an essay on war

Essays About War: Top 5 Examples and 5 Prompts

War is atrocious and there is an almost universal rule that we should be prevented; if you are writing essays about war, read our helpful guide.

Throughout history, war has driven human progress. It has led to the dissolution of oppressive regimes and the founding of new democratic countries. There is no doubt that the world would not be as it is without the many wars waged in the past.

War is waged to achieve a nation or organization’s goals, but what is the actual cost of progress? War has taken, and continues to take, countless lives. It is and is very costly in terms of resources as well. From the American Revolution to World Wars I and II to the Crusades and Hundred Years’ War of antiquity, wars throughout history have been bloody, brutal, and disastrous.

If you are writing essays about war, look at our top essay examples below.

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1. War Is Not Part of Human Nature by R. Brian Ferguson

2. essay on war and peace (author unknown), 3. the impacts of war on global health by sarah moore.

4. The Psychosocial Impacts of War and Armed Conflict on Children by Iman Farajallah, Omar Reda, H. Steven Moffic, John R. Peteet, and Ahmed Hankir

5. Is war a pre-requisite for peace? by Anna Cleary

5 prompts for essays about war, 1. is war justified, 2. why do countries go to war, 3. the effects of war, 4. moral and ethical issues concerning war, 5. reflecting on a historical war.

“Debate over war and human nature will not soon be resolved. The idea that intensive, high-casualty violence was ubiquitous throughout prehistory has many backers. It has cultural resonance for those who are sure that we as a species naturally tilt toward war. As my mother would say: “Just look at history!” But doves have the upper hand when all the evidence is considered. Broadly, early finds provide little if any evidence suggesting war was a fact of life.”

Ferguson disputes the popular belief that war is inherent to human nature, as evidenced by archaeological discoveries. Many archaeologists use the very same evidence to support the opposing view. Evidence reveals many instances where war was waged, but not fought. In the minds of Ferguson and many others, humanity may be predisposed to conflict and violence, but not war, as many believe.

“It also appears that if peace were to continue for a long period, people would become sick of the monotony of life and would seek war for a changed man is a highly dynamic creature and it seems that he cannot remain contented merely with works of peace-the cultivation of arts, the development of material comforts, the extension of knowledge, the means and appliances of a happy life.”

This essay provides an interesting perspective on war; other than the typical motivations for war, such as the desire to achieve one’s goals; the author writes that war disrupts the monotony of peace and gives participants a sense of excitement and uncertainty. In addition, it instills the spirit of heroism and bravery in people. However, the author does not dispute that war is evil and should be avoided as much as possible.

“War forces people to flee their homes in search of safety, with the latest figures from the UN estimating that around 70 million people are currently displaced due to war. This displacement can be incredibly detrimental to health, with no safe and consistent place to sleep, wash, and shelter from the elements. It also removes a regular source of food and proper nutrition. As well as impacting physical health, war adversely affects the mental health of both those actively involved in conflict and civilians.”

Moore discusses the side effects that war has on civilians. For example, it diverts resources used on poverty alleviation and infrastructure towards fighting. It also displaces civilians when their homes are destroyed, reduces access to food, water, and sanitation, and can significantly impact mental health, among many other effects.

4. The Psychosocial Impacts of War and Armed Conflict on Children by Iman Farajallah, Omar Reda, H. Steven Moffic, John R. Peteet, and Ahmed Hankir

“The damage done by war-related trauma can never be undone. We can, however, help reduce its long-term impacts, which can span generations. When we reach within ourselves to discover our humanity, it allows us to reach out to the innocent children and remind them of their resilience and beauty. Trauma can make or break us as individuals, families, and communities.”

In their essay, the authors explain how war can affect children. Children living in war-torn areas expectedly witness a lot of violence, including the killings of their loved ones. This may lead to the inability to sleep properly, difficulty performing daily functions, and a speech impediment. The authors write that trauma cannot be undone and can ruin a child’s life.

“The sociologist Charles Tilly has argued that war and the nation state are inextricably linked. War has been crucial for the formation of the nation state, and remains crucial for its continuation. Anthony Giddens similarly views a link between the internal pacification of states and their external violence. It may be that, if we want a durable peace, a peace built on something other than war, we need to consider how to construct societies based on something other than the nation state and its monopoly of violence.”

This essay discusses the irony that war is waged to achieve peace. Many justify war and believe it is inevitable, as the world seems to balance out an era of peace with another war. However, others advocate for total pacifism. Even in relatively peaceful times, organizations and countries have been carrying out “shadow wars” or engaging in conflict without necessarily going into outright war. Cleary cites arguments made that for peace to indeed exist by itself, societies must not be built on the war in the first place.

Many believe that war is justified by providing a means to peace and prosperity. Do you agree with this statement? If so, to what extent? What would you consider “too much” for war to be unjustified? In your essay, respond to these questions and reflect on the nature and morality of war.

Wars throughout history have been waged for various reasons, including geographical domination, and disagreement over cultural and religious beliefs. In your essay, discuss some of the reasons different countries go to war, you can look into the belief systems that cause disagreements, oppression of people, and leaders’ desire to conquer geographical land. For an interesting essay, look to history and the reasons why major wars such as WWI and WWII occurred.

In this essay, you can write about war’s effects on participating countries. You can focus on the impact of war on specific sectors, such as healthcare or the economy. In your mind, do they outweigh the benefits? Discuss the positive and negative effects of war in your essay. To create an argumentative essay, you can pick a stance if you are for or against war. Then, argue your case and show how its effects are positive, negative, or both.

Many issues arise when waging war, such as the treatment of civilians as “collateral damage,” keeping secrets from the public, and torturing prisoners. For your essay, choose an issue that may arise when fighting a war and determine whether or not it is genuinely “unforgivable” or “unacceptable.” Are there instances where it is justified? Be sure to examples where this issue has arisen before.

Humans have fought countless wars throughout history. Choose one significant war and briefly explain its causes, major events, and effects. Conduct thorough research into the period of war and the political, social, and economic effects occurred. Discuss these points for a compelling cause and effect essay.

For help with this topic, read our guide explaining “what is persuasive writing ?”If you still need help, our guide to grammar and punctuation explains more.

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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Essay on War - A nation or organisation may turn to war to reach its goals, but what is the actual cost of progress? Countless lives have been lost to war and continue to be lost. It costs a lot of money and resources as well. Wars have always been brutal, deadly, and tragic, from the American Revolution to World Wars I and II to the Crusades and the ancient Hundred Years' War. Here are a few sample essays on "war" .

100 Words Essay on War

The greatest destroyers of people in modern times are wars. No matter who wins a war, mankind loses in every case. Millions of people have died in battles during the past century, with World Wars I and II being the worst. Wars are typically fought to protect a nation. Whatever the motive, it is hazardous conduct that results in the loss of millions of priceless innocent lives and has dangerous impacts that even future generations will have to deal with.

The results of using nuclear bombs are catastrophic. The weapons business benefits when there is a war elsewhere in the world because it maintains its supply chain. Weapons that cause massive destruction are being made bigger and better. The only way to end wars is to raise awareness among the general public.

200 Words Essay on War

Without a doubt, war is terrible, and the most devastating thing that can happen to humans. It causes death and devastation, illness and poverty, humiliation and destruction. To evaluate the devastation caused by war, one needs to consider the havoc that was wrecked on several nations not too many years ago. A particularly frightening ability of modern wars is that they tend to become global so that they may absorb the entire world. The fact that some people view war as a great and heroic adventure that brings out the best in people does not change the fact that it is a horrible tragedy.

This is more true now that atomic weapons will be used to fight a war. War, according to some, is required. Looking at the past reveals that war has drastically changed throughout the nation's history. The destructive impacts of war have never been more prevalent in human history. We have experienced lengthy and brief wars of various kinds. There have been supporters of nonviolence and the brotherhood of man. Buddha, Christ, and Mahatma Gandhi have all lived. Despite this, war has always been fought, weapons are always used, military power has always been deployed, and there have always been armies in war.

500 Words Essay on War

If we take a closer look at human history, it will become evident that conflicts have existed ever since the primitive eras. Although efforts have been made to end it, this has not been successful so far. Thus, it appears that we are unable to achieve eternal peace. Many defend wars by claiming that nature's rules require them. Charles Darwin is placed in front of them to illustrate their point. He was the one who created the rule of the fittest. He claimed that everything in nature, whether alive or dead, is constantly engaged in a battle for survival. Only the strongest will survive in this fight. Therefore, it is believed that without battle, humankind won't be able to progress.

Impacts of War

People fail to see that war invariably results in severe damage. They ignored the nonviolent principles taught by Mahatma Gandhi, who used them to liberate his country from the shackles of slavery. They fail to consider that if Gandhi could push out the powerful Britishers without resorting to violence, why shouldn't others do the same? Wars are unavoidable calamities, and there are no words to adequately depict the vast quantity and scope of their tragedies. The atrocities of the two world wars must never be forgotten. There was tremendous murder and property devastation during the battles. There were thousands of widows and orphans. War spreads falsehoods and creates hatred. People start acting brutally selfishly. Humanity and morals suffer as a result.

War is an Enemy

War is the enemy of all humanity and human civilisation. Nothing positive can come of it. Consequently, it should never be celebrated in any way. In addition to impeding national progress, it undermines social cohesion. It slows down the rate of human progress. Wars are not the answer to the world's issues. Instead, they cause issues and generate hatred among nations. War can settle one issue but creates far too many other ones. The two most horrific examples of the war's after-effects are Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People are still enduring the effects of war 77 years later. Whatever the reason for war, it always ends in the widespread loss of human life and property.

Disadvantages of War

Massive human deaths and injuries, the depletion of financial resources, environmental degradation, lost productivity, and long-term harm to military personnel are all drawbacks of war. Families are split apart by war. Both towns and cities are destroyed by it. People become more sensitive, and every industry faces collapse. People’s health declines physically and they lose their sense of security. They won't have any security, and those who win the battle will treat the citizens of the defeated nation as their slaves and prohibit them from the right to work. After the war, there will be a lack of jobs and corruption issues for the nation to deal with.

Russia – Ukraine War

The world saw great turmoil beginning in February 2022 with the Russian-Ukraine War. Russia's invasion of Ukraine was the most serious conventional attack on a nation, bringing a severe economic crisis to the world. India has taken a neutral stance for Russia, keeping in mind the two countries' long-standing alliance, especially in its foreign policies and positive international relationships. Russia was concerned about Ukraine's security due to its intention to join NATO and invaded Ukraine in 2014. Additionally, Russia provided help to the rebels in the eastern Ukrainian districts of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The war between Russia and Ukraine has had a substantial impact on oil prices and other commodity prices, as well as increased trade uncertainty. India has economic troubles due to Western countries' supply disruptions and limited trade with Russia.

War has historically been the worst mark on humanity. Although it was made by man, it is now beyond the power of any human force. To preserve humanity, the entire human species must now reflect on this. Otherwise, neither humanity nor war will survive.

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How to Write a Perfect Essay On/About War (A Complete Guide)

War is painful. It causes mass death and the destruction of infrastructure on an unimaginable scale. Unfortunately, as humans, we have not yet been able to prevent wars and conflicts from happening. Nevertheless, we are studying them to understand them and their causes better.

In this post, we will look at how to write a war essay. The information we will share here will help anyone craft a brilliant war essay, whatever their level of education.

Let’s commence.

What Is a War Essay?

A war essay is an essay on an armed conflict involving two states or one state and an armed group. You will be asked to write a war essay at some point if you are taking a history course, diplomacy course, international relations course, war studies course, or conflict management course.

When asked to write about a war, it is important to consider several things. These include the belligerents, the location of the conflict, the leading cause or causes of the conflict, the course of the event so far, and the possible solutions to the conflict.

The sections below will help you discover everything you need to know about how to write war essays.

An essay about war can take many forms, including:

Expository essay – where you explore the timeline of the wars (conflicts), losses/consequences, significant battles, and notable dates.
Argumentative essay . A war essay that debates an aspect of a certain war.
Cause and Effect essay examines the events leading to war and its aftermath.
Compare and contrast a war essay that pits one war or an aspect of the war against an
Document-based question (DBQ) that analyzes the historical war documentation to answer a prompt.
Creative writing pieces where you narrate or describe an experience of or with war.
A persuasive essay where use ethos, pathos, and logos (rhetorical appeals) to convince your readers to adopt your points.

The Perfect Structure/Organization for a War Essay

To write a good essay about war, you must understand the war essay structure. The war essay structure is the typical 3-section essay structure. It starts with an introduction section, followed by a body section, and then a conclusion section. Find out what you need to include in each section below:

1. Introduction

In the introduction paragraph , you must introduce the reader to the war or conflict you are discussing. But before you do so, you need to hook the reader to your work. You can only do this by starting your introduction with an attention-grabbing statement . This can be a fact about the war, a quote, or a statistic.

Once you have grabbed the reader's attention, you should introduce the reader to the conflict your essay is focused on. You should do this by providing them with a brief background on the conflict.

Your thesis statement should follow the background information. This is the main argument your essay will be defending.

The introduction section of a war essay is typically one paragraph long. But it can be two paragraphs long for long war essays.

In the body section of your war essay, you need to provide information to support your thesis statement. A typical body section of a college essay will include three to four body paragraphs. Each body paragraph starts with a topic sentence and solely focuses on it. This is how your war essay should be.

Once you develop a thesis statement, you should think of the points you will use to defend it and then list them in terms of strength. The strongest of these points should be your topic sentences.

When developing the body section of your war essay, make sure your paragraphs flow nicely. This will make your essay coherent. One of the best ways to make your paragraphs flow is to use transition words, phrases, and sentences.

The body section of a war essay is typically three to four paragraphs long, but it can be much longer.

3. Conclusion

In the conclusion section of your war essay, you must wrap up everything nicely. The recommended way to do this is to restate your thesis statement to remind the reader what your essay was about. You should follow this by restating the main points supporting your thesis statement.

Your thesis and the restatement of your main points should remind your reader of what your essay was all about. You should then end your essay with a food-for-thought, a recommendation, or a solution. Whatever you use to end your essay, make sure it is relevant to what you have just covered in your essay, and it shows that you have widely read on the topic.

The structure of a Gun Control Essay
Writing an IB extended essay well
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How to write a war Essay? – The Steps

Several wars have taken place on earth, including:

World War I and II
Russian Civil War
Chinese Civil War
Lebanese Civil War
Syrian Civil War
The Spanish Civil War
The American Civil War
Afghanistan War

The list of wars that have happened to date is endless.

Writing a war essay is never easy. You need to plan your work meticulously to develop a brilliant war essay. If you are assigned to write a war essay or paper, follow the steps below to develop a brilliant essay on any conflict.

1. Read The Assignment Instructions Carefully

You must know precisely what to do to write a brilliant war essay. College professors typically provide multiple instructions when they ask students to write college essays. Students must then read the instructions carefully to write precisely what their professors want to see.

Therefore, when you get a war essay assignment, you must read the instructions carefully to understand what is needed of you entirely. Know exactly what conflict your professor wants you to focus on, what aspect of the conflict (the origin, the chronology of events leading to the war, external factors, etc.), what sources they want you to use, and the number of pages they want.

Knowing what your professor needs will help you to develop it nicely.

2. Do Your Research

After reviewing the war assignment instructions, you should research the topic you’ve been asked to focus on. Do this by Googling the topic (and its variations), searching it in your college database, and searching it in scholarly databases. As you read more on the topic, take a lot of notes. This will help you to understand the topic better, plus its nuances.

Once you understand the topic well, you should start to think about what precisely your essay should focus on. If you like, this will be the foundation of your essay or the thesis statement.

Once you settle on the thesis statement, read more on the topic but focus on information that will help you defend your thesis statement.

3. Craft A Thesis Statement and Create an Outline

At this point, you should have a rough thesis statement . Once you have read more information on it as per the previous step, you should be able to refine it into a solid and argumentative statement at this point.

So refine your thesis statement to make it perfect. Your thesis statement can be one or two sentences long but never more. Once you have created it, you should create an outline.

An outline is like a treasure map – it details where you must go comprehensively. Creating an outline will give you an overview of what your essay will look like and whether it will defend your thesis statement. It will also make it easier for you to develop your essay.

Ensure your outline includes a striking title for your conflict essay, the topic sentence for each body paragraph, and the supporting evidence for each topic sentence.

4. Start Writing the Introduction

When you finish writing your essay, you should start writing the introduction. This is where the rubber meets the road –the actual writing of your war essay begins.

Since you have already created a thesis statement and an outline, you should not find it challenging to write your introduction. Follow your outline to develop a friendly compact, and informative introduction to the conflict your essay will focus on.

Read your introduction twice to make sure it is as compact and as informative as it can be. It should also be straightforward to understand.

5. Write The Rest of Your Essay

Once you have created the introduction to your war essay, you should create the body section. The body section of your essay should follow your outline. Remember the outline you created in step 3 has the points you should focus on in each body paragraph. So follow it to make developing your essay’s body section easy.

As you develop your essay's body section, ensure you do everything nicely. By this, we mean you develop each topic sentence entirely using the sandwich paragraph writing method.

Also, make sure there is a nice flow between your sentences and between your paragraphs.

6. Conclude Your War Essay

After writing the rest of your essay, you should offer a robust conclusion. Your conclusion should also follow your outline. As usual, it should start with a thesis restatement and a restatement of all your main points.

It should then be followed by a concluding statement that provides the reader with food for thought. You should never include new information in your conclusion paragraph. This will make it feel like another body paragraph, yet the purpose of your conclusion should be to give your reader the feeling that your essay is ending or done.

7. Proofread and Edit Your Essay

This is the last step of writing a war essay or any other one. This step is final, but it is perhaps the most important step. This is because it distinguishes an ordinary essay from an extraordinary one.

You should proofread your essay at least thrice, especially if it is short. When you do it the first time, you should look for grammar errors and other basic mistakes. Eliminate all the errors and mistakes you find. When you do it the second time, you should do it to ensure the flow of your essay is perfect.

And when you do it the third and last time, you should use editing software like Grammarly.com to catch all the errors you might have missed.

When you proofread your war essay in this manner, you should be able to transform it from average to excellent. After completing this step, your war essay will be ready for submission.

How to write an essay from scratch
Writing a reflection essay on any topic (including war)

Tips for Writing a Brilliant War Essay

Follow the tips below to develop a brilliant essay.

A brilliant topic is always vital.

When you are assigned a war essay, you should do your best to choose or create a brilliant topic for your essay. A boring topic focusing on something discussed and debated a million times will never be brilliant.

A strong thesis statement is essential.

Along with a brilliant topic, you need a strong thesis statement to make your war essay brilliant. This is because a strong thesis statement is like a lighthouse – it will guide safely to the harbor (conclusion).

Do not be afraid to discuss the tragedy.

Sometimes war details can feel too graphic or gruesome, leading to hesitance on the part of students when they are writing articles. Do not hesitate or be afraid to discuss tragedy if discussing tragedy will add to the substance of your essay.

Be impartial.

Sometimes it can be challenging to write an impartial essay, especially if you relate to or strongly support one side in a conflict. Well, this should never happen. As a researcher, you must be as impartial as you can be. You must inform your reader of all the facts available to you without bias so they have an accurate impression of whatever you are talking about.

Ensure your work has flow.

This is one of the most important things you must do when writing a war essay. Since war essays sometimes discuss disparate issues, ending with a disjointed essay is straightforward. You should do all you can to ensure your workflows are well, including using transition words generously.

Proofread your work.

You should always proofread your essays before submission. This is what will always upgrade them from ordinary to extraordinary. If you don’t proofread your work, you will submit subpar work that will not get you a good grade.

Explore unexplored angles.

Chances are, whatever war or conflict you write about has already been written on or reported on a million times. If you want your essay to be interesting, you should explore unexplored angles on conflicts. This will make your work very interesting.

War Essay Sample to Inspire your Writing

Here is a short sample of a war essay on the Russia-Ukraine War.

The most affected cities in the Russia-Ukraine War 2022

The Russia-Ukraine war has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions across Ukraine. It has also led to the destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure across Ukraine. The eastern cities of Bakhmut, Kharkiv, and Mariupol are the most affected cities in the Russia-Ukraine War 2022.

Bakhmut in southeastern Ukraine is the site of the bloodiest and longest-running battle between Russian and Ukrainian forces. The city is strategic as it is close to supply routes that the Russians use in the occupied territories of southern Ukraine. It is estimated that as much as 90% of Bakhmut has been destroyed in Russia’s bid to take over the city.

