The concept of new wars initially posited in 1991 by Martin Van Creveld and

subsequently developed most notably by Herfried Mnkler and Mary Kaldor is seriously flawed.
The new wars hypothesis displays a superficial appreciation of Clausewitz On War and hinders
rather than illuminates the understanding of contemporary armed conflict. This paper will reveal
the shortcomings of the new wars thesis, areas that the thesis has legitimately called attention to
and seek to offer suggestions regarding what is salvageable from the thesis. Lastly, this paper
will make suggestions for further research that builds upon the useful portions of the new wars
thesis.
Given her number of publications related to this topic, Mary Kaldor can be considered the
principal proponent of the new war school of thought. Her work will merit numerous mentions,
with other contributions provided by Martin Van Creveld and Herfried Mnkler. The old war
approach is argued by several scholars, such as Antulio Echevarria, who are critical of the new
war thesis and provide spirited rebuttals.
Comparing and contrasting how the new war proponents and the old war school
characterize war is an illuminating exercise to expose the limitations of the new war approach.
The new war school claims that the Clausewitzean model of warfare, based upon the wondrous
trinity is in the process of breaking-down and decaying. This means that Clausewitz paradigm
for viewing warfare is no longer universally applicable and a new theory is required to plug-up
the gaps in Clausewitzean thought. However, the new war school does not simply want to revise
Clausewitz theory, they wish to discard him altogether. Creveld suggests that Clausewitz
definition is intellectual baggage that deserves to be thrown overboard.1 This gives their
school of thought a radical character as opposed to simply a revisionist agenda.
1Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War, (New York: Free Press, 1991), 55.

Fleming observes that there are two distinct trinities at work within On War and that they
have different emphases.2 This is significant because the new wars school has constructed its
paradigm by latching onto only one of the trinities. They are failing to analyze Clausewitz work
as a cohesive whole. Due to the dialectical nature of Clausewitz arguments, subsequent books
and chapters in On War build upon each other. This structure is deliberate on Clausewitz part as
an effort to examine war from all of its angles. Focusing on individual parts over the context of
the whole could easily distort Clausewitz arguments and meaning. Such distortions could lead
researchers to erroneous conclusions. Clausewitz himself cautioned that the part and the whole
must always be thought of as together and it would therefore be an unsound course of action to
separate them.3
The new war proponents are focused upon seeing the three components of the trinity as
government, the military and the people. The old war school of thought primarily concentrates
upon purpose, chance and hostility. Given that Clausewitz devotes the bulk of On War to
discussing the latter trinity, this trinity should obviously be considered the primary trinity. The
trinity of government, the military and the people being considered a secondary trinity with a
proviso that these two trinities are related to one another. Hence, the character and institutional
power and legitimacy of a state is not directly related to the core trinity of hostility, chance and
reason.4 The primary trinity is manifested through the secondary trinity; they therefore share a
symbiotic relationship and cannot be separated without perverting the ability to understand them.
The two trinities are constantly interacting with each other in peace-time as well as during a war.
2 Colin M. Fleming, Clausewitz's Timeless Trinity: A Framework for Modern War.
(Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 2.
3 Fleming, Clausewitzs Timeless Trinity, 8-9.
4 Ibid., 40

Certain elements of each trinity may become more important than another to aid in explaining
policy shifts, why a particular war occurred, its character or why it ended in a particular manner.
By failing to mention the primary trinity and concentrating on the secondary one
exclusively, John Stone argues that Creveld fails to comprehend even the basics of
Clausewitzean thought. If passion, reason and chance have an impact upon the course of a
conflict, then the Trinity remains a useful framework for analysis. Creveld is guilty of taking
parts to analyze and forgetting to look at how the parts and whole are interrelated. Stone
suggests that the trinity of government, army and people could be replaced with leaders,
fighters and supporters. Especially when considering that a government is made up of people
who are synonymously referred to as leaders, the purpose of an army is to wage war which
consists of fighting and the supporters of a given non-state actor are obviously people whose
support and favor is looked upon as a strategic asset.5
It is these differing emphases, which have led to contrasting views regarding the nature of
armed conflict in the post-Cold War world. This is the source of the debate between the
paradigms of a Clausewitzean understanding of war and the new wars advocates. Creveld refers
to the secondary one as the only trinity at work in On War.6 While Creveld does discuss
Clausewitz concepts of friction and chance in war, he confines his discussion only to matters of
theater strategy, operations and tactics. He gives the impression that he is oblivious to the notion
that friction and uncertainty can also be at play on the level of grand strategy.7 He goes as far to
5 John Stone, Clausewitz's Trinity and Contemporary Conflict. Civil Wars, vol. 9, no.
3 (2007), 283-84.
6 Creveld, The Transformation of War, 35-42.
7 Ibid.

