Types of War

War predates civilization (see above). It has many causes (Chapter 12). It also takes many forms. Those discussed below expand on Chaliand (1994). Actual wars may combine two or more of these theoretical types.

Mass wars aim at the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces and the civilian infrastructure that supports it. They may be an aberrant phase of military history lasting from the French Revolution through World War II. Clausewitz’s On War is the bible for this type of war, although it is an unfinished work published posthumously. Clausewitz did not understand sea power. His declaration of the superiority of numbers (although he understood qualitative elements such as morale) led to the mass armies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Limited wars are associated with periods when diplomats sought to maintain a balance of power, such as that between the Thirty Years War and the French Revolution. Dynastic disputes, limited aims, maneuver to avoid battle except with a high likelihood of victory, and a generally accepted code of behavior characterize these wars. Sun Tzu’s Art of War is the bible for such wars. For him, war was an essential aspect of statecraft subject to rational analysis. He stressed adaptability, deception, intelligence, mobility, striking at enemy weaknesses, and surprise. Sun Tzu and Clausewitz were alike in linking strategy and policy, and in stressing psychological factors, loyalty, and morale.

Imperial wars began with the reign of Sargon of Akkad (see above) and have been more or less continuous ever since. Russian imperialism began in the sixteenth and continued through the twentieth century. Western imperialism advanced in three main phases, the first initiated by the Portuguese and taken up by the Spanish and Dutch in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Anti-imperial wars often exhibit characteristics and methods of asymmetric war (Chapter 15) such as guerrilla tactics and terrorism. Some, such as the Spanish Reconquista and the American, French, and Russian Revolutions, evolved into imperial wars. Many colonies in Latin America gained their freedom in anti-imperial wars following the American and French Revolutions; many in Africa and Asia in anti-imperial wars following World War II.

Religious wars dominated the thousand-year period from the seventh to the seventeenth century in Europe and Middle East. They include the Muslim expansion from the seventh through seventeenth centuries. The Christian counterattack began with the Spanish Reconquista and the Crusades in the eleventh century and the defeat of the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) began between Catholics and Protestants but ended up as a political struggle that gave birth to the modern state system in Europe. So devastating was the Thirty Years War that the following period saw limited wars fought by small, disciplined, professional armies.

Wars without quarter have been the cruelest. Civil wars⁵ often are lengthy, bloody, and often extend to civilians. Race wars⁶ often have involved genocide (Chapter 10). Religious wars⁷ often were civil or imperial as well.

Ritual wars usually occur in archaic or traditional societies. Formal battles usually result in few casualties and sometimes champions from each side settle the matter. As noted in Chapter 12, the serious fighting often takes place not in battles but in raids and ambushes. Keeley (1996) compared 297 studies that suggest a mean fatality rate among primitive warriorss of about 45%, compared to about 12% for modern interstate war.⁸ More recently, Gat (2006) has confirmed these findings. Almost all the comparisons suggest the same surprising conclusion: primitive war is more likely to destroy whole societies than is any other form of war!

Traditional Japanese warfare was ritualistic, with everything from clothing to conduct defined in detail by Bushido, the code of the samurai described in the seventeenth century classic Book of Five Rings (Musashi).

Brought up in the tradition of ritual war, Shaka Zulu (c. 1787–1828) developed a new weapon and new tactics, and trained his warriors to kill most of his opponents and incorporate the survivors into his armies and the women into Zulu harems. The Zulus, until then a minor tribe, built a kingdom that was able a century later, still armed primarily with spears, to hand the British one of their worst defeats of the nineteenth century at Isandhlwanda (Ritter 1978). We would like to know if, how, and how often this transition took place in other societies. Was it a gradual evolution, did a similarly charismatic leader work a revolution, or were there other ways the transition took place? The question suggests a new way to approach the study of the emergence of states (Egypt, China) and the impact of leaders who emerged suddenly from obscurity whether they succeeded (Genghis Khan, Shaka) or failed (Tecumseh).

Private wars usually occur when and where central governments are too weak to maintain order. Bedouin raiders, seaborne pirates, and private or mercenary armies in early medieval Europe and some parts of today’s Africa and Caucasus are among their many practioners. Soldiers tend to be brave individually but unskilled and undisciplined.

Nomad wars were concentrated between 400 BC and 1400 AD. The Arab Muslim conquests and the Viking conquests—nomads of the sea—are important cases that took place in the same timeframe but different areas. The fourteenth century historian IbnKhaldun⁹ (1969) observed that Arab nomad dynasties seemed to repeat five-stage cycles of a little more than a century based on the formation, climax, decline, decay, and disintegration of aşabiyah (group feeling). The Mongols, the apogee of an ancient military and strategic tradition, produced little and attacked agrarian societies for profit, establishing an empire from the Danube to the Sea of Japanthat led to unprecedented exchanges of goods, technology, and ideas and established institutions that outlasted them (Weatherford 2010).

With so many types of war, it is a mistake to prepare only for one. Despite the experience of the Korean War, the United States made this mistake in the 1950s when the Eisenhower administration pursued the “New Look” focused entirely on long-range strategic air power, leaving it poorly prepared to respond to threats at the lower end of the spectrum. Realizing this, US adversaries moved away from conventional war toward insurgencies and asymmetric tactics (Chapter 15). The strategy of Flexible Response in the 1960s corrected this deficiency. The Obama administration’s strategy focuses on Asia and reduces ground forces even more than it reduces air, naval, and Special Forces, manifestations of what Huntington calls “strategic monism,” domination of defense policy by one strategic concept or regional focus. It supposes an ability to predict and control enemies, a supposition that history refutes. It stands in contrast to strategic pluralism, which calls for a variety of military forces and weapons able to cope with uncertainty and diversity of threats across the spectrum of conflict—which has the additional advantage of complicating planning by adversaries (Owens 2012).