What happened to war?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Putting this in General Questions as I am looking for a …cold…analysis. Yes, war is bad. Yes, people get hurt. That is not what I am looking for.

I have a casual interest in history, particularly military. It seems that war has changed since about the 1950s. WW1, WW2…Korean war…those were wars. Hard battles with many casualties. War in the ‘old’ sense. After the Korean war, wars seem to have changed in a fundamental way.

How? more difficult to explain my, nonprofessional, thoughts on this. It seems that wars involving powers with a significant military seem to lack, for lack of better words, the energy, the balls to the wall nature of wars I read about. It seems that a major power commits significantly less resources than they are capable of and fight the war in a more limited way and this produces failure and setbacks.

There are some exceptions. The first Gulf war seemed pretty all out and crushing, for example. However, the wars seem much more limited, with less committed resources than I would expect. I don’t know…it is hard to explain. It isn’t just a 20th Century thing…wars in the 19th Century had the same feel. The only top of mind war that I can think of that fits the more ‘modern’ sense is the Revoluntary war (USA). England just didn’t seem to really ‘commit’ and that is the feeling I get with most ‘modern’ wars.

We are all thinking about the Ukraine…it just seems Russia just didn’t commit the necessary resources. The may still ‘win’, who knows…but you would think the offensive would just be more…crushing. All out. It seems half-arsed.

Is Russia really that weak? Maybe…but it just seems that the flavor of wars in the past 70 years or so lack a total commitment to win.

I have done a terrible job asking this question but I hope you can understand what I am trying to ask. What are your thoughts?

2

Nukes.

3

I thought of that to and I am sure it has some effect. However, it, to me, doesn’t seem to fully explain.

I tend not to be too optimistic about humanity, though I am not a ‘we are doomed’ type either. I am thinking…hoping I guess, that there is kind of ‘sea change’ in humanity about war. The idea of balls-to-the-wall commitment just seems wrong maybe. Yea, naive but…maybe?

4

And the internet

5

I think nuclear weapons happened to war.

Prior to nukes the kind of conflict going on in Ukraine would have a very good chance of ending up in a full on major power war. Even if neither side really wanted to go to war with another major power over Ukraine, the fact one side really wanted Ukraine and one side really did not want the other side to have Ukraine (for fear of next they would want Poland, etc,), is exactly the kind of “dollar auction” stand off that would lead to war.

The difference now is both sides know a major power war ends up with everyone getting nuked, so that massively reduces the chances of that happening (though not to zero, which is why we haven’t seen many wars like this since the end of WW2)

6

I agree with the others that nuclear weapons have changed the major powers’ attitude to all out war. Of course, terrible wars still happen, just look at Syria.

The US was a colony, this wasn’t a war between two super powers. England - or rather, the United Kingdom - had bigger fish to fry in its ongoing battles with France, Spain and The Netherlands. The revolutionary war was a sideshow, the UK was never going to commit all its military resources to keeping the US.

7

Precision weapons are also a big change. In WWII, if you wanted to take out the enemy’s ball bearing production, the only way to do it was to bomb the entire city that the ball bearing factory was in. Nowadays, you can program your weapons to target specific machines on the assembly line in that factory. If you care about collateral damage, you now have the means to avoid it, at least to a much greater degree than in the past. And even if you don’t care about it, you’ll still avoid it just because it’s inefficient. Nowadays the only way you get civilians targeted is if you deliberately choose to target them.

8

Part of this might be the increase in the use of high-tech, and therefore expensive and hard to produce, weapon systems.

Earlier wars could be supported by a “war effort” in which factories that used to supply consumer items were re-purposed to produce tanks and the like. The US was famous for producing a plane every X minutes or so during the height of WWII.

But even the US can’t do that when the planes are F-35s.

So now nations go to war “With the army they have”, to borrow a phrase from the start of the Iraq war. The expectation that battle losses will be quickly replaced, and that production will ramp up so as to exceed battle loses no longer holds. You’d expect a few new planes and tanks every year, but if you’re losing hundreds, you’re never going to make up for that level of losses.

And so you husband your resources more closely. You only commit forces that you’re pretty sure you aren’t going to lose immediately. You also make more use out of things like missiles that can be used from a distance.

Russia thought it was doing that in Ukraine, but their expectations were not in line with reality.

9

How about…

The Napoleonic Wars
Greek War of Independence
Taiping Rebellion
Crimean War
Franco-Prussian War
First and Second Boer Wars

That’s off the top of my head. There are probably more.

10

I don’t think it’s nukes per-se. I do think that’s why we haven’t seen any of the nuclear-armed powers go toe-to-toe anywhere in the world for the past 3/4 of a century.

But in large part the wars of the past 75 years haven’t been near-peer, force-on-force type wars. The Korean War, the Arab-Israeli wars, and Russia/Ukraine are the only ones in all that time that have fit that mold. And even there, many of those have been fought in the desert or other sparsely inhabited places, so whatever balls-out violence was employed doesn’t make the papers like it would elsewhere.

