'War' is a prolonged state of violent, large-scale conflict involving two or more groups of people. Wars may be prosecuted simultaneously in one or more different
theaters. Within each theater, there may be one or more consecutive
military campaigns. Individual actions of war within a specific campaign are traditionally called
battles, although this terminology is not always applied to contentions in modernity involving aircraft, missiles or bombs alone in the absence of ground troops or naval forces.
The factors leading to war are often complicated and due to a range of issues. Where disputes arise over issues such as
territory,
sovereignty, resource, or
ideology, and if a
peaceable resolution fails, is not sought, or is thwarted, war often results. In ''War Before Civilization'', Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor at the
University of Illinois, calculates that approximately 90-95% of known societies engaged in at least occasional warfare, and many fought constantly.
[1][2][3][4]
A war may begin following an official
declaration of war in the case of international war, although this has not always been observed either historically or currently, nor in the case of
civil wars. A declaration of war is not normally made in internal wars.
Conduct of war
The exact conduct of war will depend to a great extent upon its objectives, which may include factors such as the seizure of territory, the annihilation of a rival state, the destruction of the enemy's ability to prosecute military action, the subjugation of another people or recognition of one's own people as a separate state, or
genocide. Typically any military action by one state is opposed, i.e. is countered by the military forces of one or more states. Therefore, the ultimate objective of each state becomes secondary to the immediate objective of removing or nullification of the resistance offered by the opposing military forces. This may be accomplished variously by out-maneuvering them, by destroying them in open battle, by causing them to desert or surrender, or to be destroyed by indirect action such as pestilence and
starvation.
Factors leading to war
''"It is of course well known that the only source of war is politics ... war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means."'' - Carl von Clausewitz, ''Vom Kriege (On War)''
The basic motivation, of course, is willingness to wage war, but motivations may be analysed specifically. Motivations for war may be different for those ordering the war than for those undertaking the war. For a state to prosecute a war it must have the support of its leadership, its military forces, and the population. For example, in the
Third Punic War,
[5] Rome's leaders may have wished to make war with
Carthage for the purpose of annihilating a resurgent rival; the army may have wished to make war with Carthage to exploit the great opportunity for
plunder while levelling the city of Carthage. But the Roman people may have tolerated the war with Carthage on account of the demonisation of the Carthaginians in popular culture, since there had been rumors of child
sacrifice. Since many people are involved, a war may acquire a life of its own -- from the confluences of many different motivations. Various theories have been presented historically to explain the causes of war:
Historical theories
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. Still, one argument to this might be that there are few, if any, "pure" accidents. One may be able to find patterns which hold at least some degree of reliability, but because war is a collective of human intentions, some potentially quite fickle, it is very difficult to create a concise prediction system.
Psychological theories
Psychologists such as
E.F.M. Durban and
John Bowlby have argued that human beings 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 may have some explanatory value about 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. Nor do they explain the existence of certain human cultures completely devoid of war.
[6] If the innate psychology of the human mind is unchanging, these variations are inconsistent. A solution adapted 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 were 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,
Biljana Plavšić,
Indira Gandhi,
Boudica[7] or
Golda Meir.
Other psychologists have argued that while human
temperament allows wars to occur, this only happens when mentally unbalanced people are in control of a nation. This school of thought argues leaders that seek war such as
Napoleon,
Hitler, and
Stalin were mentally abnormal, but fails to explain the thousands of free and presumably sane men who wage wars on their behalf.
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. Humans have similar instincts to that of a
chimpanzee but overwhelmingly more power. The earliest advocate of this theory was
Konrad Lorenz.
[8] These theories have been criticised by scholars such as
John G. Kennedy, who argue that the organised, sustained war of humans differs more than just technologically from the territorial fights between animals. Ashley Montagu
[9] strongly denies such universalistic instinctual arguments, pointing out that social factors and childhood socialisation are important in determining the nature and presence of warfare. Thus while human aggression may be a universal occurrence, warfare is not and would appear to have been a historical invention, associated with certain types of human societies. Others have attempted to explain the psychological reasoning behind the human tendency for warring as a joined effort of a class of higher intelligence beings at participating in, experiencing and attempting to control the ultimate fate of each human, death.
The Italian psychoanalyst Franco Fornari, a follower of Melanie Klein, thought that war was the paranoid or projective “elaboration” of mourning. (Fornari 1975). Our nation and country play an unconscious maternal role in our feelings, as expressed in the term “motherland.” Fornari thought that war and violence develop out of our “love need”: our wish to preserve and defend the sacred object to which we are attached, namely our early mother and our fusion with her. For the adult, nations are the sacred objects that generate warfare. Fornari focused upon sacrifice as the essence of war: the astonishing willingness of human beings to die for their country, to give over their bodies to their nation. Fornari called war the “spectacular establishment of a general human situation whereby death assumes absolute value.” We are sure that the ideas for which we die must be true, because “death becomes a demonstrative process.”