suggest that [i]f low-intensity conflict is the . . . future [of war], then strategy in the classical
sense will disappear.8 Mnkler cites Creveld favorably several times in his brief discussion of
the continuing applicability of Clausewitz and writes that interstate warfare is an outdated
modality. This gives the appearance that the pair are in agreement on this point.9
Kaldor, posits that the Clausewitzean paradigm is only applicable to states by citing
Clausewitz initial definition of war in Book I, Chapter I. She then declares that Clausewitz was
referring to state actors, even though a cursory glance at the relevant section of On War reveals
his initial definition involves duels and a wrestling match. These contests typically occur
between individuals and not nation-states.10 In Book VI, Chapter XXVI, Clausewitz writes of
the people in arms and how irregular forces could take to acting against an invading enemy
without official state sanction. He mentions that critics of this stratagem could view it as a
means to revolution or legalized anarchy. Anarchy it may be because the state would have
little to no control over these friendly combatants, but Clausewitz states that such actions are
simply another means of war.11 Kaldor argues that the trinity of the government, the military
and the people operates through reason, through chance and strategy; and through emotion, but
she fails to grasp the symbiotic relationship between the two trinities for Echevarria argues there

8 Ibid., 207.
9Herfried Munkler. The New Wars. (Oxford: Polity Press, 2005), 135.
10 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars. 2nd ed. Stanford University Press: Stanford,
2007., 17; Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Translated by Michael Howard and Peter
Paret. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 75. All subsequent quotes from
On War will come from this particular translation.
11Clausewitz, On War, 479.

is a subjective-objective construct in operation that requires paired concepts.12 It may be best

to conceptualize the two trinities not as two distinct triangles, but as a three-dimensional
geometric shape in which both trinities support and influence each other.
Kaldor offers a definition of war that recognizes the two Clausewitzean trinities, but she
posits that the decision-makers and participants in new wars are not attempting to overthrow the
enemy, thereby keeping the Clausewitzean means but discarding the Clausewitzean end. She
sees belligerents engaged in a conflict locked not in a contest of wills that is similar to a duel
or wrestling match but as witting or unwitting partners in a mutual enterprise of waging war
upon each other because they have turned war itself into a form of enterprise.13 Victory is
irrelevant for the state of war is the desired end and not the means to achieving victory. War is
viewed as the means of gaining and solidifying political power for the wars participants or
deriving economic or other benefits that can only be accessed under wartime conditions.14
However, her hypothesis could be incorrect because in her primary case study, the breakup
of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kaldor oversimplifies some matters. She includes a chart that includes
the three warring parties and their numbers of main battle tanks, artillery pieces, multiple-launch
rocket systems and mortars.15 She fails to grasp that the correlation of forces gave neither of the
three sides the necessary preponderance of firepower for adequate defense while building up
both an assault force force and the necessary reserves for an offensive. The inability to create an
12 Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 23 and Anatulio Echevarria, On The Clausewitz of the
Cold War. Armed Forces and Society, vol. 34, no. 1 (2007): 90-108.100.
13 Kaldor, New and Old Wars. 3rd ed., (Cambridge England: Polity Press, 2012), 218.
14 Kaldor, Inconclusive Wars: Is Clausewitz Still Relevant in These Global Times?
Global Policy, vol. 1, issue 3 (2010): 271-281, 274.
15 Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 2nd ed.,49 and 3rd ed. 48.

