War is a condition in which a state might find itself; warfare is a physical activity conducted by armed forces in the context of war. Of course, many kinds of group violence, from gang fights to terrorism, might display some or all of the characteristics of warfare without rising to this definition of war, but more often than not these violent War crimes have been defined by the Tokyo Charter as "violations of the laws or customs of war," which includes crimes against enemy combatants and enemy non-combatants. War crimes also included deliberate attacks on citizens and property of neutral states as they fall under the category of non-combatants, as at the attack on Pearl Harbor. Military personnel from the Empire of Japan have been May 07, · The Changing Character of War Centre (CCW) is an Interdisciplinary research centre for the study of change in armed conflict. We are part of the University of Oxford, based at Pembroke College and the Department of Politics and International Relations. In addition to research projects, we offer bespoke policy advice
The Changing Character of War Centre
Military technology often seems to be the dark side of innovation, the Mr. Hyde roaming the back alleys of civilization for opportunities to work his worst on society. But countless inventors and innovators, from Alfred Nobel to Robert Boyle, thought of weapons positively.
They believed that they could banish the scourge of war, or at least restrain its excesses, if war on terror research paper could only invent the ultimate weapon, the instrument so horrible that no one would dare use it. More than six decades into the nuclear age, there is growing evidence that the hydrogen bomb may prove to be the long-sought war-stopper.
Melvin Kranzberg, a co-founder of the Society for the History of Technology and the founding editor of its journal, Technology and Culturewas fond of observing that technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.
Technology in essence is a process of manipulating the material world for human purposes. Whether it does good or ill depends not on the technology itself but on what humans choose to do with it. Military machines and instruments can nonetheless be understood using the same concepts and categories that scholars apply to technology in general. Below I put forward four propositions about military technology, but the principles at work could be applied as easily in any realm of technological endeavor.
They sometimes have a special relevance or poignancy when applied to war, but they say more about the nature of technology than they do about the nature of war. In addition to their heuristic value, these concepts also have pedagogical utility. They can help demystify the arcane and often secretive world of military research and development and also clarify the impact on society of all complex technological systems. They offer students a set of conceptual tools for thinking about change in warfare over time and the role that technological innovation has played in that process.
My propositions are these: 1 technology, more than any other outside force, shapes warfare; and, conversely, war not warfare shapes technology.
Rather, 3 technology opens doors. And, finally, 4 these characteristics of military technology are easier to see in the modern period than previously, though they have always been at work. Technology shapes warfarenot war. War is timeless and universal. It has afflicted virtually every state known to human history. Warfare is the conduct of war. It is the clash of arms or the maneuver of armed forces in the field.
It entails what military professionals call operations, whether or not the opposing forces actually unleash their organized violence on one another.
War is a condition in which a state might find itself; warfare is a physical activity conducted by armed forces in the context of war. Of course, many kinds of group violence, from gang fights to terrorism, might display some or war on terror research paper of the characteristics of warfare without rising to this definition of war, but more often than not these violent conflicts use instruments of war.
To understand the technology of warfare is to understand the technology of most public violence. Wording is also important in articulating exactly what impact technology has on warfare. A number of verbs suggest themselves. Technology defines, governs, or circumscribes warfare.
It sets the stage for warfare. It is the instrumentality of warfare. The most important verb describing the impact of technology on warfare is that it changes warfare. Technology has been the primary source of military innovation throughout history. It drives changes in warfare more than any other factor.
Consider a simple thought experiment. Sun Tzu and Alexander the Great are brought back to life and assigned to lead coalition forces in Afghanistan in These near contemporaries from the fourth century BCE would understand almost everything they would need to know. Alexander actually fought in Afghanistan, and Sun Tzu if such a person really existed fought in comparably mountainous terrain in China.
The only modern tool of command they would not know and could not readily assimilate would be the technology of war. Airplanes, missiles, tanks, drones, satellites, computers, GPS, and all the remaining panoply of the modern high-tech battlefield would be incomprehensible to them, war on terror research paper. A sergeant from their operations staff could exploit these resources more fully and effectively than either of our great captains. Sun Tzu and Alexander would be incompetent on the modern war on terror research paper. Naval warfare does not occur without ships, which, through most of human history, were the most complex of human technological artifacts.
Of course the same is true of planes for air warfare, missiles for strategic warfare, and spacecraft for star wars. In each case, the vehicle defines the warfare. The cat-and-mouse contest of Soviet and American attack submarines in the Cold War would have been even more incomprehensible to him.
He might have gone back in time and intuited the essence of galley warfare, but he could not command in the age of steam, let alone the nuclear age, without a solid grounding in modern science and technology. The more modern, or postmodern, the warfare becomes, the more the generalization holds true. Technology defines warfare. Air warfare was not even possible before the twentieth century, save for the vulnerable and inefficient reconnaissance balloons that were pioneered in Europe and America in the nineteenth century.