Others have been conventional force-on-force wars, but so lopsided that it looks like maybe they weren’t “real” wars- the two Gulf Wars come to mind (not the subsequent insurgency in 2003-2011 Iraq). Which were largely fought in sparsely populated desert as well. I would argue that the US committed the proper number of troops to both and fought surprisingly violently in both, but the Iraqi Army was totally outclassed.

Most have been insurgencies or otherwise asymmetrical/unconventional wars where the great power is fighting a considerably weaker enemy. That more or less inherently limits the firepower brought to bear; you don’t want to level crazy amounts of civilian infrastructure and kill a bunch of civilians to possibly get a few insurgents. And it changes the tactics as well- there aren’t enemy forces that you can identify, target and destroy, there’s just a bunch of civilians, some of which may be enemies.

Vietnam, Afghanistan (USSR), Afghanistan (US), Iraq, Mali, Libya, Syria, ISIS, and a few others have been asymmetrical/unconventional wars, and that’s why it may seem like the great powers were not committing entirely to fighting those wars. Not because they were unwilling in a grand sense, but because tactically and strategically, there’s not a good way to do it.

In the case of Russia/Ukraine, I think it’s probably world opinion and a desire not to destroy and alienate the region they’re trying to conquer that’s causing them to not play Red Army 2.0 and level everything with artillery and air strikes as the tanks roll in. That, and it seems that their military is considerably less professional and well trained as we had been led to believe.

11

The major change was technology. War went from an army living off the land as it conquered, to an army using huge amounts of technology to pursue the war. By Napoleon’s time, a firearm was a simple metal tube, ammunition was powder and lead balls. After 40+ years of relative peace in Europe (and the USA) the Civil War and the Crimean War broke out, and countries got to try out new tech. Guns were more complex, ammunition had to be prepared for those guns and shipped to the front lines, cannons were more sophisticated and had better range. The carnage was worse, as the charge of the light brigade commemorates.

It got worse by WWI - machine guns, tanks, aircraft, etc. - things that needed a huge and complex infrastructure back home to build, and were expensive. War became a bigger commitment of the whole economy, instead of just rounding up an bunch of men and giving them pikes and arrows.

And we haven’t even talked about navies, which went through an equal growth of scale and technology. Sails relied on the wind, wood could be sawn from the forest. Rolling hundreds of tons of steel plate, coal for fuel and complex steam engines needed a big industry to compete.

Most wars were the squashing of those who did not have this tech by the big powers that did. This first became most evident when Napoleon rolled over most of Europe. The small states of Italy and Germany simply could not field the manpower to stand up to him - only the competing empires could. (For that, you still needed to be a smart tactician).

(Fun fact - Venice sits in a shallow lagoon miles from solid shore. This made it very difficult to attack by land or by sea - until Napoleon came along with new-fangled cannons whose 3-mile range meant they could bombard Venice from the shore. Venice surrendered without a fight, because their position was hopeless.)

The ultimate outcome of this race of technology was the aircraft. The country that could produce these things without being subjected to reciprocal attacks on its industries won the war.

Nukes, and then ICBMs, basically meant that nobody was safe from this sort of destruction. (Plus the bonus that the destruction was long lasting, radioactivity made the area uninhabitable for a while). Either side was subject to the threat that their ability to make war would be wiped out - so any war would become unwinnable if it fully escalated.

So what we see instead is wars against a side that cannot “win” in the sense of overrunning the other side - Viet Nam, Iraq, etc. Or games played with bluffing - we are not pushing to the point that this will escalate into all out war, war by proxy like Syria or now Ukraine, or the Arab-Israeli wars. Basically, whoever can field the most tech or has the reliable supply lines to acquire replacements - wins.

12

There was a rather big war right before Korea, which led to (some of) the Geneva Conventions, which in turn made warring states hesitant about blowing up civilians and the like. Also, nuclear weapons made states hesitant about being warring states.

13

I’m moving this to IMHO, because this really isn’t a factual question. But I reiterate that the OP is looking for

and opinions about the degree to which nations fight hard, not a more general discussion.

I’ve also added the Ukraine invasion tag, because even though this question is obviously broader than that, it appears to be inspired by the current events, and is something that a reader wanting to check out all the threads relevant to the Ukranian invasion might want to find.

14

Wars of national liberation, which were always asymmetrical, gurerrilla-style conflicts, proved to be very effective. The British couldn’t hold on to India, the French couldn’t hold on to Algeria or Indochina, etc.

The major powers tried to fight back with superior weaponry (the U.S. dropped 7.5 million tons of bombs during the Vietnam War) but it didn’t work.

