Rethinking Clausewitz’s Chameleon: Is It Time for Western Militaries to Abandon the Idea of War’s Immutable Nature?

Conventional wisdom holds that war has an enduring nature; its character change. This chapter offers a different way to conceptualise war by introducing the war assemblage. This will allow one to grasp how phenomena exist on a continuum between stability and change, which, we argue, aligns with Clausewitz. The aim is to bridge an ontological gap between new war and empirically minded scholars and military practitioners and classic approaches to civil-military relations. The military profession and its political masters need stable categories and boundaries. However, classifications are not reflections of an enduring nature. They are arrangements open for change.