The nature of war: old and new wars

· causes of war

· types of war

· weapons and equipment

· combat tactics

· recent and ongoing armed conflicts

Throughout human history, there have been many threats to the security of nations. These threats have brought about large-scale losses of life, the destruction of property, widespread illness and injury, the displacement of large numbers of people, and devastating economic loss.

One of the main orientations of policy of every country is to protect its citizens and secure them with a peaceful settlement of the world problems.

Unfortunately political leader not always can evade different conflicts that sometimes can lead to war.

The type of conflict varies widely

· Secession (отделение) of a territory to form a new sovereign state

· Dominance of territory or resources by various ethnic groups

· Imposition of a particular form of government, such as democracy, theocracy, or anarchy

· Economic deprivation (лишение) of a population

· Opposition to a domestic government or occupying army

Nowadays one of the burning issues of the day is the war in Iraq.

Optimists on the contrary state that some things could be done to change Human Nature. For instance: education (humans are to be educated with love of peace and hatred of war), cultural exchange (better understanding, dialogue between peoples, civilizations. The notion that what is “ours” is necessarily in conflict with what is “theirs” is false and dangerous. We can love and respect what we are without hating what we are not.) Furthermore, if war is caused by human nature then so is peace.

There is great debate over why wars happen, even when most people do not want them to. Representatives of many different academic disciplines have attempted to explain war. Historians tend to describe wars as being like traffic accidents. There are some conditions and situations that make them more likely but there can be no system for predicting where and when each one will occur. Social scientists criticize this approach arguing that at the beginning of every war some leader makes a conscious decision and that they cannot be seen as purely accidental. Psychologists have argued that human beings, especially men, are inherently violent. While this violence is repressed in normal society it needs the occasional outlet provided by war. This combines with other notions, such as displacement where a person transfers their grievances into bias and hatred against other ethnic groups, nations, or ideologies. While these theories can explain why wars occur, they do not explain when or how they occur. In addition, they raise the question why there are sometimes long periods of peace and other eras of unending war. They try to prove 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. In his fictional book “1984” George Orwell talks about war being used as one of many ways to distract people. War inspires fear and hate among the people of a nation, and gives them a 'legitimate' enemy upon whom they can focus this fear and hate. Thus the people are prevented from seeing that their true enemy is in fact their own repressive government. By this theory, war is another 'opiate of the masses' by which a state controls its people and prevents revolution. Several anthropologists take a very different view of war. They see it as fundamentally cultural, learned by nurture rather than nature. Thus if human societies could be reformed, war would disappear. The acceptance of war is inculcated into each of us by the religious, ideological, and nationalistic surroundings in which we live. Another school of thought argues that war can be seen as an outgrowth of economic competition in a competitive international system. In this view, wars begin as a pursuit of new markets, of natural resources, and of wealth. Unquestionably economic reasons could be a cause of some wars, for example the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in pursuit of oil. This theory has also been applied to many other conflicts including the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

War seems as old as human society. The earliest city states and empires in Mesopotamia became the first to employ standing armies. Organization and structure has since been central to warfare, as illustrated by the success of highly disciplined troops of the Roman Empire. The war has been changing through the ages. As well as organizational change, technology has played a central role in the evolution of warfare. Armies with iron weapons easily defeated armies armed with bronze. Invention of new weapon created for warfare plays an important role in advances of military conflicts. Modern technology has greatly increased the potential cost and destructiveness of war. In fact, military conflicts prosecute Humanity. Nowadays ethnic and religious conflicts, genocide, inter-ethnic violence and separatism inside one country play the leading role on the world’s military scene.

Modern wars and military conflicts are closely connected with genocide (the deliberate and systematic destruction of racial, religious, political or ethnic group).

I can’t but say some words about the new phenomenon of the XXI century- War on Terrorism. The exact definition of terrorism is highly controversial. According to a working definition, it is the unconventional use of violence against civilians for political gain. "Terrorist attacks" are usually characterized as "indiscriminate," "targeting of civilians," or executed "with disregard" for human life. The term "terrorism" is often used to emphasize that the political violence of an enemy is immoral, meaningless, and unjustified. An interesting fact is that terrorists rarely identify themselves as such, and instead typically use terms that refer to their ideological or ethnic struggle, such as: separatist, freedom fighter, liberator, militant, guerrilla (from guerra Spanish for "war" meaning "small war"), rebel etc.During much of the 20th century, the term terrorism was primarily applied to nationalist movements of various types. Most of them were separatist movements, seeking to create a new independent nation-state on the territory of a larger, existing state. Classic counter-terrorist operations were a feature of the decolonization in Africa and the Middle East. Some of these campaigns, such as the Mau Mau and the FLOSY, were well known in the Western media, but unlike Al-Qaeda, their violence was remote and confined to the disputed colony. However, Irish republican groups did consistently target England, and the Basque ETA often targeted Madrid and other non-Basque parts of Spain. The motives of these groups derive from their nationalist ideology, and an underlying territorial conflict about which state should control what. In this respect, no separate theory of the causes is required, since violence is the standard instrument of geopolitical change. Thus, the violence resulting from territorial conflicts is frequently considered inevitable.

The world community today is discussing the possible militant threats and the importance of winning the war on terrorism. The ideology known as Islamic radicalism, militant Jihadism, or Islamo-fascism - different

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1567