What Clausewitz can teach us about war on social media
AHALF century ago, two computers at UCLA and Stanford were linked together into the first computer network. It was called ARPANET, after the military research lab that funded it. In the years since then, the network of networks that grew out of that lab has developed into the Internet, the nervous system of modern commerce and communication.
With the rise of social media over the last decade, the Internet has changed to allow all of us to become individual collectors and sharers of information. As a result, it has also become something else: a battlefield where information itself is weaponised. The online world is now just as indispensable to governments, militaries, activists and spies as it is to advertisers and shoppers. And whether the goal is to win an election or a battle, or just to sell an album, everyone uses the same tactics.
This new kind of warfare takes all forms, from battlefield footage on YouTube to a plague of Nazi-sympathising cartoon frogs. It can seem like a fundamental break with the past. And in some ways — the digital terrain on which the war is fought, the need to grab attention rather than material resources, and the extraordinary power of a few people — it is. Yet not everything about it is new. Efforts to shape how the enemy thinks, to control the flow of information, and to win wars while avoiding actual fighting have been around for centuries. Indeed, the best place to start if you want to understand the weaponisation of social media is with the past.
On digital war The Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz was born in 1780, some 200 years before the invention of the Internet, but he would have implicitly understood almost everything it is doing to the world today. Raised in Enlightenment Europe, Clausewitz enlisted in the Prussian army at the age of 12.
A decade later, when Napoleon unleashed war across Europe and launched a new age of nationalism, Clausewitz decided to dedicate his life to studying war. He wrote essay after essay on the topic, exchanging letters with all the leading thinkers of the day and rising to become head of the Prussian military academy. After Clausewitz died in 1831, his wife, Marie, edited his sprawling library of thoughts into a 10-volume treatise, which she titled “On War”.
Clausewitz’s (and Marie’s) theories of warfare have become required reading for military officers around the world and have shaped every war fought over the two centuries since they were published. Fundamental military concepts, such as the “fog of war”, the inherent confusion of conflict, and “friction”, the way plans never work out exactly as expected when facing a thinking foe, draw on his monumental work.
Clausewitz’s most famous observation was about the nature of conflict itself. In his view, war is politics by other means. Or, as he put it, “the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means”. War and politics are intertwined, he explained. “War in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs.”
In other words, Clausewitz thought war was part of the continuum that includes trade, diplomacy, and all the other interactions that take place between peoples and governments. This theory flew in the face of the beliefs of older generations of soldiers and military theorists, who viewed war as a sort of “on-off” switch that pulled combatants into an alternate reality governed by a different set of rules. To Clausewitz, war was simply another way to get something you wanted.
Winning, Clausewitz thought, was a matter of finding and neutralising an adversary’s “centre of gravity”. This often means defeating a rival’s army. But that is not always the most effective path. “The moral elements are among the most important in war,” Clausewitz wrote. “They constitute the spirit that permeates war as a whole . . . They establish a close affinity with the will that moves and leads the whole mass of force.” Figure out how to shape or shatter your rival’s spirit, and you might win the war while avoiding the enemy army entirely.Foreign Affairs magazine.