What is war?
There is no clear, commonly held definition of war with which one may embark upon its study and consideration. A cursory review of popular and academic discourse gives evidence to the lack of a single common definition. It reveals a spectrum of definitions — covering conventional war, total war, guerrilla war, cold war, nuclear war, even trade war. These distinctions, often the product of honest attempts at precision, tend to obfuscate rather than clarify. They hinder thoughtful examinations or evaluations of the topic by increasingly the likelihood that individuals ‘talk past one another’ to the point of false agreement, inflated disagreement, of vacuous conclusion.
A general reluctance within modern society to examine or discuss the topic has produced this linguistic and conceptual fog and its effects. There is a popular belief that, in all but the most extreme circumstances, war lacks efficacy and/or justification. This belief, born out of the First World War, began a normative shift away from war as policy among Western nation-states. On balance, that is a good thing. But, the history of the 20th century and events of the 21st, have created a situation in which to speak of, examine, or contemplate war is to risk being labeled a war-monger. That is unfortunate. For, just as ignorance of a disease does not prevent its spread — ignorance of war will not prevent its outbreak. War and warfare remain important topics. Their study and consideration remain critical to the health and wellbeing of society.
This website is a companion website to a course on War & Warfare taught at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. It is open to the public to encourage discourse about war. In the menu above are pages dedicated to key aspects of the topic, including theory, strategy, operations, and civil-military relations.
Thus, the purpose of this website and its homepage — the fostering of academic discourse concerning war and warfare. To understand how political outcomes are affected by the use or threatened use of organized violence, it is critically important to understand the role, mechanics, and limits of war. Careful consideration of a topic requires a description, a definition, of the topic.
Defining war requires the conceptualization of it as an event (an observed outcome) and as a behavior (actions taken). The first component is a question of status, it is a question of occurrence. The second component is a question of nature, it is a question of form and process.
As an event, definitions tend to focus on measurement or legality. One common measure is that offered by David Singer and Mel Small as part of the Correlates of War project. Singer and Small define war as sustained combat, involving organized armed forces, resulting in a minimum of 1,000 battle-related fatalities within a twelve month period. Such a definition provides a useful threshold for the level of violence constituting war. But, it provides no leverage in addressing the dynamics and risks posed by conflicts with low or no regularly occurring violence — for example, cold wars. This is a significant shortcoming in an age of thermonuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles in which the time between peace and society-ending war may be measured in minutes. Legal definitions emphasize legal authority to declare war as the state of the relationship between two or more recognized sovereign governments. Such definitions are useful in that they provide information regarding the expected and realized parameters of the war, they identify the objects that are being contested and the general rules in which the conflict will occur. They are not, however, useful in addressing conflicts in which non-state or sub-state actors play a significant role. Furthermore, neither measure-centric or legal-centric definitions provide much insight into the causes of war.
As actions taken, definitions of war normally focus on the nature and object of the conflict. The definitions become synonymous with the object over which the belligerents are fighting. For example, wars of survival in which zero-sum control or access to subsistence resources is contested, wars of unification in which parties clash over the potential establishment a new society, or wars of religion in which violence is used to coerce conversion to a new faith (or, remove a belief system by killing its adherents). Unlike measure-centric or legal-centric definitions, nature-centric and object-centric definitions provide insight into the causes of war. They also provide useful understandings of different types of conflicts or specific wars. However, they are less useful in the examination of war as a phenomena itself. Such sui generis approaches to defining war run the risk of infinite regress, they inhibit the ability to draw fungible lessons — and, as noted above, they can retard thoughtful examination and evaluation by obfuscating the topic.
What is needed is a conceptualization that captures war as event and behavior.
War is the pursuit of a political object primarily through the use, or credibly threatened use, of violence.
Warfare is the employment of violence to achieve objectives that increase the likelihood that the political object will be realized.