Normally, warfare is mortal, which is to say that lives of the combatants may legitimately be deliberately taken by enemy forces, and the continued existence of a losing group as an entity is in doubt. In view of this, rules for the conduct of war are unenforceable. A person faced with death, or an organisation faced with extinction, both have little incentive to obey rules that are about to produce this result. If they can only survive by breaking the rules they are likely to do so, and some would argue justified.
Nevertheless, International law has attempted to reduce the mutually destructive results of war. The signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the development of the United Nations System have succeeded in discouraging the description of any specific instance of warfare, by its participants, as a war. This process has been aided by such terminologies as
Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his classic text, On War: "Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln" ("War is merely a continuation of politics by other means") and "War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will."
Wars have been fought to control natural resources, for religious or cultural reasons, over political balances of power, legitimacy of particular laws, to settle economic and territorial disputes, and many other issues. The roots of any war are very complex - there is usually more than one issue involved.
Sometimes a distinction is made between a conflict and the formal declaration of a state of war. Those who make this distinction often restrict the term "war" to those conflicts where the countries have formally declared such a state. Smaller armed conflicts are often called riots, rebellions, coupss, 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.
War is contrasted with peace, which is usually defined as the absence of war.
Another approach to classifying warfare divides it into four "generations" of war.
First generation warfare reflects tactics of the era of the smoothbore musket, the tactics of line and column. Operational art in the first generation did not exist as a concept although it was practiced by individual commanders, most prominently Napoleon.
Second generation warfare was developed in response to the rifled musket, breechloaders, barbed wire, the machinegun, and indirect fire. Tactics were based on fire and movement but they remained essentially linear, with defenses still attempting to prevent all penetrations and attacks laterally dispersed along a line advanced by rushes in small groups. Second generation tactics remained the basis of U.S. doctrine until the 1980s, and they are still practiced by most American units in the field.
Third generation warfare was first developed by the Germans in World War I, to compensate for their inability to match their enemies' industrial output. Its tactics were the first truly nonlinear tactics; attacks rely on infiltration to bypass and collapse the enemy's combat forces rather than seeking to close with and destroy them, and defense was in depth and often invited penetration to set the enemy up for a counterattack.
Fourth generation warfare is widely dispersed and largely undefined, with a blurred distinction between war and peace and few clear battlefields or fronts. Indeed, it may be difficult to even identify which organizations and individuals are actively participating in the war. Actions will occur concurrently throughout all participants' depth, including their society as a cultural, not just a physical, entity.
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, 26-29 October 1863 and Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, 75 U.N.T.S. 135, entered into force Oct. 21, 1950.
The statistical analysis of war was pioneered by Lewis Fry Richardson following World War I. More recent databases of wars have been assembled by the Correlates of War Project [1] and Peter Brecke [2].
For the 1970s funk band, see War (band).
simple:War
Types of war
First generation warfare
Second generation warfare
Third generation warfare
Fourth generation warfare
Laws of war
Statistical analysis
See also
External links