The Resurrection of Carl von Clausewitz: Part 2
How America built and then destroyed Clausewitz's kingdom
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.
Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.- Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address 1961
In 2024, the words from Eisenhower’s farewell address seem particularly relevant. Few on either side of the political divide would disagree that the military-industrial complex (a term Eisenhower created) does not hold unwarranted influence on politics.
Indeed, it seems that the arms dealers increasingly dictate terms to the government, rather than the other way around. Beyond the outright bribery which has been legitimized under the name lobbying and the so-called revolving door of defense contractors, politicians and military officers which exists to reward policymakers with lucrative jobs as “consultants” in exchange for loyal service to the MIC, the arms dealers have a near lock on our politics at every level.
There was once a time when the American military was not in the thrall of arms contractors, during the Second World War, circumstances allowed the government to build the sort of integrated system which Clausewitz imagined in vom Kriege. Military, economic and political command unified towards one goal.
Eventually, the economic power of the military industrial complex subordinated the entire government to it’s will. Now it seems that our government serves little purpose but to feed this great killing machine with more of the world’s sons and daughters
Ironically, the same President Eisenhower who warned us against this new machine threatening to crush the world in it’s iron jaws was once it’s expert pilot. As a general, Eisenhower showed just what economic might can do when put to a rational use instead of subordinated to the profit motive. In the 40s, Eisenhower was the point-man of a unified political, economic and military machine that crushed the Axis with a river of steel and fire.
A view from the ground
I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.-Carl von Clausewitz, “On War”
During the Second World War, the US faced an unprecedented challenge. The vast oceans which have for so long protected the USA from invasion were just as formidable when going the opposite direction. All of America’s men, material and equipment had to be shipped across the ocean to fight enemies who did not have such restrictions. This forced American planners to put a premium on efficiency at all levels, from weapons design and acquisition to strategy and tactics.
To give an example of this, we can examine one of the most famous weapons of the war, the M4 “Sherman1” tank. Although the Sherman was unfairly maligned after the war, looking at it’s actual combat record tells us the truth. American forces, equipped with Shermans, were able to consistently defeat German and Japanese forces. The reason for this is not because of the Sherman itself, per se, but rather the design ethos which created it.
The Sherman was incredibly reliable, endlessly customizable, easy to repair, fuel efficient, had heavily standardized parts, and was designed from the start to be weight and space efficient, meaning they could be sent overseas on fewer ships. Reliability was particularly important, as the Americans were fighting an offensive war, they needed to overwhelm the Germans with numbers to have any chance of winning. With replacements thousands of miles away, the US Army could not afford to lose armor to mechanical attrition.
Despite the huge variety of modifications made to the Sherman tank, even repurposing the chassis into an entire family of vehicles, all of these characteristics remained. This flexibility was a great benefit of the design, it allowed planners to make small changes which could yield major benefits and thousands of modifications both great and small were made during the war.
The system was so efficient that it could respond to challenges in a matter of days. A Red Army Sherman commander named Dmitry Loza wrote in his book “Commanding the Red Army’s Sherman Tanks” that early model tanks fared poorly on ice owing to their rubber track pads. In typical Soviet fashion, Loza said that the first Soviet Shermans slid around the ice “like a fat cow.”
This was such a serious problem for the Red Army that it stopped an entire armored division in it’s tracks. Three days after American attaches rushed to the scene to diagnose the problem, they brought in a shipment of metal track blocks and removable grousers for additional traction. The Soviet “Emchas” were moving again, and all future Sherman tanks were equipped with these grousers, permanently fixing the ice and snow traction problem. In Loza’s book mentions this sort of efficiency was normal for the Americans.
The M4A3 model was equipped with a Ford GAA V8 which could cover around 2000 miles and 200 hours before it needed any major overhauls. The later variants of this tank were fitted with a 76mm gun capable of matching their German rivals, but also with far better turret control and much better field of view owing to continuous refinement of the design.