Mariupol is a Ukrainian port city between Russia and the Russian-occupied Crimea. Russia decided to take the city early on to deny Ukraine a foothold close to its border and operation areas in the south. Yet the city was defended by a fanatic Ukrainian military battalion that swore not to give it up. This led to Russia bombing much of the city to the ground. In the end, Russia won the battle for Mariupol and now controls the city and the surrounding area.

Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second biggest city. It is less than 45 minutes away from the Russian border. Taking the city was one of the top priorities for Russia at the start of the war because of its proximity to Russia. Nevertheless, Ukraine deployed much of its army to defend the city and has managed to do so. Nevertheless, this has come at a cost. Much of Kharkiv’s infrastructure is destroyed. Its power lines, highways, roads, railways, dams, and industries are destroyed.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict has affected much of Ukraine, especially the eastern cities of Bakhmut, Kharkiv, and Mariupol. All three cities have suffered tremendous infrastructure damage in the past few months. Efforts must be made by the two state parties and the international community to prevent further destruction of Ukrainian cities in this conflict.

War Essay Topic Ideas

Not sure what to write about in your war essay? Here are some ideas to get your creative juices flowing.

Causes of Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022
What led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014?
Causes of Tigray conflict in Ethiopia
Somalia-Kenya border conflict
Conflict in eastern DRC
Secessionist movements in the UK
Western Sahara versus Morocco
Causes of the Libyan Civil War
The American war of independence
The American civil war
The English civil war
The Napoleonic wars
The French invasion of Russia
Causes of the crusader wars
The German invasion of Poland and its consequences
The battle of Stalingrad and its bearing on the cause of WWII
The causes of World War I
The Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia
What caused America to end the Vietnam War
The Cuban Missile Crisis
The fall of the Berlin Wall
The Arms Race
Role of the cold world war in shaping the world we live today
The causes and consequences of the Syrian Civil War
The role of propaganda in the Iraq War
Implications of the Syrian Civil War

As you Come to the End, …

An essay on war is not easy to write, but it can be written when you have the right information. This post provides you with all the vital information needed to write a brilliant war essay. We hope that this info makes it easy for you to write your war essay.

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How to Write War Essay: Russia Ukraine War

Understanding the Purpose and Scope of a War Essay

A condition of armed conflict between nations or between groups living in one nation is known as war. Sounds not like much fun, does it? Well, conflicts have been a part of human history for thousands of years, and as industry and technology have developed, they have grown more devastating. As awful as it might seem, a war typically occurs between a country or group of countries against a rival country to attain a goal through force. Civil and revolutionary wars are examples of internal conflicts that can occur inside a nation.

Your history class could ask you to write a war essay, or you might be personally interested in learning more about conflicts, in which case you might want to learn how to write an academic essay about war. In any scenario, we have gathered valuable guidance on how to organize war essays. Let's first examine the potential reasons for a conflict before moving on to the outline for a war essay.

Economic Gain - A country's desire to seize control of another country's resources frequently starts conflicts. Even when the proclaimed goal of a war is portrayed to the public as something more admirable, most wars have an economic motivation at their core, regardless of any other possible causes.
Territorial Gain - A nation may determine that it requires additional land for habitation, agriculture, or other uses. Additionally, the territory might serve as buffer zones between two violent foes.
Religion - Religious disputes can stem from extremely profound issues. They may go dormant for many years before suddenly resurfacing later.
Nationalism - In this sense, nationalism simply refers to the act of violently subjugating another country to demonstrate the country's superiority. This frequently manifests as an invasion.
Revenge - Warfare can frequently be motivated by the desire to punish, make up for, or simply exact revenge for perceived wrongdoing. Revenge has a connection to nationalism as well because when a nation has been wronged, its citizens are inspired by patriotism and zeal to take action.
Defensive War - In today's world, when military aggression is being questioned, governments will frequently claim that they are fighting in a solely protective manner against a rival or prospective aggressor and that their conflict is thus a 'just' conflict. These defensive conflicts may be especially contentious when conducted proactively, with the basic premise being that we are striking them before they strike us.

How to Write War Essay with a War Essay Outline

Just like in compare and contrast examples and any other forms of writing, an outline for a war essay assists you in organizing your research and creating a good flow. In general, you keep to the traditional three-part essay style, but you can adapt it as needed based on the length and criteria of your school. When planning your war paper, consider the following outline:

Introduction

Definition of war
Importance of studying wars
Thesis statement

Body Paragraphs

Causes of the War
Political reasons
Economic reasons
Social reasons
Historical reasons
Major Players in the War
Countries and their leaders
Military leaders
Allies and enemies
Strategies and Tactics
Military tactics and techniques
Strategic planning
Weapons and technology
Impact of the War
On the countries involved
On civilians and non-combatants
On the world as a whole
Summary of the main points
Final thoughts on the war
Suggestions for future research

If you found this outline template helpful, you can also use our physics help for further perfecting your academic assignments.

Begin With a Relevant Hook

A hook should be the focal point of the entire essay. A good hook for an essay on war can be an interesting statement, an emotional appeal, a thoughtful question, or a surprising fact or figure. It engages your audience and leaves them hungry for more information.

Follow Your Outline

An outline is the single most important organizational tool for essay writing. It allows the writer to visualize the overall structure of the essay and focus on the flow of information. The specifics of your outline depend on the type of essay you are writing. For example, some should focus on statistics and pure numbers, while others should dedicate more space to abstract arguments.

How to Discuss Tragedy, Loss, and Sentiment

War essays are particularly difficult to write because of the terrible nature of war. The life is destroyed, the loved ones lost, fighting, death, great many massacres and violence overwhelm, and hatred for the evil enemy, amongst other tragedies, make emotions run hot, which is why sensitivity is so important. Depending on the essay's purpose, there are different ways to deal with tragedy and sentiment.

The easiest one is to stick with objective data rather than deal with the personal experiences of those who may have been affected by these events. It can be hard to remain impartial, especially when writing about recent deaths and destruction. But it is your duty as a researcher to do so.

However, it’s not always possible to avoid these issues entirely. When you are forced to tackle them head-on, you should always be considerate and avoid passing swift and sweeping judgment.

Summing Up Your Writing

When you have finished presenting your case, you should finish it off with some sort of lesson it teaches us. Armed conflict is a major part of human nature yet. By analyzing the events that transpired, you should be able to make a compelling argument about the scale of the damage the war caused, as well as how to prevent it in the future.

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Russia Ukraine War

Russian President Vladimir Putin started the Russian invasion in the early hours of February 24 last year. According to him. the Ukrainian government had been committing genocide against Russian-speaking residents in the eastern Ukraine - Donbas region since 2014, calling the onslaught a 'special military operation.'

The Russian president further connected the assault to the NATO transatlantic military alliance commanded by the United States. He said the Russian military was determined to stop NATO from moving farther east and establishing a military presence in Ukraine, a part of the Soviet Union, until its fall in 1991.

All of Russia's justifications have been rejected by Ukraine and its ally Western Countries. Russia asserted its measures were defensive, while Ukraine declared an emergency and enacted martial law. According to the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the administration's objective is not only to repel offensives but also to reclaim all Ukrainian land that the Russian Federation has taken, including Crimea.

Both sides of the conflict accuse the other of deploying indiscriminate force, which has resulted in many civilian deaths and displacements. According to current Ukraine news, due to the difficulty of counting the deceased due to ongoing combat, the death toll is likely far higher. In addition, countless Ukrainian refugees were compelled to leave their homeland in search of safety and stability abroad.

Diplomatic talks have been employed to try to end the Ukraine-Russia war. Several rounds of conversations have taken place in various places. However, the conflict is still raging as of April 2023, and there is no sign of a truce.

World War II

World War II raged from 1939 until 1945. Most of the world's superpowers took part in the conflict, fought between two military alliances headed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, and the Axis Powers, led by Germany, Italy, and Japan.

If you'd like to explore it more in-depth, consider using our history essay service for a World War 2 essay pdf sample!

After World War II, a persistent political conflict between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies became known as the Cold War. It's hard to say who was to blame for the cold war essay. American citizens have long harbored concerns about Soviet communism and expressed alarm over Joseph Stalin's brutal control of his own nation. On their side, the Soviets were angry at the Americans for delaying their participation in World War II, which led to the deaths of tens of millions of Russians, and for America's long-standing unwillingness to recognize the USSR as a genuine member of the world community.

Vietnam War

If you're thinking about writing the Vietnam War essay, you should know that it was a protracted military battle that lasted in Vietnam from 1955 to 1975. The North Vietnamese communist government fought South Vietnam and its main ally, the United States, in the lengthy, expensive, and contentious Vietnam War. The ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union exacerbated the issue. The Vietnam War claimed the lives of more than 3 million individuals, more than half of whom were Vietnamese civilians.

American Civil War

Consider writing an American Civil War essay where the Confederate States of America, a grouping of eleven southern states that seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861, and the United States of America battled each other. If you're wondering what caused the civil war, you should know that the long-standing dispute about the legitimacy of slavery is largely responsible for how the war started.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

After over a century, the Israel-Palestine conflict has evolved into one of the most significant and current problems in the Middle East. A war that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people destroyed their homes and gave rise to terrorist organizations that still hold the region hostage. Simply described, it is a conflict between two groups of people for ownership of the same piece of land. One already resided there, while the other was compelled to immigrate to this country owing to rising antisemitism and later settled there. For Israelis and Palestinians alike, as well as for the larger area, the war continues to have substantial political, social, and economic repercussions.

The Syrian Civil War

Pro-democracy protests broke out in southern Deraa in March 2011 due to upheavals against oppressive leaders in neighboring nations. When the Syrian government employed lethal force to quell the unrest, widespread protests calling for the president's resignation broke out.

The country entered a civil war as the violence quickly increased. After hundreds of rebel organizations emerged, the fight quickly expanded beyond a confrontation between Syrians supporting or opposing Mr. Assad. Everyone believes a political solution is necessary, even though it doesn't seem like it will soon.

Russia-Ukraine War Essay Sample

With the Russian-Ukrainian war essay sample provided below from our paper writing experts, you can gain more insight into structuring a flawless paper.

Why is there a war between Russia and Ukraine?

Final Words

To understand our past and the present, we must study conflicts since they are a product of human nature and civilization. Our graduate essay writing service can produce any kind of essay you want, whether it is about World War II, the Cold War, or another conflict. Send us your specifications with your ' write my essay ' request, and let our skilled writers help you wow your professor!

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How to Research a Topic: A Step-by-Step Guide

635 War Topics to Write about & Examples

Can’t think of interesting wars to write about? Check out this list for inspiration! Here, you will find best war topics to write about, be it WW1, Vietnam War, or the Cold War. Choose a catchy title for war-themed paper or speech, and don’t forget to read our essay examples!

🔝 Top 10 War Essay Topics to Write About

🏆 best war topic ideas & essay examples, 👍 good essay topics on war, 📌 simple & easy war title ideas, 🎓 writing prompts for war, 💡 interesting war topics to write about, 📑 good research topics about war, ❓ research questions about war, ✅ war argumentative essay topics.

