In the pantheon of strategic theorists, Carl von Clausewitz occupies the throne. His On War adorns the reading lists of every serious military institution, his concepts of friction, the fog of war, and the trinity of violence shape how we discuss armed conflict. Yet this Clausewitzian dominance obscures a curious historical reality: for most of American military history, officers rarely read Clausewitz at all. They read his contemporary rival, Antoine-Henri Jomini.

The Swiss-born officer who served both Napoleon and the Russian Tsar produced works that American military professionals consumed voraciously throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. His Summary of the Art of War, published in 1838, became the intellectual foundation upon which American strategic thinking was constructed. At West Point, generations of cadets absorbed Jominian principles as military gospel, carrying these ideas into the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the conflicts that followed.

Understanding Jomini's influence matters not merely as historical curiosity but as a key to decoding persistent patterns in American strategic culture. The American military's preference for geometric operational planning, its emphasis on decisive points and lines of operations, its occasional discomfort with the political dimensions of warfare—these tendencies trace back to Jominian foundations. The strategist we forgot to remember continues shaping how American officers think about war.

Dennis Hart Mahan arrived at West Point in 1820 as a sixteen-year-old cadet and would not leave until his death in 1871, leaping from a Hudson River steamboat after his forced retirement. In the intervening half-century, this slight, intense professor of military engineering became the most influential military educator in American history. Through Mahan, Jominian strategic thought became the intellectual oxygen that every American professional officer breathed.

Mahan had encountered Jomini's work during four years of study in France, where he absorbed both Napoleonic military engineering and the systematic approach to warfare that Jomini championed. Upon returning to West Point, Mahan synthesized these influences into courses on military science and civil engineering that shaped every officer commissioned between 1830 and 1871. His textbooks—An Elementary Treatise on Advanced-Guard, Out-Post, and Detachment Service of Troops and Summary of the Course of Permanent Fortification—transmitted Jominian principles in accessible, practical form.

The cadets who passed through Mahan's classroom reads like a roster of Civil War commanders: Robert E. Lee, Ulysses Grant, William Sherman, Thomas Jackson, George McClellan, Henry Halleck, P.G.T. Beauregard. Both Union and Confederate armies were led by men who had absorbed the same strategic vocabulary and conceptual framework. When Halleck published Elements of Military Art and Science in 1846, he was essentially translating Jomini for an American audience, creating what became the standard American military textbook.

What Mahan transmitted was Jomini's vision of warfare as fundamentally geometric and calculable. The key to victory lay in identifying the decisive point—the enemy's center of gravity, the strategic location whose capture would unravel opposing forces—and then massing combat power against that point through proper management of lines of operations. War became a problem in applied geometry, susceptible to systematic analysis and rational planning. This framework gave American officers confidence that professional military education could indeed teach the art of war.

The Jominian system offered something that Clausewitz's more philosophical approach did not: clear prescriptions for action. Where Clausewitz explored the nature of war in all its complexity and contradiction, Jomini provided principles that could be applied. American military culture, pragmatic and action-oriented, found this approach deeply congenial. The West Point curriculum institutionalized a way of thinking about war that emphasized technical competence, systematic planning, and the identification of geometric solutions to strategic problems.

Takeaway

The strategic frameworks military professionals absorb during their education shape how they conceptualize problems for entire careers; institutional pedagogy often matters more than subsequent reading or experience.

Among Jomini's principles, none captured the American military imagination more thoroughly than the concept of interior lines. The principle held that an army operating on interior lines—positioned between separated enemy forces—enjoyed inherent advantages. Such an army could concentrate against one enemy force, defeat it, and then turn to face the other before the adversaries could unite. Napoleon had demonstrated this principle repeatedly, most dramatically in his 1796 Italian campaign, and Jomini codified it as a fundamental law of strategy.

Civil War commanders applied interior lines thinking with varying degrees of success and considerably more doctrinal rigidity than the principle warranted. Confederate strategy in Virginia essentially gambled on interior lines, using the shorter distances between Richmond and the various federal approach routes to achieve local superiority despite overall numerical inferiority. Lee's operational brilliance in 1862-63 represented interior lines theory brought to life. Yet this same thinking contributed to the Confederacy's strategic paralysis, as the focus on geometric advantage obscured the larger political and logistical realities that would determine the war's outcome.

The Union's western commanders demonstrated both the power and limitations of Jominian operational thought. Grant's Vicksburg campaign showed interior lines thinking adapted to American geography—the serpentine approach that achieved strategic surprise and split the Confederacy. Sherman's march to the sea represented something more complex: an operational concept that transcended Jominian geometry by targeting Confederate social and economic infrastructure rather than simply seeking decisive battle. Sherman was departing from his West Point education, intuiting what Clausewitz understood more clearly: that war's political object must govern military operations.