Russia was hoping for “shock and awe.” Ukraine knew they were preparing an invasion, which reduced the shock part, and Russia didn’t start out with the overwhelming destruction that would have caused awe.

15

Nah, nations have no problem blowing ever-loving shit out of civilian populations. They’ve just become more coy about it:

From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos during 580,000 bombing missions—equal to a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years – making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. The bombings were part of the U.S. Secret War in Laos to support the Royal Lao Government against the Pathet Lao and to interdict traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The bombings destroyed many villages and displaced hundreds of thousands of Lao civilians during the nine-year period.

The existence of nuclear weapons, and more specifically the ability to deliver such weapons within a few hours or (with long range ballistic missiles) tens of minutes warning has certainly put a damper on direct confrontations between superpowers, but it is also the case that in the bipolar world of the 1947 to 1991 ‘Cold War’ the Soviet Union buffered itself with a layer of ‘client states’ in the Warsaw Pact, and the US and UK essentially did the same thing with the NATO alliance hence why some European nations are less than enthused about participation in NATO even if it does provide security guarantees far beyond what they could afford on their own.

The Geneva (and Hague) Conventions exist so that the winners of a war have a legal basis for prosecuting the losers but in terms of actual effect they have largely just forced signatories to either push their unlawful behavior under the radar, use proxies in conflicts that they know will result in violations, or just weasel-word their way into claiming that they aren’t technically in violation and rely upon their economic power and the commitment of allies to looking the other way to get away with doing whatever is needed to prosecute a war. We look upon the wholly unprovoked and brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine today with horror, but of course the United States committed copious war crimes and humanitarian crises on pretty much all of Southeast Asia, deliberately targeting civilians and using chemical weapons with complete impunity, and while the 2003 invasion of Iraq was prosecuted with the awareness that cameras were watching (and indeed, imbedded in operational units as a propaganda and recruiting tool in the guise of ‘transparency’) when crimes occurred the evidence was concealed up to the highest levels to avoid repercussions. The US continues to this day to use drone warfare to commit actions within the borders of sovereign nations without a declaration of hostilities that result in copious civilian deaths, often under the thinnest premises of “imminent threat” and with virtually no consequences even when strikes against civilians are revealed.

The idea that these conventions prevent nations from committing human rights abuses is demonstrably false; at most, they may serve to protect prisoners of war that are in the eye of the media or result in the trial of a low ranking officer ‘responsible’ for a specific incident while high level decision-makers can continue to conduct themselves freely and virtually without limit. Well, okay, Henry Kissinger can’t go to Spain or France; that’s about the extent of true international ‘justice’ in the era of realpolitik.

Stranger

16

World War I may not have been the “war to end all wars”, but World War II while it was still within living memory was definitely the “war to end all world wars”. Nobody who lived through it wanted to see it repeated. We are entering a dangerous time when barely anyone (let alone world leaders) is old enough to have first hand experience with that horror.

17

World War I may not have been the “war to end all wars”, but World War II while it was still within living memory was definitely the “war to end all world wars”. Nobody who lived through it wanted to see it repeated. We are entering a dangerous time when barely anyone (let alone world leaders) is old enough to have first hand experience with that horror.

That’s pretty questionable. There was a large contingent of both sides that would have been quite happy starting it up again right away with Soviets vs Everyone else (there was even a plan to rearm the unreconstructed Nazi wehrmarcht to help the western Allies in a shooting war with the soviets) If the Soviets hadn’t developed nukes it would have been a matter of when not if it turned into a shooting war.

18

I’ll cop to hyperbolizing “nobody”, but the rest is vindicated by History. Don’t forget that actual nuclear warfare was also part of the WWII experience.

19

The “nuclear warfare” of WWII was entirely one-sided; Japan didn’t have nuclear weapons, or indeed any weapons to effectively counterstrike the United States.

There were plenty of people who participated in WWII that still had great enthusiasm for pursuing wars around the world, both because it served the ambition of the US to be a global superpower and because it served as a justification for maintaining a vast military research and production industry. The pseudohistory of the post-WWII world being a time of global peace is only supportable if you confine your focus to Europe, and even then you have to filter out proxy wars and ‘internal’ conflicts in border countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

The essential lesson from WWII is not to wait until your opponent is able to build up strength, and instead undermine them by funding insurgencies, conducting proxy or ‘secret’ conflicts, and if all else fails, ‘facilitate’ the removal of political opposition and regime change in both friend and foe.

Stranger

20

I didn’t write well. What I meant is that those wars WERE all out, not that they were not.

I’m still not convinced on nukes. Yes, they have an effect but I don’t think it explains it all. The Internet is interesting. Populations are less isolated from world opinion and much less shielded from what their nation is doing. That could go the rest of the way.

I still think that there just seems some sort of ‘change’ in populations view of war. Like someone mentioned…the wars of the earlier 20th century were just so horrific that maybe it produced some change in humanity. I hope so.