"The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation form their purposes"
About this Quote
Clausewitz is yanking the conversation about war away from drums-and-glory abstraction and back into the ledger book of state power. Coming from a Prussian officer who watched Europe convulsed by the Napoleonic wars, the line is less a moral shrug than a strategic warning: if you treat war as a self-contained craft, you will misread both its logic and its limits. The “political object” isn’t a nice-to-have add-on; it’s the destination that determines the route, the risk tolerance, the scale of violence, and when “victory” is actually victory.
The sentence works because it reverses a common temptation, especially among professional soldiers: to let the means become the mission. Clausewitz is basically saying that tactics can be brilliant and still be wrong if they don’t serve a coherent political end. That’s the subtext behind “never be considered in isolation”: war has its own momentum, its own incentives (prestige, revenge, institutional pride), and those incentives will happily hijack national policy if civilians and commanders don’t keep the purpose in frame.
Context matters here. Clausewitz is writing in an era when mass conscription, nationalism, and industrializing armies were turning war into a machine that could run hot long after the original dispute should have been settled. His insistence on purpose isn’t bloodless realism; it’s a constraint. If politics sets the goal, it also sets the point at which continued killing becomes not just costly but irrational - violence untethered from any achievable outcome.
The sentence works because it reverses a common temptation, especially among professional soldiers: to let the means become the mission. Clausewitz is basically saying that tactics can be brilliant and still be wrong if they don’t serve a coherent political end. That’s the subtext behind “never be considered in isolation”: war has its own momentum, its own incentives (prestige, revenge, institutional pride), and those incentives will happily hijack national policy if civilians and commanders don’t keep the purpose in frame.
Context matters here. Clausewitz is writing in an era when mass conscription, nationalism, and industrializing armies were turning war into a machine that could run hot long after the original dispute should have been settled. His insistence on purpose isn’t bloodless realism; it’s a constraint. If politics sets the goal, it also sets the point at which continued killing becomes not just costly but irrational - violence untethered from any achievable outcome.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | On War (Vom Kriege), Carl von Clausewitz; English trans. Michael Howard & Peter Paret; Princeton University Press, 1976; Book I, Chapter 1 (contains line equating the political objective with war as a means). |
More Quotes by Karl
Add to List
