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James K Wither. Warfare, Trends in. In Lester Kurtz (Editor-in-Chief),Vol. [3] of Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict,

3 vols. pp. [2421-2432] Oxford: Elsevier.

Author's personal copyWarfare, Trends in 2421

Warfare, Trends inJames K Wither George C Marshall European Center for Security Studies, Germany

ª 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Nature and Character of War

Trends in Warfare: The Modern Historical Context

The Impact of Nuclear Weapons

The Trend toward Irregular Warfare

The Decline of War

Contemporary Trends in Warfare

Future Trends in Warfare

Further Reading

GlossaryCollateral Damage Unintended damage during

military operations, usually referring to the deaths of

civilians or the destruction of their property.

Conventional War A war fought between two or more

states using legally constituted and controlled

uniformed regular armed forces.

Cyber Warfare The use of computers or the internet to

spread propaganda, access classified information,

disrupt electronic surveillance systems, or attack

information technology-dependent infrastructure targets.

Globalization The increase in global economic, social,

technological, and cultural communication, integration,

and interdependence.

Insurgency An armed rebellion against the authority of

a government intended to secure political, economic, or

social objectives.

Irregular War A war that does not involve direct

combat between the regular armed forces of nation-

states, but is characterized by armed conflict between

state forces and nonstate guerrilla fighters or between

rival militia groups.

Mass Casualty Terrorism An act of politically

motivated violence using methods deliberately intended

to cause the deaths of large numbers of civilians.

Network-Centric Warfare The achievement of

information dominance on military operations

through the electronic linking of sensors,

decision-makers, and weapons systems, enabling

shared awareness, a faster reaction time to events,

and greater lethality.

Precision Guide Munitions Munitions that can achieve

unprecedented accuracy through the employment of

laser, infrared, radar, or satellite guidance systems,

colloquially known as ‘smart bombs’.

Proxy War A war where major powers use third-party

actors to advance their policy objectives as a substitute

for fighting each other directly.

Revolution in Military Affairs A dramatic change in the

character of war caused by political, social, technical, or

doctrinal changes.

Total War A war characterized by the mass

mobilization of a nation’s resources and fought largely

without limitations or restraints on the geographical area

of hostilities, the means employed to wage war, or the

targets selected for attack.

Weapons of Mass Destruction A weapon with the

power to kill large numbers of people; the category

includes nuclear, chemical, bacteriological, and

radiological weapons.

The Nature and Character of War

War is organized and politically motivated violence,destruction, and death. It is a phenomenon where ration-ality and order coexist with chance and uncertainty and themost intense human feelings of determination, honor,greed, fear, and ignorance interact and conflict. The funda-mental nature of war has remained unchanged over thecenturies, which accounts for the continued interest invenerable analysts of warfare such as the Chinese philoso-pher Sun Tzu, the Greek historian Thucydides, and thePrussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. Their worksremain on the reading lists of military staff colleges around

the world even in an era of stealth technology, networkedinformation systems, and satellite communications.

In contrast, the character of war is ever changing. Fromancient times, developments in technology, social organiza-tion, and political systems have shaped the ways wars havebeen fought. Warfare itself has in turn affected the evolutionof each of these factors. Therefore, trends in warfare do nottake place in isolation and cannot be divorced from broadernational and international societal, economic, and politicaldevelopments. For example, the invention of gunpowderled to the introduction of firearms that rendered obsoletethe armored knights that had dominated European battle-fields for centuries. As gunpowder artillery also allowed

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rulers to breach the once impregnable walls of medievalfortresses, it also enabled them to destroy the independenceof warlords who challenged their authority and lay thefoundations for the growth of modern, centralized nation-states. In the contemporary world, the process of globaliza-tion has both facilitated new forms of warfare and likewisebeen affected by their impact. The terrorist network AlQaeda has exploited the unprecedented global exchangeof information, people, and finance to wage its self-declaredwar against the West, demonstrated most spectacularly withthe attacks on New York and Washington in September2001. These attacks are estimated to have cost the worldeconomy more than a trillion dollars and called into ques-tion the sustainability of the openness and freedoms that areindispensable to the globalization process.

Changes in the character of war have tended to beevolutionary rather than revolutionary. Different trendsin warfare often run parallel to each other and develop-ments are frequently uneven rather than linear. Thelongbow, for example, remained a more effective battle-field weapon than primitive handguns long after theadvent of gunpowder. Nevertheless, scholars are fond ofidentifying significant developments and labeling them‘revolutions in military affairs’. These are periods whentechnological breakthroughs, profound sociopoliticalchanges, or radical new ideas have had a seismic impacton the character of war. There have been many of theseso-called revolutions in military history. The French levee

en masse, the large-scale mobilization of citizenry madepossible by the political and social changes of the FrenchRevolution, not only enabled Napoleon to overwhelm thesmaller professional armies of his continental opponents,but also served as the blueprint for the mass conscriptarmies that fought the major wars of the twentieth cen-tury. The advent of nuclear weapons in 1945 perhapsuniquely deserves the epithet ‘revolutionary’. The intro-duction of weapons of previously unimaginabledestructive power made the prospect of war betweennuclear-armed states practically unthinkable and forcedmajor powers to find safer ways to advance their nationalinterests. Many have argued that developments in infor-mation systems have created a contemporary revolutionin military affairs, although the advances in microelec-tronics that have made these technologies possible werealready starting to have an impact on warfare in the 1970s.

Trends in Warfare: The Modern HistoricalContext

The Trend toward Total War

Despite the invention of firearms, a medieval oreven Roman commander would not have found aNapoleonic-era battlefield an entirely alien environ-ment. Because the scope and scale of war had

increased only slowly over the centuries, commanderscould still exercise direct control over their troops andthe battlefield was still the preserve of men and horsesrather than machines.

