Warfare

Warfare, the use of armed force by states or other organized groups to impose their will on opponents. Organized military forces developed in ancient times when the armies of ancient Assyria and Persia began to deploy spear-wielding regular infantry and cavalry to smash their enemies. Subsequently the Greeks deployed heavily armoured militia (or hoplites) in squares or phalanxes for shock action, using bows and arrows, spears and swords. These were impregnable in frontal assaults, but were difficult to manoeuvre. Alexander the Great welded phalanxes of heavy and light infantry and cavalry into a powerful assault force which destroyed the Persian army in 333 bc.

The Romans outclassed all these early forces in military prowess and tactical skill. The infantry legions of the Roman Empire were armed with shields, a short sword, and a javelin, and divided into three lines of about six ranks deep. They were rigorously drilled and well disciplined, and capable of marching long distances. By ad 14 the Roman armies had extended the power of the Roman Empire across Europe and the Mediterranean Sea. After 400, however, the Roman Empire in the west collapsed under the weight of successive barbarian invasions from the east and north. Not until 800 was the former Western European Roman empire reunited for a time under the Merovingian and Carolingian Franks, whose cavalry horses were fitted with the stirrup, which enabled the horseman for the first time to wield sword and lance accurately to mow down the enemy infantry.

During the Middle Ages the infantry tended to be neglected in favour of the mounted knight with his code of honour and chivalry. However, in the 14th century, light infantry began to adopt the crossbow, slower in rate of fire than the ordinary bow, but with much greater penetrative power and requiring less skill to aim and less strength to pull. This weapon had a pulverizing effect on advancing enemy cavalry. The role of the mounted knight was further undermined when gunpowder was developed in 14th-century Europe. It was first applied to the cannon, which became a battlefield weapon when the French army placed their cannons on wheeled carriages. Smoothbore small arms—the matchlock or arquebus—were developed in the mid-15th century, but they were slow to load and had limited range and penetrative power. They were, however cheaper to produce than the crossbow, which eventually disappeared during the 16th century when European armies replaced the arquebus with the more powerful and longer-range musket.

By 1600 the rulers of the newly emerging nation-states of Europe were hiring mercenaries on short-term contracts to man their armies. This method of recruitment inhibited long-drawn-out battles—such soldiers had little motivation or loyalty, and when the ruler ran out of money to pay them the mercenaries tended to desert in large numbers. During the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), Gustav II Adolf (Gustavus Adolphus) of Sweden revolutionized European warfare by dividing his infantry into smaller units and placing them in lines, with continuous volleys of fire made possible by the rapid rotation of the lines of musketeers. This method of fighting meant that drill was essential if the men were to march together in good order and load and fire when commanded. The battalion became the basic infantry unit, with 600 men five ranks deep. Armies remained dependent on mercenaries, but they now signed up for much longer periods of service and were subjected to brutal discipline to prevent desertion.

During the 18th century the infantry began to form hollow squares for all-round defence, while its firepower was enhanced by the introduction of the flintlock and the cartridge, which enabled the foot soldier to fire at a much faster rate than hitherto. Battalions were subdivided into platoons for greater fire control. These improvements in weaponry strengthened the power of the defensive, and as a result long battles of attrition developed, although the well-drilled, disciplined, and efficient Prussian infantry began to dominate the battlefield, especially during the Seven Years War (1756-1763).

At the end of the 18th century the French revolutionary armies proved to be much more dynamic and innovative in their tactics than any of their immediate predecessors. These armies, raised by universal conscription and imbued with the ideals of the French Revolution, were organized after 1794 into divisions for greater control, and the troops were deployed in columns which gave them greater manoeuvrability. Napoleon Bonaparte transformed these revolutionary forces into an aggressive and conquering army in the late 1790s and early 1800s. He further divided his armies into corps (two divisions of about 7,000 men each), which were virtually self-contained units, with their own cavalry, artillery, and infantry divided in turn into brigades, regiments, and battalions. Each corps was capable of holding its own against an enemy army until other corps arrived on the battlefield to assist them. Rapid deployment and tactical mobility were the keys to Napoleon's string of victories over Prussia, Austria and Russia in the Napoleonic Wars down to 1812.

