What-If at Waterloo. Carl von Clausewitz’s use of historical counterfactuals in his history of the Campaign of 1815

In this article, I analyze the use of historical counterfactuals in the Campaign of 1815 by Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831). Such is the importance of counterfactuals in this work that its gist can be given in a series of 25 counterfactuals. I claim that a central role is played by evaluative counterfactuals. This specific form of counterfactuals is part of a didactic method that allows Clausewitz to teach young officers a critical method that prepares them for the challenge of decision-making in real warfare. I conclude with the enduring relevance of Clausewitz’s use of evaluative counterfactuals for contemporary military historiography.     

Strategic terrorism: The framework and its fallacies

This article seeks to lay out a comprehensive framework by which those who utilize a campaign of strategic terrorism seek to attain their ends. It identifies a distinctive modus operandi: 1) disorientation: to alienate the authorities from their citizens, reducing the government to impotence in the eyes of the population; 2) target response: to induce a target to respond in a manner that is favorable to the insurgent cause; 3) gaining legitimacy: to exploit the emotional impact of the violence to insert an alternative political message. By elucidating the strategy of terrorism, the analysis also reveals its inherent limitations. Resting on the premise that a militarily more powerful adversary will in some way feel restrained from bringing the full force of its military superiority to bear, the strategy relies exclusively on the exploitation of the psychological effects of armed action, thereby rendering it vulnerable to those who are willing to view the resolution of clashes of interest principally in terms of the tangibles of military power.     

De-Constructing the French Wars: Napoleon as Anti-Strategist

The Emperor Napoleon I is regarded as one of the greatest generals of all time and, as such, he has attracted an immense bibliography. In spite of this, there have been few studies of him as a strategist: instead, it is simply assumed that it was enough for the Emperor to have conducted an operation for it to have had a logical strategic goal. In this article, however, Napoleon is shown to have been primarily an opportunist, who was frequently guided by the needs of the moment and swayed from his course by circumstance, while it is further suggested that, even considered on their own merits, many of his decisions were faulty in the extreme.     

A lost work of El Lobo: Lieutenant-Colonel Charles T.R. Bohannan's unpublished study of guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency in the Philippines, 1899–1955

Charles Ted Rutledge Bohannan (1914–1982) became an integral agent of US counterinsurgency operations during the early Cold War, contributing to both the success of the COIN effort to defeat the communist Huk insurgents in the Philippines and the stalled COIN efforts in Vietnam. In the early 1960s, he wrote a short and compact analysis of the US and Filipino experience of guerrilla warfare, from the Philippine–American war until the defeat of the Huk Rebellion. It was never published. Reprinted here, Bohannan's analysis of lessons learned makes a substantial contribution to the history of American ideas of unconventional warfare by an expert who contributed these lessons to the successful defeat of an insurgency in South East Asia.     

The German wars of liberation 1807–1815: The restrained insurgency

In the Age of Napoleon, ‘small wars’ and ‘revolutionary war’ were closely connected. There were, however, different strands of this phenomenon: speaking professionally, conservative officers condemned small wars as an irregular regression to previous less disciplined forms of warfare. The Prussian state continually tried to discipline and regulate spontaneous risings. Yet the irregular character of small wars offered the opportunities for a less complex way of fighting, thus enabling the arming of the ‘people’ to fight. Individual undertakings, such as Ferdinand von Schill's doomed campaign in 1809, were designed to spark off a general popular uprising. But they were cheered by many and supported by few. Meanwhile, Neidhardt von Gneisenau conceived guerrilla-style Landsturm home-defence forces, which were designed for an irregular people's war. These concepts were put into practice in the ‘war of freedom’ – or ‘war of liberation’ – in 1813. Eventually both the mobilisation and the tactics remained regular, however, despite the emphatic appeal to a national ‘people's war’.     

A Uniquely Important Napoleonic Memorial Sword

This remarkably fine sword was commissioned by General Baron Gaspard Gourgaud, the close personal aide of Napoleon Bonaparte, to commemorate the return of the Emperor’s body from St Helena to Paris in 1840. It was designed and made in 1842 by Alexandre Lapret, a distinguished artist-craftsman working in the famous Paris atelier of Henri Lepage.     

Self-Interest versus the Common Cause: Austria,Prussia and Russia against Napoleon

This essay re-examines coalition warfare during the Napoleonic era by looking at the three eastern European powers – Austria, Prussia and Russia – how they interacted over time with France as well as each other, and how they managed French preponderance on the Continent. Before 1812, coalition warfare was dominated by eighteenth-century military and diplomatic attitudes: overall foreign political goals were ill-defined and were characterised by deep mistrust. The result was that the eastern powers pursued their own interests with little regard to coalition cohesion. If the coalition held together in 1813 and 1814, on the other hand, it was largely because individual powers' self-interest coincided with the overall objectives of the coalition – an increased determination to defeat Napoleon – along with a never before seen numerical superiority in allied troops. In this, Austria and especially Chancellor Metternich's role in juggling conflicting interests between the allies so that they could present, for the first time, a united front against France was fundamental.     

Guerrillas and bandits in the Serranía de Ronda, 1810–1812

The Spanish Guerrilla (1808–1812) which has given its name to ideologically motivated insurgencies is usually portrayed as a patriotic uprising against the French occupation forces of Napoleon. It was that, in part, but also many other things besides. This case study illustrates its overlap and convergence with banditry but also with social unrest turned into uprisings directed by poor Spaniards against their creditors, as in the storming of Ronda by insurgents in 1810. From the propaganda of the day to the subsequent Spanish patriotic historiography, there has been a tendency to exaggerate the amplitude of events and also the damage that was done to the French forces and the casualty figures inflicted on them.