The Evolution of Warfare
The Economic Impact of Wars
Is Just War Theory Ethical?
How War Impacts Civilians
War Crimes and International Justice
The Role of Women in Armed Conflicts
Triggering Factors and Aftermath of World War I
What Is the Role of Media in War Propaganda?
The Psychological Effects of War on Soldiers
Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Stability
Similarities and Differences Between Korean and Vietnam Wars There were also several differences such as the way of development of the conflicts where the Korean War was during three years, and the Vietnam War was the prolonged struggle, the participation of the Chinese […]
War and Peace in Modern World It should be realized that not only people of each country should become civilized but the governments as well because welfare of the whole world rather than of separate countries is at stake and with […]
Analysis of the Russian War in Ukraine The war is the first in the history of Europe, which occurs during the time of the existence of social networks, and cell phones.
Effects of War on Economics, Politics, Society It is unfortunate that the major victims of any war are usually women and their children. Most of them are prone to sexual slavery and brutality in during the war.
First World War: Causes and Effects This later led to the entry of countries allied to Serbia into the war so as to protect their partners. In conclusion, the First World War led to the loss of many lives.
“The Cold War: A New History” by John Lewis Gaddis In Chapter 1 “Return of Fear”, Gaddis states that the Cold War was caused due to the competing and divergent ideologies of the United States and the Soviet Union.
The Destructive Impact of War: Causes and Consequences The movie Paths of Glory is one of the best examples of the absurdity of war. The author’s opinion is that the soldiers are not entirely aware of their position.
American Dream After World War I People lost vision of what this dream was supposed to mean and it became a dream, not of the vestal and industrious, but of the corrupt coterie, hence corrupting the dream itself.
Sociological Criticism of Twain’s “The War Prayer” In the given essay, it is discussed that The War Prayer cannot be viewed solely as a story of a pacifist, as the main argument is weak and unjustified. That is why The War Prayer […]
Positive and Negative Effects of WW1 on Canada: Essay Nonetheless, the war led to great negative impacts such as loss of lives, economic downtrend, and the generation of tensions involving the Francophones and Anglophones who disagreed after the emergence of the notion of conscription.
The Conclusion of The Civil War The main reason that the Confederacy succeeded from the Union was the issue of States’ rights which are guaranteed by the Constitution but were almost completely lost following the Civil War.
The World War 2 Positive and Negative Repercussions The Effects Of The 2nd World War: The fall of world major powers: The war did not just end, but it had some positive and negative effect to the countries both involved and those that […]
War, Its Definition, History and Aspects It should be known that there are a lot of moral theories that revolve around war and this is something that the society needs to understand.
Reflecting the Horrors of War People learn more about the horrors of war through literature but do not infer from experience they gain; the only way they apply the knowledge about the war is the development of more sophisticated weapon […]
The Cold War and the Balance of Power Theory The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Communist Block have led to a complete change in the balance of power in the international arena.
Miscommunication Problems: the US and Japan in World War II At the beginning of 1945, the leaders of such countries as the United States, the United Kingdom, and China offered the document that outlined the conditions of the Japanese surrender under which Hirohito could stay […]
“The One Day War” by Judith Soloway Review The author describes the project, in which all the events of the Civil War are shown shortened to only one day.
Music as a Weapon During the Vietnam War Music to the soldiers in Vietnam acted as a tool to remind all troops of the responsibility that they had taken by being on the battlefield.
American history: The Civil War (1861-1865) It was a belief of Federalists that in order to ensure the union does not collapse, there was need for the federal government to hold on to power.
Are 18-21 Years Old Psychologically Mature Enough to Go for War/Military? This was done to improve the overall welfare of the service and the inclusion of the eighteen years old meant that they were psychologically fit to offer service in the military and war.
World War 2 Consequences The major causes of this Great War were the unresolved issues that resulted from the World War 1. Another thing that led to the World War 2 was the failure of the League of Nations.
“The Sorrow of War” by Bao Ninh: Memory as a Central Idea The image of soldier Kien in The Sorrow of War demonstrates the difficulties of the Vietnamese people before, through and after this war.
Main Characters in “War” Story by Luigi Pirandello Upon considering the main characters in the short story “War” by Luigi Pirandello, I feel that I identify with the least is the mother of the boy being sent off to war.
Propaganda During World War II The Second World War was a complicated time for both the general public and the authorities since while the former worried for their safety, family, and homeland, the latter needed to maintain the national spirit […]
Causes of World War II Therefore the desire by the Germans under Hitler to conquer other countries and the desire by the Japanese to expand their territory was the key cause of the war in Europe and subsequently the World […]
Could the US Prevent the Start of World War II? Some believe that the United States of America could prevent the outbreak of the war. Therefore, it is possible to assume that the USA could not have prevented the start of the Second World War […]
Peace Importance and War Effects on Countries This essay seeks to outline several evidences to prove that peace is the most important thing in the world The Second World War was one of the most destructive battles in the world.
The 1930s English Poetry: Pen at War Auden’s poem uses conventional structure in the form of a sonnet although the the rhymes are not as smooth and lyrical, but the substance of the poetry remains in the era of the 1930s.
War and Violence Metaphors in Newspaper Headlines For both purposes, the use of metaphorical language in headlines is crucial to catch the people’s attention and to trigger a chain of association that will direct the readers’ focus to a particular side of […]
War and Violence: Predisposition in Human Beings Past wars and violence have shown that most wars emanated out of the need to accumulate resources. This suggests that we have to comprehend war economies and the role of greed in perpetuating violence.
World War II Innovations Named as the Manhattan Project during World War II, the nuclear program of the Allies led to catastrophic consequences for the Axis forces, particularly in the context of the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which […]
The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars Comparison To me, one of the most striking features connecting the works was the resemblance between Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings and Han Solo in A New Hope.
Total War of World War I The paper will demonstrate that the First World War was a total war since it bore most the hallmark characteristics of the total war including unlimited warfare, prioritization of armament efforts, involvement of the civilian […]
Post-Cold War Challenges At the time when strained relations between the US and the Soviet Union ended, the financial systems of several countries, particularly those in Eastern Europe, were in the process of collapsing.
Kien’s Experience in The Sorrow of War by Ninh The Vietnam War was perceived as injustice because of the discrepancy between the loose form it took and the form the soldiers had been trained to identify and label as such.
Shintoism and World War II in Japan The impact of religions on the world throughout history is undeniable, it can be seen how different religions include in their teachings all of the life aspects and affect them in a way or another.
A Historical Literary Analysis: The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam by Bau Nihn The nonlinear narrative coupled with a series of reminiscences and flashbacks, enhances the realism of the story in that it is indicative of the human memory process and the mind’s ability to cope with and […]
World War II, Causes and Outcomes: Lesson Plan It includes the key concepts, objectives, materials, and the description of the activities that teachers can use to introduce new material to the students in the 11th and 12th grades.
Effects of the Industrial Revolution in Relation to World War I During the last period of the 19th century all the way to the early 20th century, Europe and America experienced revolutions in communication, transportation and weapons which were very crucial particularly in the manner in […]
“The Sorrow of the War” by Bao Ninh The cause of the Vietnam War is partly because of the policies of the United States in meddling with the affairs of the Vietnam government.
“The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War” by Downs At the very outset, it was clear to the soldiers that the war in Indochina was not being conducted in terms of the glory myths on which they had been raised. The second part of […]
World War I Technology Although the question of the origins of the Great War is highly debated, and although this war is considered by many as the beginning of a new stage in history and the real starting point […]
Effects of the Pact of Steel Agreement on World War II He was a strong believer in the strength of the people as the backbone of the country and not the strength of the individual.
Wars in the Middle East Answering the following question will help understand the war is unjust, why is Iraq and Afghanistan the focus regarding attacks on terrorism, are the allegations against the Middle East be substantiated, is there sinister motive […]
Why the Reconstruction After the Civil War Was a Failure The reconstruction era refers to the period following the civil war whereby the numerous different affiliations in the government intended to find a solution to the socio-economic and political problems imposed by the civil war, […]
The Cola Wars Case: Industry Analysis In light of the fact that there are many similar products available for the target market, the bargaining power of consumers is very high.
Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War The Vietnam War caused unintended consequences for the civil rights movements of the 1960s as it awakened the African-Americans’ consciousness on the racism and despotism that they experienced in the United States.
The Vietnam War in the “Child of Two Worlds” Therefore, in the future, he is like to live in the outside world rather than in the inside one. Therefore, Lam wants to start a new life in the US and forgets his roots, which […]
Why Did the United States Lose the Vietnam War? The Office of the Secretary of Defense had become demoralized due to the events that had taken place; hence, it was unwilling to escalate the war further due to the decline of the army troops […]
Korean War: History, Causes, and Effects The Korean War which is termed as the forgotten war was a military conflict that started in June 1950 between North Korean who were supported by peoples republic of China backed by Soviet Union and […]
Positive Results of the War on Drugs The present section argues that the War on Drugs yielded some significant results in the United States, mainly thanks to the country’s advantageous geographic position, in terms of reducing both production and consumption of drugs […]
Peloponnesian War: Summary, Causes, & Effects According to Bagnall, the major cause of the war as accounted by Thucydides was the indiscriminate expansion of Athenian power. The honor was for his contribution to the cautious policy that the Spartans employed during […]
Prisoner of War Camp as an Economic Network The paper forms a thesis statement that ” a viable economic network would be formed even when there are severe restrictions and a common currency is evolved and that the currency is subjected to ups […]
The Film Industry During Cold War The end of world war two marked the start of the cold war between the Unites States of America and the Soviet Union.
World War II Propaganda and Its Effects The purpose of this paper is to examine the confrontation between the German and the Soviet propaganda machines during the period of the Second Patriotic War, outline the goals and purposes of each, and identify […]
The Mexican-American War Therefore, for the interest of peace in the region, the US should not have engaged Mexico in this bloody war. However, the US should not have engaged in the war.
Lysistrata: An Anti-War Play The action evolves around the idea to come about the salvation of Greek people that is hatched by the main heroine of the play Lysistrata who encourages all women of Greece to withhold their marriage […]
The Role Played by Texans in World War II Involvement in the war was expected because the US was against Japan’s entry into Middle East, and colonization of Africa and certain regions of Europe by Germany and Italy. The US was greatly perturbed after […]
The End of the Cold War Analyzing Gorbachevs actions and his incentives in the economy of the USSR, it is possible to conclude that the primary aim of these actions was the destruction of the welfare of the country, the growth […]
The Effects of the Korea Division on South Korea After the Korean War The Korean War of 1950 to 1953, was a war between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, backed up by China and the Soviet Union; and the Republic of Korea, backed by the United States […]
Women in World War II The involvement of women in the war was quite significant to the women as they were able to have a strong arguing point after the war and this made it possible for the women to […]
Freedom in Antebellum America: Civil War and Abolishment of Slavery The American Civil War, which led to the abolishment of slavery, was one of the most important events in the history of the United States.
First Fitna: Islamic Civil War Evaluating the situation, it appears that the First Islamic Civil war led to the split in the Muslim religion caused by the effects of the Arbitration Agreement developed after the battle of Siffin.
Outcomes of the Wars of the Roses The wars ended with the ascendancy of Henry, of the House of Tudor, to the throne. This marked the start of the war of the roses as Richard Duke of York and his supporters sought […]
Effects of War on Humanity in Terms of Human Rights The effects not only affect the coalition governments in war, but also members of the attacked countries for instance, Iraq people recorded the greatest number of fatalities and casualties during the Iraq war.
Air Defense Artillery in the Gulf War Operation Desert Storm is the first combat use of the missile MIM-104C Patriot, which became the backbone of the Allied air defense system.
The Beat Poets Generation in Post-war America The poetry of the Beat Generation exuded of the ideal of the Beat Generation that was to “escape” in a “vision”.
The First World War’s Long- and Short-Term Causes Numerous conflicts witnessed in Europe towards the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th formed the basis for resentment, hate, and the arms race that led to the Great War.
Cold War: Summary, Causes, History, & Facts The plot of the Soviet Union to spread the issue of communism to all parts of the world stands out as the major cause of the Cold War.
The Role of Canada in World War I The beginning of the war was marked by great losses in the field and in the economy of the state. By the war’s end, Canada had shown itself as a great power, which allowed the […]
Two Main Causes of Wars For instance, wars have existed since the time of the civilization revolution and even the wars are constantly recorded in the holy books such as the bible and the Koran respectively.
UAE Involvement in the Iran-Iraq War This paper will argue that the UAE contributed to the lengthy duration of the war due to the monetary support offered to the Iraqis and the Iranians.
Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 This war also led to significant recognition of the Christians living within the empire and a peaceful co existence was thus required.
Themes in “The Wars” Novel by Timothy Findley The title of the story, The Wars, is not that simple and represents two different types of war, which are inherent to people: the war that happens on the battlefield, and the war that happens […]
World War 2 Leaders Comparison: Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler World War 2 remains one of the most significant and historically important events in the entire world because the United States of America, Japan, and the majority of European countries were involved in it.
The Turning Point of War; Stalingrad Battle The Stalingrad battle began in September 1942 during the winter, led by the “German commander of the sixth army, General Paulus and assisted by Fourth Panzer Army”; indeed, General Paulus was ordered by Hitler to […]
The Effects of War and Destruction in Poetry This essay aims to analyze the theme of the effects of war and destruction in the poem The End and the Beginning by Wislawa Szymborska and the lyrics Harry Patch by Radiohead.
Mueller’s “The Banality of ‘Ethnic War’” Instead, the second half of the 20th and the early years of the 21st century have seen a significant increase in the number of civil wars.
How the Vietnam War Polarized American Society It galvanized the enemy and opponents of the war in both Vietnam and America and led many to question the ethics of the campaigns.
Yugoslav Wars: Ethnic Conflicts and the Collapse of Power However, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the end of this era and the start of the post-Cold War period, with its unique peculiarities of the international discourse.
The Causes and Effects of World War I To this end, the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and the Enforcement of Penalties met in Paris in 1919. It is impossible to name a single reason for the initiation […]
How Did War Change People This is one of the main issues that should be considered because it throws light on the motives that drive the actions of the narrator.
The Role of the US in the Gulf War The paper will also analyse importance of the Gulf region as a major world supplier of oil and the role played by the US in guiding the UN in making the resolutions for Iraq’s withdrawal […]
Underlying Causes of the Sierra Leone Civil War The unfortunate outcomes of the war, both in numbers and in the reality of the situation, raise the question of what other factors may have further contributed to the war.
Role of United Arab Emirates in the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait Initially, UAE’s operations in the Middle East were considered to have fuelled the Iraq- Kuwait conflicts during the early 1990s. Before the onset of the war, UAE was among the first Arab countries to object […]
Modern War and Successful Warfare WWII became a critical stage in the history of humanity and governments and resulted in the reconsideration of the approach to military campaigns and measures needed to attain success.
Vietnam War: History and Facts of War That Began in 1959 The Second Indochina War began in 1959, five years after the division of the country, according to the Geneva Agreement. South Vietnam’s troops failed to substitute American soldiers, and in 1974 the peace agreement was […]
Technology vs. Nature in ‘ War Horse’ by Steven Spielberg One of the ways the film uses to stress the distinction between the beasts of war and military machinery is lighting.
The Martians in “The War of the Worlds” by H.D. Wells The first time the reader encounters the Martians is in the chapter “The Cylinder Opens” and this encounter suggests the evident difference of appearances of the Martians and men.
“How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien People also tend to use these memories to have a purpose and goals in life.”How to tell a true war story” by Tim O’Brien is a story told about the encounters and experiences of war […]
Anglo-Zulu 1879 War Analysis The Zulu nation had been invaded by Voortrekkers and up to the time it was subdued by the British, it had fought numerous battles and even when the Zulu finally lost to the British, they […]
The Thirty Years’ War The unwillingness of Calvinists to adhere to terms of the Peace of Augsburg and the formation of military alliances by Lutheran and Catholic rulers contributed to the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War.
Anti-War Sentiments in the Play “The Trojan Women” The play The Trojan Women, created by an ancient Greek playwright Euripides, is a great example of a tragedy that can be and was used to show the outcomes of the war in a general […]
War Impacts in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien The book gives a true reflection of the effect of war on soldiers from the perspective of a soldier who directly participated in a war to defend his country.
Nationalism in World War II Another critical “nation-statehood making” is the break of the Soviet Union and the end of cold war between Soviet Union republic and the United States.
The Aftermath of World War I for Germany In spite of the fact that Germany was one of the most powerful European states before the war’s start in 1914, World War I led to the political, economic, and social decline in the country […]
Civil War in America: “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce For instance, in his story, Bierce gives specific details of the setting of the story, which is during the civil war in Alabama.
The Role of Women in the Vietnam War For example, women in the Navy Nurse Corps and Army Nurse Corp were sent to take part in the Vietnam War and the Korean War.
Causes and Effects of the Vietnamese War To the U.S.the war was a loss, because the reunion of South and North Vietnamese citizens marked the end of the war, hence U.S.’s undivided support for the southern region yielded nothing, apart from numerous […]
Investigation of War Causes Between the USA and Japan Nevertheless, it is necessary to dive into the depth of Pacific War causes analysis in order to understand its relation to the events in Europe and outline the basic effects it brought to the countries; […]
Role of the Woman During the Spanish Civil War This impact of the Spanish war is even clearer by consideration of the fact that the war had the implications of making women take up the jobs that originally belonged to men in the industries […]
“War” and “The other Wife” It is through the characterization of Marc and Alice, the contrasting of Alice with Marc’s ex-wife, that the story’s themes are revealed.
The Office of Strategic Services Operational Groups in World War II The study of the importance of O.S. To investigate the impact of O.S.
Aboriginal Soldiers in the World War I and II Additionally, the paper will argue that the role and experiences of Aboriginal soldiers and the manner in which they have been overshadowed by other significant events in Australian history.
The Causes of the Islamic Civil War The power was passed from father and son, and the Quraish of the Hashemites handed power to the Umayyads after the murder of Muttalib.
“Charlie Wilson’s War” by Nichols The 2007 movie, featuring award-winning actors Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, portrays the involvement of the US in the Soviet-Afghan conflict.”Charlie Wilson’s War” is based on a true story and presents the […]
War Justification in The Iliad and The Bhagavad-Gita The current paper observes two ancient texts, The Iliad and The Bhagavad-gita, to investigate the arguments of what the virtues of wars are.
The Use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War The Association of American Advancement of science prompted the US government to allow investigations into the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam in 1968.
“The Art of War” by Sun Tzu Sun Tzu is also known to have written the book, The Lost Art of War, which is related to the first book.
Drug Issue in “America’s Unjust Drug War” by Michael Huemer In a report on the unjust drug war in America, the author proposes that legislation on the use of recreational drugs is improper.
Refugees as a Tactic in War: History, Types, and Number A refugee is defined as a person who due to a justifiable reason of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a certain social or a political group is out of the […]
“Victims: A True Story of the Civil War” by Phillip Shaw Paludan The course of this war and the way it affected the people who suffered from it presents the main concern for the author of the book.
World Cultures: Somali Civil War The Somali National Movement gained control of the north, while in the capital of Mogadishu and most of southern Somalia the United Somali Congress achieved control.
The Battle of Chickamauga in the American Civil War The topic that is the focus of this paper is the battle of Chickamauga and its influence on the course of the Civil War.
Trucial States’ History From World War I to the 1960s During the decline of the pearling industry, the British were highly vigilant to sustain the existing regional trend of alienation amongst leaders and the people.
American History: The Road to Civil War Though the Civil War occurred in the 19th century, the roadmap to the war began back in the 17th century. In 1807, the United States senate passed a law that led to the abolition of […]
Thinking Government: Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism in Post World War II Canada This leads to the second implication which was summarized by political scientists in the following statement: “nothing can be guaranteed in life and that all individuals are also free to fail, to stumble to the […]
War Poetry: Poets’ Attitudes Towards War This paper will discuss the different attitudes adopted by four poets towards war.”The Charge of the Light Brigade” is a poem that talks about the Crimean war.
Doing Academic World War II Research Researchers can use the information on the authors at Britannica to determine the reliability of the information provided on the website.
Countries That Suffered the Greatest as a Result of the Cold War After the Second World War, there was a long period of tension between the democracies of the Western World and the communists’ countries of Eastern Europe, which is called The Cold War.
Soldier’s Home by Ernest Hemingway and War Experiences The thesis of this paper is in the form of an argument to convince the readers that Krebs’s laziness comes from his inability to adapt himself to the changing patterns of life, which society imposes […]
Latin America and the Cold War In the conditions of the Cold War, namely in the middle of the 1940s-1970s, Latin America was the arena of the struggle for the spheres of influence of the US and the Soviet Union.
Realism, Strategies and War The reality is that people expect the worst and have to create plans for such occurrences. Realism is a philosophical branch of thinking that tries to expand the knowledge of people and explain what reality […]
The Hurt Locker: Sergeant James’ Obsession With War Our essay is devoted to the investigation of a question: was the war an obsession and a drug for Sergeant James, the main character of the movie?
Fort Sumter, South Carolina – Civil War The 1812 war spurred the need for construction of a fort to strengthen the United States military along the coast which led to construction of fort Sumter.
“War and Innocence” by Robert Fullinwinder In the closing part of the article, the researcher concludes that absent of self-defense should be compensated by the introduction of the legal conventions justifying killing in war.
The Vietnam War in American History Since early fifties the government of the United States began to pay special attention to Vietnam and political situation in this country, because, it was one of the most important regions in the Southeast Asia.
The Break-up of Yugoslavia and the War in Bosnia-Hecergovina S, the end of Cold the War in 1989 led to the disintegration of Communist federations of the Soviet Union including Yugoslavia and the other nations in Eastern Europe.
French Involvement in Vietnam War Even though in the overwhelming majority of cases, the author focuses attention on the history of Vietnam since the Involvement of the French troops in the nineteenth century, he also gives background information as to […]
Conformity in “The Wars” by Timothy Findley It is equally important to stress that the issue of conformity is based on the person’s ability and willingness to fit into a group or culture. One can argue that Ross’s decision to join the […]
Strategy Ideas From ”The Art of War” by Sun Tzu In its turn, this particular requirement is predetermined by the fact that the activity in question is the subject to the rules of thermodynamics something that makes it possible to proceed with it in a […]
Vietnam War in the “Platoon” Movie by Oliver Stone In the context of the war, the confrontation between two non-commissioned officers, the cruel-hearted Barnes and the humane Elias, is depicted.
Pozieres Battle in World War I on Western Front The battle for the village of Pozieres was one of the deadliest and most remarkable for the Australian troops which took part in the First World War.
The Film “Cuban Missile Crisis: Three Men Go To War” The film Cuban Missile Crisis: Three Men Go To War produced by the Public Broadcasting Service throws light on the actions of the political leaders who were involved in the confrontation that could result in […]
Federal Government Expansion During World War I The period between 1914 and 1918 was marked by the increased role of the federal government in the United States and the dramatic expansion of its bureaucracies.
The Iraq War: Background and Issues After the end of the gulf war, the relationship between the US and Iraq was characterized by conflict which culminated into the invasion of Iraq by the US and its allies namely the United Kingdom, […]
The Neutrality of Vatican City During World War II Despite the moves made by the Pope Pius XII for the Vatican City to remain neutral in the World War II, the actions he made were seen as a great violation of stance.
The Book “The First World War” by John Keegan However, the emergence of the bill of the right to people’s life across the globe is owed to the occurrence of the First and the Second World War.
Religious Values in War and Peace Although war is a natural thing, which occurs in the presence of humanity, the maintenance of ethical and moral values is of great significance.
Hanoi and Washington: The Vietnam War The Vietnam War was a conflict that was military in nature, occurred between the years 1954 and 1975, and was between the communists and the non-communists.
War and Crusades: The Concept of War According to Brad, It is important for the state to have these rights as stipulated by the international law for the well being of its citizens and to promote peaceful interactions.
Man, the State and War by Kenneth Waltz The sheer amount of views and in-text lifting from other authors lends the work a certain degree of veracity in terms of the accuracy of the arguments and how they conform to current methods of […]
The Mass Media and War The media can decide to become actively involved in the war which can be of help when finding a resolution to the conflict or it can lead to escalation of the conflict.
Music of the Civil Wars, Civil Rights & Freedom Movements of Europe, Africa, North & South America During the 20th Century The aim of Giovinezza was to reinforce the position of Mussolini as the leader of the Fascist Movement and of Italy.
How Americans Won the Revolutionary War? Thus, the Revolutionary War resulted in the victory of the American colonists because the experienced British army was defeated with the help of the new military techniques, approaches, and strategies, the Americans had the territory […]
“War Horse” (2011) by Steven Spielberg The setting of this movie is before the onset of the First World War. The way Ted dresses and his flask of alcohol help give a date to this movie.
Civil War Paper: Valley of the Shadow The valley of the shadow explains the history the citizens especially the blacks had to go. The free blacks got involved in farming as this constituted a large part of the valley prosperity and wealth.
Tim O’Brien: The True War Storyteller In How to Tell a True War Story, author Tim O’Brien directs the reader’s attention to the idea of truth, not simply in the telling and retelling of certain events from the Vietnam War that […]
The War of 1812 Impacts on the United States The war was fought from June 1812 and it climaxed in the spring of 1815 with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, although the battle failed to solve the issues that had made it […]
Why and How Did the US Get Involved in the Korean War? On the surface, the Korean War seemed like a normal war between North and South Korea; however, there was more to it than what met the eye.
Stories From the Vietnam War In the dissonance of opinions on the Vietnam War, it appears reasonable to turn to the first-hand experiences of the veterans and to draw real-life information from their stories.
America’s Involvement in World War I The issues that led to America’s involvement in this were the German’s resumption of unexpected submarine attacks and the Zimmerman telegram.
The Cold War and the Events of September 11 The anxieties arising from the issue of European immigrants echo the sentiments of securitization and Islamophobia following the events of September 11.
The World War II: Impact and Consequences The Allies and the Axis were reluctant to follow any line that risked running into the antagonism of the other for fear of alienating their ally and therefore endangering one of the precepts of their […]
Oleg Penkovsky, a Double Agent of the Cold War The political race of the Soviet Union and the United States began after the end of the Second World War. In 1953, Penkovsky began working in GRU and was sent to work in Turkey as […]
Is War Ever Morally Justified? The purpose of this paper is to provide arguments that a moral justification of war is impossible based on a critical discussion of theories supporting the ethical justification of warfare and prove that they have […]
Germany’s Aims in the First World War Thus, Fischer insisted on the acceptance of the revolution as a means of warfare and the aim of Germany in the First World War.
All Diplomacy Is a Continuation of War by Other Means It should also be known that diplomacy is a continuation of war based on the fact that one party might be involved in diplomacy to get enough support in defense of war.
Photos of Vietnam War The role of the media in the Vietnam War also raises issues of what the media ought to censor and report to the public.
Dwight D. Eisenhower: World War II Hero and U.S. President In addition to his leading role as a peace and desegregation crusader, prior to his election as the 34th American president and even after his rise to the top seat, Eisenhower was a well known […]
The American Civil War Causes and Outcomes
The Costs Effects of the War in Afghanistan
The Spanish Civil War in Picasso’s, Siqueiros’, Dali’s Paintings
Consequences of the Hundred Years’ War Between England and France
Importance of Diplomacy in Preventing and Stopping Wars
The House I Live In: War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration
The Significance of the Iron Curtain at World War II and the Cold War
War in Poems by Dickinson, Hardy, and Jarrell
Individualism as an Ideal of Civil War in America
Soldiers’ Letters From American Civil War
The Spanish American War
World War II in “Slaughterhouse-Five“ Novel by Kurt Vonnegut
The First and Second Chechen Wars Comparison
Hard or Soft Power in the Cold War’s End
Life of Soldiers During the World War I
Religion as the Cause of Wars
The Trojan War: A New History by Barry Strauss
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Role in World War II
Effects of World War I on the Development of Modern Art
The Impacts of the Second World War on Asia
Cold War and a Bipolar World
The Progressive Movement and the American Entry Into World War I
Polybius vs. Livy on the Second Punic War
V-2 Rocket and Its Impact on World War II and Today US Army
Causes of the Civil War: Battle on the Bay
The Factors That Led to the Outbreak of the Yemeni Civil War
Causes and Conflict of the Peloponnesian Wars
The History of the Mexican–American War
The Late 19th Century and the First World War, 1850-1918
Political and Social Forces During and After the Vietnam War
Dynastic Wars’ Impact on England’s Development
US Holocaust Policy During World War II
The Post-Civil War Era in the Lives of African Americans
Reasons for Soviets Losing the Cold War
The Cold War: Reassessing the Cold War and the Far-Right
The Role of Women in the Civil War
The War in Ukraine: Weapons of Mass Destruction
World War I as the Catastrophe of the 20th Century
The American Civil War Period
International Relations: Atomic Bombs and Cold War
Canada’s Role and Experiences in World War II
The Civil War by K. Burns Film Review
The American Civil War and Its Main Stages
The Bonds or Bondage World War II Poster Analysis
The Unfinished Journey: The US During the Cold War
The Cold War Ideologies’ Impact on the American History
Strategies in the Peloponnesian War
Cold War Impact on Germany
The Cold War: The US vs. the Soviets Polarization
Canadian Martial Art and a World at War
Women Who Fought in the American Civil War
Civil War in Shaara’s The Killer Angels and Glory Film
“How War Fuels Poverty” Article by McCarthy
Important Questions on America Since World War II
World War I: American Policy of Neutrality
Role of Terrorism in Russo-Ukrainian War
The Barbary Wars’ Impact on the US
Game Theory Applied to the Russo-Ukrainian War
The US Foreign Policy in the Post-World War II Era
Causes of the Cold War’s End
The Connection of Hockey, Violence, and War
Diaries on Australia in the Pacific War
Search for Identity After Dirty War in Argentina
Implications of the Russia–Ukraine War for Global Food Security
The American Civil War: Pro- & Anti-Slavery Forces
Justification of War Based on Falklands War Example
Texas War of Independence: The Main Challenges
The First World War: Role of Aviation
“The War’s Price Tag for Russia…” Article by Aris
Economic Causes of World War I
American History: Bacon’s Rebellion & King Phillip’s War
The Election of 1860: The Final Step to Civil War
Smallpox During the American Revolutionary War
Challenges of Managing the Army and War
The Life of the US After the Civil War
The Texas War for Independence
Russo-Ukrainian War: Global Effects
American Cities and Urbanization After the Civil War
Researching and Analysis of the Vietnam War
The Afghanistan War From a Utilitarian Point of View
Post-Traumatic Growth in Student War Veterans
The Barbary Wars of the United States
World War II and the US Decision to Stay Out
The Cold War as a Turning Point in History
Latin America Impacted by Global Cold War
Contribution of Media Text to World Wars’ Propaganda
Afro-American Position on Spanish-American War
War’s Effect on Perception in Literary Characters
The Civil War in Ukraine (2014 – Present)
The Role of Propaganda During World War II
Russia and Ukraine War in News From February to April
Wartime Conferences of World War II
The Events of 1968 in American History and the Cold War
African American Soldiers in the Civil War
D-Day: The Role in World War II
Promoting Production During World War II
The World War II Discussion: The Convoy Tactics
The Sino-Vietnamese War: The Ending and the Consequences
The Russo-Ukrainian War’s Impact on the World
America’s Progressive Era and World War I
Lincoln’s Views on Ending the Civil War
War Creates Opportunities for Women: “A Story of Mercy Otis Warren”
A Change in Art Style After World War II
Russo-Japanese War and American-Japanese Conflicts in the Pacific
Significant Impact Field Artillery Had in the 2003 War in Baghdad
The World War II Propaganda Techniques
The Cold War and Engagement
US Strategy From the Cold War to the Post-Global War on Terrorism
Aspects of the Second Gulf War
War in Ukraine: A Humanitarian Disaster
What Role Did India Play in the Second World War?
Mearsheimer’s Standpoint on the War Reasons
The Spanish-American War: Reasons, Sequence, and Results
South Africa During World War II Years
Contribution to World War II of Chinese and Native Americans
The American Civil War’s Causes and Inevitability
Migration Issue: Cultural War
The Armenian Community’s Recovery After the War
From Divided to United During American War in Vietnam
Emory Upton in the Battle of Columbus in the Civil War
A Civil War with Former Ethiopian Rulers
Latin-African Philosophical Wars on Racism in US
Factors That Enable Iraq War Veterans to Integrate Into the Civilian Sphere
The Cold War in Context: Geopolitics
Ancient Egyptians’ Ethics of War
Inside the President’s War Room Documentary
The Desert War: Armed Forces of Saudi Arabia
Civil War: Causes, Technology, and Justification
Generals of the American Civil War Ulysses Grant and Robert Lee
GI Bill as Legislative Notion for Post-War Nation
The Gallic War and Julius Caesar’s Life
The Texas Abortion Law: A Signal of War on Women’s Rights and Bodies
Spirit and Northwest Airlines’ Price War
The Role of the United States in World War II
Stepping Stones to the American Civil War
Manifest Destiny and the Mexican War of 1846
Kongo’s Fourteen-Year Civil War
Wars of Independence in Latin America
The Labor Unions in the Post-Civil War Period
The Entry of the United States Into World War I
War on Drugs in “Sicario” (2015) Film
The War on Drugs Is Lost: In Search of a New Method
Revolutionary War Digital Timeline
Civil War and Horton’s Review
Role the United States of America in the World War I
The War in Iraq: Perspectives on Participating
Impact of World War I on the American Army
Jomini’s Theory on the “Western Way of War”
American History From Civil War to 20th Century
Significant Events of the Cold War
Social Aspect in the Attitude Towards the American Civil War
Women in War Industries
The Home Front During War in Japan, Germany, the US
The Use of Radio in German Propaganda During the World War II
The US Patriot Missile in the Gulf War
Online Resources on the American Civil War Topic
Why the French Revolution Led to War Between France and Prussia & Austria
Arguments Against the Use of Nuclear Weapons in World War II
A Turning Point During the Civil War
The United States Priorities Following World War I
Researching of Civil War Causes
Biggest Influence on the US Involvement in World War I
American Wars and American Political Development
Homer: The Theme of Men at War in “The Iliad”
The Participation Women in the War
Great Depression and Cold War: Making of Modern America
The Early Republic and the American Civil War
The French and Indian War and Its Aftermath
War and Diplomacy in the Politics of a Nation
The American Civil War: Key Points
American Revolution: Seven Years War in 1763
Slaves in the Civil War and Free Blacks After It
Lincoln’s Speech Against the American-Mexican War
Remembering the Great War Book by Ian Andrew
Literature Review: The War on Drugs
The Doctrine Just and Unjust Wars
Brigadier-General Mosby Monroe Parsons in the Civil War
“After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy” by Coyne
Militia Casualties of the War of 1812
The America’s Unjust Drug War
Cold War Exchange in the Bridges of Spies Film
Effects of the Civil War in Western North Carolina Communities in Appalachian Mountains
Factors Leading to the Termination of World War I
Cuban Missile Crisis: Why Was There No War?
The Yemen War: The Latest Developments and Reasons
Capacity Building for Women War Victims in D.R.Congo
The Likelihood of Civil Wars: Impact of Collective Action Problem
Not Set in Stone: Ethnicity and Civil War
American Civil War and Fiji Coups
“How the ‘80s Programmed Us for War” by Sirota
Soviet and American Perspectives on World War II Through Movies
States’ Rights as the Main Cause of the Civil War
Valley Forge in the Revolutionary War History
The Cold War Impact on African States & Societies
Pre-World War II South Africa: Centuries-Old Exploitation
How Did Cold War and Post-Cold War U.S. Imperialism Affect African Societies?
The Vietnam War and the Tet Offensive
The Ramadan War of 1973 and Its Outcomes
Abolition vs. Equality in the American Civil War
Wikipedia: Posts About World War II
The War by the Ruling Republicans Against Great Britain
Submarines: The Significance of Submarines in the First World War
The Korean War: Interview with Grandfather
War on Terrorism: Budget and Policy Discussion
War on Terror: Propaganda and Freedom of the Press in the US
War on Drugs and Prison Overcrowding Analysis
Would Be War in the Future
Students’ Drinking and Partying: Ethics of the University’s War
Torture and War Towards Terrorism
Fabricating the Memory: War Museums and Memorial Sites
The Western Way of War
World War I Causes by Ethnic Problems in Austro-Hungary
Winston Churchill, a Leader During the World War II
Japanese War Bride: Yamaguchi Yoshiko
Battle of Kursk: Germany’s Lost Victory in World War II
American Efforts in Mexican-American War
The Three Gulf Wars: Key Issues
Cold War: Personalities of Individuals and Their Nations
Premises of Korean War
War and Terrorism in the Modern World
War on Crime Influence on Power Shift Among Various Groups
Implications of the US-China Trade War on Luxembourg and Saudi Arabia
John Brown’s Holy War Analysis
Mississippi’s War and Nat Turner Documentaries
Generals and Technological Advancements in Civil War
The Artistic Legacy of Maya Lin: A Cultural Response to the Vietnam War
War on Terror: The Battle Continues
Post-Cold War Russia: Global, Strategic, and Diplomatic Importance
Chris Hondros: War Photographer
US Actions Abroad During the Cold War
The History of the Third Punic War: The Final War in the Series of Wars With the Carthaginian Civilization
Poem Concerning the American Revolutionary War
Researching the Russo-Japanese War
The U.S. Medicine During the Civil War: A Response to the Discussion
Civil War Effect on Medicine and Public Health
The War of 1812 as a Critical Historic Moment in the US and the UK
Horace Greeley’s Significance to the U.S. Civil War Era
War: How Can I Change the World?
America and Britain in American Revolutionary War
The Issues of Modern America and French and Indian War
Success of Egypt in Yom Kippur War
Casualty of the War: Hospitalman Burnett
The Cold War: Gains and Losses
Patterns of Civil Wars and Peace Duration in Southeast Asia and the Pacific
The Central Powers in the First World War
The Cold War and Motivations Behind It
Spanish American War: Causes and Consequences
Evaluating the American War
The Reality and Myth of “The Good War”
The Vietnam War: Diplomatic Mechanisms Connected With the USA
US History: Foreign Policy and Spanish–American War
The Dhofar War: Background and History
Racial Issues During War Times in the Two Novels
Satire and the Anti-war Movement
Gulf War Deterrence. The Most Viable Way of Dealing With Conflicts
Kurt Vonnegut. Wailing Shall Be in All Streets and Slaughterhouse-Five. Reflections on World War II
The Key Factors of Success in the Revolutionary War
Divergences Between North and South as Major Causes of the American Civil War
Hundred Years’ War: History and Scientific Sources
“The Green Berets” Film About the Vietnam War
The Main Cause of the Civil War
Book Summary: ”The First Way of War” by John Grenier
War Story: Pressfield’s Tides of War
Gender Related Questions in the Jewish War Novel by Tova Reich
Vietnam War: David Halberstam’s “The Making of a Quagmire”
Could the Central or Axis Powers Have Won either of the World Wars?
Personal vs. Collective Responsibility in War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
Rape as a Weapon of War: Democratic Republic of Congo
The Role of Islamic Rhetoric in the Afghanistan-Soviet War of 1979 – 1989
Can We Consider the Second Iraq War to Be a Just War?
“Prelude to the Civil War” by William Freehling: America’s Historic Legacy
When is War Justifiable? Axiomatic Justification of War
Visual Rhetoric: The Iraq War and Torture of Abu Ghraib Prisoners
Slavery, Civil War, and Abolitionist Movement in 1850-1865
The Emptiness and Futility of War: “No Man’s Land” by Danis Tanovic
Why Wars Happen: Liberal, Realist, Identity Perspectives
War and Poverty Connection in Developing Countries
“A Time of War: The United States and Vietnam” by Robert D. Schulzinger
Register to Vote by War or Convention
Civil Peace as Absence of War or Physical Conflict
The Activities That Lead to the Afghanistan War
How to Win a War: Special Focus on the War in Afghanistan as Seen Through the Eyes of Sun Tzu, Galula, and Mao
The Reasons That Led to the End of the War
US Involvement in Southeast Asia and the Cold War
Violence and War in Japanese Popular Culture
Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia”: An Expressive Portrait of the Face of War
Andrew Jackson and the “Bank War”
A Zero-Sum Game or a Win-Win Situation: The Outcome of the Cold War
Culture War in Australia: Conflict Between the Conservatives and Liberals
War and Terrorism in Algeria
Brusilov Offensive: An Unique Tactics in War
The United States of America: The Post Post-Cold War Scenarios
War on Terror and Its Effect on Individual Right
Cold War Space Race Analysis
“Saving Private Ryan”: Sharing the Nightmare of War
The First World War and Its Impact on American Society
War in Poems by Hardy, Jarrell, and Levertov
US Intelligence Fault in Persian Gulf War I and II
Aftereffect of the Cold War: “The Crisis” by Alan Greenspan
Cold War in the US. May’s ”Homeward Bound” Book
African Americans in the Spanish-American War
Canadian History Post Confederation: Robert Borden’s and W.L.M. King’s War-Time Leadership
Techniques in “The Drug War and Class War” by Harrop
War Time Art Theft and Illegal Appropriation
E. Kancler’s Paper “The Republican War on Science” Review
The China Civil War: Key Aspects
World War I: Medias of Propaganda in the U.S.
Interview Report: Memories of the Vietnam War
Go to War or Not Go to War
War Movie Analysis and Reflection
Ho Chi Minh’s Influence in the Vietnam War
“Vietnam War Generation Journal” by Aaron
The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?
The History of Ku Klux Klan: A Terrorist Organization Founded in the Southern States After the American Civil War
The Use of Counter-Terrorism Attacks During the Algerian War of Independence From F.L.N.
Comparing World War II to September 11th
Americans and the World: Reasons For War and Peace
Female Russian Snipers: From Second World War to Present Day
Lincoln and America – The Civil War and Its Aftermath
War Mediated Through Journalism
Cold War: Development of the Events
World War Two Marked the End of Modern Age
Walt Whitman and the Theme of War in His Poems
“Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-45” by C. Merridale
Reconstructing the Nation: Aftermath of War, 1865-1890
Civil War and Reconstruction: War Strategy and Economic Policy
How Was the Economy of New York Transformed by the Civil War?
The Sino-Russian Military Exercises and the US-Japanese War Game
How the Vietnam War Influenced the Iraq War?
Is Terrorism an Act of War?: Different Types of Terrorism
H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” and British Imperialism
Women in Canada During World War II
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Article contents

