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- For other uses of War, see War
(disambiguation).
War is conflict, between relatively large groups of people, which involves physical force inflicted by the use of
weapons. Other terms for war include armed conflict, hostilities, and police action. (See Limitations on
war below.) War is contrasted with peace, which is usually defined as the absence of war.
History of war
- Main article: History of warfare
War is as old as human societies. Tribes of hunter gatherers engaged in skirmishes over territory and resources. 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 others 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.
Morality of war
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 unfortunate 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 forcefully defended by the Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi (called "Mahatma" or "Great One".)
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 (which also cause suffering, but are started to
counter what is deemed even worse suffering) as legitimate, and it is the goal of organizations such as the United Nations to unite the world against wars of unjust aggression.
Limitations on war
At times throughout history, societies have attempted to limit the cost of war by formalizing it in some way. Limitations on
the targeting of civilians, what type of weapons can be used, and when combat is
allowed have all fallen under these rules in different conflicts. Total war is
the modern term for the targeting of civilians and the mobilization of an entire society.
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 (http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter), "save succeeding generations from
the scourge of war".
Sometimes the term "war" is restricted by legal definition to those conflicts where one or both belligerents have made a
formal declaration of war. This has resulted in wars (in the
informal sense, as defined in the introduction to this article) without formal declaration and combatants who officially choose
terms other than "war", such as:
For example, the British Government was very careful to use the term "armed conflict" instead of "war" during the Falklands War in 1982 to comply with international law.
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.
Causes of war
There is great debate over why wars happen, even when most people do not want them to. Representatives of many different
academic disciplines have attempted to explain war.
Historians
Historians tend to be reluctant to look for sweeping explanations for all wars. A. J. P. Taylor famously described wars as being like traffic accidents. There are some conditions and
situations that make them more likely but there can be no system for predicting where and when each one will occur. Social
scientists criticize this approach arguing that at the beginning of every war some leader makes a conscious decision and that
they cannot be seen as purely accidental.
Psychological theories
Psychologists such as E.F.M. Durban and John Bowlby have argued that human beings, especially men, are inherently violent. While this violence is repressed in normal society it needs the occasional outlet provided
by war. This combines with other notions, such as displacement where a
person transfers their grievances into bias and hatred against other ethnic groups, nations, or ideologies. While these theories
can explain why wars occur, they do not explain when or how they occur. In addition, they raise the question why there are
sometimes long periods of peace and other eras of unending war. If the innate psychology of the human mind is unchanging, these
variations are inconsistent.
A solution adopted to this problem by militarists such as Franz Alexander is that peace does not really exist. Periods that are seen as peaceful are
actually periods of preparation for a later war or when war is suppressed by a state of great power, such as the Pax Britannica.
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.
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 school argues leaders that seek war such as Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin
were mentally abnormal and thus if some sort of screening process, such as elections, could prevent these types from coming to
power war would end.
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.
Anthropological theories
Anthropologists take a very different view of war. They see it as
fundamentally cultural, learnt by nurture rather than nature. Thus if human societies could be reformed war would disappear. To
this school the acceptance of war is inculcated into each of us by the religious,
ideological, and nationalistic
surroundings in which we live.
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 the system of ideological justifications for war.
Sociological theories
Sociology has long been very concerned with the origins of war, and many
thousands of theories have been advanced, many of them contradictory. Some use detailed formulas taking into account hundreds of
demographic and economic values to predict when and where wars will break out. The statistical analysis of war was pioneered by Lewis Fry Richardson following World War I. More
recent databases of wars and armed conflict have been assembled by the Correlates of War Project, Peter Brecke and the Uppsala Department of Peace and Conflict Research. So far none of these
formulas have successfully predicted the outbreak of future conflicts. On the other hand there is a case for avoiding war in the
Democratic peace theory, since liberal democracies
rarely go to war against each other. A detailed study by Michael Haas found that no single variable has a strong correlation to the occurrence of wars. There
have been many other attempts at Predicting 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 Karl von
Clausewitz and Leopold von Ranke that argue it is the
decisions of statesmen and the geopolitical situation that leads to war.
Information theories
A popular new approach is to look at the role of information in the
outbreak of wars. This theory, advanced by scholars of international relations such as Geoffrey Blainey, argues that all
wars are based on a lack of information. If both sides at the outset knew the result neither would fight, the loser would merely
surrender and avoid the cost in lives and infrastructure that a war would cause.
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 Karl von 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 Danish
decision to resist the Nazi invasion was taken with the certain knowledge that Denmark would fall. The Danes 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 1941 it had been known with certainty the Germans would dominate
central Europe for many decades, it is unlikely the Danes 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 Britain 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 guerillas 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 fiercly partly by playing on the myth of
Arian 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.
Economic theories
Another school of thought argues that war can be seen as an outgrowth of economic competition in an anarchic international system. That wars begin as a pursuit of new markets, of natural resources,
and of wealth. Unquestionably a cause of some wars, from the empire building of Britain to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in pursuit of oil this theory has been applied
to many other conflicts. It is most often advocated by those of the left of the political spectrum who argue that such wars serve only the interests of the wealthy but are
fought by the poor.
Marxist theories
The economic theories also form a part of the Marxist theory of war, which argues
that all war grows out of the class war. It sees wars as imperial ventures to
enhance the power of the ruling class and divide the proletariat of the world by pitting them against each other for contrived
ideals such as nationalism or religion. Further, wars are a natural outgrowth of the free market and class system, and will not
disappear until a world revolution occurs.
Types of war and warfare
Smaller armed conflicts are often called riots, rebellions, coups, etc.
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.
A war where the forces in conflict belong to the same country or empire or other political entity is known as a civil war.
Geographic warfare
The terrain over which a war is fought has a big impact on the type of combat which takes place. This in turn means that
soldiers have to be trained to fight in a specific type of terrain. These include:
Troops such as the Brigade of Gurkhas have to be
acclimatised to fighting in a European environment. When they provided infantry flanking support for the British Armour entering
Kosovo after the Kosovo War in 1999,
they called the deciduous woodland on the mountains either side of the road (small hills to them) jungle.
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