operational reserve is a recipe for a stalemate that causes war to, in Mnklers words, smoulder
on in such a situation.16 Clausewitz was well aware of this when he wrote that a reserve can be
used to prolong or renew the action [and] to counter unforeseen threats and that it could
therefore help mitigate the diminishing force of the attack by providing fresh forces to keep an
assault from stalling.17 It is far more rational to believe that the Bosnian-Serbs failed to
annihilate the Muslim neighborhoods of Sarajevo because they lacked the means and not the
desire to conquer Sarajevo. Unable to overcome each other militarily, each side chose to go onto
the strategic defensive in a conventional sense and to continue pursuit of a policy of ethnic
cleansing within the areas they already controlled. Ethnic cleansing was also a stated goal for
the Serbians and Croats. Each had ardent nationalists at the helm that did not wish to coexist with
the other nationalities in the same state, or the portions of Bosnia considered to be parts of
Greater Croatia or Greater Serbia. The pursuit of such objectives is entirely rational and
consistent with the world-views of the leadership of each side. However, it appears that Kaldor
views warfare to be an example of barbarism, and, thusly, all war could be construed as semirational at best in Kaldors world-view.18
She writes of the importance of the paramilitary units in terms of being independent actors
during the conflict.19 While she mentions that some units cooperated with the regular military,
she comments in a mere sentence that most of the paramilitaries were absorbed into the regular

16 Munkler, The New Wars, 34.

17 Clausewitz, On War, 210, 527.
18 Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 3rd ed., 185; 2nd ed., 178.
19 Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 2nd and 3rd ed., 48-52.

forces of the three sides towards the end of the war.20 She fails to explore just how genuinely
independent the vast majority of these paramilitary groups were. She does not provide any
further details about how this process of integration into the regular forces was to be carried-out
or how successful it was, or even why it happened. Though Kaldor suggests that the BosnianSerbs elected to enact such a policy due to manpower shortages, she provides no justification for
why the Croats and Muslims chose to follow suit. Kaldor fails to grasp that if the paramilitary
groups were only nominally independent of central authorities, especially for supplies of
weapons and ammunition, these groups were not capable of pursuing their own independent
course of action and were always paramilitary auxiliaries of the regular forces of each
combatant. Fleming observed that elements of the Bosniak Armya mountain division and
mechanized brigadewere purged in 1993 when they had established a criminal organization
in Sarajevo. Disbanding military units who engage in non-sanctioned activities certainly casts
doubt upon the notion of independent paramilitary units. Additionally, this was at a time when
the Bosnian-Muslims were mainly fielding militia and other irregular forces.21 Kaldors
suggestion that all paramilitary units operated independently appears to be a case of
exaggeration.
The opponents of the new war paradigm have been complementary to the new wars
scholars to a limited extent, with Andreas Herberg-Rothe writing that in order to make a rebuttal,
it forces scholars to engage with portions of On War that were previously underexposed,
thereby requiring a careful rereading of the text. He is dismayed by them, writing that the
caricature of Clausewitz created by several new war writers has constructed an illusory
20 Ibid., 57.
21 Fleming, Clausewitzs Timeless Trinity, 163.

unbridgeable gap between the two schools.22 Echevarria counsels that On War is a hard
read, thereby giving the impression that rereading such difficult material could aid in
understanding the texts arguments and he counsels that modern readers need to resist the
impulse to finish it by using our present frame of reference and value sets as a guide. 23 For
Newman, the new war thesis provides a great service in explaining patterns of contemporary
conflict,24 but this where the praise ends.
The notion of new wars is potentially useful in explaining certain contours of
contemporary conflicts, but using this thesis to overthrow Clausewitz is going too far. According
to Daase, those who argue such a position are practicing intellectual ignorance and he argues
that Clausewitzean theory does include and explain them.25 He argues that Clausewitz was a
theorist of wars of national liberation and guerilla warfare by referencing relevant chapters in
On War that make reference to popular uprisings and guerilla war. Daase believes that the
Clausewitzean trinities can embrace the terms guerilla and terrorist as they are quite resilient
and the trinities can allow a spectrum of political violence to exist within their confines.26

