War

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  War is an armed conflict between the armed forces of states, between governmental forces and organized armed groups, or between such organized groups themselves. To count as war, those groups must operate under a command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations. The word itself is old. The English word descends from the 11th-century Old English wyrre and werre, traced back through Old French to the Frankish werra and the Proto-Germanic werzo. The modern German verwirren, meaning to confuse, sits in the same family. That tangled root suits a subject scholars cannot agree on. Was war common throughout human prehistory, or did it arrive only after agriculture and organized states? How many people has it killed, with estimates running from 151 million to several billion? Why do leaders choose it when nearly everyone would be better off avoiding it? And why, since 1945, has one kind of war faded while another has grown? The answers run from chimpanzee colonies to the just war theory, and they rarely settle cleanly.

• 2. Deep Roots Of Conflict

  ›

  Raymond Case Kelly, an American cultural anthropologist and ethnologist, argued that before 400,000 years ago humans clashed like groups of chimpanzees. Later, he held, they came to prefer positive and peaceful social relations between neighboring groups, such as joint hunting, trading, and courtship. In his book Warless Societies and the Origin of War, Kelly proposes that high surplus product encourages conflict, so raiding often begins in the richest environments. Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor at the University of Illinois, pressed a darker reading in his 1996 book War Before Civilization. Keeley estimated that roughly 90 to 95 percent of known societies throughout history engaged in at least occasional warfare, and many fought constantly. He catalogued styles of primitive combat: small raids, large raids, and massacres. These early war raids were not well organized, because the participants had no formal training, and scarce resources made defensive works too costly to build. William Rubinstein wrote that pre-literate societies, even relatively advanced ones, were renowned for their studied cruelty. Hard evidence is thin for the Paleolithic, since remains are sparse, but signs of violent conflict appear to rise during the Mesolithic, from around 10,000 years ago onward.

• 3. The State And The Battlefield

  ›

  In Europe the oldest known battlefield is thought to date to 1250 BC, a marker for how the state changed the scale of fighting. Military activity has continued over much of the globe since the rise of the state some 5,000 years ago. The Bronze Age has been described as a key period in the intensification of warfare, bringing dedicated warriors and metal weapons such as swords. The Axial Age and Modern Times are two other commonly named periods of increase. Charles Tilly, in Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990 to 1992, argued that war made the state, and the state made war. In his account, wars create states, which then go on to perpetuate war, and his theory of state formation is considered dominant in that literature. Geoffrey Parker took up a related question about why Western armies conquered so much of the world after 1500. Parker rooted the Western way of war in five foundations: technology, discipline, a highly aggressive military tradition, a capacity to innovate and respond to others' innovations, and from about 1500 a unique system of war finance. He stressed discipline above all, the ability of a formation to stand fast in the face of the enemy without giving way to fear and panic. That discipline came from drills, marching in formation, target practice, and small artificial kinship groups such as the company and the platoon.

• 4. Why People Fight

  ›

  Carl von Clausewitz, the military theorist, observed that every age has its own kind of war, its own limiting conditions, and its own peculiar preconceptions. The motivations behind war have produced many theories and no consensus. The Dutch psychoanalyst Joost Meerloo held that war is often a mass discharge of accumulated internal rage. The Italian psychoanalyst Franco Fornari, a follower of Melanie Klein, thought war grew out of a love need, the wish to preserve and defend the sacred object of our early mother, with nations standing in as that sacred object for adults. Maurice Walsh shifted the gaze to leaders, arguing that wars occur when men with a psychologically abnormal disregard for human life, such as Napoleon and Hitler, are placed into power during crises. Steven Pinker, a psychologist and linguist, suggested war-related behaviors were naturally selected because victory paid off, and because a reputation for retaliation built credible deterrence, breeding instincts for revenge and honor. Ashley Montagu denied any universal instinct for war. He pointed to peoples like the Chewong and Semai of the Malay peninsula, where the concept of aggression seems entirely absent, to argue that warfare is a historical invention tied to certain kinds of societies.

