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Aleksandr Andreevich Svechin (Александр Андреевич Свечин) "was an ethnic Russian born in Odessa in 1878. He became an officer of the imperial Russian army and then of the Red Army, where he rose to the rank of general and wrote
Strategy, a
definitive manual on strategy.
Strategy was published in two editions in
1926 and
1927. Here Svechin defined strategy as "the art of combining preparations for war and the grouping of operations for achieving the goal for the armed forces set by the war." Through much of his professional career Svechin carried on a lengthy debate with another important Soviet theorist, Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky. Svechin's work in
Strategy and elsewhere informed his view that modern war would be characterized by
attrition (izmor ). Tukhachevsky argued a contrary view, that with the help of technology, states could still fight swift decisive wars of
annihilation (sokrushenie)." In the end, much of military history decided the argument in Svechin's favor.
Carl Philipp Gottfried (or Gottlieb) von Clausewitz (
listen); 1 June 1780 – 16 November 1831) was a
Prussian general and
military theorist who stressed the "moral", in modern terms meaning
psychological, and political aspects of waging war. His most notable work,
Vom Kriege ("On War"), though unfinished at his death, is considered a
seminal treatise on military strategy.
Clausewitz was a
realist in many different senses, including
realpolitik, and while in some respects a romantic, he also drew heavily on the rationalist ideas of the European
Enlightenment.
Clausewitz stressed the
dialectical interaction of diverse factors, noting how
unexpected developments unfolding under the "fog of war" (i.e., in the face of incomplete, dubious, and often erroneous information and great
fear, doubt, and excitement)
call for rapid decisions by alert commanders. He saw history as a vital check on erudite abstractions that did not accord with experience. In contrast to the early work of
Antoine-Henri Jomini, he argued that war could not be quantified or reduced to mapwork, geometry, and graphs. Clausewitz had many
aphorisms, of which the most famous is
"War is the continuation of policy with other means." (often misquoted as "... by other means").
Although Clausewitz died without completing
Vom Kriege, his ideas have been widely influential in
military theory and have had a strong influence on German military thought specifically. Later Prussian and German generals, such as
Helmuth Graf von Moltke, were clearly influenced by Clausewitz: Moltke's widely quoted statement that
"No operational plan extends with high certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy force" is a classic reflection of
Clausewitz's insistence on the roles of chance, friction, "fog," uncertainty, and interactivity in war.
"A ‘Clausewitzian’ in approach, stressing the uniqueness of each war and rejecting one-size-fits-all principles, Svechin advocated the defence in depth of the young USSR. This idea was abhorrent to Stalin who, in the 1930s, dismantled the homeland defence structures in favour of an offensive posture for the Red Army, which in turn directly contributed to the catastrophic effects of the German surprise attack of 1941. But by then Svechin was long dead, executed on Stalin’s personal orders in 1938 during the Great Purge.
"Like Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, Svechin was sceptical about theories and very much agreed with Clausewitz that what strategic studies can do is reflexive: ‘Theory is capable of benefitting only those who have raised themselves above the fray and have become completely dispassionate... A narrow doctrine would probably confuse us more than guide us.’ His reading of ‘bourgeois’ authors was held against him as the USSR entered into a phase of great intolerance under Stalin, culminating in the Great Purge. Svechin’s good name was restored under Gorbachev, and he was even praised in 2013 by Russian General Staff Chief Army General Valery Gerasimov."
Military Strategy
Strategy - Aleksandr Svechin (1926) ..