In the century after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, thecharacter of war was transformed as technologicaladvances greatly increased the destructive power ofweapon systems and the strategic reach of military forces.Brass cartridges and breech-loading weapons extendedthe range and accuracy of artillery and firearms andmagnified the killing power of armies on the battlefield.Steamships and railways allowed the projection of mili-tary force on land and at sea over hitherto unthinkabledistances and at previously unimaginable speeds. Theinvention of the telegraph gave commanders the abilityto control and direct military operations in locationshundreds of miles away.

The pace of technical innovation accelerated in the firsthalf of the twentieth century, not least because of the spurprovided by the two World Wars. The invention of theinternal combustion engine led to the mechanization ofwarfare on land, in the skies, and under the seas with theappearance of tanks, aircraft, and submarines. Research inthe new science of electronics created breakthroughs incommunications, target acquisition, and fire control sys-tems. Radio sets, for example, linked armor, artillery,infantry, and aerial units and facilitated the rapid fusion ofmobility and firepower that characterized German blitzkrieg

warfare. The introduction of radar allowed targets to beidentified far beyond visual range at sea and in the air byday and night. Toward the end of World War II, Germanscientists developed the world’s first operational jet aircraftand ballistic missiles, although these weapons came too lateto affect the outcome of the war. In 1945, American physi-cists won the race to build atomic weapons. The single atombombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima andNagasaki caused death and destruction on a scale that hadpreviously required the employment of hundreds of con-ventional bomber aircraft.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,industrialization in Western states hugely expanded thewealth of the major powers and similar advances in publichealth allowed rapid increases in their populations.Modern bureaucracies enabled the mass mobilization ofcitizens in the name of nationalism or universalistic ideol-ogies. Thinkers as diverse as Hegel and E H Carr viewedwar in a positive light, arguing that it provided a legitimatemeans of promoting social and political change. Popularcommitment was as important as industrialization in pro-viding the means to wage total war. The growth ofeconomic power and national consciousness allowed hugearmies, navies, and later air forces to be equipped, sustained,and motivated. Consequently, World War I (1914–18)and World War II (1939–45) were massive wars of attri-tion with victory ultimately granted to the side with the


greatest reserves of men, material, and money. If World

War I was characterized by battlefield slaughter and

destruction on a massive scale, in World War II this

slaughter and destruction extended to the homelands

and civilian populations of the combatant states.World War II truly merits the description of ‘total

war’. The major combatants mobilized to the limit of

their technical and manpower resources to achieve war

aims that were grandiose and uncompromising. The

scope of the war was global, no continent or ocean

remained free of combat or the effects of the war.

Unlike the limited European wars of the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, when the focus of violence was

enemy armies on the battlefield, societies and civilian

infrastructure became regarded as legitimate targets.

Bomber fleets were employed to terrorize civilian popu-

lations and attempt to break the will of their governments

to continue fighting. Attacks on German cities alone

killed over 600 000 civilians. In Eastern Europe, the

Soviet Union, and China, civilians were deliberately

killed during military operations in vast numbers as

extreme ideological and racial theories unlocked a sava-

gery unprecedented in modern conflicts. Whereas 90% of

the deaths in nineteenth-century wars had comprised

military personnel and a clear majority of the casualties

in the World War I were also soldiers, over half of the

estimated 50 million dead in World War II were non-

combatants. The magnitude of the deaths in World War II

compared with a selection of other wars of the twentieth

century is illustrated in the chart in Figure 1.

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Figure 1 Deaths in wars of the twentieth century.

The Impact of Nuclear Weapons

Global politics between 1945 and 1990 were dominated

by the rivalry between the two principal victors of World

War II, the United States (US) and the Soviet Union. The

relationship between these ideological opponents was

characterized by political, economic, and military com-

petition on a global scale, but because a direct military

engagement between the two states was avoided, the

period is most frequently referred to as the Cold War.The advent of nuclear weapons reversed the trend

toward total war that had developed over the previous

century. War had always been an expensive and risky

undertaking, but the unlimited destructive power of

nuclear weapons made interstate war between major

powers an act of potential national suicide.The implications of the nuclear age were not fully

appreciated in 1945. At first, atomic weapons were few

in number and monopolized by the US. However, within

ten years, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom

(UK) had become nuclear-armed states and France and

China had their own nuclear weapons’ programs. Above

all, the introduction of thermonuclear hydrogen bombs in

the early 1950s, with far greater destructive power than

those used in 1945, eliminated any lingering illusions that

nuclear weapons could be employed in a similar manner to

conventional ordnance. From the 1960s, the creation of

huge arsenals of nuclear-armed intercontinental, ballistic

missiles created the phenomenon known as mutually

assured destruction (MAD), which appropriately described

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a situation where the homelands of both the US andthe Soviet Union would have been utterly devastated inthe event of a full-scale nuclear exchange. By the end of theCold War, there were around 30 000 nuclear warheadsbased on missiles in underground silos, on mobile launch-ers above ground, in nuclear submarines, and on aircraft.

With no viable defense against nuclear missiles, deter-rence rather than defense was the main focus of strategyduring the Cold War and both superpowers sought toavoid a direct, bilateral armed clash that could escalateto nuclear war. Consequently, the US and the SovietUnion limited the scale and scope of the wars they foughtin Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan and constrainedarmed conflicts fought by their allies and clients. Afterthe Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the US and SovietUnion came close to nuclear war, both superpowers alsomade formal efforts to diminish the risk of war throughconfidence-building arms control and antinuclear prolif-eration measures.