22 Andreas Herberg-Rothe, Clausewitzs Wondrous Trinity as a Coordinate System

of War and Violent Conflict, International Journal of Conflict and Violence, vol. 3, no.
2 (2009): 204-219, 205.
23Anatulio Echevarria, On The Clausewitz of the Cold War, 103.
24 Edward Newman, The New Wars Debate: A Historical Perspective Is Needed,
Security Dialogue, vol. 35, no. 2 (2004): 173-89, 179.
25 Christopher Daase, Clausewitz and Small Wars in Hew Strachan, Clausewitz
and the Dialectic of War in Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe, eds.
Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 182.
26 Ibid., 185.

Clausewitz examples of duels and wrestling matches are examples of the individual perpetration
of violence upon another person.27
From Clausewitz understanding of war, Daase extracts wars essence to include an
attacker, a defender, the application of violence and the use of military means to achieve a
political end. Daase then recasts Clausewitz definition to reveal its true wondrous elasticity in
terms of its core objects: attacker, defender, violent means, military aims, and political ends.28
He demonstrates that it is possible to remove the nation-states as attacker and defender and still
retain the internal logic of Clausewitz definition. Daase writes that terrorism can fit under this
conceptualization rather easily. The current wave of terrorism is simply the chosen strategy by a
non-state actor using organized, violent means against identifiable civilian targets with the
intention to spread fear. The hope is that the public of the targeted state apply political pressure
upon the government to alter one or more policy goals in the terrorists favor. A non-state actor
would be inferior to a state actor. Avoiding conventional warfare to preserve its forces, this type
of attacker will generally only engage in small-scale assaults against carefully chosen enemy
installations and lines of communication. However, its true target is not enemy fielded forces,
but public opinion and the objective is to erode public confidence in the governments policy.29
Daase also indicates that Clausewitz understood that attack and defense takes place on
three levels: political, strategic and tactical. Each has its own distinct manifestations of what
constitutes attack and defense with [p]olitical defence mean[ing] that a nation struggles for its
survival or very existence, not for its . . . expansion. Clausewitz also writes of the active
27 Clausewitz, On War, 75.
28 Daase, Clausewitz and Small Wars, 186.
29 Ibid., 187.

defense which is the classical definition of guerilla warfare. Guerilla warfare aims to defeat
the enemy force not through decisive battle, but through wearing-down its morale and combat
power via the exhaustion of the stamina of the enemy force, therefore sapping its morale and
combat effectiveness.30
Echevarrias advice was not taken by Kaldor, who wishes to see polities around the world
embrace cosmopolitan or humanistic values. This espoused wish leads to her viewing sides in
a conflict not fighting to uphold such values as behaving irrationally and without legitimacy.
Legitimacy would be bestowed by upon the side that fights to uphold the values extolled in
various treaties and conventions of international law. She then extends this argument to conclude
that participants in new wars irrational actors pursuing irrational goals because their goals go
against the Kantian worldview she obviously wishes to see come into being. She argues that the
Kantian sense of cosmopolitanism, implies the existence of a human community with certain
shared rights and obligations and that such principles are already in several international
agreements. She wishes to see national sovereignty reduced to an artificial concept.31
Furthermore, Kaldor suggests that the European Council of the European Union and the United
Nations Security Council could be regarded as the international equivalent of Clausewitz
cabinet as a conception of public authority based on the notion of the common good.32 Such
attitudes obviously make her an advocate for humanitarian intervention and the so-called
responsibility to protectthe notion that upholding international human-rights law trumps
national sovereignty. Such conceptual arguments are part of the security studies concept of
30 Ibid., 189. Italics in original.
31 Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 123-25.
32 Kaldor, Inconclusive Wars, 279.

