wars

War is the reciprocal and violent application of force between hostile political entities aimed at bringing about a desired political end-state via armed conflict. In his seminal work On War, Carl Von Clausewitz calls war the "continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means."^[1] War is an interaction in which two or more militaries have a “struggle of wills”.^[2] When qualified as a civil war, it is a dispute inherent to a given society, and its nature is in the conflict over modes of governance rather than sovereignty. War is not considered to be the same as occupation, murder, or genocide because of the reciprocal nature of the violent struggle, and the organized nature of the units involved.

War is also a cultural entity, and its practice is not linked to any single type of political organization or society. Rather, as discussed by John Keegan in his “History Of Warfare”, war is a universal phenomenon whose form and scope is defined by the society that wages it. ^[3] The conduct of war extends along a continuum, from the almost universal tribal warfare that began well before recorded human history, to wars between city states, nations, or empires.

A group of combatants and their support is called an army on land, a navy at sea, and an air force in the air. Wars may be conducted simultaneously in one or more different theatres. Within each theatre, there may be one or more consecutive military campaigns. A military campaign includes not only fighting but also intelligence, troop movements, supplies, propaganda, and other components. A period of continuous conflict is traditionally called a battle, although this terminology is not always applied to conflicts involving aircraft, missiles or bombs alone, in the absence of ground troops or naval forces.

War is not limited to the human species, as ants engage in massive inter-species conflicts which might be termed warfare. It is theorized that other species also engage in similar behavior, although this is not well documented.

Before the dawn of civilization, war likely consisted of small-scale raiding. Since the rise of the state some 5,000 years ago, military activity has occurred over much of the globe. The advent of gunpowder and the acceleration of technological advances led to modern warfare.

The Human Security Report 2005 documented a significant decline in the number and severity of armed conflicts since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. However, the evidence examined in the 2008 edition of the Center for International Development and Conflict Management's Peace and Conflict study indicated that the overall decline in conflicts had stalled.^[7]

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,^[8] Rome's leaders may have wished to make war with Carthage for the purpose of eliminating a resurgent rival, while the individual soldiers may have been motivated by a wish to make money. Since many people are involved, a war may acquire a life of its own from the confluence of many different motivations.

In Why Nations Go to War, by John G. Stoessinger, the author points out that both sides will claim that morality justifies their fight. He also states that the rationale for beginning a war depends on an overly optimistic assessment of the outcome of hostilities (casualties and costs), and on misperceptions of the enemy's intentions. In War Before Civilization, Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor at the University of Illinois, says that approximately 90–95% of known societies throughout history engaged in at least occasional warfare, and many fought constantly.^[9]

Tradeoff analysis theories

Wars happen when a group of people or an organization perceives the benefits that can be obtained to be greater than the cost. This can happen for a variety of reasons:

1. To protect national pride by preventing the loss of territory
2. To protect livelihood by preventing the loss of resources or by declaring independence
3. To inflict punishment on the "wrongdoer", especially when one country is stronger than the other and can effectively deal out the punishment

Behavioral 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 mixes with other notions such as displacement, where a person transfers their grievances into bias and hatred against other ethnic groups, racial groups, religions, nations or ideologies. While these theories may have some explanatory value about why wars occur, they do not explain when or how they occur. Nor do they explain the existence of certain human cultures completely devoid of war.^[10] 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 and predetermined (according to determinism philosophy) by many psychological theories, then there is little hope of ever escaping it. 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, Saddam Hussein, and Stalin were mentally abnormal, but fails to explain the thousands of free and presumably sane people who wage wars at their behest. Some psychologists argue that such leaders are a manifestation of the build up of anger and madness repressed in modern societies and it is only they that are allowed to show various mental anomalies. Because people elect and support such leaders suggestions have been made that very few people are in fact sane and that modern society is an unhealthy one. Scientists such as Desmond Morris have argued that stress is the major cause of death in people of today. Heart failure, obesity, mental disorders and long lists of diseases are proven to be related to stress. Therefore showing that the rise of insane leaders is due to a very toxic environment in which presumably healthy individuals exist and that social pressure forces mentally healthy people to participate in conflicts.

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. The earliest advocate of this theory was Konrad Lorenz.^[11] 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. Ashley Montagu^[12] strongly denies such universalistic instinctual arguments, pointing out that social factors and childhood socialization 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.

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.” Also it is argued that leaders take the role of fathers and people taken the role of children. This could explain why people are either very rebellious against societies or very obedient. This means that the majority of people are not full grown adults. Doctor Bruce Charlton a psychiatrist says that more and more people are suffering from Neoteny, further more supporting this thesis.