The Western democracies relied on nuclear deter-rence to keep the peace during the Cold War. However,they also recognized that if deterrence failed it would benecessary to resist a possible Soviet conventional militaryassault in Europe. The standoff between the NorthAtlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and WarsawPact alliance in Europe was the most visible manifestationof the military confrontation between the rival super-powers. Both alliances maintained large numbers oftroops with armored vehicles, combat aircraft, and war-ships at a high state of readiness. By 1980, in the Europeantheatre alone, 11 000 NATO battle tanks and 3300 tacticalaircraft confronted over 27 000 Warsaw Pact tanks andnearly 6000 aircraft. During the Cold War, continuousimprovements took place in mechanization and the rate offire and accuracy of weapon systems. By the 1970s,advances in microelectronic guidance systems allowedbombs, shells, and missiles to strike targets with ever-increasing precision. Military planners prepared for aconventional war in Europe similar in form to WorldWar II, with combat between mechanized, armored for-mations; long-range aerial bombardment; and navalbattles on the North Atlantic supply routes. However,technological trends suggest that such a war would haveinvolved a hitherto unprecedented rate of casualties, attri-tion of military hardware, and expenditure of munitions.Conventional military operations would have resulted inthe rapid exhaustion of the combat power of the forcesinvolved. Given NATO’s numerical inferiority, its lea-ders might have been faced with the dilemma of surrenderor escalation to the use of nuclear weapons relatively soonafter the outbreak of hostilities. Contemporary simula-tions of nuclear war in Europe involving relatively low-yield, so-called tactical or theater nuclear weapons, pre-dicted continent-wide devastation and millions ofcasualties. The fact that neither alliance could view the

prospects of even a conventional war in Europe withequanimity increased the perception that war betweenthe major powers would hardly advance any rationalpolicy objectives.

Nuclear weapons inhibited but did not eliminate inter-state wars during the Cold War period. The Soviet Unionand the US were not adverse to exploiting local conflictsto advance their own or their allies’ interests. Some regio-nal wars such as those between Israel and her Arabneighbors were treated as proxy wars by the two super-powers. During the 1973 Arab–Israeli war, for example, theUS and Soviet Union supported and supplied weaponry toopposing sides, even during the fighting, and intervened toend the conflict when it threatened to escalate to a widerwar. The superpowers could not control the behavior of allstates and some military clashes were largely outside oftheir control. For example, India fought wars withPakistan and China, China conducted a border war withVietnam in 1979, and in 1982 the UK and Argentina went towar over the Falkland–Malvinas Islands. Interstate wars ofthe Cold War period, fought under the nuclear shadow ofthe superpowers, were generally localized and character-ized by restraint. The Iran–Iraq war (1980–88) was anexception to the prevailing tendency. Poison gas wasemployed by the Iraqis and both sides mounted indiscrimi-nate missile and air attacks against each other’s cities.However, despite infantry combat that resembled thetrench warfare of World War I, neither Iran nor Iraqpossessed the necessary industrial, technological, or militarymuscle to fight a truly total war.

The Trend toward Irregular Warfare

For the world’s richest and most technically advancedstates, the Cold War was a time of unprecedented free-dom from war. However, this was not the experience ofpeople in the developing world where civil wars andwars of national liberation in states as diverse as China,Vietnam, El Salvador, Guatemala, Algeria, Angola, andMozambique led to the deaths of around 40 millionpeople between 1945 and 1990. Irregular warfare hasbecome a term used to describe any armed conflict thatdoes not involve set-piece battles between the uniformedarmed forces of nation states, though the categoryembraces wars of very different scale and complexity.In China and Vietnam, large-scale armed conflictsinspired by Mao Tse Tung’s concept of People’s Warinvolved concurrent irregular and conventional militaryoperations. In small, densely populated territories, thepredominant form of irregular warfare was urban terror-ism, such as the campaigns against the British inPalestine, Aden, and Northern Ireland. Irregular warfareis just one term used to classify these wars; they havealso been variously described as guerrilla wars, small


wars, insurgencies, revolutionary wars, low-intensitywars and, most recently, asymmetrical wars. Theplethora of terms reflects the difficulty of classifyingarmed conflicts that do not fit the traditional model ofwar between nation-states fought by legally constitutedand controlled military forces. Major definitional pro-blems have also arisen over attempts to distinguishbetween a guerrilla fighter and a terrorist as illustratedby the cliche that ‘one man’s terrorist is another’s free-dom fighter’. In practice, fighters in irregular warsconduct both, guerrilla operations against governmentsecurity forces and perpetrate acts of terrorism, to inspirefear among the civilian population.

Irregular warfare is by no means only a modern phe-nomenon. Since ancient times, guerrilla tactics have beenemployed by the militarily weak against stronger oppo-nents, although prior to 1945 such operations wereusually subsidiary to the campaigns by regular armedforces that decided the outcome of wars between states.The impetus for irregular warfare after 1945 arose frommany interrelated factors. The decline of the Europeancolonial empires caused political and social upheaval on agrand scale and unleashed anti-imperialist and nationalistaspirations for statehood. In this context, revolutionarysocialism appeared to offer ideological inspiration tomany oppressed people in much of the developingworld. Consequently, the geopolitical rivalry betweenthe superpowers acted as an additional stimulus to war-fare. The Soviet Union and its allies supplied manyguerrilla movements with arms and training and the USand its allies in turn supported counterrevolutionaries.Improvements in global communications allowed guer-rilla movements to mobilize support and influence publicopinion across the world and the ready availability ofweaponry, in particular the ubiquitous Kalashnikovassault rifle and rocket-propelled grenade (RPG)launcher, ensured that irregular fighters were usuallywell armed.

Traditionally, guerrilla warfare has been characterizedby small-scale, hit-and-run operations by lightly armedfighters who exploit deception, surprise, and the ability tomerge into the local population and terrain. In warsfought for anticolonial, nationalist, or ideological objec-tives, guerrillas sought to exploit popular grievances tobuild mass support for their cause. Where persuasionfailed, judicious use of terrorism was made to coerce thelocal population and undermine their confidence in theability of government security forces to protect them.Because guerrilla fighters sought to undermine theiropponents’ political will rather than destroy their materialmeans to make war, irregular wars tended to be pro-tracted. Guerrillas in Indo-China fought the Japanese inthe 1940s, the French in the 1950s, and the US in the1960s before attaining a unified, independent state ofVietnam in 1975. In a very different theater of operations,

the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s military cam-paign against British rule in Northern Ireland lasted25 years.

