217;s <em>On War<\/em> is a classic work on war, its ramifications, strategies, and tactics.\u00a0 It was written in the 1830&#8217;s (and technically unfinished), so it is easy to imagine that it is from another age and largely irrelevant.\u00a0 There are certainly parts that are of their time, but there&#8217;s a surprising amount of thinking that is fresh.<\/p>\n<p>All the discussion of the lines between and interdependence of strategy and tactics is relevant, even when the specific examples are from battles of another time fought with old weapons.\u00a0 Every bit as compelling are discussions of politics and strategy.\u00a0 Clausewitz is unambiguous that those are never separable and to understand that is to have a hope of understanding a a war.\u00a0 It makes our current adventures in Asia even less comprehensible to me, probably because I don&#8217;t want to think about what our political goals are.<\/p>\n<p>While there are many interesting ideas here, the text &#8211; translated from 19th century German &#8211; is often opaque.\u00a0 It doesn&#8217;t help that all the examples are drawn from the time as well.\u00a0 While there are some Napoleonic battles that I have some inkling of, overall I don&#8217;t know many details.\u00a0 The combination of the syntax and obscurity makes for difficult reading.<\/p>\n<p>Worth it if you&#8217;re interested enough to penetrate the fog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Von Clausewitz&#8217;s On War is a classic work on war, its ramifications, strategies, and tactics.\u00a0 It was written in the 1830&#8217;s (and technically unfinished), so it is easy to imagine that it is from another age and largely irrelevant.\u00a0 There are certainly parts that are of their time, but there&#8217;s a surprising amount of thinking [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1182"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1185,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182\/revisions\/1185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}