Warfare

C

Offensive Warfare

Offensive actions involve operations that will force the defeat of armed forces and destroy an enemy's will to fight. Offensive action permits initiative—the choice of immediate objectives and direction of attack, and the organization and timing of attack.

The changes in types of operation—from ancient hand-to-hand combat to modern deployment of nuclear missiles—are linked to changes in technology. The integration of the horse into military organization proved to be of great tactical and logistical value on land, just as the development of sailing vessels (replacing oared vessels) revolutionized naval warfare. The introduction of gunpowder, and the invention of the steam engine, the telegraph, and the internal-combustion engine, completely changed land and sea warfare and added a third type—air warfare. Modern warfare relies on such devices as tracklaying vehicles, radio and radar, rocket propulsion, laser-guided weaponry, and the developments of space technology.

D

Defensive Warfare

Defense entails the employment of all means and methods to prevent, resist, or destroy an enemy attack. Its purpose may be twofold: to gain time pending the development of more favorable conditions to take the offensive, or to concentrate forces in one area for decisive offense elsewhere. Security, through technological means or through intelligence, is an integral part of defense—to prevent surprise attack, preserve freedom of action, and deny the enemy information. Technological means of ensuring security include such devices as radar, which greatly contributed, for example, to alerting the Royal Air Force's Fighter Command of impending German bomber attacks during the Battle of Britain (1940). Intelligence is the end result of information that has been collected, analyzed, and distributed to the appropriate agencies or individuals. See Espionage.

Civilians play a role in defensive action, primarily on the home front, by organizing and carrying out maneuvers designed to protect human lives, natural resources, and means of production from the effects of enemy action.

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E

Psychological Warfare

Psychological warfare aims at destroying an enemy's will to resist. It includes the use of propaganda (printed, broadcast, or in the form of films) and aerial bombardment employed for its demoralizing effect on the enemy civilian population as well as on combatant forces. A development of 20th-century warfare has been the use of so-called brainwashing techniques, by which behavior can be modified after first weakening a captured enemy's mind and body through prolonged fatigue, discomfort, malnutrition, and anxiety.

F

Results of and Responses to Warfare

Increasingly, as total warfare has evolved, wars affect not only the combatants but noncombatant civilian populations who may be left homeless, destitute, and subject to disease. Since 1864 the International Red Cross (see Red Cross) has worked to alleviate such suffering. Warfare also results in population shifts as masses of refugees seek asylum—for example, after World War II, most of the remnant of European Jewry who survived the Holocaust migrated to North and South America and to Israel.

The effects of warfare can also be measured in changes to the land itself. Ecological damage has become more evident with the use of modern weaponry and combat aids. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, bear witness to the use of the atom bomb in World War II. The use of chemical defoliants in the Vietnam War resulted in marked changes to the topography of the regions sprayed. See Chemical and Biological Warfare.

Responses to these effects range from expressions of philosophical opposition to warfare as a means of settling human differences, to efforts at establishing and maintaining peace after the cessation of hostilities: armistice and peace treaties, disarmament conferences and pacts, the establishment of such international peace organizations as the League of Nations in 1920 and the United Nations in 1945, and détente (suggested for scaling down the cold war). See Arms Control.

Modern antiwar sentiment and organized peace movements are derived in large part from the beliefs of religious sects such as the Society of Friends and the Mennonite Church. The first peace societies in history were established in the U.S. in 1815, and since then pacifists have actively opposed wars and conscription, and promoted the cause of conscientious objectors. See Pacifism.

For additional information, see such entries as see Air Warfare; Army; Navy; see also separate articles on the armed forces of the U.S., for example, see United States Navy..

III

Warfare Through the Ages

Organized warfare began, along with Western civilization, in the Fertile Crescent between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea. The peoples of that area were nomadic until the discovery of grass seeds that could be cultivated and animals that could be domesticated led to the establishment of settled communities. Initially, military forces were organized to defend these communities from marauders; then, because of the pressures of increased population and proliferating herds, community boundaries were pushed outward at the expense of neighboring peoples. Beginning about 3500 bc, the Middle East from Mesopotomia to Egypt was in constant turmoil as empires rose and fell.

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