In the twenty-first century, air warfare ranges from strategic bombing to close air support of ground troops to dog fights for air superiority to pilotless drones that carry the eyes and ears, and sometimes the ordnance, of operators hundreds, even thousands, of miles away.
The U. boasts a missile defense installation that can stop the unstoppable, an intercontinental ballistic missile. Space-faring nations flirt with anti-satellite weapons launched from earth and even the prospect of space-based weapons to fight one another and threaten the earth below.
Air warfare differs from naval warfare, not because the strategy and tactics of conflict in those realms differs, but because planes differ from ships. And, of course, both differ from tanks and rockets and satellites. Each technology shapes, defines, circumscribes, and governs a new kind of warfare. Nor is it just the evolution of weaponry that changes warfare. It is the distribution of the weaponry. Throughout history, states have usually fought one another in weapons symmetry. The quality and quantity of the American technology prevailed.
In the second Gulf War, however, the insurgents resorted to asymmetrical warfare, fighting the high-tech American arsenal with low-tech instruments of assassination, war on terror research paper, sabotage, and terror. Only when the United States adjusted its technology to meet the new threat did the enemy tactics lose their edge.
Of course training, morale, war on terror research paper, numbers, will, and politics also contributed to the outcome in Iraq, but the nature of the technology set the stage for the struggle. However much technology may change warfare, it never determines warfare—neither how it will be conducted nor how it will turn out. Technology presides in warfare, but it does not rule, war on terror research paper. To believe in determinism is to believe in inevitability.
What historical force or law pushes events to some inescapable outcome? In hindsight, events may appear predetermined or inevitable, but nothing in human activity can be predicted with certainty. Think war on terror research paper the instances in history when technology appeared to determine the nature and even the result of warfare. Chariots were perhaps the most dominant instrument of warfare before nuclear weapons.
Indeed, historian William H. McNeill has called them the superweapon of their day. From Egypt to Mesopotamia, states either adopted chariots or ceased to compete in interstate war, war on terror research paper.
The chariot craze bred an international chariot aristocracy, the Maryannu, who sold their services to the highest bidder. Western warfare through most of the second millennium BCE was chariot warfare. The chariot defined, drove, governed, circumscribed ground warfare. And then it was gone. Within a century after the Armageddon at Kadesh, the chariot disappeared as the dominant technology of Levantine warfare. Just as there is no sure evidence of where the chariot came from and why it ruled, so is its fall from dominance a mystery.
In any case, the apparent determinism of the chariot evaporated. unassailable military prowess. Seeking to demonstrate that medieval society spawned its share of technological innovation, White presented a series of interrelated case studies.
One revisited and refined the discredited claim by Heinrich Brunner that the appearance of the heavily armed and armored mounted knight on the battlefields of eighth-century Europe had bred feudalism, war on terror research paper. Brunner had imagined that Charles Martel first conceived the scheme of a feudal array and the social, political, and economic system to sustain it at or immediately following the battle of Poitiers inwhen his posse of mounted warriors drove off Muslim raiders spilling into southern France from the Iberian Peninsula.
But White showed that Martel had begun confiscating church property for distribution to a new class of mounted warriors before the battle of Poitiers.
What, then, asked White, might have inspired Martel, if not his victory over the lightly armed and armored Muslim mounted warriors? White imagined war on terror research paper this technology allowed the heavily armed and armored mounted knight to lean into his lance and overwhelm mounted and unmounted warriors alike with irresistible force.
Most of his critics accused him of technological determinism, of arguing that the stirrup produced feudalism. But White had gone out of his way to avoid any such claim. Rather, when it was added to the complex soup of medieval society, feudalism precipitated out. Other societies with different ingredients and different chemistries would produce different residues. Technology does not determine outcomes, said White, it opens doors.
People must decide if they want to pass through, war on terror research paper. The war on terror research paper of the stirrup in Europe did not mean that Martel would adopt it to make the heavily armed and armored mounted knight the mainstay of an emergent military system.
It adds what most accounts of technological innovation lack: human agency. Humans must decide if they are going to, or can, war on terror research paper, take up a given military innovation, war on terror research paper. And they must adapt it to their circumstances. Technology is a possibility, not an imperative.
War on terror reconsidered - reTHINK TANK
, time: 8:52Bombing of Dresden in World War II - Wikipedia
May 07, · The Changing Character of War Centre (CCW) is an Interdisciplinary research centre for the study of change in armed conflict. We are part of the University of Oxford, based at Pembroke College and the Department of Politics and International Relations. In addition to research projects, we offer bespoke policy advice War crimes have been defined by the Tokyo Charter as "violations of the laws or customs of war," which includes crimes against enemy combatants and enemy non-combatants. War crimes also included deliberate attacks on citizens and property of neutral states as they fall under the category of non-combatants, as at the attack on Pearl Harbor. Military personnel from the Empire of Japan have been The bombing of Dresden was a British-American aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, during World War blogger.com four raids between 13 and 15 February , heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3, tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city
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