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This chapter discusses Clausewitz's purpose in writing On War. He attempted to construct a body of objective (verifiable) knowledge, a theory, of war. He hoped others might use this theory as a basis for constructing their own (subjective) theories of war.

This chapter discusses how Clausewitz saw the relationship between war and policy and war and politics. Some scholars have focused more on the former than the latter. In parts of On War, Clausewitz succumbed to political determinism, excluding the roles of culture and technology in warfare, or subsuming them under the term politics.

This chapter discusses the method Clausewitz used in writing On War. Scholars have paid too little attention to his method in the past, and this oversight has contributed to the many misunderstandings of his work. Clausewitz first tested a concept from a purely logical standpoint, then from a material or practical perspective, and then evaluated or assessed the concept, placing it within an accepted hierarchy of other known concepts if it passed the first two tests.

Carl von Clausewitz has had a massive influence on military officers. One faculty member at a US war college had spent most of his academic life teaching Clausewitz and would brook no contrary word. Whatever the occasion, he had a quote from On War to bolster his argument. The result was a skewed interpretation of what Clausewitz was attempting to inform, and this tended to push students into a group-think mentality. Some people, in and out of uniform, take their Clausewitz very seriously, so this chapter is an attempt to restore a balance. It looks at what Clausewitz wrote, but also what military leaders and civilian pundits thought he meant in the two centuries since.

One of Carl Clausewitz's most famous dictums is that “war is an instrument of policy.” Yet, few writers over the past two centuries have attempted to define what is meant by the term “policy.”  Indeed, when doing so, most posit a definition that is so broad as to include virtually any type of motive for war: power politics, domestic politics, economics, irredentism, religion, etc. This is far too broad and tends to make the dictum meaningless. Moreover, many nations do not always wage war for such concrete reasons; rather, sometimes it is waged for cultural reasons such as pride, honor, revenge, fear, love, hate, or prestige.

Chapter 5 traces the lines from Clausewitz’s early intellectual engagement with small war to his magnum opus, On War. It shows how Clausewitz’s lifelong concern with the integration of reason and emotions/passion runs like a red thread through to his mature theory of war. In contrast to this continuity regarding the integration of reason and emotions/passion, Clausewitz’s thought on the role of people’s war evolved while he was writing On War. Whereas, in the reform years, people’s war had constituted an exceptional measure as a response to the exceptional situation of Napoleonic imperialism, in On War, people’s war became firmly integrated into Clausewitz’s theory of major war as the option of last resort to stave off conquest. As such, people’s war could even function as the custodian of the European balance of power. In this respect, Clausewitz proved to be an earlier (implicit) theorist of deterrence.

The third chapter was written after listening to several ground officers and historians argue that the nature of war was unchanging and immutable. One stated that war as experienced by an ancient Greek hoplite was the same as for any soldier today in Iraq or Afghanistan. That statement bears examination. Such attitudes are almost always expressed by those who know only of land warfare—which they equate to war in general. For sailors, aviators, space or cyber warfare practitioners, the experience of war is fundamentally different, especially today. New methods, but also old ones too often ignored, clearly demonstrate that war is indeed mutable.

This chapter demonstrates how parallels between the military theories of Leo Tolstoy and Carl von Clausewitz play out in the fictional narrative of War and Peace. Both Tolstoy and Clausewitz attempted to explain war to their uninitiated readers by employing the metaphor of the duel, a violent tradition connected to chivalry. Clausewitz and Tolstoy, whose readers were familiar with the conventions of dueling, described war as an extension of the duel. In his seminal treatise, On War, Clausewitz depicts war as a “duel on a larger scale.” The principles of war as enunciated by Andrei Bolkonsky and Tolstoy's narrator govern Pierre's duel with Dolokhov, which takes on a dynamic of its own that Pierre cannot resist even as he repudiates it.