Clausewitz on Hegseth and the "Lethality" Obsession

The "Absolute Destruction" of America's Military

Hegseth: “We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”

Carl von Clausewitz: “If we wanted to take the goal of pure theory as the actual goal we set and derive from that the means which we should apply, we would arrive by interactions to the extreme—but this conclusion would be a pure figment of the imagination, produced by a barely visible thread of logical sophistry.”

Isabel Hull’s book on the military culture of the German Army is titled “Absolute Destruction” and traces the consequences of the fixation on this concept through both the Wilhelmine era and the Third Reich. In particular, she notes how the pursuit of absolute destruction turned to wanton killing of civilians in Germany’s part in the Boxer Rebellion and to outright genocide when suppressing colonial rebellions. This drive to the extreme was ineffective and often counterproductive, being not just criminal, but a waste of effort. In On War, Clausewitz wrote, perhaps too optimistically, that the tendency of war to the extreme would find its counterweight in the principles of statecraft that abhor such a waste of effort. In Wilhelmine Germany, the army had largely escaped the oversight of any statesmen, and its assertions of the necessity of extreme measures and total victory were not seriously questioned. The German army became involved in the systematic killing of civilians in these colonial wars not through true military necessity nor a discrete political goal, but a culture that emphasized ever-increasing violence as a uniform solution.

But today we are talking about Pete Hegseth and his “vision” for how America’s military must change, for which the comparison to the army of Imperial Germany is far too flattering, though it is useful for our purposes.

A Policy of Wanton Destruction

The ideals of “lethality” and “warfighting” that Hegseth valorizes appeal to the same impulse: the barbaric desire to destroy the one whom you hate. But the purpose of war is not destruction, the mere satisfaction of instinctual enmity. The purpose is to induce your enemy to fulfill your will, to gain something. Clausewitz argues that the only reason wars of “civilized” nations involve less wanton destruction than those of the uncivilized is because the civilized have developed more effective uses of violence. But Clausewitz was by no means unaware of the ways in which the elemental forces of the emotional powers could affect the conduct of war in all cases, as he wrote, “tensions can exist that make the eruption of war a veritable explosion.” Yet, in civilized nations, this does not give rise to a shapeless mass of primal violence, but is molded by the state and civil society to form a political purpose and define its extent, based on the intensity of hostile feeling, but also rational interest.

But we are talking here about something rather different from hatred between nations leading to a war over something relatively minor becoming a vast conflagration. We are talking about the choice of the armed forces or government to insist that extreme conduct in war is itself a means to victory. Clausewitz wrote much on the concept of the extreme in war, but the extremity with which he was concerned was the extremity of effort, of how much a state and people might exert themselves in pursuit of victory. This is entirely distinct from the matter of how “extreme” or indiscriminate the conduct of a war might be. Wanton murder of civilians is not indicative of a higher degree of exertion towards victory. Murder of non-combatants may be more likely in a more passionate, all-encompassing struggle, but it may nonetheless be present in a minor skirmish with no serious aims. The decision to engage in violence towards civilians is either a raw, barbarous outburst by individuals or it is a policy of the state. In either case, it cannot be considered as something belonging to war itself, but either a personal act or an act of state distinct from the business of war.

How can this be so? Does Clausewitz not define war as the mere continuation of policy with the addition of violent means? Clausewitz also describes war as a duel on a larger scale. This illustration is useful because it demonstrates how it is the interaction between two wills that makes war a phenomenon distinct from the mere application of state power. Violence against the nonresistant is therefore no more war than a man beating his wife is a duel. To kill civilians, to merely inflict suffering on the nonresistant, is a policy choice. It is also a crime. The mistake of considering it a part of war comes from the fact that it frequently accompanies war, e.g. the deliberate, indiscriminate killing of combatant and noncombatant alike. But violence against civilians is also the act of troops firing into a crowd of protestors, which certainly does not belong to war. This distinction is important because there are many particular or peculiar tendencies produced by the interaction of wills in a contest of violence that are not present in the pure inflicting of suffering.

But what is the significance of mistaking an act of policy for part of war if war is but the continuation of policy? Aside from what we have already said about the peculiar nature of war, it must be remembered that war is a means by which policy can be pursued, and so this error would be confusing means and ends. It is disguising a political decision in the terms of military necessity to prevent it from being scrutinized, a practice we have elsewhere discussed.

A Golden Calf Named Lethality

One form of this is the “lethality” fetish. The term lacks any specific or direct meaning in the context of the practice of war. At first glance, this may seem surprising, but when we consider that battles are not typically won by exterminating the other side, the relative unimportance of killing per se is more easily explained. The cult of lethality captures a central conviction of Hegseth’s school of thought (if it can be called as much): that the key to victory is killing people. Reciprocally, that defeat can be explained by failure to kill enough people. This poor understanding of war on all levels draws immediate comparisons to Stalin’s pithy (but apocryphal) “Death solves all problems—no man, no problem” and to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s attempt to quantify success in the Vietnam War in terms of body count.

