Carl von Clausewitz
![Carl von Clausewitz, while in Prussian service, painted by Wilhelm Wach in early 1830s.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Clausewitz.jpg)
Clausewitz stressed the multiplex interaction of diverse factors in war, noting how unexpected developments unfolding under the "fog of war" (i.e., in the face of incomplete, dubious, and often erroneous information and great fear, doubt, and excitement) call for rapid decisions by alert commanders. He saw history as a vital check on erudite abstractions that did not accord with experience. In contrast to the early work of Antoine-Henri Jomini, he argued that war could not be quantified or reduced to mapwork, geometry, and graphs. Clausewitz had many aphorisms, of which the most famous is "War is the continuation of policy with other means" (often misquoted as "... by other means"). Provided by Wikipedia