War has changed.
no!WAR
no!WAR HAS
NO!WAR HAS NOT CHANGED!
war hasnt event occured yet!what u see the iraq n afghan"war" etc are not real wars!
they are mere skirmishes.....fighting with d enemy in d form of guerillas,insurgents and what they sell on the fish market on discount.
the real war has yet to come....history will not be changed suddenly.
Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1974, there has been no further major cross border violence that can be on the scale of the Vietnam War.
Do you consider Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 and the Chinese retaliatory invasion of Vietnam in Feburary 1979 to be major cross border wars?
they dun sound like they are interested in fighting n wage a real war for conquest!
i would say a costly war with no gains of any sort...........not even a goat!
War has changed.
On the military level in Western Civilization in the twentieth century the chief development has been a steady increase in the complexity and the cost of weapons.
When weapons are cheap to get and so easy to use that almost anyone can use them after a short period of training, armies are generally made up of large masses of amateur soldiers.
Such weapons we call "amateur weapons," and such armies we might call "mass armies of citizen-soldiers."
The Age of Pericles in Classical Greece and the nineteenth century in Western Civilization were periods of amateur weapons and citizen-soldiers.
But the nineteenth century was preceded (as was the Age of Pericles also) by a period in which weapons were expensive and required long training in their use.
Such weapons we call "specialist" weapons. Periods of specialist weapons are generally periods of small armies of professional soldiers (usually mercenaries).
In a period of specialist weapons the minority who have such weapons can usually force the majority who lack them to obey; thus a period of specialist weapons tends to give rise to a period of minority rule and authoritarian government.
But a period of amateur weapons is a period in which all men are roughly equal in military power, a majority can compel a minority to yield, and majority rule or even democratic government tends to rise.
The medieval period in which the best weapon was usually a mounted knight on horseback (clearly a specialist weapon) was a period of minority rule and authoritarian government.
Even when the medieval knight was made obsolete (along with his stone castle) by the invention of gunpowder and the appearance of firearms, these new weapons were so expensive and so difficult to use (until 1800) that minority rule and authoritarian government continued even though that government sought to enforce its rule by shifting from mounted knights to professional pike-men and musketeers.
But after 1800, guns became cheaper to obtain and easier to use. By 1840 a Colt revolver sold for $27 and a Springfield musket for not much more, and these were about as good weapons as anyone could get at that time.
Thus, mass armies of citizens, equipped with these cheap and easily used weapons, began to replace armies of professional soldiers, beginning about 1800 in Europe and even earlier in America.
At the same time, democratic government began to replace authoritarian governments (but chiefly in those areas where the cheap new weapons were available and local standards of living were high enough to allow people to obtain them).
The arrival of the mass army of citizen-soldiers in the nineteenth century created a difficult problem of control, because techniques of transportation and of communications had not reached a high-enough level to allow any flexibility of control in a mass army...
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/02.html#4
The political conditions of the latter half of the twentieth century will continue to be dominated by the weapons situation, for, while politics consists of much more than weapons, the nature, organization, and control of weapons is the most significant of the numerous factors that determine what happens in political life. Surely weapons will continue to be expensive and complex.
This means that they will increasingly be the tools of professionalized, if not mercenary, forces.
All of past history shows that the shift from a mass army of citizen-soldiers to a smaller army of professional fighters leads, in the long run, to a decline of democracy.
When weapons are cheap and easy to obtain and to use, almost any man may obtain them, and the organized structure of the society, such as the state, can obtain no better weapons than the ordinary, industrious, private citizen.
This very rare historical condition existed about 1880, but is now only a dim memory, since the weapons obtainable by the state today are far beyond the pocketbook, understanding, or competence of the ordinary citizen.
When weapons are of the "amateur" type of 1880, as they were in Greece in the fifth century B.C., they are widely possessed hy citizens, power is similarly dispersed, and no minority can compel the majority to yield to its will.
With such an "amateur weapons system" (if other conditions are not totally unfavorable), we are likely to find majority rule and a relatively democratic political system.
But, on the contrary, when a period can be dominated by complex and expensive weapons that only a few persons can afford to possess or can learn to use, we have a situation where the minority who control such "specialist" weapons can dominate the majority who lack them.
In such a society, sooner or later, an authoritarian political system that reflects the inequality in control of weapons will he established.
At the present time, there seems to be little reason to doubt that the specialist weapons of today will continue to dominate the military picture into the foreseeable future.
If so, there is little reason to doubt that authoritarian rather than democratic political regimes will dominate the world into the same foreseeable future. To be sure, traditions and other factors may keep democratic systems, or at least democratic forms, in many areas, such as the United States or England.