After the Napoleonic Wars, little changed in infantry tactics and weaponry until the 1860s, when the development of the breech-loading rifle vastly increased the infantrymen's rate of fire, and enabled soldiers to fire from a prone position, making them less vulnerable to enemy retaliation. Artillery and infantry weapons were also equipped with rifled barrels, which dramatically increased their accuracy and range. The Prussian army established a general staff to coordinate and control the large armies which Prussia raised by conscription of most of the country's young men, a practice which spread to all European armies, except the British, after 1870. Prussia's officer class was more highly trained and more professional than any of its rivals. The development of the telegraph and the railway completed the revolution in late 19th-century warfare. Armies could now be dispatched more quickly to the battlefield with less fatigue. Prussia's victories over Austria in the Seven Weeks' War (1866) and France in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) demonstrated the crucial impact of the efficient utilization of railways by Prussia as well as of the superior leadership and organization of the Prussian army. The other European powers thereafter adopted Prussia's military methods. Down to 1914 there were continuous improvements in the velocity, range and accuracy of infantry and artillery weapons. However European military leaders believed that these developments would aid the offensive, since the defending forces would be first overwhelmed by the dense mass of artillery bombardment, then mopped up by the advancing infantry armed with bayonet and rifle. In fact, as the American Civil War had indicated, and World War I was to prove, the opposite was true: the defensive became almost impregnable as a result of the new weaponry.

All the belligerents in World War I planned to take the offensive at the outset, using the vastly improved railway systems of Europe to convey their mass conscript armies rapidly to the front. The German Schlieffen plan was the most ambitious, seeking to destroy the French armies by a rapid offensive through Belgium and northern France to envelop the French. The German army would then be switched to the eastern front to defeat the slowly advancing Russians. However, as it approached Paris in late August and early September 1914, the German army was suffering from severe exhaustion as a result of its long march from Belgium and from an increasing shortage of supplies. (The retreating French and Belgians had destroyed their railways behind them.) The French rallied and counter-attacked the Germans on September 6 in the First Battle of the Marne and forced them to retreat to the Aisne. Both sides began to dig entrenchments, and eventually a continuous parallel line of defensive works stretched from the North Sea to Switzerland. Thereafter, until 1918, despite suicidal offensives by both sides, these trench lines could not be penetrated. The war became a long attritional struggle with the battlefield dominated by barbed wire, heavy artillery, rifles, machine-guns, and siege weapons of all kinds, with appalling losses on both sides as a result of the sheer intensity of firepower. In March 1918, the German army launched an offensive against the British army using assault or storm troops to infiltrate the Allied lines before the main wave of infantry descended. This technique achieved initial successes: the British were driven back towards the English Channel ports and the French towards Amiens, but in August the tide turned as the Allies counter-attacked using tanks, aeroplanes, and infantry in coordinated assaults to push the Germans back to their frontier.

With the end of the war on November 11, 1918, the European victors, Britain and France, tended to rest on the laurels of their victories, while the Germans, in the 1930s, developed strong shock forces which combined modern and relatively fast-moving tanks with aeroplanes and mobile infantry. The French concentrated on preparing for a long defensive war after 1929, when they began to construct the Maginot Line— a network of fortifications and entrenchments running from Luxembourg to the Swiss border which, they believed, would prove impregnable if Germany invaded France. During this period the pace of technological change gathered speed. The primitive fighting and bombing planes of World War I became faster and infinitely more sophisticated. Radar and improved radio communications were developed.