• 5. Economics And Numbers Game

  ›

  The Marxist theory of war holds that all modern wars spring from competition for resources and markets among great imperialist powers. Marxist economists Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Rudolf Hilferding, and Vladimir Lenin argued that capitalist countries needed new markets, since their own workers could not absorb expanding production, which drove imperialism outward. A separate strand reads war through pure calculation rather than class. James Fearon, in Rationalist Explanations for War, set out three reasons rational states still fight: issue indivisibilities, incentives to misrepresent through information asymmetry, and commitment problems. Geoffrey Blainey sharpened the second point, arguing that war is usually the outcome of a diplomatic crisis that cannot be solved because both sides hold conflicting estimates of their bargaining power. The philosopher Iain King added that most instigators of conflict overrate their chances of success while most participants underrate their chances of injury, and that most catastrophic military decisions are rooted in groupthink. Demographic theories run alongside these. Pope Urban II, in 1095 on the eve of the First Crusade, urged the faithful to leave a land too narrow for its large population and wrest the Holy Sepulchre from a wicked race, an early voice of what became the Malthusian theory of war. Thomas Malthus, who lived from 1766 to 1834, wrote that populations always grow until checked by war, disease, or famine.

• 6. The Toll Of War

  ›

  Of the 450,000 soldiers who crossed the Neman on the 25th of June 1812, less than 40,000 returned, and during Napoleon's retreat from Moscow more French personnel died of typhus than were killed by the Russians. From 1500 to 1914, more soldiers were killed by typhus than by military action. During the Seven Years' War, the Royal Navy reported conscripting 184,899 sailors, of whom 133,708, or 72 percent, died of disease or were counted as missing. The mind suffers alongside the body. Swank and Marchand's World War II study found that after sixty days of continuous combat, 98 percent of surviving military personnel become psychiatric casualties, showing up as fatigue, confusional states, conversion hysteria, anxiety, and character disorders. It has been estimated that anywhere from 18 to 54 percent of Vietnam war veterans suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder. Civilians bear their own share. During the Thirty Years' War, the population of the Holy Roman Empire was reduced by 15 to 40 percent. A medium-sized conflict with about 2,500 battle deaths reduces civilian life expectancy by one year, raises infant mortality by 10 percent, and lifts malnutrition by 3.3 percent. World War II stands as the deadliest war in history, with 70 to 85 million deaths from 1939 to 1945, followed by the Mongol conquests at up to 60 million. Of the nine million people on the territory of the Byelorussian SSR in 1941, some 1.6 million were killed by the Germans away from battlefields, including about 700,000 prisoners of war, 500,000 Jews, and 320,000 counted as partisans, most of them unarmed civilians.

• 7. Forms And Boundaries

  ›

  Poison gas, used principally during World War I as a chemical weapon, resulted in over a million estimated casualties, including more than 100,000 civilians. That is one face among many that warfare wears. Asymmetric warfare unfolds between belligerents of drastically different military capability or size. Biological warfare turns infectious agents and toxins against people, plants, or animals, whether through cluster munitions or the old trick of catapulting an infected corpse behind enemy lines. Cyberwarfare sees a nation-state or international organization attack another nation's information systems. Total war discards the laws of war and places no limits on legitimate targets, accepting heavy civilian casualties. Against these forms stands a long effort to draw lines. The just war theory rests on two pillars: jus ad bellum, the right to war, and jus in bello, the right in war. Jus ad bellum sets six criteria for declaring a just war, among them a lawful authority, a just cause, rightful intentions, a reasonable chance of success, war as a last resort, and ends proportional to means. Jus in bello turns on proportionality and discrimination, the latter separating combatants, who may be killed, from non-combatants, who may not. The just war theory was foundational in creating the United Nations and in international law's regulation of legitimate war. The Second Vatican Council document Gaudiem et Spes declared that any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities along with their population is a crime against God and man himself.

• 8. Pauses And The Modern Shift

  ›

  A ceasefire is a stoppage in which each side agrees to suspend aggressive actions, often through mediation by a third party, and it differs from an armistice in that the armistice is a formal end to a war. Ceasefires may be temporary or indefinite, and their underlying purposes vary, from delivering humanitarian aid to managing a conflict or advancing a peaceful settlement. They can also be exploited, since an actor may use a pause to re-arm, reposition forces, or strike an unsuspecting adversary, which makes such agreements harder to implement and to keep. Durability improves with demilitarized zones, withdrawal of troops, and third-party guarantees and monitoring such as peacekeeping. The larger picture has shifted since 1945. Great power wars, territorial conquests, and war declarations have declined in frequency, and wars have come under increasing regulation by international humanitarian law. Battle deaths and casualties have fallen, partly thanks to advances in military medicine. In Western Europe, more than 150 conflicts and about 600 battles have taken place since the late 18th century, yet no battle has occurred there since 1945. War has not simply vanished, though. Civil wars have grown in absolute terms since 1945, and combat has largely become a matter of civil wars and insurgencies, with major exceptions including the Korean War, the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, the Eritrean-Ethiopian War, and the Russo-Ukrainian War.