The major powers of the postwar period had ampleexperience of small-scale, colonial constabulary operationsdating back to the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, thestrategic focus on the nuclear and conventional militarybalance of power during the Cold War tended to obscurethe fact that irregular warfare was the predominant type ofwar after 1945. While the armed forces of the major powerstrained and equipped for a large-scale interstate war, theywere more likely to find themselves deployed on counter-insurgency operations. In these campaigns, where successwas determined by political rather than military factors,measures of progress in conventional warfare, such as theattrition of enemy forces, were usually of lesser impor-tance. Neither the US in Vietnam in the 1960s, nor theSoviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s was able toprevail against irregular opponents. Their massive arsenalsof nuclear missiles and sophisticated conventional weap-onry were largely irrelevant to the outcome of these wars.In campaigns where the guerrillas were able to gain pop-ular support, governments often faced the dilemma ofaccepting defeat or attempting ruthless repression of theinsurgents by means widely perceived as illegitimate, espe-cially for modern democracies. During the campaign inAlgeria (1954–62), the French armed forces successfullysuppressed the guerrillas of the National Liberation Front,but the brutality of the counterinsurgency campaign,including the use of torture, undermined public supportfor the war in France, brought down the metropolitangovernment, and ultimately failed to prevent Algerianindependence. Elsewhere, notably in Malaya and Oman,guerrillas were contained or defeated by effective counter-insurgency techniques in which civil administrative, police,and military responses were coordinated and integrated. Inthese campaigns, military forces played a supporting role tothe political initiatives that were the main ingredients ofsuccessful strategies. Nevertheless, the failure of insurgentcampaigns between 1945 and 1990 was due more tothe inability of guerrilla movements to capture mass pop-ular support than specific counterinsurgency measures oroutright repression by the governments of states thatopposed them.

The Decline of War

The Impact of the End of the Cold War

A marked trend since 1990 has been the significant reduc-tion in the number and magnitude of armed conflictsworldwide. However, the decline in warfare is not evenlydistributed across the world. In the early twenty-firstcentury, wars are largely confined to sub-Saharan Africaand south-central Asia. Europe and North America, by


contrast, continue to enjoy a historically unprecedentedera of peace and stability. The prospect of a conventionalwar between major powers remains uniquely low, notleast because of the continued existence of substantialarsenals of nuclear weapons. Contemporary wars areliable to occur in weak or failing states and are civil ratherthan interstate conflicts. Poorly governed countries pla-gued by corruption and poverty, ethnic or religiousdivisions, and rapidly growing populations providebreeding grounds for warfare.

The twentieth century was the bloodiest in humanhistory with an estimated 200 million deaths directly orindirectly associated with armed conflicts. It is too earlyto conclude that the twenty-first century will be any lessviolent than its predecessor, but a number of trends havecontributed to the resolution of disputes between statesby nonviolent means and reduced the likelihood of war.The end of the Cold War in 1990 had a major impact as itlowered international tensions and stopped American andSoviet support for proxy wars in the developing world incountries such as Angola and Nicaragua. The 1990s alsobrought what has been called a ‘peace dividend’ as statesreduced their military spending and cut the size of theirarmed forces. Only a few nations, most notably the USand China, have increased military spending in the lastdecade. Overall, per capita global military spending hasdeclined by one-third since 1985 and most developedstates no longer measure their security and influence interms of military capabilities as was formerly the case.

Globalization and Democratization

Most states have benefited from the growth of trade andattendant prosperity arising from globalization. Sinceentering the global trading system, for example, theChinese economy has grown by more than 10% perannum. Economic interdependence is the predominantfeature of globalization, a factor that makes it harder forstates to act independently or pursue unilateral, selfishstate interests with impunity. War or the threat of war candrive away investment, destroy business confidence, andjeopardize economic progress and prosperity. Major warscan bankrupt even the most powerful trading nationsas the UK found to its cost in the first half of thetwentieth century. The current globalization process ischaracterized by unprecedented integration through for-mal international institutions and informal transnationalprofessional and social networks. Finance and industrialproduction are now organized on a worldwide scale.Although pessimists point out that an earlier age of glo-balization ended with the outbreak of World War I in1914, current levels of interdependence suggest that con-temporary globalization could prove a more robustrestraint on war than its predecessor.

The eighteenth-century German philosopher ImmanuelKant is credited with the origin of what has become knownas the concept of ‘democratic peace’. Kant argued thatconstitutional republics, where rulers required the consentof the people to govern, were much less likely to go to war,particularly with each other. Empirical evidence appears tosupport his theory as fighting between democracies israre. The creation of nearly 80 new democracies in thelast 20 years suggests that wars might become even rarerin future. The ideal of democratic peace has reached itsmost advanced form in the institution of the EuropeanUnion (EU), which has united former perennial enemies,such as France and Germany, and made the idea of warbetween them an anachronism.

International Efforts to Prevent War

The proposition that war can only be justified in a limitedset of circumstances dates back to ancient times. For mostof history, efforts to limit the incidence of war through theinternational rule of law have been trumped by notions ofstate sovereignty and national interest. However, the totalwars of the twentieth century generated a new urgency inefforts to curtail war. The League of Nations was set up asan international body in 1919 to promote the negotiatedresolution of disputes between states. This initiative wasfollowed in 1928 by the Kellogg–Briand Pact, whichrenounced war as an instrument of national policy. Afterthe failure of these measures to prevent World War II, theinternational community tried again with the establish-ment of the United Nations (UN) organization in 1945.