The conduct and consequences of war.

Alyssa K. Prorok Alyssa K. Prorok Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
and Paul K. Huth Paul K. Huth Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.72
Published in print: 01 March 2010
Published online: 22 December 2017
This version: 25 June 2019
Previous version

The academic study of warfare has expanded considerably over the past 15 years. Whereas research used to focus almost exclusively on the onset of interstate war, more recent scholarship has shifted the focus from wars between states to civil conflict, and from war onset to questions of how combatants wage and terminate war. Questioned as well are the longer-term consequences of warfare for countries and their populations. Scholarship has also shifted away from country-conflict-year units of analysis to micro-level studies that are attentive to individual-level motives and explanations of spatial variation in wartime behavior by civilians and combatants within a country or armed conflict. Today, research focuses on variations in how states and rebel groups wage war, particularly regarding when and how wars expand, whether combatants comply with the laws of war, when and why conflicts terminate, and whether conflicts end with a clear military victory or with a political settlement through negotiations. Recent research also recognizes that strategic behavior continues into the post-conflict period, with important implications for the stability of the post-conflict peace. Finally, the consequences of warfare are wide-ranging and complex, affecting everything from political stability to public health, often long after the fighting stops.

interstate war
laws of war
civilian victimization
war termination
war severity
post-conflict peace

Updated in this version

Updated introduction, subheadings, references, and substantial revision throughout.

Introduction

Over the past 15 years, research by social scientists on the conduct and consequences of war has expanded considerably. Previously, scholarly research had been heavily oriented towards the analysis of the causes of interstate war and its onset. Three simultaneous trends, however, have characterized scholarship on war since the early 2000s. First, studies of the dynamics of civil war have proliferated. Second, war is conceptualized as a series of inter-related stages in which the onset, conduct, and termination of wars as well as post-war relations are analyzed theoretically and empirically in a more integrated fashion. Third, studies have shifted away from country-conflict-year units of analysis to micro-level studies that are sensitive to spatial variation in behavior within a country or conflict.

This article reviews and assesses this body of recent scholarship, which has shifted the focus from war onset to questions of how combatants wage war and what are the longer-term consequences of warfare for countries and their populations. Scholarly research examines the conduct and consequences of both interstate and civil wars.

The analysis is organized into three main sections. It begins with research on how states and rebel groups wage war, with particular attention given to questions regarding war expansion, compliance with the laws of war, and war severity. Section two turns to the literature on war duration, termination, and outcomes. Different explanations are discussed, for when and why wars come to an end; then, the question of how war’s end influences the prospects for a stable post-war peace is considered. In section three, recent scholarship is examined on the consequences of war for post-war trends in political stability and public health. The concluding discussion addresses some of the important contributions associated with recent scholarship on the conduct and consequences of war as well as promising directions for future research.

The Waging of Civil and International Wars

What accounts for the nature of the wars we see? This broad question drives a new research tradition in conflict studies that compliments traditional analyses of war onset by shifting the focus to state behavior during war. This research goes beyond understandings of why states fight one another to engaging questions of why states join ongoing wars, when and why they follow the laws of war, and what explains the severity of wars. Taken together, these questions open the black box of wartime behavior.

Intervention and the Expansion of Interstate Wars

Research on war expansion developed as a natural outgrowth of analyses of war onset: scholars studying why states initiate conflict shifted focus to understand why third parties join ongoing wars. The link between alliances and joining behavior has been central to studies of war expansion, spawning a broad research tradition that focuses on alliances and geography, differences among types of alliances, and the characteristics of alliance members. Siverson and Starr ( 1991 ), for example, find a strong interaction effect between geography and alliances, in that a warring neighbor who is an ally increases the likelihood of a state joining an existing conflict. Leeds, Long, and Mitchell ( 2000 ) also find that the specific content of alliance obligations is critical to understanding when states choose to intervene, and that states uphold the terms of their alliance commitments nearly 75% of the time. Most recently, Vasquez and Rundlett ( 2016 ) found that alliances are essentially a necessary condition for war expansion, highlighting the importance of this factor in explaining joining behavior.

Alliance behavior is also an important topic in the study of democratic wartime behavior. While Choi ( 2004 ) presents findings suggesting that democracies are particularly likely to align with one another, Reiter and Stam ( 2002 ) provide counter-evidence that democracies are willing to align with non-democracies when it serves their strategic interests. Given the tendency to uphold alliance obligations, and empirical evidence showing that war initiators are more successful when their adversary does not receive third-party assistance (Gartner & Siverson, 1996 ), recent theoretical research suggests that states, understanding joining dynamics, might manipulate war aims to reduce the likelihood of outside intervention (Werner, 2000 ).

These studies suggest that war expansion should be understood as the consequence of a decision calculus undertaken by potential joiners. While much of the contemporary literature focuses on alliance behavior, this only indirectly gets at the question of who will join ongoing conflicts. A full explanation of war expansion from this perspective would also require that we explain when states form alliances in the first place. Further, the analyses of Gartner and Siverson ( 1996 ) and of Werner ( 2000 ) suggest that strategic thinking must be the focus of future research on war expansion. Recent research begins to address this issue: DiLorenzo and Rooney ( 2018 ) examine how uncertainty over estimates of third party resolve influence war-making decisions of states, finding that rival states are more likely to initiate conflict when domestic power shifts in potential joiner states (i.e., allies) increase uncertainty over the strength of that alliance commitment. Future research should continue to investigate the links between expectations of third-party behavior and initial war initiation decisions, as this research highlights important selection processes that empirical research has not yet fully explored.

Finally, recent research goes further to connect war initiation and expansion by arguing that commitment problems—one of the key bargaining failures leading to war initiation—also helps explain war expansion. Shirkey ( 2018 ) finds that wars caused by commitment rather than information problems are more likely to expand, as they are generally fought over greater war aims, are more severe, and last longer. These factors generate risks and rewards for intervention that encourage expansion.

The literature on interstate war expansion has made progress in the last decade with much closer attention to modeling strategic calculations by combatants and potential interveners. The result has been a better understanding of the interrelationship between onset and joining behavior and the realization that the timing and the sequence in which sides intervene is critical to war expansion (Joyce, Ghosn, & Bayer, 2014 ).

Expansion of Civil Wars

The analog to studies of war expansion in the interstate context has traditionally been the study of intervention in the civil war context. Research in this field treats the decision to intervene in much the same way as the war expansion literature treats the potential joiner’s decision calculus. That is, intervention is the result of a rational, utility-maximizing decision calculus in which potential interveners consider the costs and benefits of intervention as well as the potential for achieving desired outcomes. Understood in these terms, both domestic and international strategic considerations affect the decision to intervene, with the Cold War geopolitical climate much more conducive to countervailing interventions than the post-Cold War era has been (Regan, 2002a ), and peacekeeping-oriented interventions most likely in states with ethnic, trade, military, or colonial ties to the intervening state (Rost & Greig, 2011 ).

Whether states are most likely to intervene in easy or hard cases is a central question. While Aydin ( 2010 ) showed that states will delay intervention when previous interventions by other states have failed to influence the conflict, Rost and Grieg ( 2011 ) showed that state-based interventions for peacekeeping purposes are most likely in tough cases—long ethnic wars and conflicts that kill and displace large numbers of civilians. Finally, Gent ( 2008 ) shows that the likelihood of success may not affect the intervention decision equally for government and opposition-targeted interventions. He finds that both types of intervention are more likely when governments face stronger rebel groups, thus implying that intervention in support of rebel groups occurs when the likelihood of success is highest, but intervention supporting governments is most likely when states face their most intense challenges.

