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The WarData.net website contains military history and other historical information in the form of timelines and other material. There is also the WarData.net World War II Quiz. Soon, there may be quizzes on other wars and other historical subjects. The timelines are chronological lists of the major battles and diplomatic events of each war. Some are more complete than others, and all are works in progress, as is the database in which the information is stored. There are also lists of major wars and battles. See the floating menu at left or the more complete list at the bottom of this page.
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A much quoted phrase says that “in the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.” Unfortunately, which years were peaceful are not given, nor is there any data to back up this assertion.1 This is clearly a problem of insufficient data. Wars can be considered as empirical phenomena, as studies by meteorologist Lewis Frye Richardson, and others, have shown.2 As such, they can be studied by use of a statistical treatment. Richardson considered all sorts of "deadly quarrels," from individual murders to world wars. He also assigned a magnitude to each quarrel, or war, according to the number of deaths. Thus, an individual murder would have a magnitude of one, a small riot in which ten people were killed would have a magnitude of two. On this scale, the Spanish-American War had a magnitude of 5.3, and the American Civil War was 5.8. World War I was a 7.2, and World War II was magnitude 7.3. By this measurement, depending on what magnitude of quarrel is defined as war, wars could be said to occur rather frequently. Like earthquakes, smaller wars are occuring somewhere, more or less continually.
According to George Santayana, only the dead have seen an end to war. (This saying was incorrectly attributed to Plato by Douglas MacArthur in his Farewell Address to the Cadets at West Point on May 1962. See: Soliloquies in England," Scribners, 1924, p. 102) In light of humankind's apparently innate propensity towards aggression and violence, Santayana may very well be correct. Even so, an attempt must be made to understand and prevent what is basically a pathological, and possibly suicidal, activity for the human species. Unfortunately, there are many close-minded religious fanatics, some of whom are the leaders of various countries in the world, who believe that they themselves are selected by some mythical religious figure or other for some “higher” purpose.3 These ideas often include an apocalytic battle followed by peace or rapture or some sort of earthly paradise. These are dangerous ideas, and frighteningly similar to the thinking of world leaders who brought about World War II.
Not only can government and leadership directly endanger peace and prosperity for their own people and the world at large, their very existence represents a drain on mankind. The relationship of government, and especially the military, to the people are like those of parasites to a host organism. This analogy was well made by William McNeil in Plagues and Peoples, and he used the term macroparisitism to describe it. Around the time that specialization of labor developed in early human communities, a ruling class and a military class arose. While producing no wealth on their own, they were necessary to organize and defend the community as a whole.
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Disease immunity arises by stimulating the formation of antibodies and raising other physiological defenses to a heightened level of activity; governments improve immunity to foreign macroparisitism by stimulating surplus production of food and raw materials sufficient to support specialsts in violence in suitably large numbers and with appropriate weaponry. Both defense reactions constitute burdens on the host populations, but a burden less onerous than periodic exposure to sudden lethal disaster.
The result of establishing successful governments is to create a vastly more formidable society vis-à-vis other human communities. Specialists in violence can scarcely fail to prevail against men who have to spend most of their time producing or finding food.4
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While providing immunity from certain threats, a successful government can, like a parasitic organism which sucks the life out of its host, destroy its own civilization by consuming a larger and larger portion of the resources generated by the people. This puts a completely new perspective on a popular slogan and lyric from the 1960s, “Military Madness is killing our country.”5
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The Definition of War
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The Department of Defense (DOD) apparently considers the words 'war' and 'battle' to be adjectives and not nouns. Although the DoD's online dictionary of military terminology33 has a number of related definitions in which the word ‘war’ is used as an adjective or prefix (war game, warhead, warhead mating, warhead section, war materiel procurement capability, and war materiel requirement), the DOD dictionary does not a have a definition of the word ‘war’ itself. Likewise, the word ‘battle.’ Again, however, there are a number of ‘battle’ related terms, with the word itself as an adjective or prefix. (battle damage assessment, battle damage indicator, battle damage repair, battlefield coordination detachment, battlefield illumination, battlefield surveillance, battle force, battle reserves, and battlespace).
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Studies of War
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Quincy Wright undertook the difficult task of studying war as an empirical phenomenon. His results, originally published in 1942, and republished with a new commentary, a massive 1637-page tome appropriately entitled A Study of War, His intention was to understand war in order to abolish it. In his study, he had a tabled list of wars from 1480 to 1941. Two other studies of war as an empirical phemonenon are Statistics of Deadly Quarrels and War in the Great Power System, 1495-1975, by Lewis Frye Richardson and Jack S. Levy, respectively.
Some of the data which Richardson and Levy used in their study was based on the table of wars in Wright's study. Some of the tabled data from the studies of Wright, Richardson, and Levy, is presented here: WarData.net Table of Wars 1750-1975.
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Clausewitz and Ninteenth Century Views of War
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Clausewitz wrote about an extension of the political philosophy of war. The French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars which followed saw a new sort of war, that of the mass army. These mass armies were fighting for ideals, the Rights of Man, or some nationalistic ideal. The large bodies of troops and the fervor and discipline they displayed made possible a new era of strategy and tactics. Clausewitz served in a number of campaigns during this era and was strongly influenced by his experiences. His famous book, On War (or Vom Krieg, in the original German), influences military thinking to this day.