World War II, which broke out in September 1939, became increasingly a war of competing technologies. Germany's lightning victories over Belgium, Holland and France in the spring of 1940 were miracles of inspired leadership and innovative military technology over opponents who were poorly led and badly organized. Blitzkrieg warfare—heavy and coordinated German tank and aerial assaults on the Allied forces, in advance of the main German infantry—took the Allies completely by surprise. However, after the entry of the Soviet Union and the United States into the war in 1941, the enemy forces were eventually ground down by the superior resources of the United States and the dogged resistance of the Red Army to the German invader. Despite some belated German successes—in rocketry and the jet aircraft, for instance—the Anglo-Americans were far superior in technological innovation, and their well-equipped armies eventually overcame the fanatical resistance of the German and Japanese armies as the advancing Allies closed in on their homelands. It was a war of unparalleled destructiveness and slaughter. European and Asian cities were laid to waste by massive aerial bombing while millions of Germans and Russians were killed in the vicious fighting on the Eastern Front. In this kind of warfare distinctions between civilians and combatants disappeared: all were equally engaged in the war effort and were equally subject to death and destruction. Germany surrendered unconditionally in May 1945 after German armies had been totally defeated by the Western Allies and the Russians. The Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945 after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been totally destroyed by nuclear weapons—an awesome example of the superiority of Western technology. This event altered the potential scale of war forever and consequently its political and social significance.

In retrospect it may have been salutary—it was certainly significant—that the new atomic weapons were actually used in the closing stages of the war, for this gave the world a practical example of the destructive power of nuclear warfare, small though they were by the standards of later technology, without breaking the taboo against such use which has so far characterized the post-war era.

If nuclear weapons have never been used since 1945, theorizing about their significance and building them into politico-military strategies has proceeded constantly. The first reaction of theorists was that these were “absolute” weapons that could never be employed in war as a rational political strategy. Nevertheless the United States, which for some years had a monopoly of such weapons, proceeded on the assumption that if it were involved in a major war with its new adversary, the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons would be used to ensure a decisive victory. The early acquisition of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union, however, led to an appreciation of the mutually destructive nature nuclear war would assume. Emphasis therefore fell upon a strategy of deterrence. Some believed nuclear weapons could deter any aggression against a nuclear power or its allies, and the United States adopted a strategy of Massive Retaliation. Further thought inhibited such plans, and nuclear strategy tended to divide into two schools: those who thought the mere existence of nuclear weapons would stabilize balances of power, and those who thought that under such a deadlock “conventional” wars would resume. An intermediate view was that the smaller nuclear weapons becoming available might permit controlled uses of nuclear weapons in “limited” nuclear wars that need not necessarily “escalate” into all-out mutual destruction. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization built such weapons into its strategy of flexible response in the hope that it would make the stabilizing deterrent threats of nuclear war more credible. Soviet strategists never conceded that nuclear weapons were unusable.

Nuclear weapons had secured their reputation as unbeatable weapons of mass destruction because the marriage of the more powerful fusion or hydrogen weapons to ballistic missiles seemed to preclude any active or passive defence. By the 1960s the possibility of intercepting missiles gave rise to hopes of building effective antiballistic missile (ABM) defences. This alarmed those who believed that mutual vulnerability was the essential basis of stability. Similar fears that the deterrent forces of one power might be destroyed in a pre-emptive strike had led to great efforts to preserve a “secure second strike” by such devices as putting weapons in hardened silos or in elusive nuclear-propelled submarines. Also in the 1960s the idea of maintaining stability by agreed limitations upon nuclear forces initiated the series of arms control negotiations that led to the Strategic Arms Limitation (SALT) and Strategic Arms Reduction (START) talks and agreements.

While the superpowers and their nuclear allies, Britain, China, and France, were thus attempting to avoid nuclear war, warfare of a more familiar kind continued on a large scale in the post-1945 era. Countries outside the confrontation between the American and Soviet-led blocs, such as Israel and Arab states, and India and Pakistan, fought several large-scale, so-called conventional wars involving big armoured and aerial forces. The two large military blocs assembled around the United States and the Soviet Union found ways to fight with each other indirectly by supporting one or other so-called “proxies”. Thus the United States, and South Korea, with lesser contributions by other allies under the banner of the United Nations, fought the long Korean War (1950-1953) of traditional type against Communist forces based in North Korea. The Vietnam War waged by South Vietnam and its United States and other allies against Communist forces during the 1960s attained very large dimensions, costing some 50,000 American lives. Another prolonged conventional conflict took place in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War. In 1991 the United States led large conventional forces against Iraq in defence of Kuwait during the Gulf War, and more than a decade later in 2003 again led a conventional force against Iraq, this time to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein.

