| [image] | War portal |
A common perception of war is a series of military campaigns between at least two opposing sides involving a dispute over Sovereignty, Territory, resources, Religion or a host of other issues. A war to liberate an occupied country is sometimes characterised as a "war of liberation", while a war between internal elements of the same state may constitute a Civil war.
War seems as old as human society, and certainly features prominently in the recorded histories of state-cultures. But it is a complex issue. Some Hunter-gatherer societies engaged in skirmishes over territory and resources, although many did not. The earliest city states and empire in Mesopotamia became the first to employ standing armies. Organization and structure has since been central to warfare, as illustrated by the success of highly disciplined troops of the Roman Empire.
As well as organizational change, Technology has played a central role in the evolution of warfare. Inventions created for warfare have also played an important role in other fields. The continued advance of technology has led to an increase in the destructiveness and cost of warfare throughout human history.
The study of warfare is known as Military history.
Throughout history war has been the source of serious moral questions. Although many ancient nations and some more modern ones viewed war as noble, over the sweep of history concerns about the morality of war have gradually increased. Today war is almost unanimously seen as undesirable and morally problematic. Many now believe that wars should only be fought as a last resort. Some, known as pacifists, believe that war is inherently immoral and no war should ever be fought. This position was passionately defended by the Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi (called "Mahatma" or "Great Soul").
The negative view of war has not always been held as widely as it is today. Many thinkers, such as Heinrich von Treitschke saw war as humanity's highest activity where Courage, Honour, and ability were more necessary than in any other endeavour. At the outbreak of World War I the writer Thomas Mann wrote, "Is not peace an element of civil corruption and war a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope?" This attitude was embraced by many societies from Sparta in Ancient Greece and the Ancient Romans to the fascist states of the 1930s. The defeat and repudiation of the fascist states and their Militarism in the Second World War, combined with the unquestioned horror of nuclear war have contributed to the current negative view of war.
Today, some see only Just Wars as legitimate, and it is the goal of organizations such as the United Nations to unite the world against wars of unjust aggression.
While culture, law, and religion have all been factors in causing wars, they have also acted as restraints at times. In some cultures, for example, conflicts have been highly ritualized to limit actual loss of life. In modern times, increasing international attention has been paid to peacefully resolving conflicts which lead to war. The United Nations is the latest and most comprehensive attempt to, as stated in the preamble of the U.N. Charter, "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war."
A number of treaties regulate warfare, collectively referred to as the Laws of war. The most pervasive of those are the Geneva Conventions, the earliest of which began to take effect in the mid 1800s.
Treaty signing has since been a part of international Diplomacy, and too many treaties to mention in this scant article have been signed. A couple of examples are: Resolutions of the Geneva International Conference, Geneva, 26 October-29 October 1863 and Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, 75 U.N.T.S. 135, entered into force 21 October 1950. It must be noted that in war such treaties are generally thrown to one side if they interfere with the vital interests of either side; some have criticised such conventions as simply providing a fig leaf for the inhuman practice of war. By only illegalising "war against the rules", it is alleged, such treaties and conventions, in effect, sanction certain types of war.
For example, the United States Government referred to the Korean War as a "police action", and the British Government was very careful to use the term "armed conflict" instead of "war" during the Falklands War in 1982 to comply with the letter of international law. Sometimes the term "war" will not be used in order to circumvent national constitutions which restrict the power of the executive to wage war without the agreement of other branches of government.
If war is innate to human nature, as is presupposed by many psychological theories, then there is little hope of ever escaping it. One alternative is to argue that war is only, or almost only, a male activity and if human leadership was in female hands wars would not occur. This theory has played an important role in modern Feminism. Critics, of course, point to various examples of female political leaders who had no qualms about using military force, such as Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi.
Other psychologists have argued that while human temperament allows wars to occur, they only do so when mentally unbalanced men are in control of a nation. This extreme school of thought argues leaders that seek war such as Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin were mentally abnormal.
A distinct branch of the psychological theories of war are the arguments based on Evolutionary psychology. This school tends to see war as an extension of animal behaviour, such as territoriality and competition. However, while war has a natural cause, the development of technology has accelerated human destructiveness to a level that is irrational and damaging to the species. We have the same instincts of a chimpanzee but overwhelmingly more power. The earliest advocate of this theory was Konrad Lorenz. These theories have been criticized by scholars such as John G. Kennedy, who argue that the organized, sustained war of humans differs more than just technologically from the territorial fights between animals.
In his fictional book Nineteen-Eighty-Four, George Orwell talks about war being used as one of many ways to distract people. War inspires fear and hate among the people of a nation, and gives them a 'legitimate' enemy upon whom they can focus this fear and hate. Thus the people are prevented from seeing that their true enemy is in fact their own repressive government. By this theory, war is another 'opiate of the masses' by which a totalitarian state controls its people and prevents revolution.
Many anthropologists also see no links between various forms of violence. They see the fighting of animals, the skirmishes of Hunter-gatherer tribes, and the organized warfare of modern societies as distinct phenomena each with their own causes. Theorists such as Ashley Montagu emphasize the top down nature of war, that almost all wars are begun not by popular pressure but by the whims of leaders and that these leaders also work to maintain a system of ideological justifications for war.