There are two likely sources of the discrepancies in this literature. First, most analyses have focused exclusively on the intervener’s decision calculus, or the supply side, failing to account for variation in the demand for intervention. Second, there is significant inconsistency in the literature’s treatment of the goals of interveners. Some analyses assume that states intervene to end conflicts, while others don’t make this limiting assumption but still fail to distinguish among interventions for different purposes.

Newer research takes important strides to address these issues. First, Salehyan, Skrede Gleditsch, and Cunningham ( 2011 ) developed a theory of third party support for insurgent groups that explicitly modeled both supply-side and demand-side factors driving the intervention decision. They found that demand is greatest among weak rebel groups, but supply is greatest for strong groups. Second, research by Cunningham ( 2010 ) explicitly measured whether third party states intervene with independent goals, and Stojek and Chacha ( 2015 ) theorized that intervention behavior is driven by economic motivations. Trade ties increase the likelihood of intervention on the side of the government.

Finally, Kathman ( 2010 ) focused on contiguous state interveners in examining motives for intervention. He developed a measure of conflict infection risk that predicts the likelihood of conflict spreading to each contiguous state. Empirically, he finds that, as the risk of contagion increases, so does the probability of intervention by at-risk neighbors. This research develops a convincing mechanism and empirical test to explain a subset of interventions and provides a clear link from intervention research to recent research on civil conflict contagion. While the contagion literature is too broad to review here, mechanisms posited for civil war expansion across borders range from refugee flows (Salehyan & Gleditsch, 2006 ), to ethnic kinship ties (Forsberg, 2014 ), to increased military expenditures in neighboring states (Phillips, 2015 ).

The literature on intervention into civil wars has grown significantly over the past decade as internationalization of civil conflicts has become common and often results in escalatory dynamics that are of deep concern to analysts and policymakers.

Compliance With the Laws of War

Scholars have recently begun studying the conditions under which compliance with the laws of war is most likely and the mechanisms most important in determining compliance. This research shifts the focus toward understanding state behavior during war and the strategic and normative considerations that influence decision-making processes of states. Two key questions drive scholarship in this tradition; first, does international law constrain state behavior, even when the state is threatened by severe conflict, and second, can observed compliance be attributed to ratification status, or is it instead a result of strategic decision making?

Scholars have yet to provide conclusive answers to these questions; while compliance is observed in many circumstances, most scholars attribute observed restraint to factors other than international law. Legro ( 1995 ), for example, found that international agreements had limited impact on Britain and Germany’s use of unrestricted submarine warfare, strategic bombing of civilian targets, and chemical weapons during WWII. In analyses of civilian targeting during interstate war, Downes ( 2006 ) and Valentino, Huth, and Croco ( 2006 ) also found that international law itself has little impact on a state’s propensity for civilian targeting. Downes argued that civilian targeting occurs most often when states are fighting protracted wars of attrition and desire to save lives on their own side, or when they intend to annex enemy territory with potentially hostile civilians. Valentino et al. ( 2006 ) similarly found that the decision to target civilians is driven by strategic considerations and is unconstrained by treaty obligations relating to the laws of war. Finally, Fazal and Greene ( 2015 ) found that observed compliance is explained by identity rather than law; violations are much more common in European vs. non-European dyads than in other types of dyads.

While these analyses suggest that international law has little effect on state behavior and that observed compliance is incidental, Price ( 1997 ) and Morrow ( 2014 ) argued that law does exert some influence on compliance behavior. Price attributed variation in the use of chemical weapons to the terms of international agreements, arguing that complete bans are more effective than partial bans. Morrow ( 2014 ), however, demonstrated that law’s impact varies depending upon issue area, regime characteristics, and adversary identity. Of eight issue areas, he found the worst compliance records on civilian targeting and prisoners of war, which perhaps accounts for the largely negative conclusions drawn by Downes ( 2006 ) and Valentino et al. ( 2006 ). Additionally, Morrow found, unlike Valentino et al., that democratic states are more likely to comply after ratification than before, suggesting that obligations under international law do affect state behavior, at least in democracies. Finally, he demonstrated that compliance increases significantly when an adversary has also ratified a given treaty, arguing this effect is due to reciprocity.

More recent scholarship expands this research, showing that law may affect state behavior through additional mechanisms that previous research had not considered. For example, Kreps and Wallace ( 2016 ) and Wallace ( 2015 ) found that public support for state policies as diverse as drone strikes and torture of prisoners of war are critically influenced by international law. International condemnation of U.S. policies reduces public support most when such condemnation focuses on legal critiques. This suggests that international law influences state behavior in democracies through its effect on public opinion, not through liberal norms of nonviolence. Additionally, Appel and Prorok ( 2018 ) and Jo and Thompson ( 2014 ) showed that external constraints influence states’ compliance behavior. Specifically, Appel and Prorok showed that states target fewer civilians in interstate war when they are embedded in alliance and trade networks dominated by third party states who have ratified international treaties prohibiting the abuse of non-combatants during war. Jo and Thompson showed that states are more likely to grant international observers access to detention centers when they are more reliant upon foreign aid. These findings suggest that international law can influence state behavior indirectly, through pressure exerted by international donors and backers.

Scholarship on compliance with the laws of war in interstate wars has made considerable progress over the past decade. We now know much more about the contingent support of democratic state leaders and publics for compliance with the laws of war. This key finding opens up new areas of research on the strategic efforts of political and military leaders to convince publics of their commitment to international law and whether those strategies are likely to be successful.

Civilian Targeting in Civil War

The mistreatment and deliberate targeting of civilian populations is an active area of research by scholars who study civil wars (Hultman, 2007 ; Humphreys & Weinstein, 2006 ; Kalyvas, 2006 ; Valentino et al., 2004 ; Weinstein, 2007 ; Wickham-Crowley, 1990 ). Most research on this topic treats the use of violence against civilians as a strategic choice; that is, combatants target civilians to induce their compliance, signal resolve, weaken an opponent’s support base, or extract resources from the population. In his seminal work on the topic, Kalyvas ( 2006 ) demonstrated that combatants resort to the use of indiscriminate violence to coerce civilian populations when they lack the information and control necessary to target defectors selectively. Similarly, Valentino ( 2005 ) and Valentino et al. ( 2004 ) found that incumbents are more likely to resort to mass killing of civilians when faced with strong insurgent opponents that they are unable to defeat through more conventional tactics.

More recent analyses have built upon these earlier works, adding levels of complexity to the central theories developed previously and examining new forms of violence that previous studies did not. Balcells ( 2011 ) brought political considerations back in, finding that direct violence is most likely in areas where pre-conflict political power between state and rebel supporters was at parity, while indirect violence is most likely in locations where the adversary’s pre-war political support was highest. Wood ( 2010 ) accounted for the impact of relative strength and adversary strategy, finding that weak rebel groups, lacking the capacity to protect civilian populations, will increase their use of violence in response to state violence, while strong rebel groups display the opposite pattern of behavior. Lyall ( 2010a ) also found conditionalities in the relationship between state behavior and insurgent reactions, demonstrating that government “sweep” operations are much more effective at preventing and delaying insurgent violence when carried out by forces of the same ethnicity as the insurgent group. Finally, Cohen ( 2016 ) advanced research by focusing on wartime sexual violence. She found that rape, like other forms of violence, is used strategically in civil war. Specifically, armed groups use rape as a socialization tactic: groups that recruit through abduction engage in rape at higher rates, to generate loyalty and trust between soldiers.

This large body of research provides many insights into the strategic use of violence against civilians during civil war. However, until recently, little research addressed questions of compliance with legal obligations. With the recent formation of the International Criminal Court, however, states and rebel groups are now subject to legal investigation for failure to comply with basic principles of the laws of war.

Emerging research suggests that the International Criminal Court (ICC) and international law more generally do affect the behavior of civil war combatants. For example, Hillebrecht ( 2016 ) found that ICC actions during the Libyan civil war reduced the level of mass atrocities committed in the conflict, while Jo and Simmons ( 2016 ) found that the ICC reduces civilian targeting by governments and rebel groups that are seeking legitimacy, suggesting international legal institutions can reduce violations of humanitarian law during civil war. These findings should be tempered, however, by recent research suggesting that ICC involvement in civil wars can, under certain conditions, extend ongoing conflicts (Prorok, 2017 ).

Finally, beyond the ICC, Stanton ( 2016 ) and Jo ( 2015 ) both demonstrated that international law constrains civil war actors by establishing standards against which domestic and international constituencies judge the behavior of governments and rebel groups. Particularly when rebels are seeking legitimacy, Jo argues, they are more likely to comply with international legal standards in a variety of areas, from protection of civilian populations to child soldiering. This research suggests that even without direct intervention by the ICC, international law can influence the behavior of governments and rebels engaged in civil war.

While recent research has shown that the laws of war can influence civilian targeting in civil wars, the large loss of civilian life in the Syrian civil war highlights how fragile the commitment to international law can be. It points to important future research questions about when threats of various sanctions by the international community against non-compliance are actually credible and which actors can apply effective coercive pressure.

Losses Suffered in Wars

Recent scholarship has taken up the issue of war severity. Empirical research suggests that the tactics and strategies used by states during war, and the political pressures that compel them to adopt those policies, affect the severity of conflict. Biddle ( 2004 ), for instance, argued that war-fighting strategies influence the magnitude of losses sustained during war, and found that states employing the modern system of force reduce their exposure to lethal firepower, thus limiting losses. Valentino, Huth, and Croco ( 2010 ) examined the reasons behind different strategic choices, arguing that democratic sensitivity to the costs of war pressure democratic leaders to adopt military policies designed to limit fatalities. They found that increasing military capabilities decreases civilian and military fatalities, while reliance on guerrilla or attrition strategies, as well as fighting on or near one’s own territory, increases fatalities. They reported that democracies are significantly more likely to join powerful alliances and less likely to use attrition or guerrilla strategies, or to fight on their own territory.

Speaking to the conventional wisdom that interstate warfare is on the decline, recent research by Fazal ( 2014 ) suggests that modern medical advances mean that, while war has become less fatal, it has not necessarily become less severe. This raises questions about common understandings of broad trends in conflict frequency and severity as well as questions about best practices for measuring conflict severity. Future research should grapple with both of these issues.

Civil war studies have recently begun to focus more on conflict severity as an outcome in need of explanation. Many key explanatory factors in early research mirrored those in interstate war research, making comparison possible. For example, like interstate war, civil war scholarship consistently finds that democracies suffer less severe conflicts than nondemocracies (Heger & Salehyan, 2007 ; Lacina, 2006 ; Lujala, 2009 ). Regarding state military strength, research by Lujala ( 2009 ) demonstrated that relative equality between government and rebel forces leads to the deadliest conflicts, as rebels with the strength to fight back will likely inflict more losses than those without the ability to sustain heavy engagement with government forces. Finally, recent research by Balcells and Kalyvas ( 2014 ) mirrored work on interstate war by focusing on how the military strategies adopted by combatants affect conflict intensity. They found that civil conflicts fought via conventional means tend to be more lethal than irregular or symmetric nonconventional (SNC) wars, as only the former involve direct confrontations with heavy weaponry. While research on conflict severity is still developing, these studies suggest that democracy, military strength, and strategy are consistent predictors of conflict severity, although the mechanisms posited for the effects of these variables sometimes differ between civil and interstate war.

What this research does not provide clear answers on is how battle losses trend throughout the course of conflict, as most factors examined in the above research are static throughout a conflict. As our ability to measure conflict severity at a more micro temporal and spatial level has improved, emerging research is beginning to address these questions. For example, Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon ( 2014 ) find that increasing UN troop presence decreases battlefield deaths by increasing the costs of perpetrating violence. Dasgupta Gawande, and Kapur ( 2017 ) also found reductions in insurgent violence associated with implementation of development programs, though the pacifying effects of such programs are conditional upon local state capacity. Additional research shows that trends in violence in Islamist insurgencies vary predictably, with violence suppressed due to anticipated social disapproval during important Islamic holidays (Reese, Ruby, & Pape, 2017 ). Recent research also suggests local variation in cell-phone coverage affects local levels of insurgent violence, as increasing cell-phone communication improves the state’s ability to gather information and monitor insurgent behavior, thereby reducing insurgent violence (Shapiro & Weidmann, 2015 ). These recent studies represent an important trend in conflict severity research that more carefully examines the dynamics of escalation and de-escalation within given conflicts, both spatially and temporally. We encourage additional research in this vein.

The Duration, Termination, and Outcome of War

What accounts for the duration, termination, and outcomes of interstate and civil wars, and the durability of the peace that follows these conflicts? These questions represent a central focus of contemporary conflict studies, and are closely linked in terms of their explanations. A major innovation in this literature in the past 10 to 15 years has been the extension of the bargaining model of war from its original application in the context of war onset (Blainey, 1973 ; Fearon, 1995 ) to its use in the context of war duration, termination, and outcome.

The turn to bargaining models has placed relative military capabilities and battlefield developments at the center of much of the theoretical literature in this area. This focus, however, has spawned a backlash in recent years, as patterns that contradict the implications of bargaining models are detected and theorized. The bargaining approach and its critiques are discussed in the following sections.

Duration of Wars

Understood within the bargaining framework, war duration is closely linked to factors that influence the relative strength of combatants. Theoretical and empirical research suggests that longer wars occur when opponents of relatively equal strength cannot achieve breakthroughs on the battlefield (Bennett & Stam, 1996 ; Filson & Werner, 2007b ; Slantchev, 2004 ), although this pattern does not hold for wars involving non-state actors where a large asymmetry in power increases war duration (Sullivan, 2008 ).

Additional research suggests, however, that relative military strength may not be the best predictor of war duration. Bennett and Stam ( 1996 ), for example, demonstrated that military strategy has a large impact on war duration, independent of military strength, with attrition and punishment strategies leading to longer wars than maneuver strategies. The type of political objectives sought by a war initiator may also offset the impact of military strength, as war aims that require significant target compliance generally lead to longer wars (Sullivan, 2008 ). Still others argue that domestic political sensitivity to concessions-making increases conflict duration, while domestic cost sensitivity leads to shorter wars (Filson & Werner, 2007a ; Mattes & Morgan, 2004 ). Thus, democracies are expected to fight shorter wars (Filson & Werner, 2007b ), whereas mixed regimes will fight longer wars as they gamble for resurrection in the face of high domestic costs for war losses (Goemans, 2000 ). Research by Lyall ( 2010b ), however, suggests that this relationship is conditional upon conflict type, as he found no relationship between democracy and war duration in the context of counterinsurgency wars.

Biddle ( 2004 ) more directly challenged bargaining models of war duration by comparing the predictive power of models including traditional measures of relative military capabilities to those accounting for combatants’ methods of force employment. Biddle demonstrated that models taking force employment into account generate more accurate predictions of war duration than those assuming an unconditional relationship between military power and war duration. A second important challenge to traditional applications of bargaining models comes from Reiter ( 2009 ). He demonstrated that the argument that decisive battlefield outcomes promote quick termination is conditional upon the absence of commitment problems. When compliance fears dominate information asymmetries, battle losses and the expectation of future losses may not be sufficient to end conflict, as belligerents will continue fighting in pursuit of absolute victory to eliminate the threat of the losing state defecting from post-war settlements. Reiter thus demonstrates that commitment problems and information asymmetries have varying effects on war duration, and both must be accounted for in models of conflict duration and termination.

Despite these critiques, more recent research continues to approach the question of war duration from the bargaining perspective. Shirkey ( 2012 ), for example, argued that late third-party joiners to interstate conflicts lengthen those disputes by complicating the bargaining process. Joiners add new issues to the war and increase uncertainty about relative power among combatants, thus requiring additional fighting to reveal information and find a bargained solution. Weisiger ( 2016 ) similarly focused on information problems, but attempts to unpack the mechanism by focusing on more specific characteristics of battlefield events. Using new data on the timing of battle deaths for specific war participants, Weisiger found that settlement is more likely after more extensive fighting, and that states are more likely to make concessions after their battle results have deteriorated. Finally, recent research has also begun to problematize resolve, considering how variation in actors’ resolve affects their willingness to stay in a fight or cut losses (Kertzer, 2017 ). This represents a fruitful area for future research, as conceptually and empirically unpacking resolve will shed new light on costs of war and how they relate to war onset, duration, and termination.

Scholars studying the duration of civil wars also commonly apply a rationalist perspective. Factors that increase the costs of sustaining the fight generally shorten wars, while those that raise the costs of making concessions tend to lengthen conflicts. Along these lines, research suggests that the availability of contraband funding for rebel groups lengthens conflicts by providing rebels with the economic resources to sustain their campaigns (Fearon, 2004 ). However, additional research demonstrates that the influence of contraband is mitigated by fluctuations in its market value (Collier, Hoeffler, & Söderbom, 2004 ), by how rebels earn funding from resources (through smuggling versus extortion; Conrad, Greene, Igoe Walsh, & Whitaker, 2018 ), and by the composition of state institutions (Wiegand & Keels, 2018 ).

Research suggests that structural conditions also affect civil war duration, such as the stakes of war, ethnic divisions, and the number of combatants involved. For example, ethnic conflicts over control of territory are generally longer than those fought over control of the central government (Balch-Lindsay & Enterline, 2000 ; Collier et al., 2004 ; Fearon, 2004 ). Regarding the role of ethnicity, Wucherpfennig, Metternich, Cederman, and Skrede Gleditsch ( 2012 ) demonstrated that the effect of ethnic cleavages is conditional on their relationship to political institutions. Regarding the complexity of the conflict, Cunningham ( 2011 ) found that civil wars with a greater number of combatants on each side are longer than those with fewer combatants. Findley ( 2013 ), however, showed that the number of conflict actors has varying effects across different stages of conflict, encouraging cooperation early on while impeding lasting settlement.

Third party intervention has also received significant attention in the civil war duration literature, with scholars generally arguing that intervention affects duration by augmenting the military strength of combatants. Empirical findings in early studies are mixed, however; while results consistently show that unbiased intervention or simultaneous intervention on both sides of a conflict increase war duration (Balch-Lindsay & Enterline, 2000 ; Balch-Lindsay, Enterline, & Joyce, 2008 ; Regan, 2002b ), biased interventions generate more inconsistent results.

In a valuable study addressing limitations of earlier research, Cunningham ( 2010 ) focused on the goals of third parties, and found that when interveners pursue agendas that are independent of those of the internal combatants, wars are more difficult to terminate due to decreased incentives to negotiate and a higher likelihood that commitment problems stymie settlements. This suggests that the empirical finding that intervention lengthens war may be driven by a subset of cases in which third parties intervene with specific goals. Ultimately, analyses focused on intervention do not account for the potential selection effect that influences when states will intervene. If Gent ( 2008 ) is correct, biased intervention should be most likely when the power ratio between government and rebel forces is close to parity, a factor which, if ignored, may bias the results of these analyses.

More recent studies have continued to unpack intervention, demonstrating that there are important distinctions beyond the biased versus balanced debate. Sawyer, Cunningham, and Reed ( 2015 ), for example, showed that different types of external support affect rebel fighting capacity differently. Specifically, fungible types of support like financial and arms transfers are particularly likely to lengthen conflict because they increase uncertainty over relative power. Similarly, Narang ( 2015 ) also focused on the uncertainty induced by external support. He showed that humanitarian assistance inadvertently increases both actors’ uncertainty over relative power, thereby prolonging civil war.

Until recently, this literature suffered from a major weakness in that it relied empirically on state-level variables that did not fully capture the dyadic nature of its theoretical propositions. Cunningham, Skrede Gleditsch, and Salehyan ( 2013 ) new dyadic data represents an important contribution to the field, as it explicitly measures the relative strength, mobilization capacity, and fighting capacity of rebel groups and applies a truly dyadic empirical approach. New research in this field should continue to approach questions of war duration and outcome with dyadic data and theory along with more micro-level studies that seek to explain variation in rebel and state fighting across different geographic locations and over time (e.g., Greig, 2015 ).

Ending Wars as a Bargaining Process

Interstate wars rarely end in the complete destruction of the defeated party’s military forces. Instead, new information is revealed through combat operations and negotiating behavior which enables belligerents to converge on a mutually agreeable settlement short of total war. Wittman ( 1979 ) provided the first formal articulation of the bargaining model in the context of war termination. He argued theoretically that war continues until both adversaries believe they can be made better off through settlement. Subsequent analyses have focused on both the battlefield conditions and strategies of negotiations leading states to believe settlement is the better option.