The aims of the UN are to maintain internationalpeace and security and outlaw war. Although the UNhas obviously failed to prevent interstate and intrastatewars since 1945, it has nevertheless succeeded in estab-lishing a new norm that the use of force in internationalrelations without the sanction of the UN Security Councilcontravenes international law. States seeking to use mili-tary force attempt to justify their actions on the groundsof self-defense or make considerable diplomatic efforts togain UN support, as the US and the UK tried to do priorto the invasion of Iraq in 2003. War has not been delegi-timized out of existence but, in contrast to the latenineteenth century, the existence of the UN and theattendant body of international law governing the use offorce (jus ad bellum) has helped to establish a trend that waris something pathological in international relations.

Up until 1990, the antagonism between the SovietUnion and the US and its allies obstructed the work ofthe UN Security Council. The five permanent councilmembers – China, France, the Soviet Union, the UK, andthe US – exercised their individual veto rights to preventthe Council from taking effective action to keep the peaceas intended by the UN’s founders. The end of the Cold

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Figure 2 The rise in global peacekeeping. Source: Future of Peace Operations Program, The Henry L Stimson Center.

Warfare, Trends in 2427

War unlocked the Security Council and the UN has beenable to conduct or sponsor a sixfold increase in conflictresolution and peacekeeping operations since 1990. Thisincludes peacekeeping activities by regional collectivesecurity organizations, such as NATO, the Organizationfor Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the AfricanUnion. The rise in peacekeeping activities is illustrated inFigure 2. UN activities remain constrained by a numberof factors, for example, it is still hard to achieve unanimityin the Security Council and the quality of troops sent bymany states on operations is poor, but overall, peacekeep-ing contributes significantly to the prevention and controlof armed conflict throughout the world.

Constraints on Warfare

States in the developed world are no longer confronted byexistential threats. War appears a distant prospect forcitizens living at a time of unprecedented peace andprosperity. The heroic, common national causes thatinspired the will to sacrifice in the era of the WorldWars of the twentieth century seem to be largely absent.Consequently, it is harder for governments, especially inliberal democracies, to persuade their public of the needto use military force or to accept the risks associated withits use. Although troops have been deployed frequentlysince 1990, some states appear unwilling to use theirarmed forces for tasks other than humanitarian missionsor benign peacekeeping operations where there is littledanger of combat. Governments fear the impact of

casualties on already tenuous public support for militaryoperations and many contingents deployed on recentoperations have been subject to national caveats placingrestrictions on their use. Although less casualty-verse thanits European allies, the US is not immune from this trend.During operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Americantroops have relied on force-protection measures and pre-cision aerial bombing to keep soldier casualties to apolitically tolerable level. The reluctance to exposesmall, expensive professional military forces to debilitat-ing losses is reminiscent of the approach to militaryoperations in eighteenth-century Europe, when comman-ders were equally disinclined to risk their troops in battle.

Laws governing the conduct of warfare (jus in bello) alsoact as a constraint on the abuse of military power.Attempts to limit the savagery of war through reciprocalagreements and customs are as old as warfare itself.However, formal international laws governing theconduct of war, including the first of the GenevaConventions, were not introduced until the mid-nineteenth century. Since 1945, the body of humanitarianlaw covering armed conflict has grown substantially. Lawsgoverning the conduct of war include measures to limit orban the use of certain weapon systems, restrict the rangeof legitimate targets and stipulate behavior toward non-combatants and prisoners of war. Soldiers and theirleaders are increasingly liable for prosecution for allegedwar crimes in national or international courts. In contem-porary conflict zones, military lawyers are on hand toadvise commanders on the legal implications of theiractions. During the Kosovo campaign in 1999, for


example, military lawyers assessed all proposed NATOtargets in Yugoslavia in terms of the Geneva Conventions.The 24-hour media presence in contemporary conflictzones has also helped to reinforce the laws of war as theconduct of even the most junior soldiers in the heat ofbattle is potentially subject to global news coverage.Compliance with the laws of war is still far from universal.Powerful states are often criticized for ignoring interna-tional law when they feel vital national interests are atstake. The US has been widely condemned for denyinglegal rights to suspected terrorist detainees held atGuantanamo in Cuba. During wars against Chechenrebels in the 1990s, the armed forces of the RussianFederation frequently violated international humanitar-ian norms. A massive bombardment of Grozny in 1995alone is estimated to have killed as many as 27 000civilians.

Irregular fighters generally disregard the laws and con-ventions of armed conflict, not least to even the odds inwhat would otherwise be very unequal military contests.Insurgents in Iraq have murdered hostages, used religiousbuildings for military purposes, and reportedly transportedarms and fighters in ambulances, all actions that are inbreach of the Geneva Conventions. Western sensibilitiesregarding casualties and the laws of war have been deliber-ately exploited by nonstate fighters in contemporaryconflicts. The images of dead American soldiers beingdragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 wereinstrumental in persuading the US government to withdrawits forces from the peacekeeping mission in Somalia. Duringthe Lebanon war in August 2006, Hezbollah fighters delib-erately intermingled with the civilian population, takingadvantage of Israel’s reluctance to cause civilian casualties.Even the most accurate air strikes in urban areas causeso-called ‘collateral damage’, usually a euphemism for civi-lian deaths. In a notable double standard of contemporarywarfare, it is the armed forces of the state concerned thattend to take the full blame for civilian casualties in suchcircumstances rather than local irregular fighters.

Contemporary Trends in Warfare

Information Age Warfare

The Cold War rivalry acted as a stimulus for scientificresearch and many of the technologies that currentlydefine the information age, most notably the internet,were originally developed for military purposes. Duringthe Gulf War in 1991, advanced microelectronic technol-ogy gave the US forces a decisive advantage over theirIraqi foes. American aircraft were able to outsmart Iraqiair defenses and their armored vehicles could navigateaccurately across the desert at night and engage targets atlong range with a 90% hit probability. An Iraqi army that

had stood up to eight years of combat with Iran collapsed

rapidly with the loss of an estimated 10 000 battlefield

deaths. In contrast, casualties in the US-led coalition were

minimal. The wars against the former Yugoslavia (1999),

the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (2003)

further demonstrated the futility of engaging American

forces in conventional combat. In these campaigns the US

demonstrated its unchallenged ability to conduct devas-

tating, large-scale, precision-guided missile and bombing

strikes.Improvements in the miniaturization and data-handling

capacity of digital information systems throughout the

1990s gave rise to the concept of network-centric warfare

(NCW). NCW seeks to defeat an opponent through total

information dominance at all levels of military operations.