human security, a concept Kaldor is considerably involved in developing as she herself

declares.33 Mnkler takes an approach that is less complimentary to notions of cosmopolitanism.
He argues that the key factors hinging on intervention are politico-economic and he does not
advocate a cosmopolitan approach, instead seeing it as being ineffective. 34
The differing emphases on the two trinities lead to contrasting views regarding the nature
of armed conflict in the post-Cold War world. This is the source of the debate between new war
proponents and opponents. Echevarria argues that it is incorrect to argue that Clausewitzean
thought is only applicable to wars between nation-states because variety preludes pattern and
that no two conflicts are going to share the exact same pattern, but there will still be an
underlying rationality that conflicts across time and space will generally share.35 Consequently,
he considers the new wars concept to be worthy of little serious consideration.36 He also faults
the new war theorists for failing to understand the differences between Clausewitzs conception
of real and absolute war and specifically cites Kaldor in the pursuant end-note.37
Echevarria considers absolute war to serve as Clausewitz conception of limitless
escalation, which is unattainable, thereby relegating absolute war to an abstract concept and it
therefore serves only as the opposite to real war for comparative purposes.38 Hew Strachan
agrees with Echevarria and argues that many people since the publication of On War have been
33 Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 3rd ed., viii.
34 Munkler, The New Wars, 125-7.
35 Echevarria, Clausewitz and Contemporary War, 57.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 40, see note 15, page 51.
38 Ibid.,

confused by the fact that Clausewitz considered absolute war to be an unattainable abstraction.
Kaldor is in company that includes numerous German, French and British military leaders and
commentators, including Liddel-Hart.39 Kaldor argues that absolute war is an ideal that is
mitigated by friction, but also argues that absolute war is the inner nature of war even though
she mentions that friction could include the imposition of limited objectives by political
authorities.40 This means that she believes war aims in and of themselves are a form of friction.
The imposition of war aims of limited scope are not a source of friction. Friction comes from all
of the constituent parts of a war and the varying interpretations of those aims that go into
implementing the policy from the lowest to the highest situated elements of the chain of
command.
Policy in and of itself cannot lead to friction. Rather, resistance to policy at the strategic
level once it has been promulgated is the source of friction at this level. This is a matter for the
individual psychology of each military and government participant in a war, as well as an
assessment of how well the implemented policy is effective in terms of concluding the war. Such
ongoing assessments would naturally lead to friction when differing points of view regarding
adjustments to tactics and strategy are debated throughout the chain of command.
Kaldor is attempting to simultaneously argue that absolute war is both an abstraction as
well as being attainable. This leads to arguing that policy should be subordinated to war because
she suggests that policy in and of itself can lead to friction. The only way policy could be a

39 Hew Strachan, Clausewitz and the Dialectic of War in Hew Strachan and Andreas
Herberg-Rothe, eds. Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007. Accessed April 10, 2016. ProQuest Ebrary, 2, 20-28.

40 Kaldor, In Defence of New Wars. Stability: International Journal of Security and

Development. Vol. 2, No. 1, Part 4, 12-13.

source of friction is if it were subordinated to war. If Clausewitz believed this to be the case, he
would not have written Book VIII of On War in which he argues for the primacy of policy when
he argues war is only a branch of political activity; that it is in no sense autonomous.41
These two groups of scholars are writing for different audiences, with military historians
primarily writing for war-fighters of all ranks. The new war school is primarily writing for
civilian policy-makers who are typically lawyers and likely lack much, if any, systematic
exposure to military thought or history.42 Mnkler writes that classification of war is no longer
purely an academic concern in this post-September 11 world, for it has become an issue of
possibly world-political importance. Kaldor writes that one of the main objectives in her mind
of the new wars thesis is to influence and change the prevailing perceptions held by policymakers. She expresses belief that the new war thesis reveals a new reality of globalization
which has left a mark on the character of war.43 By focusing more on typically civilian policymakers and not war-fighters, the new wars school is advocating for certain policy prescriptions.
Kaldor is disappointed that demand for a cosmopolitan political response44 has not
materialized to restrain the illegitimate new wars.45 However, such clamoring is nothing new
as liberal thought regarding an approach to international relations has had a cosmopolitan ethos
undergirding it going back centuries.

