Warfare 101: What is war?

Greetings and Salutations! Once again, another week with your fantastic blog host Limax, Vivian Sayan! Today's topic is war and warfare! Take up arms! Grab your shields, hold your swords high, today we go to war! But first, a message from our disclaimer.

Disclaimer: War is an atrocious act that leaves deep seated scars on the people involved that will remain for many generations and should under no circumstances be glorified. This blog doesn’t glorify war but is as per usual using humour to lighten the mood on a topic that is very dark.

With that out of the way, to battle!

What is war?

War is a complicated thing but it can be roughly defined:

War is an organised form of controlled violence between two groups.

Pay close attention to the choice of words above. The organised part is there because it generally excludes individuals, small groups, or random violence. The controlled part is also to exclude random acts of violence.

Purpose of war

As I stated in the definition, war is organised, and that means it serves a purpose. Now now, I know what we all think,

War has no purpose! You can get things through other means!

To which I say, you sweet sweet innocent child of a human! A lot can be achieved through peaceful means, but not everything in every era. Back in the era where land=wealth, the only way to get more land is to take it from someone else. This connection exists to this day and will exist in all eras, it has only lessened slightly with modern technology.

So when you have wars and such, make certain that all of those involved have a reason; it can be anything from holding up a treaty, to wanting to take land, settling an old score, or many more. Of course, for the defending party, it is a matter of repelling the attacker, but even then, they can add reasons after the fact to suit political agendas.

History of war

We can of course not say exactly when warring states began because the earliest civilisations were hard to track, but with the definition above, we can apply it with tribes and then we see that wars likely have been done for over 100 thousand years. So a very very long time. The history of it is long and fascinating, but ultimately, it can be summarised into a few things changing. The weapons, the strategies, the logistics.

Weapons and countermeasures have been developed throughout history. You got swords, then you got chainmails, then you got crossbows, then you got full-on armour, and so on. There is never “one silver bullet” in war technology. No technology cannot be countered in some way because if there is no way to counter it, someone will throw money at it until there is a way to counter it. Similar things have happened with strategies; they have come and gone and changed with the technologies. Though some things about war have never changed and remain true to this day. The Art of War by Sun Tzu is a perfect example of this.

The biggest thing that has changed, though, is logistics. Logistics are the ways and means that someone supports the war, including supplying weapons and ammunition but also food, water, and other general supplies that are required to keep a force warring. While technology has made it so one person can do more damage and be a better soldier, logistics has experienced the opposite. There needs to be more people in logistics because the resources for logistics have increased. It is today at a point where logistics is everything. If it doesn’t work, you ain’t gonna win a war… and we are seeing it playing out live, too. One of the reasons, for example, that the Prussians were so good and able to beat France was that they realised the utility of trains when it comes to the military and transporting people and materials fast.

War exhaustion

Domestic support

So how is low war exhaustion maintained at home? Generally one way: propaganda! Propaganda has a negative connotation in normal speech, but it is academically very neutral. It means “Communication intended to influence and persuade the other party to further a specific agenda”. All nice and neutral! It can be used for good–lots of you have likely done it with memes for good–and it can be used for evil like it is commonly associated.
This can be done by active ads, posters, or people moving about talking at street corners and more. It can also be done indirectly by skewing the numbers. Too many died in a battle? Fudge the numbers a bit, and it looks better! A classical example of the more active kind is posters that demonise the enemy. This works because it feeds into the beliefs that the enemy has to be stopped due to their perceived wickedness.
This is a very classic piece of propaganda from World War One. Wait, you have to specify that it was the first one? Divinum, why did you have two!? Anyway, it was American propaganda and demonised the Germans in order to get people to enlist. The brutes must be stopped, and you are doing it for a good cause to save others!
Other techniques include putting forth your own virtues or “showing” how well the war is going. All this keeps morale up and war exhaustion down. The issue, however, is when shells and explosions start happening where you live. War exhaustion goes up fast then, and you need some strong conviction for people to still think it is worthwhile.

