The constants of war are the constants of life because, as Heraclitus observes, “War is the father of all things.” The mother of all things, I suppose, is love. So there you have it, war and love, the universal constants, appearing as emotion, chance and reason, von Clausewitz’s Trinity.
Update 1: On 20JUN15 Scott Johnson at Power Line meditated on criticism of The Fraud by former Israeli Ambassador to the USA Michael Oren. The meditation, as per Oren’s criticism, orbited the word reasonable. With edits here, I commented:
Von Clausewitz’s three constants (Trinity) of war are violence, chance and reason. The first concerns more the people, the second more the commander and the third more the government. Reason in this usage means that national interests, national policy and national war-making actions align in a single vector of force.
To call a nation or her leaders unreasonable is to say the linkage between the nation’s interests, the leaders’ policies and the ground commanders’ actions is broken. One can scrutinize where and how the linkage is broken, but the determination that the situation is unreasonable rests on the observation THAT it is broken.
The source document — and none has surpassed it for this purpose — for determining whether the White House occupiers are unreasonable, even irrational, is their West Point speech of 01DEC09 on USA national interest, policies and actions with respect to Afghanistan and Pakistan specifically but in principle MENA. See for yourself. Contrast interests, policies and actions enunciated there with events since. Is there linkage between what the occupiers in that speech at West Point say is USA national interest, their policies for fulfilling that interest and their actions in pursuit thereof?
Do those occupiers exhibit the three constants of war, especially the third, reason (linkage between interest, policy and action)? If so, they are reasonable. If not, they are not.
If there is a disconnect between what is declared important, what was said will happen and what happened, then Von Clausewitz’s Trinity will show and explain it.
AMDG
