Changing Faces of Human Conflict

¶ … Changing Faces of Human Conflict and Warfare

As the way in which humans fight war progresses from conventional warfare to more modern conflicts, the state becomes less and less involved in the warfare itself. Other key players including religious, value-oriented, ethnic, and political groups play the leading roles in conflicts. No longer is the state the legal monopoly of armed force. The evidence is all around, and examples are numerous that show these assertions to be true. The implications for these conditions are quite compelling, and suggest that in the future, the way in which war is both understood and fought will likely very rapidly evolve from conflict to conflict and from group to group. War is no longer as cut and dry as it used to be and often involves the confluence of many political, social, religious, and cultural ideas, ideals, and beliefs.

The slow metamorphosis that conventional warfare underwent shortly after World War Two is unmistakable. From a U.S.-centric viewpoint, the Korean and Viet Nam Wars were the beginning of this shift from state to state conflict to conflict between two or more groups with interests in winning the war. Proxy wars along with religious and social movements that have been deemed by historians as wars and conflicts have become much more prevalent as conventional warfare, and the conventional mindset and war fighting approach have waned. The necessity to understand this shift from conventional to modern is quite compelling, given the fact that as the world's population grows, so does the number of groups, cultures, and societies willing to go to war with each other for many reasons. War no longer typically involves state-to-state conflicts. Author Martin van Creveld states, "At any given time and place, prevailing ideas concerning who may do what in war, to whom, for what purposes, under what circumstances, and by what means constitute a broad reflection of that society's culture, structure, and war-making institutions." (205). The author is stating that the societies and cultures that are now fighting wars are responsible for the causes and effects of the war directly, and not the states that these societies may be functioning within.

In order to better understand the evolution of war and the way in which the main players are affected, it is necessary to first look at a modern day example of warfare as it is fought by non-state entities. Larger states and groups have much more economic power to influence smaller ones (Keohane and Nye, 28) and this can be seen in thee following example as well. Al Qaeda represents a terrorist threat to the United States. The former is a small group of religious fundamentalists while the latter is a state, with state-run war mechanisms and political engines. The interesting dichotomy between these two entities truly illustrates the difference between modern and conventional warfare. The United States, though it has been involved in much unconventional fighting over the last 50 years, has positioned itself to fight more or less conventional wars. Al Qaeda represents an adaptable, flexible, and potent enemy that has no headquarters and does not fight on any battlefield so to speak. Each of these entities views and fights war completely differently. The Al Qaeda model is based in the historic warfare model of the crusades, whereby small religious groups brought the battle to each other's doorstep. The United State's relatively inflexible, unadaptive forces are having a hard time fighting successfully against such a small, moving target. The battle lines and compartments of this war between these two entities are ever shifting and ever-increasing in complexity.

As war becomes more compartmentalized, that is to say as low-intensity conflict spreads, the face of warfare will shift forever as a result. Author van Creveld (216) states, "As states start to collapse, leaders and war-making organizations will merge into each other." His assertion is more poignant when combined with the fact that as the future of warfare shifts from a state vs. state model to a less defined warfare, the goals and demands of the groups' leaders will come into play. This idea that war will become more about the smaller groups of individuals rather than individuals bound together by statehood is important because it shows a re-stratification of the groups and people that have traditionally made war with each other. It is as if modern warfare is coming back to the model of warfare that existed hundreds or thousands of years ago, before official states were typically involved in battles.