[Cyclelicious] New comment on How Wars Are Won: Book review.

Dingbat has left a new comment on your post "How Wars Are Won: Book review":

Keegan's History of Warfare is good, but it does get to be boggy going at times. All you need to know about Clausewitz:
War, on the one hand, is "a continuation of politics by other means." Governments choose to go to war to accomplish specific political ends. However, war is unpredictable, not merely in its outcome, but also in the fact that it tends to get out of control. In Clausewitz's formulation, war tends toward total war. It's hard to have a small war, in short, because the stakes for the loser are so high.
Clausewitz's observations on total war are a little less apropos now that superpowers are able to extend power over seas so that a defeat or pullout doesn't directly harm the superpower, the nations on which they're exerting their power still fight back with everything they've got.



Posted by Dingbat to Cyclelicious at 9/24/2007 08:51:00 AM