Anthropological theories
Several
anthropologists take a very different view of war. They see it as fundamentally cultural, learned 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.
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.
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. Sociology has thus divided into a number of schools. One, the ''Primat der Innenpolitik'' (Primacy of Domestic Politics) school 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 ''Primat der Außenpolitik'' (Primacy of Foreign Politics) approach of
Carl von Clausewitz and
Leopold von Ranke that argues it is the decisions of statesmen and the
geopolitical situation that leads to war.
Demographic theories
Demographic theories can be grouped into two classes, Malthusian theories and
youth bulge theories.
Malthusian theories see a misproportion of expanding population and scarce food as a source of violent conflict. Youth Bulge theory differs in that it identifies a disproportion between the number of well educated, well fed angry "fighting age" young males (2nd, 3rd, and 5th sons) and the number of positions available to them in society as a primary source of different forms of social unrest (including war). According to this view, "people beg for food, for positions they shoot."
Pope Urban II in 1095, on the eve of the
First Crusade, wrote, "For this land which you now inhabit, shut in on all sides by the sea and the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population; it scarcely furnishes food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder and devour one another, that you wage wars, and that many among you perish in civil strife. Let hatred, therefore, depart from among you; let your quarrels end. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulcher; wrest that land from a wicked race, and subject it to yourselves."
This is one of the earliest expressions of what has come to be called the Malthusian theory of war, in which wars are caused by expanding populations and limited resources.
Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) wrote that populations always increase until they are limited by war,
disease, or
famine.
This theory is thought by Malthusians to account for the relative decrease in wars during the past fifty years, especially in the
developed world, where advances in agriculture have made it possible to support a much larger population than was formerly the case, and where
birth control has dramatically slowed the increase in population.
Contributors to the development of
youth bulge theory include French sociologist
Gaston Bouthoul,
[10] U.S. Sociologist
Jack A. Goldstone,
[11] U.S. Political Scientist
Gary Fuller,
[12][13][14] and German sociologist
Gunnar Heinsohn.
[15] Samuel Huntington has modified his
Clash of Civilizations theory by using youth bulge theory as its foundation:
''"I don’t think Islam is any more violent than any other religions, and I suspect if you added it all up, more people have been slaughtered by Christians over the centuries than by Muslims. But the key factor is the demographic factor. Generally speaking, the people who go out and kill other people are males between the ages of 16 and 30".''[16]
Youth Bulge theories represent a relatively recent development but seem to become more influential in guiding U.S. foreign policy and military strategy as both Goldstone and Fuller have acted as consultants to the U.S. Government. CIA Inspector General
John L. Helgerson referred to youth bulge theory in his 2002 report "The National Security Implications of Global Demographic Change".
[17]
According to Heinsohn, who has proposed youth bulge theory in its most generalized form, a
youth bulge occurs when 30 to 40 percent of the males of a nation belong to the "fighting age" cohorts from 15 to 29 years of age. It will follow periods with average birth rates as high as 4-8 children per woman with a 15-29 year delay. If an average birth rate of 2,1 represents a situation of in which the son will replace the father, the daughter the mother, 4-8 children per mother imply 2-4 sons. Consequently, one father has to leave not 1, but 2 to 4 social positions (jobs) to give all his sons a perspective for life, which is usually hard to achieve. Since respectable positions cannot be increased at the same speed as food, textbooks and vaccines, many "angry young men" find themselves in a situation that tends to escalate their adolescent anger into violence: they are
# demographically superfluous,
# might be out of work or stuck in a menial job, and
# often have no access to a legal sex life before a career can earn them enough to provide for a family.
The combination of these stress factors according to Heinsohn
[18] usually heads for six different exits:
# Violent Crime
# Emigration ("non violent colonization")
# Rebellion or putsch
# Civil war and/or revolution
# Genocide (to take over the positions of the slaughtered)
# Conquest (violent colonization, frequently including genocide abroad).
Religions and
ideologies are seen as secondary factors that are being used to legitimate violence, but will not lead to violence by itself if no youth bulge is present. Consequently, youth bulge theorists see both past "Christianist" European colonialism / imperialism and today's "Islamist" civil unrest / terrorism as results of high birth rates producing youth bulges.
[19] Today´s Afghanistan, which has a birth rate above 6 children per woman and an estimated unemployment rate of 40%, can be seen as a classical youth bulge country
[20].
While the security implications of rapid population growth have been well known since the publication of the
National Security Study Memorandum 200 in 1974,
[21] neither the U.S. nor the WHO have actively implemented preventive measures to control population growth to avert the terror threat it is now facing. Prominent demographer
Stephen D. Mumford attributes this to the influence of the
Catholic Church[22]
Youth Bulge theory has been subjected to statistical analysis by the World Bank,
[23] Population Action International,
[24] and the Berlin Institute for Population and Devel
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