These analyses show that, as a state’s resources are depleted from battle losses, it has incentives to negotiate a settlement more acceptable to its adversary rather than suffer total defeat (Filson & Werner, 2002 ; Smith & Stam, 2004 ). Further, fighting battles reduces uncertainty by revealing information about resolve, military effectiveness, and the true balance of power between adversaries, causing expectations on the likely outcome of the war to converge, and making settlement possible (Wagner, 2000 ). Wartime negotiations provide adversaries with additional information, which Slantchev ( 2011 ) argued makes war termination more likely.

Challenging traditional notions regarding the likelihood of termination in the face of large asymmetries in capabilities, Slantchev ( 2011 ) argued that war termination depends upon states’ abilities to both impose and bear the costs of fighting. If a weaker state can minimize the costs it bears while forcing its adversary to expand its war effort, the benefits of fighting relative to its costs are reduced, and the stronger state may choose termination. The implication of this argument relates closely to Biddle’s ( 2004 ) empirical critique of the bargaining literature, which finds modern methods of force employment can mitigate losses during war, thereby shifting the balance of costs and benefits independent of relative military capabilities. Reiter’s ( 2009 ) critique of bargaining approaches also has implications for war termination. While traditional approaches argue that fighting battles reveals information and increases the likelihood of termination, Reiter suggested that this is only the case if belligerents expect their opponent to comply with the post-war status quo. If commitment problems are severe, information revealed during battles and war-time negotiations will have little effect on termination.

Biddle’s argument that country-year measures of military capabilities are inexact and crude proxies for the concepts advanced in theoretical models is a strong one that should be taken seriously by scholars. We therefore appreciate the contributions of Ramsay ( 2008 ) and Weisiger ( 2016 ), which use more fine-grained battle trend data rather than country-level measures of military capabilities to empirically test the implications of bargaining theories of war termination, and advocate future research adopting this strategy for testing the implications of bargaining theories.

Much of the literature on civil war termination also focuses on how battlefield developments affect the termination of civil wars. Collier et al. ( 2004 ) built on the idea of war as an information revelation mechanism, arguing that the probability of settlement should increase as war duration increases and more information is revealed regarding the relative strength of each side. Others focus on the costs of battle, with research showing that settlements are more likely when the costs of battle are high and the relative payoffs from victory decrease (Walter, 2002 ). Also, a relatively equal balance of power between combatants creates a mutually hurting stalemate, in which neither side can achieve victory, and settlement becomes more likely (Walter, 2002 ).

Empirical results support many of these theoretical predictions. Several scholars show that the longer a civil war lasts, the more likely it is to terminate (Collier et al., 2004 ; Fearon,, 2004 ; Regan, 2002b ), and that the probability of negotiated settlement increases as conflict duration increases (Mason, Weingarten, & Fett, 1999 ). The magnitude of conflict, measured as total war deaths, also correlates positively with the probability of adversaries initiating negotiations (Walter, 2002 ). Finally, Walter ( 2002 ) found that military stalemates significantly increase the likelihood of negotiations as well as the implementation of a ceasefire.

While these results support the theoretical predictions surrounding “hurting stalemates,” Walter’s coding of stalemates does not account for the timing of the stalemate or the number of stalemates that occur throughout the course of conflict. We therefore see great value in more recent research that uses new micro-level data to more closely capture actual battle dynamics and incorporate more information at the conflict and group-level. For example, Hultquist ( 2013 ) used a novel troop strength measure to better capture relative strength between rebel and government forces. He found that relative power parity increases the likelihood of negotiated settlement, while power imbalances extend civil war. Making use of fine-grained data on battle event dates and locations, Greig ( 2015 ) showed that the location, and changes in location over time, of battle events relays information to combatants that, in turn, affects their willingness to negotiate and settle their conflicts. We encourage additional research in this vein moving forward.

Domestic-Level Factors and War Termination

Recent research suggests that domestic political conditions influence war termination. Specifically, domestic political accountability, the domestic audience’s expectations, and cost-sensitivity affect leaders’ decisions to continue fighting versus settling on specific terms (Mattes & Morgan, 2004 ). Along these lines, Goemans ( 2000 ) argued that the postwar fate of leaders influences their choice between terminating and continuing a war. The threat of severe punishment by domestic actors increases the costs of war losses for leaders of semi-repressive regimes, leading them to continue fighting a war they are losing in the hope of achieving victory. Thus, war termination does not follow strictly from battle trends.

Empirically, Goemans ( 2000 ) found that losing mixed regimes suffer significantly more battle deaths than democratic or autocratic losers, and that wars fought against losing mixed regimes last, on average, almost twice as long as those fought against either democratic or autocratic losers. Taken together, these results suggest that mixed regime leaders are likely to sustain rather than terminate a losing war, and more generally, that regime type significantly influences war termination. Croco ( 2015 ) refined Goemans’s work by arguing that the individual responsibility of leaders for involving their country in a war has important effects on war termination patterns, with culpable leaders more likely to fight for victory in order to avoid being punished domestically for poor wartime performance. Croco and Weeks ( 2013 ) refined this logic further, showing that only culpable leaders from democracies and vulnerable nondemocracies face increased punishment risk from war losses. Koch and Sullivan ( 2010 ) provide another take on the relationship between domestic politics and war termination, demonstrating that partisanship significantly affects democratic states’ war termination decisions. Faced with declining approval for military interventions, their results demonstrate, right-leaning governments will continue the fight, while left-leaning executives will be more likely to end their military engagements.

The analog to studying domestic-level factors in interstate conflict would be to examine the effect of internal state and rebel characteristics on civil war termination. Traditionally, civil war studies have focused only on state characteristics, as data on rebel groups’ organization and internal characteristics has been unavailable. Early research argued that state capacity, regime characteristics, and ethnic/religious divisions influenced war termination by influencing the balance of power, accountability of leaders, and stakes of conflict, but empirical results provided mixed support for these theories (e.g., DeRouen & Sobek, 2004 ; Svensson, 2007 ; Walter, 2002 ).

More recent research has made significant strides in understanding how internal characteristics of combatants affect civil conflict termination by using new data to explore how the composition and practices (i.e., leader characteristics, governance, and internal cohesion) of rebel groups influence civil conflict dynamics. This research demonstrates that some of the same leader-accountability mechanisms that affect interstate war termination also influence civil conflict. For example, Prorok ( 2016 ) used novel data on rebel group leaders to show that culpable leaders are less willing to terminate or settle for compromise outcomes than their non-culpable counterparts in civil wars, just like in interstate conflicts. Heger and Jung ( 2017 ) also advanced existing research by using novel data on rebel service provision to civilian populations to explore how good rebel governance affects conflict negotiations. They found that service-providing rebels are more likely to engage in negotiations and to achieve favorable results, arguing that this reflects the lower risk of spoilers from groups with broad support and centralized power structures. Finally, Findley and Rudloff ( 2012 ) examined rebel group fragmentation’s effects on conflict termination and outcomes. Using computational modeling, they find that fragmentation only sometimes increases war duration (on fragmentation, also see Cunningham, 2014 ).

These studies underscore the value of exploring rebel group internal structures and practices in greater detail in future research, as they have an important impact on how, and when, civil wars end.

Victory/Defeat in Wars

Recent scholarship on victory and defeat in war suggests, as in the duration and termination literatures, that domestic politics, strategies of force employment, military mechanization, and war aims mediate the basic relationship between military strength and victory. Empirical results show that strategy choices and methods of force employment have a greater impact on war outcomes than relative military capabilities (Biddle, 2004 ; Stam, 1996 ), that high levels of mechanization within state militaries actually increase the probability of state defeat in counterinsurgency wars (Lyall & Wilson, 2009 ), and that weak states win more often when they employ an opposite-strategy approach in asymmetric conflicts (Arreguin-Toft, 2006 ) or when the stronger party’s war aims require high levels of target compliance (Sullivan, 2007 ). High relative losses and increasing war duration also decrease the likelihood of victory for war initiators, even if prewar capabilities favored the aggressor (Slantchev, 2004 ).

More recent research focuses on counter-insurgent conflicts, using new micro-level data and modeling techniques to address questions of counterinsurgent effectiveness in these complex conflicts. For example, Toft and Zhukov ( 2012 ) evaluated the effectiveness of denial versus punishment strategies, finding that denial (i.e., increasing the costs of expanding insurgent violence) is most effective, while punishment is counterproductive. Relatedly, Weidmann and Salehyan ( 2013 ) used an agent-based model applied to the U.S. surge in Baghdad to understand the mechanisms behind the surge’s success. They found that ethnic homogenization, rather than increased counterinsurgent capacity, best accounts for the surge’s success. Finally, Quackenbush and Murdie ( 2015 ) found that, counter to conventional wisdom, past experiences with counterinsurgency or conventional warfare have little effect on future success in conflict. States are not simply fighting the last war.

An important area of research that has fostered significant debate among scholars focuses on explaining the historical pattern of high rates of victory by democracies in interstate wars. The strongest explanations for the winning record of democracies center on their superior battlefield initiative and leadership, cooperative civil-military relations, and careful selection into wars they have a high probability of winning (Reiter & Stam, 2002 ). Challenging these results both theoretically and empirically, however, Desch ( 2002 ) argues that “democracy hardly matters,” that relative power plays a more important role in explaining victory. This debate essentially comes down to the relative importance of realist-type power variables versus regime type variables in explaining military victory; while scholars such as Lake ( 1992 ) and Reiter and Stam ( 2002 ) argued that regime type matters more, Desch asserted that relative power is the more important determinant of military victory.

Ultimately, we find Desch’s objections to the relevance of democracy to be overstated and his theoretical and empirical justifications to be largely unconvincing. First, Desch’s analysis is biased against Reiter and Stam’s argument because it is limited to dyads that Desch labels “fair fights,” that is, dyads with relatively equal military capabilities. This does not allow Desch to test the selection effect that Reiter and Stam discuss. Second, Desch failed to recognize that many of the realist variables he attributes the greatest explanatory power to are actually influenced by the foreign and military policies adopted by democratic leaders (Valentino et al., 2010 ). Democracy thus has both a direct and an indirect effect on war outcomes, and because Desch ignores the latter, he underestimates democracy’s total impact. Finally, the impacts of power variables may be overstated, as recent research demonstrates that military power’s influence is conditional upon method of force employment and military mechanization (Biddle, 2004 ; Lyall & Wilson, 2009 ).

More recent research examines some of the mechanisms suggested for the unique war-time behavior of democracies, raising some questions about existing mechanisms and suggesting alternatives to explain democratic exceptionalism. For example, Gibler and Miller ( 2013 ) argued that democracies tend to fight short, victorious wars because they have fewer territorial (i.e., high salience) issues over which to fight, rather than because of their leaders’ political accountability. Once controlling for issue salience, they find no relationship between democracy and victory. Similarly, using novel statistical techniques that allow them to account for the latent abilities of states, Renshon and Spirling ( 2015 ) showed that democracy only increases military effectiveness under certain conditions, and is actually counterproductive in others. Finally, new research by Bausch ( 2017 ) using laboratory experiments to test the mechanisms behind democracy and victory suggested that only some of these mechanisms hold up. Specifically, Bausch found that democratic leaders are actually more likely to select into conflict and do not mobilize more resources for war once involved, contrary to the selection and war fighting stories developed by Reiter and Stam ( 2002 ). He did find, however, that democratic leaders are less likely to accept settlement and more likely to fight to decisive victory once conflict is underway, and that democratic leaders are more likely to be punished than autocrats for losing a war. Thus, the debate over the democratic advantage in winning interstate wars continues to progress in productive directions.

Theoretical arguments regarding civil war outcomes focus on state/rebel strength, positing that factors such as natural resource wealth, state military capacity, and third-party assistance influence relative combatant strength and war outcomes. Empirical studies find that increasing state military strength decreases the likelihood of negotiated settlement and increases the probability of government victory (Mason et al., 1999 ). Characteristics of the war itself also affect outcomes, with the probability of negotiated settlement increasing as war duration increases (Mason et al., 1999 ; Walter, 2002 ), and high casualty rates increasing the likelihood of rebel victory (Mason et al., 1999 ).

Debate remains over how third-party interventions affect civil war outcomes. UN intervention decreases the likelihood of victory by either side while increasing the probability of negotiated war terminations (DeRouen & Sobek, 2004 ). This impact is time sensitive, however (Mason et al., 1999 ). Further, the impact of unilateral interventions is less clear. While Regan ( 1996 ) found intervention supporting the government to increase the likelihood of war termination, Gent ( 2008 ) found military intervention in support of rebels to increase their chance of victory but that in support of governments to have no significant impact. More recent research by Sullivan and Karreth ( 2015 ) helps explain this discrepancy. They argued that biased intervention only alters the chances for victory by the supported side if that side’s key deficiency is conventional war-fighting capacity. Empirically, they show that because rebels are generally weaker, military intervention on their behalf increases their chance of victory. For states, however, military intervention only increases their odds of victory if the state is militarily weaker than or at parity with the rebels.

Additional new research by Jones ( 2017 ) also represents an important step forward in understanding the effects of intervention in civil war. By examining both the timing and strategy of intervention, Jones demonstrated that the effects of intervention on conflict outcomes are much more complex than previous research suggests.

Post-War Peace Durability

As with studies on war duration, termination, and outcomes, much of the literature on the stability of post-war peace grows from extensions of the bargaining model of war. For these scholars, recurrence is most likely under conditions that encourage the renegotiation of the terms of settlement, including postwar changes in the balance of power (Werner, 1999 ) and externally forced ceasefires that artificially terminate fighting before both sides agree on the proper allocation of the spoils of war (Werner & Yuen, 2005 ). Building off of commitment problem models, Fortna ( 2004b ) argued that strong peace agreements that enhance monitoring, incorporate punishment for defection, and reward cooperation help sustain peace. Specific measures within agreements, however, affect the durability of peace differently. For example, troop withdrawals and the establishment of demilitarized zones decrease the likelihood of war resumption, while arms control measures have no significant impact (Fortna, 2004b , p. 176).

Postwar intervention is also expected to increase peace duration by ameliorating commitment problems, as peacekeepers act as a physical barrier and reduce security fears, uncertainty, and misperceptions between former adversaries (Fortna, 2004a ). Empirical results support this theoretical prediction, and while the size of the force is not significant, both monitoring and armed forces missions increase the durability of post-war peace (Fortna, 2004a ).

The debate that remains in this literature is whether or not peace agreements can effectively mitigate the influence of relative power variables. Recent research by Lo, Hashimoto, and Reiter ( 2008 ) suggests that they cannot. They demonstrated that cease-fire agreement strength has almost no significant impact on post-war peace duration, while factors encouraging renegotiation receive partial support. While discrepancies in results may be in part attributable to differences in time periods covered, this result essentially confirms Warner and Yuen’s ( 2005 ) finding that externally imposed war termination invites resumption of conflict, regardless of the presence of strong cease-fire agreements.

If, at the end of a civil conflict, each side maintains its ability to wage war, issues of credibility can undermine the peace and cause the conflict to resume. Thus, wars ending in negotiated settlements are more likely to recur than those ending with a decisive victory because both sides have the ability to resume fighting to gain greater concessions and neither can credibly commit to the peace (Licklider,, 1995 ; Walter, 2002 ). More recent research confirms that conflicts ending in military victory are less likely to recur than those ending in settlement (Caplan & Hoeffler, 2017 ; Toft, 2009 ), though Toft suggested that this is particularly true for rebel victories.

This understanding of post-war peace in terms of the bargaining model’s commitment problem has led scholars to examine three primary avenues through which commitment problems might be overcome and peace maintained. First, partition has been advanced as a possible solution to post-war instability. The separation of warring factions is expected to reduce security fears by creating demographically separate, militarily defensible regions (Kaufmann, 1996 ). Empirical evidence generally supports this strategy. Partitions that successfully separate warring ethnic groups significantly reduce the risk of renewed conflict (Johnson, 2008 ), while those that do not achieve demographic separation increase the risk of renewed hostilities (Tir, 2005 ). Further, relative to de facto separation, autonomy arrangements, or maintenance of a unitary state, partition is significantly less likely to lead to war recurrence (Chapman & Roeder, 2007 ).

Second, third-party intervention is expected to play a role in ameliorating the security dilemma arising from commitment problems in post-conflict states (Fearon, 2004 ; Walter, 2002 ). Empirical results confirm that third-party security guarantees are critical to the signing and durability of peace settlements (Walter, 2002 ). Once settlement has been reached, third-party guarantees and international peacekeeping establish punishments for defection (Fortna, 2008 ; Walter, 2002 ), thereby reducing incentives for and increasing costs of renewed conflict. More recent research that employs more fine-grained data on the size and composition of UN peacekeeping forces suggests, however, that this type of third-party guarantee is most effective when it has the military power to enforce the peace. Specifically, Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon ( 2016 ) found that increasing UN troop presence increases peace durability, but the presence of other types of UN monitors has little effect on peace duration. By using more fine-grained data, this study makes an important contribution by allowing us to parse the mechanisms driving the role of third party guarantees in promoting peace.

Third, the incorporation of power-sharing arrangements that guarantee the survival of each side into the postwar settlement is also expected to solve post-civil war commitment problems (Walter, 2002 ). These arrangements allow adversaries to generate costly signals of their resolve to preserve the peace, thus ameliorating security fears (Hartzell & Hoddie, 2007 ). Empirical results indicate that given a negotiated settlement, the agreement’s ability to ameliorate security concerns is positively associated with the preservation of peace. Thus, the more regulation of coercive and political power included in an agreement, and the greater the number of dimensions (political, territorial, military, economic) of power sharing specified, the more likely agreements are to endure (Hartzell & Hoddie, 2007 ).

More recently, scholars have begun to extend this research by focusing more broadly on settlement design. Whereas previous research tended to simply count the number of power-sharing dimensions, newer analyses focus on issues such as the quality of the agreement (Badran, 2014 ) and equality in the terms of settlement (Albin & Druckman, 2012 ). Martin ( 2013 ), for example, found that provisions that share power at the executive level are less effective than those that regulate power at the level of rank-and-file or the public, as elite-level power-sharing is relatively easy for insincere actors to engage in at a relatively low cost. Cammett and Malesky ( 2012 ) found that proportional representation provisions are particularly effective at stabilizing post-conflict peace because of their ability to promote good governance and service provision, while Joshi and Mason ( 2011 ) similarly found that power-sharing provisions that expand the size of the governing coalition result in more stable peace. These analyses suggest that delving further into the design and content of settlement agreements is a positive avenue for future research. Future research should also examine how implementation of peace agreements proceeds, and how the timing and sequencing of implementation affects the durability of peace (e.g., Langer & Brown, 2016 ).

Finally, emerging research on civil war recurrence also shifts focus toward rebel groups and how their composition and integration affect post-conflict peace. For example, new research finds that rebel group fragmentation hastens the recurrence of civil war (Rudloff & Findley, 2016 ), while greater inclusion of former rebels in government improves prospects for post-conflict peace (Call, 2012 ; Marshall & Ishiyama, 2016 ). Emerging research on post-conflict elections also represents an important area for further study, as debate remains over how elections affect conflict recurrence. While some argue that they destabilize the peace (Flores & Nooruddin, 2012 ), others suggest they actually reduce the risk of conflict recurrence (Matanock, 2017 ).

The Longer-Term Consequences of Wars

What are the political, economic, and social consequences of interstate and civil wars, and what explains these postwar conditions? As Rasler and Thompson ( 1992 ) recognized, the consequences of war are often far-reaching and complex. Given this complexity, much of the literature varies significantly in quality and coverage; while post-war political change has received significant attention from political scientists, the social and health-related consequences of war are less well-known.

Post-War Domestic Political Stability and Change

Scholarship on post-war political stability focuses on both regime and leadership change, positing political accountability as a central mechanism in both cases. Interstate war has been theorized to induce internal revolution both indirectly (Skocpol, 1979 ) and directly (Bueno De Mesquita et al., 2003 ; Goemans, 2000 ). Empirical results support the accountability argument, as war losses and increasing costs of war increase the likelihood of post-war leadership turnover (Bueno De Mesquita & Siverson, 1995 ) as well as violent regime overthrow (Bueno De Mesquita, Siverson, & Woller, 1992 ). Related work shows that accountable leaders are also more likely to face foreign-imposed regime change at the hands of war victors (Bueno De Mesquita et al., 2003 ).