The vaunted German Panther had superior armor and a more powerful gun but serious mechanical flaws meant that more often than not, it simply didn’t matter. The Germans estimated average the lifespan of a Panther engine to be less than 500 miles, and the transmission was so unreliable that drivers were ordered not to switch gears unless absolutely necessary.
In post war testing, the French army found that Panther’s final drive failed about every 150 miles. The tank was also difficult to service in the field, so major repairs often required shipping it back to the factory. In German service, anywhere from 25% to 50% of all Panthers were undergoing repairs at any given time, making an already scarce tank even rarer.
This Panther’s reliability was so bad that in practice German commanders used trains to transport their tanks any distance beyond about 20 miles to decrease the wear on their fragile transmissions. In so doing, they further stretched an already threadbare logistics network, as trains that are hauling tanks back and forth cannot be hauling supplies needed to win the war.
While the Panthers were burning in ditches or being shipped back to the factory for repairs, Sherman tanks were where they belonged, at the front lines, fighting and winning the war.
It was more than just the tank itself, however. The Americans created a genius echeloned system of maintenance and repair which allowed them to maximize uptime for their tanks. While German tanks had to be sent back to the factory for even minor repairs, the Sherman was fully field serviceable. Everything but the most catastrophic failures could be repaired at the divisional level in depots just behind the front lines.
The standard American practice was to perform preventative maintenance on a regular schedule, first using the driver and assistant driver to perform daily and weekly tasks, then sending the tank back to a battalion or regimental mechanic twice a year for more thorough inspections and overhauls.
If any serious repairs were necessary, the practice was not to perform them in the field, but rather to simply swap out bad parts for good ones, and send the bad parts back to the Army motor pool for repair. This was all designed to be as easy as possible, major assemblies were designed to be easily accessed without a crane. The engine sat on roller rails behind an access port and could be removed in under an hour with nothing but hand tools and a normal wrecker. The transmission was just as easily accessible, sitting behind an armored cover that could be removed with wrenches and a prybar.
This ease of maintenance and repair allowed the Americans to get more work from the same number of mechanics. Any repair on a Sherman tank, including removal of the engine and transmission, required a maximum of 4 mechanics with hand tools while the German heavy tanks required teams of 8 with specialized equipment. This let the Americans spread out their mechanics to service more tanks, greatly increasing the fleet’s overall reliability.
At motor pools behind the front lines, parts could be safely repaired by specialized mechanics and sent back to the fronts. There was a focus on preventative maintenance, switching out parts before they failed, then sending them back for a rebuild. If this was done properly, it would prevent parts from breaking in the first place. This system maximized the uptime of American tanks, and greatly lowered their logistical tail by rebuilding instead of replacing parts whenever possible.
Despite the German tanks appearing superior on paper, the reality was that the Sherman tank won. It could be where it was needed, when it was needed, and with enough backup to make a difference. Even against opponents which appeared superior on paper, it still won. It won the battles, and it won the war. In the end, the Sherman was designed to fight a holistic Clausewitzian war, while the German tanks were designed only to fight duels.
Much ink has been spilled about the five to one ratios of Sherman tanks to German Panzers. There is a kernel of truth to this, American tanks always traveled in groups of five. Five tanks are considerably more effective than just one. Tanks have very limited visibility, and the only way to counteract this is to have more tanks. When working together, five tanks, and five sets of eyes are much more likely to spot the enemy. When engaging the enemy, regardless of if they are infantry or other tanks, five guns are better than one.
However, there is one other element to this. The Americans sent five tanks because they could.
The Sherman tank started production in 1942 and ran until 1945. In the span of three years, the United States managed to build over 50,000 Sherman tanks in all it’s myriad of forms and variants. The US built so many that they equipped their entire army, and then built 17,000 more for their allies.
In the same three year span, the Germans produced about 40,000 armored vehicles of all types, and the majority of those were destroyed on the Eastern Front, meaning the American advantage in numbers was even more decisive.
To make it all the more impressive, the US had almost no domestic tank manufacturing before the war. The entire industry had to be built from scratch starting in 1941. However, rational economic planning was able to turn this into an advantage. Because America was starting from scratch, the government was able to build the sort of fully integrated, rational system Clausewitz dreamed of.
