Helmuth von Moltke the Elder is not very well known as a strategic theorist. Yet he can be considered as a practical extension to Clausewitz. The two lived in greatly different eras--Clausewitz was a struggling strategic reformer in an era of great German weakness and defeat, and Moltke lived long enough to supervise Prussia's rise to prominence and the smashing victory over the hated French adversary in 1871. This accounts for the striking difference of their respective visions.
Clausewitz was an abstract philosopher less interested in providing a means of waging war than describing its essential nature, utilizing a fundamentally dialectic philosophical method. Moltke, on the other hand, is relentlessly practical.
Moltke famously viewed strategy as a "system of expedients." He was suspicious of rigid, inflexible, and totalizing grand strategies and theories, instead advocating strategy as a series of plug-in points that could be fashioned and molded to fit the situation. He coined the oft-repeated saying that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy" and also designed the first real systemized wargames. The practice of Blue and Red teams (and especially red as the opposing force) was Moltke's doing.
The celebrated German system of "mission orders" was also something that Moltke pushed hard for. He correctly saw that talented subordinates, if properly trained and possessed of the right ethos, could achieve greater results if left to their own devices. Mission orders allowed them to carry out the objective in the manner they saw fit. This stands in stark opposition to the extreme micromanagement that often prevails in the modern era, the worst example of which was President Johnson selecting bombing targets from the Oval Office during the Vietnam war.
The modern system of "off-the-shelf" planning owes itself to Moltke's innovations. If the United States intervenes in Pakistan we will be using an concept of operations planned many years in advance, like the "War Plan Orange" which served as an intellectual framework and foreshadowing for the campaign planning of the Pacific Theater in World War II. Moltke also built the powerful German General Staff up as a peerless planning organ.
The real problem, however, that Germany faced, however, was one of politics. Unlike Clausewitz, Moltke's strategic theory is almost wholly devoid of the political aspects of war. A lack of attention to politics is the consequence of the essential weakness of civilian politicians in Imperial German society, who were entirely shut out of planning national security policy. The result was an unchallenged aura of militarism untempered by the unfortunate geopolitical realities.
Those who saw the need for a more restrained political strategy, such as Chancellor Bismarck in his later years, were given the boot by a vainglorious Kaiser bent on primacy. Civilians such as the military historian Hans Delbruck also attacked the haphazard link of political and military maneuvers--and were ignored. The German military's operational excellence, crafted by men like Moltke, was ultimately not enough to compensate for weaknesses in political strategy.
What lessons can we take from this? Saying that national security must be connected with politics is too glib of an answer. If it were that obvious, everyone would have done it. Most wars are haphazardly planned and propelled more by purely military than political drivers. Figures like Moltke--who provide utilitarian strategies--have more influence than the often maddening to read Clausewitz.
Perhaps the converse of this formula is more important. Yes, national security should be tied to a grander political strategy. But at the same time it's just as important for political grand strategies to have a pragmatic "system of expedients" at their heart. The appeal of a totalizing vision like the Bush administration's 2002 National Security Strategy--the genesis of preventive (not preemptive, as preemption is a matter of striking first at an imminent threat rather than a potential one) war is that it linked a grand end to a very clearly defined set of means. Bush's means were wrong and his ends were gravely misconceived, but they were there. Anti-war critiques and hazy visions of multilateralism, however, seldom linked their purely political visions with a set of means.
With Obama preparing to send envoys to the Middle East in an attempt to advance diplomacy with Iran and solve the festering Arab-Israeli conflict, linking ends to means is more important than ever in US strategy. If he succeeds, it will be because he created a set of drivers to advance his grand vision of strategy. If the result--like so much else in the Middle East--is stalemate, it won't be hard to discern why.
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