"Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult"
About this Quote
War flatters planners with a childlike geometry: take the hill, cut the supply line, break the enemy’s will. Clausewitz’s bite is that this apparent simplicity is a trap. The tasks are easy to name because they reduce conflict to verbs. The difficulty arrives the moment real people, weather, fear, bad maps, proud subordinates, and a thinking adversary collide with those verbs. His line compresses an entire worldview: war is not complicated like calculus; it’s difficult like carrying a cup of water through a crowd without spilling. The steps are obvious. The conditions make them treacherous.
The subtext is an argument against the comforting fantasy of the “perfect plan.” Clausewitz wrote in the shadow of the Napoleonic wars, watching Europe learn that mass armies and fast campaigns could shatter old rules overnight. He’s diagnosing what he later calls friction: the accumulation of small mishaps that turns straightforward orders into improvisation. Even the most basic requirement - coordination - becomes precarious when communication breaks, morale wavers, or intelligence is wrong by a mile. The enemy is not a fixed problem; it is a moving, deceptive force actively trying to make your simplest move fail.
The specific intent is practical, almost moral. Clausewitz is warning commanders (and politicians) that war’s danger lies in its apparent clarity. When leaders talk about conflict as if it’s merely a checklist, this sentence waits like a recoil: the checklist is real, and that’s exactly why it’s so easy to underestimate what it costs to execute.
The subtext is an argument against the comforting fantasy of the “perfect plan.” Clausewitz wrote in the shadow of the Napoleonic wars, watching Europe learn that mass armies and fast campaigns could shatter old rules overnight. He’s diagnosing what he later calls friction: the accumulation of small mishaps that turns straightforward orders into improvisation. Even the most basic requirement - coordination - becomes precarious when communication breaks, morale wavers, or intelligence is wrong by a mile. The enemy is not a fixed problem; it is a moving, deceptive force actively trying to make your simplest move fail.
The specific intent is practical, almost moral. Clausewitz is warning commanders (and politicians) that war’s danger lies in its apparent clarity. When leaders talk about conflict as if it’s merely a checklist, this sentence waits like a recoil: the checklist is real, and that’s exactly why it’s so easy to underestimate what it costs to execute.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Clausewitz, Carl von. On War (Vom Kriege), trans. Michael Howard & Peter Paret; Princeton University Press, 1976. See Book I, Chapter 1 ('What Is War?') — contains the line: "Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult." |
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