International support

Well, you might not necessarily need other nations to cheer you on, but you do need them to not really give a damn at bare minimum. It is much harder to control the information they get as opposed to your own people, so baseline propaganda is not going to work. So what do you do? You can have them as allies, trading partners, that is, to have them benefit from you somehow, and that will make them support you more in times of war. This effect is greatly enhanced if it is a defensive war and greatly reduced in offensive wars. This is primarily because in defensive wars, they are just trying to keep what is considered theirs, while in offensive wars, they are trying to gain stuff, and if they fail, it is their own fault for being greedy.

Another big contributor to international support is sticking to rules of engagement and war. Yes, wars have rules, and I will get to that in a little bit. If you are acting in a noble, honourable sense, other nations will support you. If you are the opposite, they will stop supporting you because that means they support immoral acts in war… which may result in themselves and their people suffering when tides turn in a war.

And finally, winning. Everyone supports a winner because that means when the victory becomes a reality, they can call back on the favours from the winning party. If you back the loser, you have nothing to call on even if you helped. They are either gone or so royally fucked now that even if they cared to repay, they have nothing to pay with. That’s why winning a war, looking like you’re going to win, or having a history of winning wars is important in keeping international support.

Rules of War

As I said earlier, there are rules to war and engagement, and there have been since time immemorial. People are bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling, but even they realised early on that there was a floor which they didn’t want to fall below, so people made rules. It has ranged from rules so rigid and followed that the war is more of a theatre performance to modern warfare where violations are genuinely prosecuted whenever possible.

What do the rules generally concern? Glad you asked! The rules have generally been concerned with the following topics:

When is it legitimate to go to war?
How do you deal with enemy survivors?
How do you deal with prisoners?
How are actual battles performed?
When are you supposed to disengage?

Casus Belli covers the first question. In the age of early nationalism, such as mid-19th century, a common one as nations unified was that people who spoke the same language (or close enough) should be unified under one and the same banner, and thus wars to get lands and people that fit the bill was generally considered legitimate. The second and third questions have often been agreed to on things because you are supposed to care for your own people. And if you care about them you want to make sure that if they can, they survive, right? So by treating your prisoners well in accordance to the rules, you increase the chances the enemy reciprocates the favour. Even if you do not care about your enemy or your own people that much, you still have an incentive to do it according to the rules, again because other forces outside will be observing and might get angry, but even ignoring that, treating prisoners well means they will give up more easily. The moment your enemy is convinced that giving up to you is a mistake, they will fight tooth and nail until the bitter end, and that will cost you a lot of men and materials, so treating prisoners well benefits you.

The fourth question is similar: what kind of fighting is just too bad? Fighting is bloody, people will die, people will suffer, but when is enough enough? This is why, for example, biological weapons and chemical weapons are banned by the Geneva Convention. These weapons are considered so excessively cruel, painful, and outright dangerous that they should not ever be used against another human. If I recall correctly, flamethrowers are also banned for the same reason.

Now, why would you ever bother with these rules if it gave you an advantage to break them? Most of the time, the reason is simple: if you do not follow them, you get the wrath of others upon you, and they might decide you are better gobbled up than allowed to be around anymore. It is a might makes right kind of world, unfortunately. Another reason is this: anything you do can be done toward you. Do you use chemical weapons? Congratulations… have some right back at you! And your own morale will tank. A thing to notice, however, is that certain breakages of the rules… do eventually become standard because it is simply too good to not do it. This is usually in the way that warfare is done ( not in the weapons used), in other words tactics and the actual engagements.

Types of war

There are many different kinds of war, and not all are created differently. So I’ll be running through the types and explaining their differences and how they can be used in worldbuilding and stories.

Aggressive war & Defensive war

I lump these together because they are generally the same war but from different perspectives. When you are the one declaring war on someone else to get something out of it, whether land, resources, regime change, etc, it is an aggressive war for you. For the one that you are attacking, it is a defensive war. They are defending themselves against you. This is the most classical form of war you see in any kind of story, and thus is left at that.