To us, brought up as we were on a democratic ideology, this may seem very tragic, but a number of perhaps redeeming features in this situation may well be considered...
...There is still another element in this complex picture. This is also related to weapons.
The past history of weapons over thousands of years shows that the reason political units have grown larger in certain periods has been because of the increased power of the offensive in the dominant weapons systems, and that periods in which defensive weapons became dominant have been those in which political units remained small in area or even became smaller.
The growing power of castles in the period about 1100 B.C. or about A.D. 900 made political power so decentralized and made power units so small that all power became private power, and the state disappeared as a common form of political organization. Thus arose the so-called "Dark Ages" about 1000 B.C. or A.D. 1000...
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/20.html#74
...Also related to the problem of internalised controls is the shift of weapons in our society. This is a profound problem. I have spent ten years working on it throughout all of history, and I hope eventually to produce a book if I can find a publisher. There will be endless analyses of Chinese history, Byzantine history and Russian history and everything else, and the book is about nine-tenths written.
I'd say in the last ten years the shift of weapons in any civilization and, above all, in our civilization, from shock weapons to missile weapons has a dominant influence on the ability to control individuals: individuals cannot be controlled by missile weapons.
Notice that if you go back several hundred years to the Middle Ages, all weapons were shock, that is, you came at the enemy with a spear or a sword.
Even as late as 1916, in the First World War, you came at the Germans with bayonets after a preliminary barrage with artillery. But we have now shifted almost completely to missile weapons. Missile weapons are weapons that you hurl. You may shoot, you may have bombs dropped from an airplane, you may throw a hand grenade: these are missile weapons.
The essential difference between a shock weapon and a missile weapon is this: a missile weapon is either fired or it isn't fired. It cannot be half-fired. Once you let it go, it's out of your control. It is a killing weapon.
But a shock weapon--a billy club or a bayonet-- can be used to any degree you wish. If you say to someone, "Get up and get out of my room," and you pull out a machines gun, or you call in a B-52 bomber, or you pull the pin in a hand grenade....But with a bayonet you can persuade him.
In our society, individual behaviour can no longer be controlled by any system of weaponry we have. In fact, we do not have enough people, even if we equip them with shock weapons, to control the behaviour of that part of the population which does not have internalised controls.
One reason for that, of course, is that the twenty percent who do have internalised controls are concentrated in certain areas. I won't go into the subject of controls. It opens up the whole field of guerrilla resistance, terrorism, and everything else; these cannot be controlled by any system or organized structure or force that exists, at least on the basis of missile weaponry.
And, as I said, it would take too many people on the basis of shock weaponry.
We have now done what the Romans did when they started to commit suicide: we have shifted from an army of citizens to an army of mercenaries, those mercenaries are being recruited in our society, as they were in Roman society, from the twenty percent of the population which does not have the internalised controls of the civilization and...
http://www.wealthbuilder.ie/essay15.htm
its evolution.........just like guys buying the best and updated technology computer antivirus software.it goes on and on......
these terrorists n insurgents r only temp werkers.
We have now done what the Romans did when they started to commit suicide:
we have shifted from an army of citizens to an army of mercenaries, those mercenaries are being recruited in our society, as they were in Roman society, from the twenty percent of the population which does not have the internalised controls of the civilization...
A whole host of new cavalry and infantry units had been created in desperate times of civil war and barbarian invasions.
One of the most significant differences between the old army system was that Caracalla in AD 212 had bestowed Roman citizenship on all the provinces. With this the ancient distinction between the legionaries and the auxiliary forces had been swept aside, each now being equal in their status.
So provincial inhabitants might have become Romans, but this didn't mean the end to non-Romans being part of the Roman army.
In their desperation the embattled emperors of the third century had recruited any military forces which came to hand. Germans Sarmatians, Arabs, Armenians, Persians, Moors; all were not subjects of the empire and now stood to the Roman army in the same relation as once the auxiliaries had done...
http://www.roman-empire.net/army/army.html
The U.S. Army is stepping
up efforts to recruit more skilled soldiers by offering immigrants a
fast track to U.S. citizenship if they enlist.
The
move comes as the Pentagon prepares to send several thousand more
troops to Afghanistan and with the war in Iraq in its sixth year.
The
U.S. Army chief of staff, himself, swore in a group of recruits at a
ceremony in New York. Half of the 32 new Army recruits are immigrants from countries such as Pakistan, India, South Korea and Bangladesh...
http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-04-13-voa18.cfm