Many sociologists have attempted to divide wars into types to get better correlations, but this has also produced mixed results. Data looked at by R.J. Rummel has found that civil wars and foreign wars are very different in origin, but Jonathan Wilkenfield using different data found just the opposite.
Sociology has thus divided into a number of schools. One based on the works of Eckart Kehr and Hans-Ulrich Wehler sees war as the product of domestic conditions, with only the target of aggression being determined by international realities. Thus World War I was not a product of international disputes, secret treaties, or the balance of power but a product of the economic, social, and political situation within each of the states involved.
This differs from the traditional approach of Carl von Clausewitz and Leopold von Ranke that argue it is the decisions of statesmen and the geopolitical situation that leads to war.
This is based on the notion that wars are reciprocal, that all wars require both a decision to attack and also a decision to resist attack. This notion is generally agreed to by almost all scholars of war since Clausewitz. This notion is made harder to accept because it is far more common to study the cause of wars rather than events that failed to cause wars, and wars are far more memorable. However, throughout history there are as many invasions and annexations that did not lead to a war, such as the U.S.-led invasion of Haiti in 1994, the Nazi invasions of Austria and Czechoslovakia preceding the Second World War, and the annexation of the Baltic states by the Soviet Union in 1940. On the other hand, Finland's decision to resist a similar Soviet aggression in 1939 led to the Winter War.
The leaders of these nations chose not to resist as they saw the potential benefits being not worth the loss of life and destruction such resistance would cause. Lack of information may not only be to who wins in the immediate future. The Norwegian decision to resist the Nazi invasion was taken with the certain knowledge that Norway would fall. The Norwegians did not know whether the German domination would be permanent and also felt that noble resistance would win them favour with the Allies and a position at the peace settlement in the event of an Allied victory. If in 1940 it had been known with certainty the Germans would dominate central Europe for many decades, it is unlikely the Norwegians would have resisted. If it had been known for certainty that the Third Reich would collapse after only a few years of war, the Nazis would not have launched the invasion at all.
This theory is predicated on the notion that the outcome of wars is not randomly determined, but fully determined on factors such as doctrine, economies, and power. While purely random events, such as storms or the right person dying at the right time, might have had some effect on history, these only influence a single battle or slightly alter the outcome of a war, but would not mean the difference between victory and defeat.
There are two main objectives in the gathering of intelligence. The first is to find out the ability of an enemy, the second their intent. In theory to have enough information to prevent all wars both need to be fully known. The Argentinean dictatorship knew that the United Kingdom had the ability to defeat them, but their intelligence failed them on the question of whether the British would use their power to resist the annexation of the Falklands. The American decision to enter the Vietnam War was made with the full knowledge that the communist forces would resist them, but did not believe that the guerrillas had the capability to long oppose American forces.
One major difficulty is that in a conflict of interests, some deception or at least not telling everything, is a standard tactical component on both sides. If you think that you can convince the opponent that you will fight, the opponent might desist. For example, Sweden made efforts to deceive Nazi Germany that it would resist an attack fiercely partly by playing on the myth of Aryan superiority, and by making sure that Hermann Göring only saw Elite troops in action, often dressed up as regular soldiers, when he came to visit.
When one country sends armed forces to another, allegedly to restore order or prevent Genocide or other crimes against humanity, or to support a legally recognized government against insurgency, that country sometimes refers to it as a Police action. This usage is not always recognized as valid, however, particularly by those who do not accept the connotations of the term.
"Conventional warfare" descibes either:
(Compare with Unconventional warfare and Nuclear warfare.)
A war where the forces in conflict belong to the same country or empire or other political entity is known as a Civil war. Asymmetrical warfare is a conflict between two populations of drastically different levels of military Mechanization. This type of war often results in guerrilla tactics. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a common example of asymmetrical warfare.
The tactics and methods used in warfare will have to change as the warring parties change and the paradigm of international relations shifts to the earlier model. Soldiers now are trained to be unemotional and clinical, a policy that reflects the state-based notion that war must be undertaken by rational armies who are regulated by agreed upon rules and laws (e.g., the Geneva Convention, the Law of land warfare, etc.). As warfare shift back to the time when civilizations, cultures and religions attempted to obliterate their opponents, soldiers will have to understand the complex nature of the conflicts that surround them and state-based armies will have to undergo massive changes. (Waddell 2004)
Modern combatants include religious zealots and terrorists and, because they are not defined by the state, cannot be bombed or fought as were the armies of Hitler or Napoleon. Some suggest that Western culture, which employs the majority of these state-based militaries, will have to fight using elite forces that appeal across national lines to broader cultural similarities if it is to effectively fight modern wars. (Waddell 2004)
}}>??2}}}}}|??Author|}}} }}??2
}}
}}??2}}}} |. }} Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816- 1980.
}}
}}>}}}}}|??Author|}}} }}
}}
}}}}}} |. }} The Art of War: War and Military Thought.
}}