But this must be accounted a serious insult to McNamara, with Hegseth having much more in common with the former; he too has little care whether the dead are civilians. In fact, the evidence before us suggests that he would prefer some number of civilians were amongst the dead as proof of the lethality with which the “operators” are “operating”. How else might we explain his philia for those who have deliberately killed civilians? His recent pathetic attempt to get the final word and “settle history” by glorifying the criminals of Wounded Knee comes to mind. More notably, Hegseth is Secretary of Defense for precisely one reason: he spent his time on Fox News defending convicted war criminal and alleged (by his comrades) murderer Eddie Gallagher. It was this that gained him the favor of President Trump.

Considering “lethality” as a goal around which to orient a military is immediately deficient on two counts. On the tactical level, killing the enemy is a means, not an end in itself. The end is to render him incapable of further resistance, for which purpose non-lethal injuries and surrender are no less suitable. Capturing prisoners in particular is generally superior to having to actually kill the enemy—convincing the enemy to give themselves up rather than sell their lives dearly will invariably be less costly.

The second count of the weakness of lethality is in its unsuitability as a metric on the strategic level. Battles may perhaps be won or lost on the basis of lethality (though we have argued to the contrary) but reducing the question of victory or defeat in war to whether there was enough lethality is plainly absurd. Strategy cannot be reduced to counting corpses. Not only does that ignore the many factors of resistance beyond mere life, it ignores that war is a political act and so success can only be measured by progress towards achieving a political end. To take killing as the purpose of a military is to confuse means for ends and reduce the enterprise to a cargo cult, imitating behaviors without understanding their purpose.

Idolatry of the “Warfighter”

Another aspect of Hegseth’s vision is “returning” to the ideal of the hyper-masculine warfighter. The idea that “warrior spirit” is the deciding factor in war is common to history; we see it in machismo, élan, bushido, and general romantic ideals of heroism. Even Clausewitz cites Napoleon’s comment that “the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” But from history we also see the impotence of raw courage and aggression in the face of superior organization, strategy, and materiel. The Romans did not lack courage at Cannae, nor the Gauls at Alesia, nor the Japanese on Iwo Jima, nor the Army of Virginia at Gettysburg, but that was far from enough to even avoid defeat. We should not find this surprising, as war is the realm of danger, so courage is the first of military virtues, which allows the others to operate; it is necessary but not sufficient. There is no amount of courage that will protect against starvation or make good a lack of ammunition, so long as the enemy is not himself deficient in courage.

This gets to the fallacy at the heart of the fetishization of courage: the very fact that courage is essential means that modern militaries are highly adept at instilling it. In a business as deadly as war, the apex of human daring is soon achieved. By this we mean physical courage, the willingness to risk bodily harm, rather than the more elusive moral courage, of a commander to take a dangerous course and assume responsibility for it, which does not necessarily correlate with the first kind of courage.

The development of physical courage therefore soon runs into sharply diminishing returns. In a clash between the brave and the brave, marginally higher courage cannot compensate for deficiencies that come from neglecting all other fundamental parts of war, such as feeding, equipping, and maneuvering masses of people in the realm of danger. It is this—not instilling courage—that is the true challenge of the practice of war.

The Crusader for Incompetence

What we have here discussed are more than mere intellectual errors. Hegseth has pursued these delusions with the zeal of an iconoclast. The targets of his arson have been the real institutions that are useful for waging war, the unglamorous sinews that appear superfluous to someone who cannot be troubled to think deeply about the business. And this is not to mention the pretextual uses of these concepts to purge certain demographics from America’s military. We should be less concerned were these views strictly confined to alcoholic Fox News hosts, even with one currently as Secretary of Defense. But the preoccupation with “lethality” and “warfighters” has proliferated, even if not in as perverse a magnitude as with Hegseth. The vacuousness of these terms is precisely their appeal. One may gesture at anything approvingly and bluster about its lethality or just as easily gesture disapprovingly and criticize its lack of lethality. What is key is not speaking in specifics, so you cannot be subject to any kind of criticism or risk of being flatly wrong.

The appeal to the mystical image of the “warfighter” is that it avoids having to discuss war in concrete terms. It sells the attractive myth that by doing more of the parts of war that look cool and really make you feel like a man, you can actually win wars. That lame pencil-pusher stuff like logistics and map exercises are only around because of political correctness, that real warriors spend all their time doing CQB drills and pushups. And let us not forget the importance of killing civilians. Surely, once the warrior ethos is restored and every soldier is as happy to stab POWs as Eddie Gallagher, the US will never lose another war.

It seems almost unfair to contrast these ideas of play-acting at soldiery with the genius of Clausewitz. But we must not forget that war is a serious business. It is easy and good to mock the fact that America has a buffoon for Secretary of Defense. But the impacts of Hegseth and his school of thought will be measured in lives. Sooner or later, someone else will be Secretary of Defense, but that is no guarantee we will be free of the influence of these delusions. The only remedy is furthering the understanding of war as a serious affair requiring serious consideration, not the performance of a caricature. The aim is not lethality. It is not feeling like a man or like a warrior. The aim is victory, of forcing our adversary to fulfill our will. If that simple fact cannot be remembered, all the tactical acumen in the world will get you nowhere.