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.