What American commanders consistently struggled with was the political dimension that Jomini's geometric framework pushed to the margins. Jomini treated politics as the realm that determined when wars began and ended, but viewed military operations themselves as a technical domain governed by universal principles. This separation proved deeply problematic in the American Civil War, where political objectives—Union preservation, emancipation, reconstruction—necessarily shaped what military operations could and should accomplish. Commanders who excelled at operational geometry sometimes floundered when required to integrate political considerations into their planning.

The McClellan phenomenon illustrates this gap perfectly. George McClellan was perhaps the most thoroughly Jominian commander of the war—brilliant at organization, deeply versed in European military theory, convinced that proper application of strategic principles would produce decisive results. His operational planning for the Peninsula Campaign demonstrated geometric sophistication. Yet McClellan's inability to grasp the political context of his operations, his failure to understand that Lincoln needed military success to sustain political coalition, represented the Jominian framework's blind spot made manifest. He could see the lines of operations but not the political landscape they traversed.

Takeaway

Strategic frameworks that separate military operations from political context create systematic blind spots; geometric elegance in operational planning means little if it ignores why the war is being fought.

The twentieth-century American military rediscovered Clausewitz, incorporating his concepts into doctrine and professional military education with particular intensity after Vietnam. Yet this Clausewitzian turn did not displace Jominian foundations so much as layer upon them. Contemporary American operational art—the conceptual level between tactics and strategy—remains structured by recognizably Jominian principles, now translated into modern doctrinal vocabulary. The concepts have new names, but the geometric logic persists.

Current joint doctrine's emphasis on centers of gravity, decisive points, and lines of operations represents direct transmission of Jominian categories. When American planners construct operational approaches, they identify enemy centers of gravity whose neutralization will achieve strategic objectives, determine decisive points that provide access to those centers of gravity, and design lines of operations connecting current positions to objectives. This analytical framework—systematic, geometric, focused on sequential relationships between military actions and strategic effects—is Jomini's gift to American military thought.

The effects-based operations concepts that proliferated in the 1990s and 2000s represented Jominian logic extended by systems analysis and networked technology. The premise that military planners could identify critical nodes in enemy systems, calculate cascading effects of attacking those nodes, and achieve strategic paralysis through precise application of force echoed Jomini's faith in the calculability of warfare. The subsequent critique of effects-based operations—that it overestimated predictability and underestimated friction, adaptation, and political complexity—essentially recapitulated the Clausewitzian critique of Jomini from a century and a half earlier.

American military culture's persistent preference for conventional warfare against peer competitors over counterinsurgency and stability operations also reflects Jominian intellectual inheritance. Jomini's framework worked best for wars between regular armies operating in defined theaters with identifiable decisive points. It offered less purchase on irregular warfare, popular resistance, or conflicts where political and military dynamics could not be separated. The American military's repeated difficulty with such conflicts—from the Philippines to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan—suggests that deeply embedded conceptual frameworks continue channeling institutional attention toward problems they can address while obscuring problems they cannot.

Recognizing Jominian persistence is not an argument for abandoning systematic operational planning—such planning remains essential for organizing complex military operations. Rather, it is an argument for understanding the intellectual genealogy of planning frameworks and their inherent limitations. Every analytical framework illuminates certain aspects of reality while casting shadows elsewhere. Jomini's framework illuminates the geometry of military operations; it shadows the political, social, and psychological dimensions that Clausewitz emphasized. Strategic wisdom lies in knowing which framework to apply and when to transcend frameworks altogether.

Takeaway

Doctrinal vocabulary evolves, but underlying conceptual frameworks prove remarkably durable; recognizing the intellectual genealogy of planning concepts reveals both their utility and their systematic blind spots.

Antoine-Henri Jomini's influence on American strategic culture represents one of intellectual history's more consequential acts of transmission. A Swiss theorist interpreting a Corsican emperor's campaigns shaped how American officers would fight wars from Mexico to Mesopotamia. The Jominian framework offered clarity, system, and actionable principles—exactly what a young republic building professional military institutions required.

Yet Jomini's strengths were also limitations. The geometric clarity came at the cost of political sophistication. The systematic principles worked best in contexts resembling the European conventional warfare for which they were derived. American strategic culture inherited both the framework's analytical power and its characteristic blind spots.

For contemporary strategists, the Jomini case study offers an essential lesson: the frameworks we absorb shape the problems we can see and the solutions we can imagine. Professional military education inevitably transmits not just knowledge but ways of knowing. Understanding those ways—their origins, their assumptions, their limitations—is prerequisite to thinking strategically about when to apply them and when to think beyond them.