Clausewitz’s Center of Gravity

Over the last two decades, the U.S. military has struggled to understand the center of gravity concept as developed by Carl von Clausewitz and to find practical ways to apply it. In the process, however, each of the services—shaped as they are by different roles, histories, and traditions—has brought individual perspectives to Clausewitz’s expression and redefined it in its respective image. Thus, the U.S. Marine Corps, a relatively small force designed more for winning battles than fighting campaigns or wars, prefers to strike at enemy weaknesses. Accordingly, it initially equated enemy centers of gravity (CoGs) with key vulnerabilities. Recently, however, Marine Corps doctrine has distinguished between CoGs and critical vulnerabilities, considering them different but complementary concepts; CoGs, for the Marines, are now “any important sources of strength.” By comparison, the U.S. Air Force, which takes a “targeting” approach to warfare, sees centers of gravity as multiple strategic and operational critical points that it can attack with its bombing assets. Airpower theorists like John Warden, with his notion of “concentric rings,” have in fact identified so many CoGs as to reduce the concept to absurdity. In contrast, the U.S. Army, which has the role of fighting campaigns and winning wars, sees the enemy’s center of gravity as his “source of strength.” Accordingly, the Army tends to look for a single center of gravity, normally in the principal capability that stands in the way of the accomplishment of its own Lieutenant Colonel Echevarria is the director of national security affairs in the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1981 and was commissioned as an armor officer. He has since served as assistant professor of European history at West Point; as squadron operations officer of 3d Squadron, 16th Cavalry Regiment, at the U.S. Army Armor Center at Fort Knox, Kentucky; at the Training and Doctrine Command, Fort Monroe, Virginia; and as a speechwriter for the chief of staff of the Army. He earned master’s and doctoral degrees in history at Princeton University and is a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and the U.S. Army War College. He is the author of After Clausewitz: German Military Thinkers before the Great War (2001), as well as of numerous articles.