Carl von Clausewitz

Carl von Clausewitz was a Prussian officer who fought Napoleon from the age of twelve, was captured at Jena, served with the Russians in 1812 when Prussia was forced into alliance with France, and spent his last years as director of the war college in Berlin writing On War, left unfinished when he died of cholera in 1831 and published by his widow. War, it holds, is the continuation of politics by other means, subject to friction and chance, and its object is to impose one’s will; the passages on the fog of war and the culminating point of victory have been studied in every staff college since.