41 Clausewitz, On War, 605. Italics in original.

42 Kaldor, Inconclusive Wars, 272.
43 Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 3rd ed., 3.
44 Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 3rd ed., 221.
45 Ibid., 207.

Newman cautions that the factors involved in new wars are not a recent phenomenon and
that these perceived shifts in the understanding of war are likely due to the nature of modern
means of communications. These wars being brought into the living-rooms of Westerners
policy-makers and the public alikevia news reports.

He stresses that it is important to weigh

and analyze if features of war are more of an issue of degree then type and whether certain
presentations of warfare could be due to some something unique about the theater it is taking
place in rather than a birthing a new modality of warfare.46
It must be borne in mind that most policy-makers are not going to have had much
systematic exposure to military history. Much of what they will be able to recall from their
schooling will only revolve around the twentieth century. The notion of new wars could
certainly be new to them because they have not studied early-modern warfare in Europe at all.
This explains the reason Mnkler provides a case-study of the Thirty Years War, due to
structural affinities between the early modern and post-Cold War periods.47

Strachan and

Herberg-Rothe are critical of Kaldor for using the adjective new because they stress that
historians look for and examine continuity and identify change that fosters something genuinely
new, yet this is something that Kaldor has readily acknowledged in her own work. 48 She still
continues to use the adjective new when discussing these conflicts precisely because she is
seeking to take a specialized topic and present it to non-specialists while simultaneously also

46 Edward Newman, The New Wars Debate, 179-80.

47 Munkler, The New Wars, 34-35.
48 Editors Introduction in Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe, eds. Clausewitz in the
Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 9 and Kaldor, New and Old
Wars, 2nd ed., 15-22.

seeking to have her thesis appeal to specialists as evidenced by the several articles she has
written to defend the idea of new wars.49
The existence of several different English-language translations of On War only muddies
the waters of understanding further. There are three principal English translations written by
Graham, Jolles and Howard and Paret, and Honig argues that the Howard/Paret translation is the
most readable and the one that has held up the best to scholarly critiques of its quality,50 yet it is
not used with regularity by all scholars who are party to the new wars debate. This only adds to
the frustrating observation by Hans Rothfels that On War seems to be more quoted than actually
read.51 A single, common version would ensure everyone is working from the same benchmark
of basic understanding and comprehension. Yet, Honig also warns us that translations are also a
product of their times, and, as such, they have a shelf-life.52 Fleming writes that translations
prior to the Howard/Paret version had tended to view Clausewitz as a militarist, while Howard
and Paret viewed him as a liberal scholar in the search of objective knowledge.53 There is
also a further complication: the existence of abridged translations of On War. Looking over the
bibliographies and references of the works cited for this paper reveals that, as a whole, scholars
have not agreed upon the use of a standard English-language translation.

49 Kaldor, In Defence of New Wars, 6-7.

50 Jan Willem Honig, Clausewitzs On War: Problems of Text and Translation in Hew
Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe, eds., Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 58
51 H. Rothfels, Clausewitz, in ,93.
52 Honig, Clausewitzs On War: Problems, 60-61.
53 Fleming, 49.

In his bibliography, Martin Van Creveld lists the Howard and Paret translation,54 while
Mnkler utilizes an abridged version of the Graham translation of On War.55 This single-volume
abridgement was edited by Anatol Rapaport and published in 1968. The Rapaport abridgment
does not include any material from Books V, VI or VII, and there are several sections missing
from Book VIII.56 The missing chapters and books can be easily identified by comparing the
table of contents in one of the complete translations with the abridgments.
Kaldor makes use of two abridgments of the Graham translation. She makes use of the
Rapaport abridgement and another by Louise Wilmot.57 While this second abridgment includes
all of the books of On War, Wilmot chose to exclude several chapters that are present in the
Howard and Paret translation. Neither Mnkler nor Kaldor ever bother to comment upon how
relying upon an abridgment that only includes about half of the entire work is somehow more
sound methodologically than using either a complete edition of On War. Perhaps Mary Kaldor
and Herfried Mnkler subscribe to the school of translational thought that Beatrice Hauser, a
fellow international relations scholar, characterizes as a flawed belief held by some political
scientists who assume that the particularities of different languages (and their evolution over
time), once translated into English, are irrelevant.58

