The exact thing I was thinking in response to the GP.
Worth noting is that Clausewitz lived in a world where wars were events that were declared between states.
Today a major difference is insurgency/counterinsurgency. And our state likes to wage wars without formal declaration. Not to mention its wars against abstract concepts instead of foreign states.
> Clausewitz lived in a world where wars were events that were declared between states
Sort of. Born 1780, died 1831, the main wars in his life were the Napoleonic Wars.
But he would not have been unfamiliar with the Wars of Religion that convulsed Europe for 150 years following Luther's Protestant Reformation and culminated in the Peace of Westphalia. These we not regular state-on-state wars, but were a series of internationalized civil wars, caused by Protestant and Catholic low-level violence, coups, usurpations, overthrows, assassinations, and other civil conflicts. These low-level conflicts caused by non-state actors who were part of a transnational religious/ideological movement were not unlike the religious/ideological insurgencies we see today.
Clausewitz would also have seen wars of colonization/imperialism and decolonization in the New World. These were also wars of states against irregular non-state combatants. Especially after the Napoleonic Wars, when the Concert of Europe was keeping stability in Europe, the main form of warfare Clausewitz would have been observing would have been wars of colonization/decolonization.
> And our state likes to wage wars without formal declaration. Not to mention its wars against abstract concepts instead of foreign states.
This really well fits what Russian gov does (as someone from there).
I actually think every offensive war is explained by concepts because people don't want to just kill people, they need a higher explanation to risk death and sleep at night after some murdering. It is in the name of religion or unification or against Nazism or against rotting capitalism. Only true defence doesn't need explanation.
> This really well fits what Russian gov does (as someone from there).
ok but I am pretty sure the OP was talking about the US's politically-motivated forever wars on nouns, the "War on Some Drugs" and the "War on Terror But Not The Causes Of Or Allies Hosting Terror".
Worth noting is that Clausewitz lived in a world where wars were events that were declared between states.
Today a major difference is insurgency/counterinsurgency. And our state likes to wage wars without formal declaration. Not to mention its wars against abstract concepts instead of foreign states.