"The Jomini of Non-Violence"

I've never been a fan of Jomini, but after reading his works as well as the historical context behind them I have to cut him some slack. Check out this comment thread at SWJ about Gene Sharp's theories. A great comment by Barry Zellen about Jomini's legacy:

Jomini hoped, and thus sought to extract lessons from the Napoleonic experience, to reduce war's extremes, hoping for an efficiency of ends and means. His legacy, from advising Ney and later the Tsar, his participation at the Congress of Vienna, his prolific pen, and his long commitment to PME, shows a lifelong dedication to learning from military history, and to deriving practicable lessons from the past for tomorrow's conflicts - something Sharp has likewise dedicated himself to. While generals on both sides of our Civil War made blunders, and were both schooled in Jomini's works, their bloody battles were no more Jomini's fault than were WWI's killing fields caused by Clausewitz, as Liddell Hart believed. Both theorists had their strengths, and despite their differing styles, both shared a desire to leverage knowledge to increase war's efficiency and to decrease its destructiveness.

Comments

[Joseph Fouche]

So far, if the unfolding events reflect Mr. Sharp's tactics, his tactical doctrine can be summed up as "the art of getting protesters killed until the other means turn on the politics they continue".

[A.E.]

Maybe there's a parallel here to the aforementioned Civil War misuse Zellen mentions.