54 Creveld, The Transformation of War, 231.

55 Munkler, The New Wars, 146, note 4.
56 See table of contents in Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Anatol Rapoport,
(Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1982, 1968).
57 See table of contents in Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Louise Wilmot, (Ware,
England: Wordsworth, 2000).
58 Beatrice Hauser, review of War, Clausewitz, and the Trinity by Thomas Waldman,
RUSI Journal, vol. 158, no. 6 (Dec. 2013), 108.

It is encouraging to see a work like Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century be published.

The work takes a multidisciplinary approach and includes contributions by historians (several of
whom are retired military officers), political scientists, philosophers and an active-duty French
colonel. Had the new war scholars not come forward to offer their new interpretation of
Clausewitz, this work may never have been written.
This approach is one that should serve as a model for further research into Clausewitz in
order to break down the tendency of academics to write largely for the consumption of specialists
within their own fields. This can begin a serious discussion of Clausewitz that incorporates all
relevant disciplines to ensure that different fields can come to a more comprehensive
understanding of Clausewitz and his ideas. However, there was a missing discipline: German
language specialists, who would be able to speak and write more authoritatively about methods
of translation and the intricacies of language that Honig only briefly touched upon in his essay.
Having the input of these scholars could help in the eventual fashioning of a new translation of a
new English translation On War, one that could receive the approval of historians, political
scientists and other academic stakeholders. Such a new translation should include critical
introductions separately written by a historian and a political scientist. These academics should
possess considerable renown and expertise on Clausewitz to write about what Clausewitz means
for their particular field. These essays would enable historians and political scientists to
understand where the other is coming from when examining and writing about Clausewitz and
hopefully aid the new wars scholars in seeing that some of their arguments are exaggerated or
overstated.
There is one other area that the new war scholars have touched upon, which could open a
new area of research that also must be multidisciplinary in nature: the use of child soldiers.

Unfortunately, Kaldor confines her discussion of this phenomenon to a single paragraph in New
& Old Wars and only briefly eludes to the considerable use of child soldiers by Charles Taylors
National Patriotic Front during Liberias war with Sierra Leone.59 Mnkler cites that 300,000
child soldiers actively participating in conflicts in 1999, but he also only has a paragraph of
discussion.60 P.W. Singer observed in 2001 that children served as active combatants in over
75% of the worlds armed conflicts and observed that the United States possessed no systematic
understanding of children in wartime in terms of the field of security-studies, which he noted
must address all the . . . actors in warfare, even the littlest ones in order to remain relevant.61
He cites alarming figures that show the ubiquity of the use of child soldiers.62 Singer observes
that the use of children could provide combatants with a new pool of recruits beyond typical
military-age adult males and could lead to conflicts becoming more violent and less politically
motivated because children lack the abstract reasoning skills to have a through grasp of political
ideology.63 Would American forces confronted by units of children wielding Kalashnikovs hold
their fire and suffer unnecessary casualties due to American cultural understanding of children
and childhood? This is an extremely important question for policy-makers and war-fighters to
ponder and prepare for if the United States is going to elect to continue to be global policeman.

59 The 2nd edition has the paragraph on page 99, while the 3 rd edition has it on
pages 98-99.
60 Munkler, The New Wars, 18
61 Singer, P.W. Caution: Children at War. Parameters, Winter, 2010-2011: 156172, 157.
62 Ibid., 159-60.
63 Ibid., 165.

This paper has examined the new wars thesis, and, has found the thesis to be lacking in
terms of generalized evidentiary power, but it is not without merit if its scope is narrowed to
evaluating individual conflicts and not attempting to refute Clausewitz. The debate over this
thesis has led to potentially useful lines of multidisciplinary inquiry that have the potential to
enrich the comprehension that academics, war-fighters and policy-makers have for Clausewitz.
The exploration of these lines of inquiry will lead to the enrichment of the mutual understanding
and intellectual betterment of us all.

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