A view from the Sky
Behind the Sherman was an efficient economic machine. The Sherman tank was not designed by an arms dealer, or a contractor. It was designed by the US Army Ordinance Department, who owned the rights to the design. The goal of the project was not to generate value for the shareholders of an arms contractor, but rather to win the war.
This is the true essence of Clausewitzian theory. Despite Clausewitz’s premise that war and politics cannot be separated, many western theorists insist on doing so anyway. In Clausewitz’s eyes, the military, political and economic sectors of a society should be united under one common goal and one common command structure.
Because the government owned the designs, they were free to work with anyone. In the US, 10 companies made Sherman tanks. The two largest were Chrysler and General Motors who operated in factories built by the US government, Fisher Body and the colossal Detroit Arsenal. From these two factories, the majority of America’s armored vehicles were built to fight the war. The government operated the factories and owned the designs, the contractors were only clients. If they failed, they could be replaced with another.
The Sherman design was such that a wide variety of different parts could be used. Throughout the war, the Sherman had four engines, allowing the army to pick the best of them. Even the engine designs were required to be freely licensed out, so anyone who had the capabilities could make parts for them. For a time, Chrysler plants were manufacturing Ford and GM designed engines, and vice-versa.
The design itself was flexible enough that any Sherman could accept any of the engines. This meant that older Shermans could be fitted with new, improved variants of engines even in the field. This allowed the US to stretch out the service life of older tanks, and continuously improve reliability fleet-wide.
Meanwhile, all German tanks were designed for one engine only. If the contractor had a faulty design or could not deliver enough parts, the entire fleet suffered. As Allied forces slowly liberated Europe and bombing campaigns increasingly battered Germany, the availability of parts slowed to a trickle. The Germans could not properly disperse their machinery because only a few factories could produce the parts they needed.
It was this rationally planned and executed system that won the war. The combined political, economic and military apparatus which could make and execute rational decisions quickly, with the sole goal of winning the war rather than generating a profit. For all the talk of Generals and battles, the war was not won in Normandy or Berlin, it was won in Detroit and Nizhny Tagil.
However, after the war, the economic machinery built to fight and win was handed over to private corporations. Over the span of years, the contractors behaved exactly as Eisenhower predicted. In the service of ever increasing growth and profit margins, they have consumed more and more of the military, turning jobs the military previously did themselves into profit-generating enterprises.
Now, the US Air Force complains that it is not even allowed to service it’s F-35 fighters. Lockheed-Martin will not sell them service manuals to protect their intellectual property. Lockheed must perform repairs and maintenance on the F-35 themselves, which is done at the highest possible profit margins. Even for parts, Lockheed’s extensive “intellectual property” means that they are the sole manufacturer for many critical systems. This means backlogs for repairs which the USAF can perform itself on every other aircraft in the world reach into the years, and Lockheed can charge whatever it wants.
Eventually the arms dealers gobbled up so much power that they now dictate to the military, not the other way around. If Lockheed fails to produce working aircraft, who else could replace them? No other company has access to the “intellectual property” necessary to make F-35s, let alone the factories.
As America turned away from the sort of system espoused by Clausewitz, they have also increasingly abandoned Clausewitzian ideology. In Part 3, we will examine how NATO’s doctrine has fallen behind and why Clausewitz remains just as relevant, if not moreso, to the modern battlefield as he was to the 1940s.
Although this is a common name, the name was never officially adopted by the US armed forces.
Not sure how much this is Clausewitz, but 100% that when a vendor gets a large buyer locked in as deep as is the case in the MIC, the result is just as described. In wartime these arrangements get reversed once people start dying. But even under a quick return to common sense, the time needed for that reversal of the vendor lock-in, would be give a 2-5 year head start to the other side.
(Also, the US has been often insulated from people dying in wars we start, by finding others to do most of the dying even when US forces are openly involved at scale. Starting with Vietnam, same in Iraq II, Afghanistan, and even more so for the countless proxy conflicts such as Ukraine).