A central focus of recent research has been the conditional relationship between war outcomes and regime type. In his seminal study, Goemans, 2000 ) found that leaders of mixed and democratic regimes are more likely to be removed from office as a result of moderate losses in war than are leaders of autocracies. These findings, however, have been challenged by recent scholarship. Colaresi ( 2004 ) finds no difference in leadership turnover rates across all regimes types under conditions of moderate war losses, and Chiozza and Goemans ( 2004 ), employing a different measure of war outcomes and discounting the impact of termination over time, find that defeat in war is most costly for autocratic leaders and has no significant impact on tenure for democratic leaders.

Recently, research in the civil war literature has begun to focus more on post-war democratization, elections, and how groups transition from fighting forces to political parties. Much of the early work in this area focused on the link between war outcomes and the development of democratic institutions in the post-war period, specifically arguing that negotiated settlements facilitate democratization by requiring the inclusion of opposition groups in the decision-making process (Doyle & Sambanis, 2006 ; Gurses & Mason, 2008 ). More recent research, however, challenges this conventional wisdom, showing that the benefits of negotiated settlement are limited to the short-term and that economic factors are better predictors of post-war democratization (Fortna & Huang, 2012 ).

Recognizing that not all negotiated settlements are created equal, scholars have also begun to examine how variation in power-sharing provisions influences democratization. Debate remains on this topic as well, however. While some argue that power-sharing facilitates democratization by generating costly signals that create the stability necessary for democratization (Hoddie & Hartzell, 2005 ), others argue that they undermine democratization by reifying wartime cleavages, incentivizing political parties to seek support only from their own wartime constituencies, and undermining public confidence in governmental institutions (Jung, 2012 ). However, after accounting for non-random selection into power-sharing, Hartzell and Hoddie ( 2015 ) found that the inclusion of multiple power-sharing provisions in peace agreements increases post-civil war democratization. Future research should delve further into this debate, and consider more carefully whether specific types of provisions or institutional designs vary in their ability to promote democracy. Joshi ( 2013 ) represents an important first step in this direction, finding that institutional designs that favor inclusivity (e.g., parliamentary systems and proportional representation) are more successful at producing democracy.

Debate also continues over the effects of international intervention on post-conflict democratization. While some scholars expect intervention to facilitate postwar democratization by mitigating commitment problems and raising the costs of defection (Doyle & Sambanis, 2006 ), others suggest it is used as a tool by interveners to impose amenable, generally non-democratic, institutions in the target country (Bueno De Mesquita & Downs, 2006 ). Doyle and Sambanis ( 2006 ) found multidimensional UN missions incorporating economic reconstruction, institutional reform, and election oversight, to be significantly and positively correlated with the development of postwar democracy. However, Gurses and Mason ( 2008 ) and Fortna and Huang ( 2012 ) challenged this finding, reporting no significant relationship between UN presence and postwar democratization, and Paris ( 2004 ) and Bueno de Mesquita and Downs ( 2006 ) showed that peacebuilding missions and UN interventions actually decrease levels of democracy.

Future research should attempt to reconcile many of these open debates in both the interstate and civil conflict literatures. It should also build upon emerging research on post-conflict elections (Flores & Nooruddin, 2012 ; Matanock, 2017 ) and rebel governance (Huang, 2016 ). Huang’s work on rebel governance, in particular, shows that how rebels interact with civilian populations during conflict has important implications for post-conflict democratization.

Public Health Conditions in the Aftermath of Wars

Social scientists have recently begun to study the consequences of war for the postwar health and well-being of civilian populations. Theoretical arguments developed in this literature generally do not distinguish between interstate and civil war, instead developing mechanisms that apply to both types of conflict. The most direct public health consequence of war, of course, results from the killing and wounding of civilian populations. Scholars argue, however, that more indirect mechanisms cause longer-term public health problems as well. War, for example, is expected to undermine long-term public health by exposing populations to hazardous conditions through the movement of refugees and soldiers as vectors for disease (Ghobarah, Huth, & Russett, 2003 ; Iqbal, 2006 ), damaging health-related facilities and basic infrastructure (Li & Wen, 2005 ; Plümper & Neumayer, 2006 ), and reducing government spending and private investment on public health (Ghobarah et al., 2003 ).

Many empirical analyses, unfortunately, do not directly address the mechanisms outlined above. Overall, findings indicate that both civil and interstate war increase adult mortality in the short and long term (Li & Wen, 2005 ) and decrease health-adjusted life-expectancy in the short term (Iqbal, 2006 ). Conflict severity is also influential; while low-level conflict has no significant effect on mortality rates, severe conflict increases mortality and decreases life-expectancy in the long run (Li & Wen, 2005 ; Hoddie & Smith, 2009 ; Iqbal, 2006 ). Comparing the health impacts of interstate and civil wars, analysts have found interstate conflict to exert a stronger, negative impact on long-term mortality rates than civil war, despite the finding that civil war’s immediate impact is more severe (Li & Wen, 2005 ). Finally, many analysts have found that the negative, long-term effects of war are consistently stronger for women and children (Ghobarah, et al., 2003 ; Plümper & Neumayer ( 2006 ) than for men.

This developing field provides important new insights into the civilian consequences of war, but remains underdeveloped in many respects. First, while some evidence suggests that civil and interstate war might affect public health differently, the mechanisms behind these differences require further elaboration. Research by Hoddie and Smith, represented an important contribution in this respect, as it distinguishes between different conflict strategies, finding that conflicts involving extensive violence against noncombatants have more severe health consequences than those in which most fatalities are combat-related. Second, theoretical models are generally much more developed and sophisticated than the data used to test them. While data availability is limited, efforts should be made to more closely match theory and empirics.

Third, analyses that employ disaggregated measures of health consequences (Ghobarah et al., 2003 ) provided a more thorough understanding of the specific consequences of war and represent an important avenue for additional theoretical and empirical development. Iqbal and Zorn ( 2010 ) thus focus specifically on conflict’s detrimental impact on the transmission of HIV/AIDS, while Iqbal ( 2010 ) examines the impact of conflict on many different health-based metrics, including infant mortality, health-associated life expectancy, fertility rates, and even measles and diphtheria vaccination rates. These studies represent important advances in the literature, which should be explored further in future research to disentangle the potentially complex health effects of civil and interstate conflict.

Finally, recent research has begun to conceptualize health more broadly, accounting for the psychological consequences of wartime violence. Building upon research in psychology, Koos ( 2018 ) finds that exposure to conflict-related sexual violence in Sierra Leone generates resilience: affected households display greater cooperation and altruism than those unaffected by such violence during conflict. Bauer et al. ( 2016 ) similarly find that conflict fosters greater social cohesion and civic engagement in the aftermath of war. This is an important area for future research. As conceptions of conflict-related violence broaden, our conceptualizations of the consequences of violence should also expand to include notions of how conflict affects psychological health, community cohesion, and other less direct indicators of public health.

This final section highlights some of the contributions generated by scholarship on the conduct and consequences of war, as well as some of the gaps that remain to be addressed. First, this body of scholarship usefully compliments the large and more traditional work of military historians who study international wars, as well as the work of contemporary defense analysts who conduct careful policy analyses on relevant issues such as wartime military tactics and strategy as well as weapon system performance. The bargaining model of war has also proven a useful theoretical framework in which to structure and integrate theoretical analyses across different stages in the evolution of war.

Second, a number of studies in this body of work have contributed to the further development and testing of the democratic peace literature by extending the logic of political accountability models from questions of war onset to democratic wartime behavior. New dependent variables, including civilian targeting, imposition of regime change, the waging of war in ways designed to reduce military and civilian losses, and victory versus defeat in war have been analyzed. As a result, a number of new arguments and empirical findings have improved our understanding of how major security policy decisions by democratic leaders are influenced by domestic politics.

Third, this literature has advanced scholarship on international law and institutions by examining questions about compliance with the laws of war and the role played by the UN in terminating wars and maintaining a durable post-war peace. The impact of international law and institutions is much better understood on issues relating to international political economy, human rights, and international environmental governance than it is on international security affairs. As a result, studies of compliance with the laws of war, the design of ceasefire agreements, or international peace-building efforts address major gaps in existing literature.

Fourth, this new body of research has explicitly focused on the consequences of war for civilian populations, a relatively neglected topic in academic research. Research on questions such as the deliberate targeting of civilians during wars and the longer-term health consequences of war begin to address this surprising gap in research. As such, this new literature subjects the study of terrorism to more systematic social science methods and also challenges the common practice of restricting terrorism to non-state actors and groups when, in fact, governments have resorted to terrorist attacks on many occasions in the waging of war.

While this literature has advanced scholarship in many ways, there remain several theoretical and empirical gaps that future research should aim to address, two of which are highlighted here. First, while research on interstate war duration and termination is more theoretically unified than its civil war counterpart, the dominance of the bargaining model in this literature is currently being challenged. Recent research on asymmetric conflict suggests that the basic tenants of the bargaining model may not hold for non-symmetric conflict, while research on force employment and mechanization suggest that traditional power measures exert a conditional impact at best. Additional research is needed to determine the conditions under which bargaining logic applies and its relative importance in explaining wartime behavior and war outcomes.

Second, the accumulation of knowledge on civil war’s conduct and consequences has lagged behind that on interstate war, partially because the civil war literature is younger, and partially because sub-national level data is only now becoming more readily available. While bargaining logic is often applied to civil war, we have little cross-national information on relative capabilities and battle trends, and thus a very limited understanding of the way in which these variables affect civil war duration and outcomes. New micro-level data and studies that are beginning to address these problems represent a promising direction forward for civil conflict research.

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The Ethics of War: Essays

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Some of the most basic assumptions of Just War theory have been dismantled in a barrage of criticism and analysis in the first dozen years of the twenty-first century. The Ethics of War continues and pushes past this trend. This anthology is an authoritative treatment of the ethics and law of war by eminent scholars who first challenged the orthodoxy of Just War theory, as well as by “second-wave” revisionists. The twelve original essays span both foundational and topical issues in the ethics of war, including an investigation of whether there is a “greater-good” obligation that parallels the canonical lesser evil justification in war, the conditions under which citizens can wage war against their own government, whether there is a limit to the number of combatants on the unjust side who can be permissibly killed, whether the justice of the cause for which combatants fight affects the moral permissibility of fighting, whether duress ever justifies killing in war, the role that collective liability plays in the ethics of war, whether targeted killing is morally and legally permissible, the morality of legal prohibitions on the use of indiscriminate weapons, the justification for the legal distinction between directly and indirectly harming civilians, whether human rights of unjust combatants are more prohibitive than have been thought, the moral categories and criteria needed to understand the proper justification for ending war, and the role of hope in the moral repair of combatants suffering from PTSD.

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war , in the popular sense, a conflict between political groups involving hostilities of considerable duration and magnitude. In the usage of social science , certain qualifications are added. Sociologists usually apply the term to such conflicts only if they are initiated and conducted in accordance with socially recognized forms. They treat war as an institution recognized in custom or in law . Military writers usually confine the term to hostilities in which the contending groups are sufficiently equal in power to render the outcome uncertain for a time. Armed conflicts of powerful states with isolated and powerless peoples are usually called pacifications, military expeditions, or explorations; with small states, they are called interventions or reprisals; and with internal groups, rebellions or insurrections . Such incidents, if the resistance is sufficiently strong or protracted, may achieve a magnitude that entitles them to the name “war.”

In all ages war has been an important topic of analysis. In the latter part of the 20th century, in the aftermath of two World Wars and in the shadow of nuclear, biological, and chemical holocaust, more was written on the subject than ever before. Endeavours to understand the nature of war, to formulate some theory of its causes, conduct, and prevention, are of great importance, for theory shapes human expectations and determines human behaviour . The various schools of theorists are generally aware of the profound influence they can exercise upon life, and their writings usually include a strong normative element, for, when accepted by politicians, their ideas can assume the characteristics of self-fulfilling prophecies.

The analysis of war may be divided into several categories. Philosophical, political, economic, technological, legal, sociological, and psychological approaches are frequently distinguished. These distinctions indicate the varying focuses of interest and the different analytical categories employed by the theoretician, but most of the actual theories are mixed because war is an extremely complex social phenomenon that cannot be explained by any single factor or through any single approach.

Reflecting changes in the international system, theories of war have passed through several phases in the course of the past three centuries. After the ending of the wars of religion, about the middle of the 17th century, wars were fought for the interests of individual sovereigns and were limited both in their objectives and in their scope. The art of maneuver became decisive, and analysis of war was couched accordingly in terms of strategies. The situation changed fundamentally with the outbreak of the French Revolution , which increased the size of forces from small professional to large conscript armies and broadened the objectives of war to the ideals of the revolution , ideals that appealed to the masses who were subject to conscription. In the relative order of post-Napoleonic Europe , the mainstream of theory returned to the idea of war as a rational, limited instrument of national policy. This approach was best articulated by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz in his famous classic On War (1832–37).

Louis IX of France (St. Louis), stained glass window of Louis IX during the Crusades. (Unknown location.)

World War I , which was “total” in character because it resulted in the mobilization of entire populations and economies for a prolonged period of time, did not fit into the Clausewitzian pattern of limited conflict, and it led to a renewal of other theories. These no longer regarded war as a rational instrument of state policy. The theorists held that war, in its modern, total form, if still conceived as a national state instrument, should be undertaken only if the most vital interests of the state, touching upon its very survival, are concerned. Otherwise, warfare serves broad ideologies and not the more narrowly defined interests of a sovereign or a nation. Like the religious wars of the 17th century, war becomes part of “grand designs,” such as the rising of the proletariat in communist eschatology or the Nazi doctrine of a master race.

Some theoreticians have gone even further, denying war any rational character whatsoever. To them war is a calamity and a social disaster, whether it is afflicted by one nation upon another or conceived of as afflicting humanity as a whole. The idea is not new—in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars it was articulated, for example, by Tolstoy in the concluding chapter of War and Peace (1865–69). In the second half of the 20th century it gained new currency in peace research, a contemporary form of theorizing that combines analysis of the origins of warfare with a strong normative element aiming at its prevention. Peace research concentrates on two areas: the analysis of the international system and the empirical study of the phenomenon of war.

World War II and the subsequent evolution of weapons of mass destruction made the task of understanding the nature of war even more urgent. On the one hand, war had become an intractable social phenomenon, the elimination of which seemed to be an essential precondition for the survival of mankind. On the other hand, the use of war as an instrument of policy was calculated in an unprecedented manner by the nuclear superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union . War also remained a stark but rational instrumentality in certain more limited conflicts, such as those between Israel and the Arab nations. Thinking about war, consequently, became increasingly more differentiated because it had to answer questions related to very different types of conflict.

Clausewitz cogently defines war as a rational instrument of foreign policy: “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.” Modern definitions of war, such as “armed conflict between political units,” generally disregard the narrow, legalistic definitions characteristic of the 19th century, which limited the concept to formally declared war between states. Such a definition includes civil wars but at the same time excludes such phenomena as insurrections, banditry, or piracy. Finally, war is generally understood to embrace only armed conflicts on a fairly large scale, usually excluding conflicts in which fewer than 50,000 combatants are involved.

Essay on War and Its Effects

Students are often asked to write an essay on War and Its Effects in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on War and Its Effects

Introduction.

War is a state of armed conflict between different countries or groups within a country. It’s a destructive event that causes loss of life and property.

The Devastation of War

Wars cause immense destruction. Buildings, homes, and infrastructure are often destroyed, leaving people homeless. The loss of resources makes it hard to rebuild.

The human cost of war is huge. Many people lose their lives or get injured. Families are torn apart, and children often lose their parents.

Psychological Impact

War can cause severe psychological trauma. Soldiers and civilians may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

250 Words Essay on War and Its Effects

War, a term that evokes immediate images of destruction and death, has been a persistent feature of human history. The consequences are multifaceted, influencing not only the immediate physical realm but also the socio-economic and psychological aspects of society.

Physical Impact

The most direct and visible impact of war is the physical destruction. Infrastructure, homes, and natural resources are often destroyed, leading to a significant decline in the quality of life. Moreover, the loss of human lives is immeasurable, creating a vacuum in societies that is hard to fill.

Socio-Economic Consequences

War also has profound socio-economic effects. Economies are crippled as resources are diverted towards war efforts, leading to inflation, unemployment, and poverty. Social structures are disrupted, with families torn apart and communities displaced.

Psychological Effects

Perhaps the most enduring impact of war is psychological. The trauma of violence and loss can have long-term effects on mental health, leading to conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder. Society at large also suffers, with the collective psyche marked by fear and mistrust.

In conclusion, war leaves an indelible mark on individuals and societies. Its effects are far-reaching and long-lasting, extending beyond the immediate physical destruction to touch every aspect of life. As we continue to study and understand these impacts, it underscores the importance of pursuing peace and conflict resolution.

500 Words Essay on War and Its Effects

War, an organized conflict between two or more groups, has been a part of human history for millennia. Its effects are profound and far-reaching, influencing political, social, and economic aspects of societies. Understanding the impact of war is crucial to comprehend the intricacies of global politics and human behavior.

The Political Impact of War

War significantly alters the political landscape of nations. It often leads to changes in leadership, shifts in power dynamics, and amendments in legal systems. For instance, World War II resulted in the downfall of fascist regimes in Germany and Italy, giving rise to democratic governments. However, war can also destabilize nations, creating power vacuums that may lead to further conflicts, as seen in the aftermath of the Iraq War.

Social Consequences of War

Societies bear the brunt of war’s destructive nature. The loss of life, displacement of people, and the psychological trauma inflicted upon populations are some of the direct social effects. Indirectly, war also affects societal structures and relationships. It can lead to changes in gender roles, as seen during World War I and II where women took on roles traditionally held by men, leading to significant shifts in gender dynamics.

Economic Ramifications of War

Economically, war can have both destructive and stimulating effects. On one hand, it leads to the destruction of infrastructure, depletion of resources, and interruption of trade. On the other, it can stimulate economic growth through increased production and technological advancements. The economic boom in the United States during and after World War II is an example of war-induced economic stimulation.

The Psychological Impact of War

In conclusion, war is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon with profound effects that can shape nations and societies in significant ways. Its impacts are not confined to the battlefield but reach deep into the political, social, economic, and psychological fabric of societies. Therefore, understanding its effects is not only essential for historians and political scientists but also for anyone interested in the complexities of human societies and their evolution.

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Carl von Clausewitz’s On War is the most significant attempt in Western history to understand war, both in its internal dynamics and as an instrument of policy. Since the work’s first appearance in 1832, it has been read throughout the world, and has stimulated generations of soldiers, political leaders, and intellectuals. First published in 1976 and revised in 1984, Michael Howard and Peter Paret’s Princeton edition of Clausewitz’s classic work has itself achieved classic status and is widely regarded as the best translation and standard edition of On War in English. This feature-rich edition includes an essay by Paret on the genesis of Clausewitz’s book, an essay by Howard on Clausewitz’s influence, and an essay by Bernard Brodie on the continuing relevance of On War . In addition, Brodie provides a lengthy and detailed commentary on and guide to reading On War , and the edition also includes a comprehensive index.

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Home — Essay Samples — War — Effects of War — World War II

World War Ii

Categories: Effects of War World History

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Published: Jul 17, 2018

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Writing Tips

How to Write a War Essay

By: Max Malak

Writing about the war is one of the most challenging creative works at school, college, and even university. Modern students have almost no personal experience communicating with people who experienced the battle years' hardships on themselves. Typically, a war essay is not delivered in the classroom unexpectedly to students. Usually, a significant amount of time is given to prepare, or in general, it is set a week before delivery of the paper. Of course, no student can write such an essay without help.

Types of Essay Appropriate For War Topic

Strategy and tactics, causes of war, treatment of prisoners, collaboration with enemy, civil war essay prompts, world war i essay prompts, world war ii essay prompts, vietnam war essay prompts, iraq war essay prompts, anti-war essays.

The guidelines for writing a war essay are straightforward. The most important thing is to consider the topic. In high school, students already have access to such a form of writing as an essay. Besides, they already have sufficient social experience, so it is best to build an essay on national importance plots. You can start with a brief description of the events of the battle, emphasizing their formality.

The main motive for such an essay should be the search for an answer to why wars arise. In conclusion, it is necessary to substantiate the importance of preserving historical memory, generations' continuity, and emphasize patriotism as a national idea. Now that you know how to create an essay like this, we'd prepare more details.