A worldwide grid of networked communication systems

provides the foundation of the system. Data from electronic

sensors on satellites, aircraft, and unmanned aerial vehicles

are transferred into the network to provide real-time sur-

veillance and allow commanders to acquire targets rapidly

and accurately. Commanders can then choose to engage

and destroy these targets with a range of precision-guided

munitions. A hypothetical visual representation of NCW is

shown in Figure 3. NCW has the potential to transform

military structures and consequently the ways that wars are

fought. Networking, for example, enables the integration of

army, navy, and air force units, thus removing the tendency

for each service to fight separately. Networked forces also

have the potential to achieve greater lethality with fewer

weapons’ platforms and the wider dispersal of battlefield

units enhances flexibility and survivability. Just as in busi-

ness enterprises, networking favors flatter organizational

structures. This development might render traditional

military hierarchical structures obsolete as the fleeting

operational opportunities provided by real-time battlefield

data can best be exploited by delegating decision-making

down to the lowest levels of leadership. Advocates of

NCW believe that the exploitation of information technol-

ogy offers the prospect of wars that can be won rapidly with

few casualties and, thanks to precision targeting, a mini-

mum of noncombatant deaths.Impressive results were achieved by networked units

and precision-guided bombing during the conventional

phases of operations in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in

March–April 2003. However, both Taliban and Saddam

Hussein’s armed forces were weak and no military com-

petitor has yet emerged armed with sophisticated

electronic countermeasures to challenge US information

superiority. Historical experience suggests that no state

can sustain a decisive military technological lead for long.

China, for example, is investing heavily in cyber-warfare

resources and methods to disrupt the satellite surveillance

systems on which American information dominance

depends.

Author's personal copy

Figure 3 Network-centric warfare.

Warfare, Trends in 2429

Irregular, rather than conventional, warfare remainsthe prevalent form of war in the early twenty-first cen-tury. High-technology sensors and communicationsystems, as well as precision bombing, can play a usefulrole in such wars, but cannot substitute for large numbersof relatively low-tech light infantry soldiers. The techni-ques of guerrilla warfare continue to be effective incontemporary conflicts against opponents armed withgreatly superior military technology, as illustrated bythe improvised roadside bombs that have caused over70% of US casualties during counterinsurgency opera-tions in Iraq. Irregular fighters have also proved adept atexploiting the technology of the information age. AlQaeda has created its own form of sophisticated net-worked warfare, giving its campaign a global reach thatwas impossible for earlier terrorist groups. Al Qaedamaintains affiliated cells in over 40 countries, coordinatedand motivated through the exploitation of modern com-munication systems. The group has used the internet tofacilitate financial transfers, recruit and train fighters, andpass encrypted instructions and intelligence. During thewar with Israel in August 2006, Hezbollah guerrillas inLebanon demonstrated the extent to which modern tech-nology can empower well-trained, nonstate militias.Hezbollah fighters operated advanced command and con-trol equipment to coordinate missile strikes against Israel,eavesdropped on Israeli military radio and telephonecommunications, and employed unmanned aerial vehiclesfor surveillance.

The Changing Character of Irregular Warfare

The character of irregular war has continued to evolvesince 1990. Guerrilla fighters of the Cold War, such as theVietcong, typically belonged to disciplined, hierarchically

organized political movements. Contemporary equiva-lents are groups such as the Taliban or Hezbollah,although their ideology is political Islam rather thanMaoism or Marxist–Leninism. However, such unifiedmovements are relatively rare. Most contemporary warzones are populated by disparate groups of irregular fight-ers with differing objectives and motivations. Theinsurgents in Iraq, for example, include Sunni and Shiitemilitias, Al Qaeda jihadists, and criminal gangs.

Terror was used by guerrillas and state security forcesduring irregular wars of the Cold War era, but normallyits purpose was to coerce or frighten political opponentsrather than kill large numbers of people. However, insome recent wars, entire ethnic or religious communitieshave been targeted in campaigns of terror, a trend stimu-lated by the collapse of central governments and thesplintering of states along ethnic, religious, or tribal linesafter 1990. During the wars that accompanied the disin-tegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, combatantscommitted atrocities, including massacres and mass rape,to force ethnic opponents to flee their homes; a processthat became known notoriously as ‘ethnic cleansing’. Inthe war in the Republic of Congo (1998–2003), an esti-mated 3.8 million people, almost all noncombatants, diedin fighting that primarily involved tribal militias. As isfrequently the case, economic rather than political objec-tives sustained the war, as different groups of fightersstruggled for control of Congo’s rich natural resources.The withdrawal of state sponsorship following the end ofthe Cold War forced some guerrilla groups to sacrificeany pretense of ideological purity and turn to organizedcrime to finance their activities. This is the case inColumbia where Marxist–Leninist insurgents havemerged with the major narcotic trafficking gangs. Manycontemporary conflicts, especially in sub-Saharan Africa,


resemble large-scale turf wars between rival criminal

gangs and bear little resemblance to the popular image

of warfare.Urban terrorism, rather than rural-based insurgency, is

now the dominant form of irregular warfare. To an extent

this is the result of accelerating global urbanization, but it

also reflects contemporary terrorists’ desire to cause the

maximum number of civilian casualties. The dramatic

rise in deaths due to terrorist attacks is illustrated in

Figure 4, which covers the period from 1983–2006. The

Marxist–Leninist or nationalist-inspired groups of the

Cold War period were prepared to act ruthlessly to

achieve their objectives, but mass casualty attacks on

civilians were rarely a feature of traditional insurgencies.The Spanish experience of terrorism provides an illus-

tration of the difference between traditional and

contemporary terrorist campaigns. Euzkadi Ta

Azkatasuna (ETA) has fought the Spanish government

since 1959 with the aim of establishing an independent

Basque homeland. ETA has killed over 800 people, but its

violence has largely been restricted to representatives of

the Spanish government and security forces.

