Greater Understanding Of The Underlying Dynamics Of War and It's Conflict

The History Of Early Cold World War and It's Conflict Management's-

The Human Security Report 2005 documented a significant decline in the number and severity of armed conflicts since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. However, the evidence examined in the 2008 edition of the Center for International Development and Conflict Management's "Peace and Conflict" study indicated that the overall decline in conflicts had stalled.


Recent rapid increases in the technologies of war, and therefore in its destructiveness (see Mutual assured destruction), have caused widespread public concern, and have in all probability forestalled, and may hopefully altogether prevent the outbreak of a nuclear World War III. At the end of each of the last two World Wars, concerted and popular efforts were made to come to a greater understanding of the underlying dynamics of war and to thereby hopefully reduce or even eliminate it all together. These efforts materialized in the forms of the League of Nations, and its successor, the United Nations. Shortly after World War II, as a token of support for this concept, most nations joined the United Nations. During this same post-war period, with the aim of further deligitimizing war as an acceptable and logical extension of foreign policy, most national governments also renamed their Ministries or Departments of War as their Ministries or Departments of Defense, for example, the former US Department of War was renamed as the US Department of Defense.

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War is a behavior pattern of organized violent conflict, typified by extreme aggression, societal disruption, and high mortality. This behavior pattern is found in many primate species, including man, and also found in many ant species. It involves two or more organized groups. Such a conflict is always an attempt at altering either the psychological hierarchy or the material hierarchy of domination or equality between such groups. In all cases, at least one participant (group) in the conflict perceives the need to either psychologically or materially dominate the other participant. Amongst humans, the perceived need for domination often arises from the belief that an essential ideology or resource is somehow either so incompatible or so scarce as to threaten the fundamental existence of the one group experiencing the need to dominate the other group. Leaders will sometimes enter into a war under the pretext that their actions are primarily defensive, however when viewed objectively, their actions may more closely resemble a form of unprovoked, unwarranted, or disproportionate aggression.


In all wars, the group(s) experiencing the need to dominate other group(s) are unable and unwilling to accept or permit the possibility of a relationship of fundamental equality to exist between the groups who have opted for group violence (war). The aspect of domination that is a precipitating factor in all wars, i.e. one group wishing to dominate another, is also often a precipitating factor in individual one-on-one violence outside of the context of war, i.e. one individual wishing to dominate another.


In 2003, Nobel Laureate Richard E. Smalley identified war as the sixth (of ten) biggest problems facing the society of mankind for the next fifty years. In the 1832 book "On War", by Prussian military general and theoretician Carl Von Clausewitz, the author refers to war as the "continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means." War is an interaction in which two or more opposing forces have a “struggle of wills”. The term is also used as a metaphor for non-military conflict, such as in the example of Class war.


War is a seemingly inescapable and integral aspect of human culture. 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. The conduct of war extends along a continuum, from the almost universal primitive local tribal warfare that began well before recorded human history, to advanced nuclear warfare between global alliances, with the recently developed ultimate potential for human extinction.

Wars ranked by total deaths-

Rank	War	Years	Deaths	Deaths per Day	Deaths per Population
1	American Civil War	1861–1865	625,000	599	1.988% (1860)
2	World War II	1941–1945	405,399	416	0.307% (1940)
3	World War I	1917–1918	116,516	279	0.110% (1920)
4	Vietnam War	1955–1975	58,151	26	0.03% (1970)
5	Korean War	1950–1953	36,516	45	0.02% (1950)
6	American Revolutionary War	1775–1783	25,000	11	0.899% (1780)
7	War of 1812	1812–1815	20,000	31	0.345% (1810)
8	Mexican–American War	1846–1848	13,283	29	0.057% (1850)
9	War on terror	2001–present	5,491	2	0.00002% (2010)
10	Philippine–American War	1899–1913	4,196	1	0.006% (1900)

"Deaths per day" are the total number of US military deaths, divided by the number of days between the dates of the commencement and end of hostilities, or until 25 February 2010 in the case of the Iraq War. "Deaths per population" are the total number of US military deaths, divided by the US population of the year indicated.

Wars ranked by combat deaths

Rank	War	Years	Deaths
1	World War II	1937–1945	291,557
2	American Civil War	1861–1865	212,938
3	World War I	1917–1918	53,402
4	Vietnam War	1955–1975	47,355
5	Korean War	1950–1953	33,746
6	American Revolutionary War	1775–1783	8,000
7	War on terror	2001–present	4,295
8	War of 1812	1812–1815	2,260
9	Mexican–American War	1846–1848	1,733
10	Northwest Indian War	1785–1795	1,221+

Etymology and scope-

From late Old English (c.1050), wyrre, werre, from Old North French werre "war" (Fr. guerre), from Frankish *werra, from Proto-Germanic *werso (Compare with Old Saxon werran, Old high German werran, German verwirren "to confuse, perplex.") Cognates suggest the original sense was "to bring into confusion."

There was no common Germanic word for "war" at the dawn of historical times. Spanish, Portuguese, Italian guerra are from the same source; Romanic peoples turned to Germanic for a word to avoid Latin "bellum" because its form tended to merge with bello- "beautiful."

In an organized military sense, 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 theaters. Within each theater, 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 intense 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. Also many other actions may be undertaken by military forces during a war, this could include weapons research, prison internment, assassination, occupation, and in some cases genocide may occur.

A civil war is a war between factions of citizens of one country (such as in the English Civil War), or else a dispute between two nations that were created out of one formerly-united country. A proxy war is a war that results when two powers use third parties as substitutes for fighting each other directly.

Motivations-

World War I,sequences from Romania

Motivations for war may be different for those ordering the war than for those undertaking the war. For a state to prosecute a war it must have the support of its leadership, its military forces, and its people. For example, in the Third Punic War, Rome's leaders may have wished to make war with Carthage for the purpose of eliminating a resurgent rival, while the individual soldiers may have been motivated by a wish to make money. Since many people are involved, a war may acquire a life of its own from the confluence of many different motivations.

The Jewish Talmud describes in the BeReshit Rabbah commentary on the fight between Cain and Abel (Parashot BeReshit XXII:7) that there are three universal reasons for wars: A) Economic, B) Ideological/religious, and C) Power/pride/love (personal).

In Why Nations Go to War, by John G. Stoessinger, the author points out that both sides will claim that morality justifies their fight. He also states that the rationale for beginning a war depends on an overly optimistic assessment of the outcome of hostilities (casualties and costs), and on misperceptions of the enemy's intentions.

As the strategic and tactical aspects of warfare are always changing, theories and doctrines relating to warfare are often reformulated before, during, and after every major war. Carl Von Clausewitz said, 'Every age had its own kind of war, its own limiting conditions, and its own peculiar preconceptions.' The one constant factor is war’s employment of organized violence and the resultant destruction of property and/ or lives that necessarily follows.

From Wikipedia-