Proxy war

This is one where you are not directly engaging your enemy. Maybe you both are too powerful or don’t want to destroy each other's infrastructure because your own will be destroyed as well. Whatever the reason, you just do not want to engage directly, but you want to engage and show who is the top dawg… Oh look, a random nation or two is about to go to war or have a civil war! You could take sides in that conflict and supply your side and through it, show your dominance! For stories, this one is rarely done unless it is set in the modern cold war era. In fantasy and scifi it can be used to show different ideologies duking it out without having to wreck the entire world. Sure the country gets wrecked, but not the rest!

Great war

Yeah yeah, this was the title for World War I, the Great War… until the sequel was even worse! Anyway, in a great war, two or more great powers are involved and fighting against each other. What is a great power? A great power in the geopolitical sense refers to a state that has such power both in military and other things to exert influence on the global scale. But for the sake of worldbuilding, we can substitute the last bit about global scale to “on the scale of the known world/universe”.

This gets its own category because when great powers duke it out… the level of destruction is even worse than a normal war. These are powers with so much military prowess and industrial capabilities that the war will be long, dragged out, and the amount of dead will soar through the sky. Napoleonic wars are generally considered amongst the earliest examples of this as states by modern concepts barely existed before, if at all. This is great for when you want to throw up everything, have it all destroyed, and reshuffle the world order of your world to show the great tragedies! Anne, this one's for you! (Anne: I do love it when the whole world falls apart, and then the heroes can rise from the ashes!)

Cold “war”

This one is not a war per se as there is no active aggression between the states in question. That is what makes it cold. Why it is called a war is that there is active hostilities between the factions involved, and both are constantly preparing for what they perceive as an inevitable war. Proxy wars are often done in order to avoid it getting hot, as it is a cold war that people care about only when there are great powers involved, and a war between them is not only hot, it will be so hot that the sun goes “damn”. These are good for large ideological conflicts when you don’t want to upheave the entire world you’ve made. This of course also assumes those involved are rational actors, which fortunately most of the time, they are… most of the time 😰

Ending a war

Everything must come to an end, even war. THANK DIVINUM! So how and when does that happen? It can happen for many reasons. The most obvious one is when the enemy has occupied the capital and captured the government and made them sign a peace treaty. This treaty is of course, then, extremely unfavourable to the defeated party, but what are they gonna do? Call to arms? With what? They got NOTHING LEFT!

Oh yeah, speaking of a peace treaty, just like war generally needs an official declaration and reason to be considered valid, war needs an official agreement that it is now over and done with. This is the peace treaty. It marks the end of a war, and without it, there is no peace! North and South Korea have never signed a peace treaty, so they are still at war, believe it or not! The treaty lays out what each party has to do for the peace to remain, and when you are that overwhelmingly defeated, it is more demanded with a gun aimed at you.

Your war can also end because both sides decide that they cannot achieve their desired goals and it is costing too much, so they come to the table and agree to end it. How the treaty looks here depends a lot on the situation on the battlefield. The more it favours one side, the more leverage they have to get more from the other.

A third one is a forced peace as well, but it is not from the enemy, but from the people. They force the politicians' hands and are rebelling to the point where they cannot deal with it. Either the government is overthrown and the new one gets peace, or the old one gets the peace. This again due to desperation, which makes it more favourable to the other side.

Another option that has happened is that one of the belligerents packs up and fucks off. This is not common for the two that actually got into the war but can happen for other parties that chose to join in on one side. They decide it is not worth it and fuck off. Vietnam is an example where the U.S.A packed up and left when it no longer suited them.

Summa Summarum

So we are now at the end, the war is over, and a peace treaty is signed. All that remains is rebuilding and an end written by me. While war is an awful thing that should not be glorified, it is something that has been with you humans since before history itself. It is an important aspect of worldbuilding, important in many stories, and the horrors of it need to be on display so people can learn to never do it.

Make certain that when you do stories, you make war choices that make sense. What kind of war is it, what is the devastation like, what is it like after the war, and how will it affect things? These are big questions that must be asked in a war, and I will do more blog posts where we will explore these questions in greater detail. For now, these are some basics in war for your world that will help make them slightly better.

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