Indiscriminate attacks on civilians have been avoided,

with warnings sent to the authorities before bomb attacks

on infrastructure targets and a tacit understanding on

rules of engagement established with the security forces.

The bombing of commuter trains during the morning

rush hour in Madrid on 11 March 2004, which killed

14 000

Deaths by

12 000

10 000

Dea

ths 8000

6000

4000

2000

0

19831985

1987

19891991

1993

Figure 4 Deaths from terrorist attacks 1983–2006. This chart was

Prevention of Terrorism, Terrorism Knowledge Database.

191 people and injured over 1600, provided a stark con-

trast to ETA’s methods. The Madrid attack perpetrated

by Arab immigrants affiliated with Al Qaeda was

mounted without warning with the deliberate intention

of causing maximum casualties.Unlike the local grievances that have motivated cam-

paigns by groups like ETA or the Irish Republican Army in

Northern Ireland, the Madrid bombings were representa-

tive of a new trend in terrorism, both global in its reach and

as extreme and uncompromising in its objectives as any

ideology of the total war era. With a campaign restricted in

scope to intermittent if devastating terrorist attacks, Al

Qaeda’s violence cannot be compared to World War II in

its scale or intensity. Terrorism is not generally thought to

represent an existential threat to Western states comparable

to that of the former Nazi Germany or Soviet Union.

However, just as in World War II, the civilian population

is in the front line of the war. Al Qaeda’s leadership has

openly stated that civilians in the US, the UK, and else-

where are legitimate targets because they share

responsibility for the perceived aggression by their govern-

ments against the Muslim world. Terrorist organizations

are known to be seeking weapons of mass destruction and

the prospect of the use of chemical, biological, or radiolo-

gical devices in an Al Qaeda-inspired attack provides

contemporary security analysts nightmares. The employ-

ment of such weapons would certainly bring parallels with

the era of total war frighteningly closer.

year

19951997

19992001

2003

2005

generated using statistics from the Memorial Institute for the


The growing tendency toward indiscriminate masscasualty attacks since the 1980s has been accompaniedby a rise in suicidal terrorism, justified by the perpetratorson both strategic and ideological grounds. Suicidal brav-ery is not uncommon in conventional and irregular wars,but deliberate acts of suicide have been comparativelyrare. Suicide bombing was not a technique of classicalguerrilla warfare. For example, suicide bombings haveonly recently occurred in Afghanistan; it was not a tech-nique employed during the struggle by Afghan guerrillasagainst the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

The era of suicide terrorism began in Lebanon in theearly 1980s and suicide bombers have become a majorfeature of irregular warfare campaigns in Palestine, Iraq,Sri Lanka, and Chechnya. Suicide was also used for themass casualty terrorist attacks of September 2001 in the USand in London in July 2005. Although frequently identifiedwith so-called martyrdom operations by organizations likeHamas, Islamic Jihad, and Al Qaeda, suicidal terrorism isnot restricted to Muslim groups. Until recently, it wasthe Tamil Tiger separatist fighters in Sri Lanka that madethe most frequent use of suicide bombing as a technique ofwarfare. The obvious reason for the use of suicide bombersis their effectiveness. On average suicide attacks cause sixtimes as many deaths as conventional terrorist bombings,generate more propaganda value, and are more likely toresult in concessions from target governments.Consequently, suicidal terrorism is no longer merely atactical device, but rather has become a basic strategy ofirregular warfare. Campaigns based on suicidal terrorismwere instrumental in coercing Israel into withdrawing fromLebanon in 1985 and from the West Bank in 1995. Al Qaedahas employed massive suicide car bombs in a largely suc-cessful attempt to promote sectarian conflict between Shiiteand Sunni Muslims in Iraq.

Future Trends in Warfare

Despite the contemporary decline in the frequency andmagnitude of armed conflict, historical experience suggeststhat war will not disappear. It is even possible that thecontemporary era will be viewed in retrospect as a particu-larly peaceful one, as there are a number of threateningdevelopments on the horizon. Some of the more dire pre-dictions of the impact of global warming include the returnof old-fashioned interstate wars over territory andresources. These wars could erupt because of shortages ofwater, food, and fuel or climatic changes that force millionsof people to migrate. Vulnerable states could collapse underthese pressures creating further opportunities for savageinterethnic and tribal civil wars. Nuclear proliferation isanother threatening trend as more states seek to acquirenuclear weapons and the danger of them falling into thehands of terrorist groups increases. A nuclear arms race in

the volatile Middle East region, for example, could poten-tially create a greater risk of a nuclear exchange thanexisted at the height of the Cold War. There is no guaranteethat future nuclear powers will manage their rivalry ascarefully as the US and the Soviet Union. New nuclear-armed states may not have the technological and adminis-trative fail-safe procedures of the established nuclearpowers and small, unsophisticated nuclear arsenals mighttempt rival states to risk disarming first-strike attacks.

It is possible to identify three major trends that will affectthe way that future wars will be fought. One future scenario isbased on emerging technical innovations, which have thepotential to fundamentally alter the character of war, suchas robots, directed-energy weapons, genetically engineeredclones, and nanotechnology. Aircraft, warships, and armoredvehicles could operate without human crews and robots maytake over from fallible human beings in the network that linkssurveillance, acquisition, and target engagement. In thisenvironment, future human soldiers may be computer scien-tists and women rather than the physically fit young men thathave traditionally supplied societies with their warriors.