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Anatol Rapoport, in an introduction to an edition of Clausewitz's book, discussed the way that war was viewed in the eighteenth century, prior to Clausewitz's study. Basically, Rapoport wanted to answer the question of “What is War?” His answer was that, like many other things, it depended on how you viewed it. There were three fundamental philosophies of how war was viewed, which Rapoport termed the eschatological, the cataclysmic, and the political.6
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The eschatological view of war, already been mentioned above, is the view that war will fulfill some grand design for mankind. This view is commonly held by religious groups, cults, and fanatics like Adolf Hitler.
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The cataclysmic view of war has also been briefly discussed above, in particular, the views of Richardson, the meterologist. This view is that war is a more-or-less inevitable phenomenon, like earthquakes, wildfires, or hurricanes, to be avoided if possible, but otherwise one to be endured. This view usually prevails among the poor and powerless who are usually victims of war and who have little choice in when and where war occurs.
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The political view of war was that it was more or less a tool to be used in the game of international “chess” played for control of territory and resources. This was the view of war that prevailed in the eighteenth century among many national leaders, military and political. War, like diplomacy, was a means to achieve the ends of the nation-state.
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Industry, Capitalism, and the Twentieth Century View of War
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War as Industry
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War as Business
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The Opportunity Costs of War
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Dwight Eisenhower, in a speech entitled The Chance for Peace, given in 1953 shortly after the death of Stalin, clearly outlined some of the economic opportunity costs of the Cold War:
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Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953.7
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The cost of war must be reckoned not only in dollars and cents but in the many opportunities it precludes.
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Social Human
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Economic
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Environmental
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Conclusion - The Ultimate Cost of War
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Notes
1Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 81.
2Lewis F. Richardson, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, (Quincy Wright and C.C. Lienau, eds). Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1960.
3 This includes the current resident of the White House, George W. Bush II. If you have read anything about Skull and Bones, its hard to put your faith in someone who is a member of that secret organization, and someone who would go through it's initiation procedure, and whose members include not only the current president, but his opponent in the last election, and his two predecessors in the Oval Office, Bill Clinton and George Bush I. For a little info on Skull and Bones, see Alexandra Robbins, Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths to Power, (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2002). Besides that, why is George Bush II, after six years as President, still unable to correctly pronounce the word “nuclear?“ Does he not have advisors?? Do they not know either, or are they too cowed to tell him that he sounds like a fool when he consistently mispronounces that word? Perhaps he is under the misconception that it is quaint or “folksy.” For a discussion of the danger of an isolated leader, see: Russell Baker and Charles Peters, “The Prince and his courtiers: at the White House, the Kremlin, and the Reichschancellery - The Culture of Institutions,” Washington Monthly, February, 1989 (originally published 1971).
4 See William H. McNeil, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 47-48.
5 With apologies to Graham Nash (I will have to look up the complete citation later), the lyrics are:
In an upstairs room in Blackpool
By the side of a northern sea
The army had my father
And my mother was having me
Military Madness was killing my country
Solitary Sadness comes over me
After the school was over and I moved
To the other side
I found a different country but I never
Lost my pride
Military Madness was killing the country
Solitary sadness creeps over me
And after the wars are over
And the body count is finally filed
I hope The Man discovers
What's driving the people wild
Military madness is killing your country
So much sadness between you and me
War, War, War, War, War, War
6 There were a number of other views, including the Eskimo view of war as an absurdity, and the view of war as an affair of honor, but these were views held by a minority of people. Anatol Rapoport, ed. On War, by Carl von Clausewitz (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1982), 12-17.
7 This speech was given before the American Society for Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953, and was also known as the "Cross of Iron" speech. In it, Eisenhower contrasts the Soviet Union's post-World War II doctrine as one of force, while the United States purportedly pursued peace and cooperation in the world. The President noted that the belligerence of the Soviet Union brought free nations together to avoid atomic war, and he challenges the new Soviet leadership to reject Stalin's style of governance.
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Bibliography
Baker, Russell, and Charles Peters. “The Prince and His Courtiers: at the White House, the Kremlin, and the Reichschancellery - The Culture of Institutions,” Washington Monthly, February, 1989 (originally published 1971).
Durant, Will and Ariel. The Lessons of History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968.
Levy, Jack S. War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495-1975. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1983.
McNeil, William H. Plagues and Peoples. New York: Doubleday, 1976.
Porter, Bruce. War and the Rise of the Modern State. New York: Macmillan, 1994.
Richardson, Lewis F. Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, (Quincy Wright and C.C. Lienau, Editors). Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1960.
Robbins, Alexandra. Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths to Power, (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2002).
Wright, Quincy. A Study of War; Second Edition, with a Commentary on War since 1942. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
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A plain-text version of the above essay is available here.
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Timelines of Major Wars since 1750
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About the WarData.net website and database project
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