Clausewitz Delusion: How the American Army Screwed Up the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (A Way Forward) - Hardcover

This book reveals the failings of the U.S. Army in its adoption of a doctrine of "Full Spectrum Operations" that codified the thinking of Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussion general of the 1830s. Instead, the author suggests, the army should adopt a new doctrinal framework based on an analysis of the historical record and previously successful American methods of war.  A clear and persuasive critique of current ideas about warfare, The Clausewitz Delusion lays out a new explanation of victory in war, based on an analysis of wartime casualties and post-conflict governance.  It is a book of critical importance to policymakers, statesmen, and military strategists at every level.

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.