While interstate conventional wars are likely to remainrare for the foreseeable future, there will still be states andnonstate groups willing to use force to further their politicalobjectives. These actors are likely to continue to employ thetechniques of irregular warfare to offset the military advan-tages of the major powers. In this scenario, the primarythreat is likely to come from superterrorism inspired byruthless, uncompromising ideologies similar to those thatcurrently motivate Al Qaeda and its offshoots. Quite apartfrom weapons of mass destruction, advances in explosivedevices, personal weapons, and cyber-warfare threaten toplace ever greater destructive potential into the hands ofsmaller groups or even radicalized individuals such asThomas McVeigh, who perpetrated the Oklahoma Citybombing in 1995 that killed 168 people.

Another significant trend is that states appear to belosing the monopoly of armed force that has been a definingfeature of sovereignty since the emergence of nation-states.Advanced, nonstate militias, such as Hezbollah, are emer-ging with greater military capability and will to fight thanthe cash-starved and poorly motivated armed forces ofmany nation-states. On the other hand, many military ser-vices have been privatized or outsourced by advancedmilitary powers. Civilian companies have taken over logis-tic, training, and security roles on operations that werepreviously undertaken by military personnel. Some privatecompanies that offer combat services have emerged and theUN has even contemplated the privatization of peacekeep-ing operations. The current tendency to outsource warfareto nonstate agencies seems set to continue.

Predictions of the future of warfare must beapproached with caution. History is full of exampleswhere states have been taken by surprise by novel ideas,sociopolitical changes, or technological breakthroughs.

Author's personal copy2432 Warriors, Anthropology of

Predicting future trends in the early twenty-first centuryis particularly problematic as the boundaries betweenconventional and unconventional, regular and irregularwarfare, civilian and military, political and criminal, andpublic and private are becoming increasingly blurred inmany conflict zones.

See also: Chemical and Biological Warfare; Civil Wars; Clan

and Tribal Conflict; Cold War; Guerrilla Warfare; Nuclear

Warfare; Peacekeeping; Terrorism; Warfare, Modern;

Warfare, Strategies and Tactics of; World War I; World War II

Further Reading

Berkowitz, B. (2003). The new face of war: How war will be fought in the21st century. New York: The Free Press.

Bobbitt, P. (2002). The shield of Achilles: War, peace and the course ofhistory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Boot, M. (2006). War made new: Technology, warfare and the course ofhistory, 1500 to today. New York: Gotham Books.

Ferguson, N. (2006). The war of the world: History’s age of hatred.London: Allen Lane.

Gray, C. S. (1999). Modern strategy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Hammes, T. X. and Respondents (2005). War evolves into the forth

generation. Contemporary Security Policy 26(2): 189–285.International Institute for Strategic Studies (2005–2006). Complex

irregular warfare: The face of contemporary conflict. In The militarybalance, vol. 105, ch. 9, no. 1, pp 411–420. New York: Routledge.

Kaldor, M. (1999). New and old wars: Organized violence in a global era.Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Keegan, J. (1989). The Second World War. London: Pimlico.Leitenberg, M. (2006). Deaths in wars and conflicts in the 20th century.

Occasional paper no.29, 3rd edn. Cornell University Peace StudiesProgram.

Luard, E. (1989). The blunted sword: The erosion of military power inmodern world politics. New York: New Amsterdam Books.

Luttwak, E. N. (1995). Towards post-heroic warfare. Foreign Affairs74(3): 109–122.

Marshall, M. G. and Gurr, T. R. (2005). Peace and conflict 2005: A globalsurvey of armed conflicts, self determination movements, anddemocracy. Baltimore, MD: Center for International Developmentand Conflict Management, University of Maryland.

This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 3,

pp 773–784, � 1999, Elsevier Inc., with revisions made by the Editor.

Metz, S. (2000). Armed conflict in the 21st century: The informationrevolution and post modern war. Carlisle, PA: Strategic StudiesInstitute. http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?PubID¼226. (accessed on February 2008).

Murray, W. and Sinnreich R. H. (eds.) (2006). The past as prologue: Theimportance of history to the military profession. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Pape, R. A. (2003). The strategic logic of suicidal terrorism. AmericanPolitical Science Review 97(3): 343–361.

Shultz, R. H. and Dew, A. J. (2006). Insurgents, terrorists and militias: Thewarriors of contemporary conflict. New York: Columbia University Press.

Smith, R. (2005). The utility of military force: The art of war in the modernworld. London: Allen Lane.

Special Report Civil Wars (2003). The global menace of local strife. TheEconomist 24, 23–26 May 2003.

van Creveld, M. (2000). Through a glass, darkly: Some reflections on thefuture of war. Naval War College Review Autumn25–44, 2000.http://www.d-n-i.net/creveld/through_%20a_glass_darkly.htm.(accessed on June 2008)

Relevant Websites

http://www.cidcm.umd.edu – Center for International

Development and Conflict Management, University of

Maryland.

http://www.defac.ac.uk – Conflict Studies Research Centre,

Defence Academy, UK.

http://www.d-n-i.net – Defense and the National Interest.

http://www.mipt.org – Memorial Institute for the Prevention of

Terrorism.

http://www.rand.org – RAND Corporation, National Security

Research Division.

http://www.sipri.org – Stockholm International Peace Research

Institute.

http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil – Strategic

Studies Institute of the US Army War College.

http://ccw.politics.ox.ac.uk – The Oxford Leverhulme Programme

on the Changing Character of War, University of Oxford.

Warriors, Anthropology ofAndrew Sanders, University of Ulster, Coleraine, Londonderry

ª 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The Tribal Warrior

The Warrior in Centralized Polities

Further Reading

GlossaryAge Set Formally organized group of persons of a

common age range.

Genipa Bluish-black pigment of the fruit of the tree

Genipa americana.

http://www.cidcm.umd.edu

http://www.defac.ac.uk

http://www.d-n-i.net

http://www.mipt.org%E2%80%93

http://www.rand.org

http://www.sipri.org

http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil

http://ccw.politics.ox.ac.uk

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