The Clausewitz Delusion: How the American Army Screwed Up the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan a Way Forward - Rilegato

Now retired from active duty following more than twenty years of service as an army officer, Stephen L. Melton is a member of the faculty at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College. He is a graduate of the University of California and holds a masters degree from the University of Missouri. He lives in Leavenworth, Kansas.

In searching for the U.S. Army’s fundamental doctrine on how to wage war, you would expect to find a vault somewhere, perhaps at the Army War College, maybe at the Pentagon, full of the closely guarded secrets of success in armed conflict. This meticulously updated library of important facts would give us confidence both in our current decisions and in our projections for the future.

You would expect to find this, but according to author Stephen L. Melton, retired army officer and professor at the Command and General Staff College, you would not. The army has not systematically collected, archived, and analyzed the lessons from its history; consequently, the army has forgotten what it once knew. As the author argues, the post–Cold War army was “just making it up.”

Incredibly, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War the American military embraced an early nineteenth-century view of warfare. Advocated by Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, this view is completely inappropriate to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Clausewitz fad of the 1980s and 1990s led the U.S. Army to abandon its time-honored methods of offensive war, which enabled the expansion of American power from the time of the early Indian campaigns all the way through World War II, in favor of a military philosophy derived from the dynastic campaigns of Napoleon and Frederick the Great.

In the United States, the civilian authorities—the president and the congress—control the military and tell it where and when to go to war. To achieve victory in the wars of the twenty-first century, particularly offensive wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, the army needs to go back to its historical roots and relearn the lessons of its victories.