3 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, "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:

• " armed conflict";
• " state aggression by armed force";
• " crime against international peace."

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, 26-29 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.

4 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.

4.1 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.

4.2 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.

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 distant 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.

4.3 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.

4.4 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. A detailed study by Michael Haas found that no single variable has a strong correlation to the occurrence of wars.

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.

4.5 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, or the Nazi invasions of Austria and Czechoslovakia in the lead up to the Second World 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 a 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.

4.6 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.

4.7 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.

5 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.

5.1 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:

• Arctic warfare
• Desert warfare
• Jungle warfare
• Mountain warfare (sometimes called alpine warfare)
• Urban warfare

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.

6 Costs and benefits of war

Warfare is indisputably destructive; it destroys lives, causes physical and psychological injury, and destroys property. War is waged at a cost, but are there benefits as well? Can the benefits outweigh the costs at times?

Near term

In the near term, the economic costs of war and defense usually exceed the benefits, by almost any measure which excludes the cost of wars averted by strong defenses.

While some point to beneficial economic effects from warfare and defense spending, including invention and economic stimulus , opponents of this view argue that resources expended on warfare could be applied to education, research and infrastructure without the destructive or unproductive component, i.e., that the same good could have been achieved without the costs. (See Parable of the broken window.)

Long term

Wars are sometimes advocated on moral grounds, such as freeing people from brutal dictatorships. While such wars may have a costly and disruptive effect in the short term, after a few years a more stable and productive society can emerge, perhaps with less loss of life overall than would have occurred under the old regime. Intervention in genocide or ethnic cleansing would seem to be an unassailable example of this.

7 See also

• List of wars
• List of battles
• List of orders of battle
• List of invasions
• List of military commanders
• List of current wars

• Military technology and equipment
• Military strategy
• Military tactics
• Military-industrial complex

• Weapons
• War profiteer

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about .

8 External links

• Correlates of War Project -- http://www.umich.edu/~cowproj/
• Correlates of War 2 -- http://cow2.la.psu.edu/
• Peter Brecke's article -- http://www.inta.gatech.edu/peter/PSS99_paper.html
• Current Military News, News Sources, and Links.
• The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation
• Uppsala Department of Peace and Conflict Research -- http://www.pcr.uu.se/
• 1986 Seville Statement on Violence -- http://www.unesco.org/shs/human_rights/hrfv.htm
• Introduction and Updated Information on the Seville Statement on Violence -- http://www.culture-of-peace.info/ssov-intro.html
• Rough estimates of the number of deaths in various wars and conflicts

War

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