In other places prolonged guerrilla wars raged. Guerrilla tactics, usually involving informal insurgent forces fighting wars of attrition against stronger governmental or occupying forces, had occurred in many historical periods, but in the latter half of the 20th century such campaigns were commonly linked to leftist, usually Communist, ideology and given a much more explicit theoretical base. One of the most influential exponents was Mao Zedong, who used the strategy against both the Japanese and the Nationalist Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek. The success of Fidel Castro in Cuba spawned a set of Latin-American theorists. Later, both the United States in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan were defeated by guerrilla campaigns. Guerrilla tactics played a major part in expelling the vestiges of European colonial governments from their overseas possessions.One of the few successes of government forces quelling a guerrilla operation was achieved by Great Britain against Communist insurgency in the Malayan Emergency. This success was partly attributable to clever, patient tactics, but also to the lack of enthusiasm for the mostly ethnically Chinese guerrillas by the Malay majority, and the promise of early independence offered to them by the British.

A major factor in several of the defeats inflicted by insurgent forces was the effect of modern media coverage of the wars on public opinion in the intervening powers. As the 20th century came to a close with an explosion of mass media, particularly television, the management of news about successes, failures, and especially casualties, including those inflicted on enemies, became an important new dimension of war.

Another qualitative change in warfare was produced by the rapid technological advances in weaponry. While there were important advances in such fields as explosives and armour, the most dramatic effects stemmed from electronics. In particular, satellites and other intelligence devices removed much of the “fog of war”, and simultaneously permitted much more complex and rapid command and control of forces. At the same time electronic guidance permitted vast improvements in accuracy. This not only made weapons more effective, but also greatly reduced, at least potentially, unintended or “collateral” damage. In an age of public scrutiny, the opportunities for less destructive success had added significance. By the end of the century this consideration had become so important that “non-lethal” weapons were developed with the aim of incapacitating enemy forces without killing them.

For centuries one of the most important distinctions between lesser military powers and the greater has been the capacity of the latter to project their power over long distances by the use of effective transport and the organizational capability to use it. Long-range air and missile forces offer a modern extension of this capability to launch direct attacks from far away and large transport aircraft, aircraft carriers and other means enable a few nations to deploy air and ground forces over long distances. By the end of the 20th century satellite reconnaissance and high accuracy in guidance systems added a further dimension by making possible previously unimaginably accurate and effective attacks to be launched on such key targets as headquarters and command centres without entailing much associated damage to surrounding areas. All of this, however, demanded a high and expensive level of technological sophistication, making capability for “power projection” a continued and important characteristic distinguishing a few great military powers. For perhaps the first time in history much of the new military technology is led by developments in the civilian economy rather than the other way around.

While the most technologically advanced powers are naturally able to exploit such technology best, the balance is not wholly in their favour. Some modern devices, such as the notorious plastic explosives of which Semtex is the best known, offer many opportunities to terrorists. Missiles and even so-called weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear devices, and chemical or biological weapons, were within the grasp of numerous states far from being among the most technologically sophisticated. Moreover, the will to inflict and suffer casualties remained an important military factor which less advanced countries often preserved more than the more socially and technologically advanced powers. Thus, a spate of new technology has combined with new political and social circumstance to create a very fluid and uncertain balance between great and smaller powers and between the forces of order and disorder, both within and between states. Contrary to contemporary belief, the end of the Cold War revealed it to have been in many respects a stabilizing force. Despite the hopes that an era of peaceful relations supervised by the United Nations would ensue, warfare continues in many places as a common instrument of policy.