The close interrelationship between politics and war, between state policy and the employment of military means, is generally well recognized. Soviet leaders, beginning with Lenin's careful study of Clausewitz and enthusiastic endorsement of the famous maxim that war is a continuation of politics only by other means (injecting his own concept of politics), have been especially aware of the interconnection. This is important, although few maxims are so oft quoted and so little understood as this one of Clausewitzin American usage, in Soviet usage, and in much of the American commentary on the Soviet view. ' Over the past decade, the usually dreary and pedestrian Soviet discussion of political-military problems has been enlivened by the appearance of a number of sophisticated, high-caliber analytical studies, exemplified by such collaborative works as Military Power and International Relations and International Conflicts by political and military analysts of the Academy of Sciences Institutes studying international politics.2 The main source for the present discussion,