For military topics, you can use these types of essays:

An informative essay is a text describing what war is and additional meanings on a chosen topic. An informative essay is the simplest type because you only need to specify dates, word values. But be careful not to turn your paper into a dictionary.
The cause and effect approach is the most popular essay about the battle among students. In this type, you can indicate the causes of war and the consequences after it. The consequences may include information about how the battle affected the economy, the life of the population, industrial development, science, international relations, etc. You can also read the cause and effect examples and find other consequences of the battle.
An argumentative essay is a text in which you can lead evidence in favor of your thesis. It is advisable to draw up an argumentative essay outline to know which part of the argument is appropriate. For example, it could be that "The First World War was meaningless for people?" In the text, you must agree or disagree with the assumption and select evidence in favor of your opinion.
Comparative essay - in this text, you can select two of the most striking events during the battle and compare. Or compare two different wars. You can also compare the leaders of the battle, such as Hitler and Stalin.
Persuasive essay - in this text, it is also necessary to give a specific assumption and convince the reader that your opinion is correct. This is how you can influence how people think about the war. Or call for action to remember and honor the memory of the military. The main task is to lead arguments.
DBQ is one of the challenging types of essays, but teachers still ask them. Teachers give some visual passages from a book about a battle or a verse, and you will need to analyze it and add information about what you think from the provided passage.

What You Can Write About in War Essay

Students understand a historical event best if a parallel can be drawn with their personal experience. You can take the theme "My great-grandfather or great-grandmother when they were the same age as I am now." Such an essay will open your relatives from a completely different side, make you think about how cruelly the battle has invaded people's fate, and take a fresh look at your life. The motive of gratitude for peace, respect for the memory of those killed for the sake of victory will be a natural conclusion.

Of course, the volume of an essay on the war cannot be limited by any norms. Among other things, such an essay is excellent preparation for exams. The theme of battle is always present in the thematic blocks of exams. We also advise you to look at other persuasive essay topics about what you can write in a war paper.

The main subject of strategy is the plan of war. Strategy determines the goal of military operations by setting the number of forces required to participate in them. It also seeks to determine the primary grouping of the enemy's forces, the abilities, and weaknesses of the character of the people of his country. The strategy leader considers the influence of the war on other states and, based on all these often conflicting elements, seeks to find the place in the hostile camp on which the main blow should be struck.

Tactics are an essential part of preparation and battle. Tactics cover theoretical and practical training of fighters. About theory, the fighters study the nature and consequences of combat, forms of training, methods of attack. Based on this information, you can write which of the war commanders was the best in creating strategies and tactics.

Military diplomacy is a set of special military-diplomatic bodies and career military diplomats in their composition. The objects of military diplomacy are certain states. Various components of the military, military-political, military-economic, and military-technical life of the host country are included in their sphere of activity to solve the problems that have arisen before them. You can tell how during the war diplomacy goes between countries. Or compare the military diplomacy of the two countries.

News streaming twenty-four hours a day, journalism, the Internet, traveling the globe. Is our big world getting closer and more accessible than it was before? Including conflicts and battles. Regardless of whether the conflict concerns your country, any confrontation, any battle, in a certain way, affects everyone's life. So many conflicts in the world make you wonder: why do they arise?

This question will help readers understand that often conflicts cannot be prevented, but war can be avoided. Readers will learn how small disagreements escalate and turn into large and serious ones, what all conflicts have in common, and the influence of biases in history, diplomacy, geography, and economics on these events. Comparing global conflicts with disputes from your own life, you can reveal why there were conflicts and battles between countries.

If we consider not modern wars, but those 50 or 100 years ago, how the prisoners lived can be horrified. The prisoners were brought to the colonies, where people lived in the most severe conditions. The clergy of all denominations, representatives of the intelligentsia, former nobles, peasants, and people who opposed the new government fell under mass arrests. Prisoners worked in mines and fields, manually erecting dams and digging canals. Agronomical scientists were engaged in the development of agriculture. There is a lot of information on this topic, and you can compare the behavior with the prisoner in ancient and modern times.

Afghanistan's problem is undergoing a shift - the United States has begun negotiations with the Taliban terrorist movement. This was the result of the complete failure of American strategy, which Washington reluctantly acknowledged. But the trouble is that over the years, the Americans have not understood the main problem of Afghanistan, and therefore risk making even more terrible mistakes.

Taliban negotiations have been a central event in recent decades. They can radically change the country's situation and bring a sensation at any moment since they pass every day. As you can see, it is essential to negotiate and cooperate with the enemy. In the essay, you can give examples of how negotiation can end a battle.

Today, there are very few war veterans, but you can still find those who took part in these events. Consider one student's example:

Great-grandfather was born in 1917. Before the war, he worked as a hairdresser. When the Great Patriotic War began, my great-grandfather went to the front. Then he was 23 years old. In 1942 there was a battle. After the battle, there were very few of them. We ran out of cartridges, and there was nothing to defend with.

The Germans surrounded and captured the surviving soldiers. They began to divide the soldiers into two "heaps.".In one, they put privates, and in the other officers. No one knew where they were taking them. It turned out that they had brought them to the Buchenwald camp. On the gate was written: "To each his own."

There were people from 18 countries and different nationalities in this camp, including children and German communists. Great-grandfather, together with his friends, worked at the factory, and, as best they could, they carried parts and assembled weapons in various ways.

They were waiting for the Americans to open a second front and release them. But the prisoners armed themselves earlier. They wanted to escape, but there was a traitor among the prisoners. And I had to arrange an uprising. They held the camp in their hands for a week. Only in 1946 was my great-grandfather sent home. He defended his homeland as best he could.

There are a lot of unique stories about the battle. Take this chance and tell someone a story. You may be able to influence the opinions of many people.

Useful Prompts

We understand that you can take a topic from different wars. For this reason, many questions may arise. To make the writing process more comfortable, we have prepared tips for different periods of the battle. Use them, and you can write a brilliant essay on the battle.

The Civil War of 1861-1865 was the bloodiest in US history. Losses in the North killed and died from wounds and diseases amounted to 360 thousand people, in the South - 258 thousand people. As a result of the battle, the United States' state unity was restored. The institution of slavery was destroyed, and favorable conditions were created to restructure social relations in the southern states and develop capitalism in the United States, the farming path.

Today, the most popular topic is precisely the Civil War. We have prepared a few tips to help you write your Civil War essay. We suggest the following topics as tips:

Did the Civil War affect the lives of women?
What place did trains and railways take in the Civil Battle?
Why did the cotton trade become so popular during the Civil War?
Why did nationalism become the main idea at the time of these events?
What was the idea and mission of the Civil Battle?

The First World War had no equal in the entire previous history of humanity. The armed struggle was fought on fronts with a length of 3-4 thousand km, on the territory of three continents - Europe, Asia, and Africa, not only on land and at sea, but also in the air. About 45 million people were mobilized in the Central Powers' coalition - 25 million in the Entente countries. All the human resources of the largest states were drawn into the battle. You can talk about this topic forever, but if you have difficulties, then here are some tips for you to write about:

How did the First World War affect the whole world?
Why is the period 1914-1918 called the First World War?
Why did the majority of countries perceive the First World War with enthusiasm and not fear?
For many decades in the world, there were no battles. What caused the outbreak of the First World War?
For what reason did the United States decide to take part in the events of 1914-1918?

World War II began on September 1, 1939, when German troops attacked Poland. In response to the German aggression on September 3, Great Britain and France declared battle on it.

The main causes of the battle were the political contradictions generated by the imperfect Versailles system and the aggressive policy of capturing Nazi Germany, the Japanese Empire, and Italy. The Versailles System is a peace treaty system signed by the victor states of the First World War - Great Britain, the French Republic, the United States, and the Japanese Empire.

You can contribute a lot to debate on a given topic, but if you don't have ideas, then keep our tips:

Did Hitler have the opportunity to win the battle?
Why did the Soviet-German treaty of 1939 affect the events of the Second World War?
Write an abortion essay and indicate the reasons for such operations during the Second World War.
Why during 1939-1945 there were mass executions of Jews?
How did countries manage to stop Hitler's plans?

The Americans did not understand why they were fighting and perishing in the Vietnam War. Morale in many units was extremely low, which sometimes resulted in non-observance of orders. The antiwar movement was growing in the United States. In October 1967, about a hundred thousand young people undertook a "campaign against the Pentagon" gathered in Washington for protests. The Americans were tired of the battle and did not want to die away from their homeland.

The topic seems trite, but there are a lot of really wild things left in it. For example, the word "frag" came from the Vietnamese time and meant the murder of his officer. The soldiers of the "Tiger" detachment cut off the ears of the enemies. The famous photograph's executioner showing a partisan's execution opened a pizzeria and calmly lived out his days in Virginia. If you are interested in this topic, then use these tips:

Why is the Vietnam War considered the longest in American history?
What did the United States do to gain support from other countries?
Why was the Vietnam Battle on TV? How did society react to this?
Why was the United States defeated and unable to achieve its goals?
Why were US citizens opposed to how the government behaved during the Vietnam Battle?

It is difficult to say today the real reason for the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. It is difficult to assume that Washington seriously believed that chemical or nuclear weapons were being created in Iraq.

There was no need for the US to seize Iraqi oil, and, most importantly, it did not take place in any form. Either George W. Bush considered it essential to complete what his father did not complete, or the Americans seriously wanted to turn Iraq into a country of exemplary democratic content. Now it will hardly be possible to find out. If you're going to understand this situation, then you may be able to make a great discovery. Also, here are some tips from us:

Why are there misunderstandings between countries?
Was the battle in Iraq planned or spontaneous?
War in Iraq influenced oil production?
Compare the battle in Iraq and Vietnam. What are the similarities and differences?
Would you support US political views towards Vietnam?

Now on TV, they show many military conflicts and armed clashes of various scales. They always bring death and destruction to civilians who do not participate in this at all. If you listen to the politicians, they always try to settle differences through peace negotiations to avoid bloodshed. But why, then, are there so many wars around the world? Have people still not learned to negotiate with each other and must kill each other? If you are against battle, you can write about it to prove your perspective on this matter. Perhaps you can show the other side of the battle. Try to prove that battle is unnecessary and meaningless.

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In this Book

Carl von Clausewitz Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret
Published by: Princeton University Press
View Citation

The most authoritative and feature-rich edition of On War in English Carl von Clausewitz’s On War is the most significant attempt in Western history to understand war, both in its internal dynamics and as an instrument of policy. Since the work's first appearance in 1832, it has been read throughout the world, and has stimulated generations of soldiers, political leaders, and intellectuals. First published in 1976 and revised in 1984, Michael Howard and Peter Paret’s Princeton edition of Clausewitz’s classic work has itself achieved classic status and is widely regarded as the best translation and standard edition of On War in English. This feature-rich edition includes an essay by Paret on the genesis of Clausewitz’s book, an essay by Howard on Clausewitz’s influence, and an essay by Bernard Brodie on the continuing relevance of On War . In addition, Brodie provides a lengthy and detailed commentary on and guide to reading On War , and the edition also includes a comprehensive index.

Table of Contents

Title Page, Copyright
Editors' Note
Note for the 1984 Edition
Introductory Essays
The Genesis of On War
Peter Paret
The Influence of Clausewitz
Michael Howard
The Continuing Relevance of On War
Bernard Brodie
Author's Preface
Author's Comment
Marie von Clausewitz
Two Notes by the Author On War
Book 1: On the Nature of War
1 What is War?
2 Purpose and Means in War
3 On Military Genius
pp. 100-112
4 On Danger in War
pp. 113-114
5 On Physical Effort in War
pp. 115-116
6 Intelligence in War
pp. 117-118
7 Friction in War
pp. 119-121
8 Concluding Observations on Book One
pp. 122-124
Book 2: On the Theory of War
1 Classifications of the Art of War
pp. 127-132
2 On the Theory of War
pp. 133-147
3 Art of War or Science of War
pp. 148-150
4 Method and Routine
pp. 151-155
5 Critical Analysis
pp. 156-169
6 On Historical Examples
pp. 170-174
Book 3: On Strategy in General
pp. 177-182
2 Elements of Strategy
3 Moral Factors
pp. 184-185
4 The Principal Moral Elements
5 Military Virtues of the Army
pp. 187-189
pp. 190-192
7 Perseverance
8 Superiority of Numbers
pp. 194-197
pp. 198-201
pp. 202-203
11 Concentration of Forces in Space
12 Unification of Forces in,Time
pp. 205-209
13 The Strategic Reserve
pp. 210-212
14 Economy of Force
15 The Geometrical Factor
pp. 214-215
16 The Suspension of Action in War
pp. 216-219
17 The Character of Contemporary Warfare
18 Tension and Rest
pp. 221-222
Book 4: The Engagement
1 Introduction
2 The Nature of Battle Today
3 The Engagement in General
pp. 227-229
4 The Engagement in General-Continued
pp. 230-235
5 The Significance of the Engagement
pp. 236-237
6 Duration of the Engagement
pp. 238-239
7 Decision of the Engagement
pp. 240-244
8 Mutual Agreement to Fight
pp. 245-247
9 The Battle: Its Decision
pp. 248-252
10 The Battle-Continued: The Effects of Victory
pp. 253-257
11 The Battle-Continued: The Use of Battle
pp. 258-262
12 Strategic Means of Exploiting Victory
pp. 263-270
13 Retreat after a Lost Battle
pp. 271-272
14 Night Operation
pp. 273-276
Book 5: Military Forces
1 General Survey
2 The Army, the Theater of Operations, the Campaign
pp. 280-281
3 Relative Strength
pp. 282-284
4 Relationship between the Branches of the Service
pp. 285-291
5 The Army's Order of Battle
pp. 292-296
6 General Disposition of the Army
pp. 297-301
7 Advance Guard and Outposts
pp. 302-307
8 Operational Use of Advanced Corps
pp. 308-311
pp. 312-313
pp. 314-318
11 Marches-Continued
pp. 319-321
12 Marches-Concluded
pp. 322-324
pp. 325-329
14 Maintenance and Supply
pp. 330-340
15 Base of Operations
pp. 341-344
16 Lines of Communication
pp. 345-347
pp. 348-351
18 The Command of Heights
pp. 352-354
Book 6: Defense
1 Attack and Defense
pp. 357-359
2 The Relationship between Attack and Defense in Tactics
pp. 360-362
3 The Relationship between Attack and Defense in Strategy
pp. 363-366
4 Convergence of Attack and Divergence of Defense
pp. 367-369
5 The Character of Strategic Defense
pp. 370-371
6 Scope of the Means of Defense
pp. 372-376
7 Interaction between Attack and Defense
pp. 377-378
8 Types of Resistance
pp. 379-389
9 The Defensive Battle
pp. 390-392
10 Fortresses
pp. 393-399
11 Fortresses-Continued
pp. 400-403
12 Defensive Positions
pp. 404-408
13 Fortified Positions and Entrenched Camps
pp. 409-414
14 Flank Positions
pp. 415-416
15 Defensive Mountain Warfare
pp. 417-422
16 Defensive Mountain Warfare-Continued
pp. 423-428
17 Defensive Mountain Warfare-Concluded
pp. 429-432
18 Defense of Rivers and Streams
pp. 433-444
19 Defense of Rivers and Streams-Continued
pp. 445-446
20 A. Defense of Swamps
pp. 447-448
20 B. Inundations
pp. 449-451
21 Defense of Forests
22 The Cordon
pp. 453-455
23 The Key to the Country
pp. 456-459
24 Operations on a Flank
pp. 460-468
25 Retreat to the Interior of the Country
pp. 469-478
26 The People in Arms
pp. 479-483
27 Defense of a Theater of Operations
pp. 484-487
28 Defense of a Theater of Operations-Continued
pp. 488-498
29 Defense of a Theater of Operations-Continued: Phased Resistance
pp. 499-500
30 Defense of a Theater of Operations-Concluded: Where a Decision Is Not the Objective
pp. 501-520
Book 7: The Attack
1 Attack in Relation to Defense
2 The Nature of Strategic Attack
pp. 524-525
3 The Object of the Strategic Attack
4 The Diminishing Force of the Attack
5 The Culminating Point of the Attack
6 Destruction of the Enemy's Forces
7 The Offensive Battle
pp. 530-531
8 River Crossings
pp. 532-534
9 Attack on Defensive Positions
10 Attack on Entrenched Camps
11 Attack on a Mountainous Area
pp. 537-539
12 Attack on Cordons
13 Maneuver
pp. 541-542
14 Attacks on Swamps, Flooded Areas, and Forests
pp. 543-544
15 Attack on a Theater of War: Seeking a Decision
pp. 545-547
16 Attack on a Theater of War: Not Seeking a Decision
pp. 548-550
17 Attack on Fortresses
pp. 551-554
18 Attack on Convoys
pp. 555-556
19 Attack on an Enemy Army in Billets
pp. 557-561
20 Diversions
pp. 562-564
21 Invasion
22 The Culminating Point of Victory
pp. 566-574
Book 8: War Plans
pp. 577-578
2 Absolute War and Real War
pp. 579-581
3 A. Interdependence of the Elements of War
pp. 582-584
3 B. Scale of the Military Objective and of the Effort To Be Made
pp. 585-594
4 Closer Definition of the Military Objective: The Defeat of the Enemy
pp. 595-600
5 Closer Definition of the Military Objective-Continued: Limited Aims
pp. 601-602
6 A. The Effect of the Political Aim on the Military Objective
pp. 603-604
6 B. War Is an Instrument of Policy
pp. 605-610
7 The Limited Aim: Offensive War
pp. 611-612
8 The Limited Aim: Defensive War
pp. 613-616
9 The Plan of a War designed to Lead to the Total Defeat of the Enemy
pp. 617-638
A Commentary
A Guide to the Reading of On War
pp. 641-712
Rosalie West
pp. 713-738

Additional Information

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How To Write an Essay on War Writing Prompts

Writing an impressive piece of paper is always a challenging task, but it becomes even harder if you have to address a delicate and controversial topic, such as war. The thing is that wars are usually fought for some higher purpose, and it is not always easy to find the phrases to express your support or disagreement with a certain conflict.

But at our essay writing service , the experience taught us how to approach war-related essays with all due attention and responsibility. This is extremely important for a number of reasons:

You need to be able to find the right words to express your own opinion on the matter
Presenting different points of view is a must
It is mandatory to be respectful of other people's opinions, even if you don't share them
You need to be able to properly structure your thoughts and present them in a coherent manner
You must never be lopsided in your argumentation

Now that we got that out of the way, it is time to focus on how to write an essay on war. The good news is that there are a lot of war essay writing prompts you can use to get started. So, if you are looking for some ideas on how to write an essay on war, check out the following topics and writing prompts.

What is War Essay

A war essay is an essay that covers the topics of warfare and military history. It can be either informative or argumentative in nature, depending on what you want to focus on. Additionally, a war essay can also discuss the causes and effects of war, as well as different types of warfare.

However, there are many things that can make writing a war essay difficult.

For one, you need to have a strong understanding of the history and causes of the war you are discussing. You must also be able to effectively communicate your thoughts and ideas in writing. Finally, you will need to ensure that your essay is well-organized and flows smoothly from beginning to end.

Types of Essay You Can Use For War Topic

As we mentioned earlier, there are different types of essays you can use to write about war. But before you pick the right one for your academic paper, it is necessary to understand exactly what each type of essay entails. We will go through the five most common war essay types here:

An informative essay - An informative essay is an objective piece of writing that covers the basics of a particular topic. When writing an informative war essay, your goal is to educate your reader about the subject matter. You will need to provide accurate and up-to-date information about the topic, as well as present it in a clear and concise manner. The purpose of this essay is to give readers a general overview of the subject matter.
The cause and effect essay - Cause and effect essays analyze the reasons why a particular event or situation occurred, as well as the resulting effects. When writing a cause and effect war essay, you will need to focus on the causes and effects of a specific conflict. You can discuss the political, social, or economic causes of war, as well as the physical and psychological effects it has on those involved. For example, you could discuss the causes and effects of World War II or the Vietnam War.
An argumentative essay - Argumentative essays are a type of paper that presents a debatable opinion on a particular issue. When writing an argumentative war essay, you will need to take a stance on a specific aspect of warfare and support your position with evidence. You will need to consider both sides of the issue and present a convincing argument for your point of view. Additionally, you must be able to refute any opposing arguments.
Comparative essay - A comparative essay is an essay in which you compare and contrast two or more things. This can be done by analyzing similarities and differences between two or more wars or by comparing and contrasting the causes and effects of different wars. When writing a comparative war essay, you will need to consider both the similarities and differences between the topics you are discussing. It is the only way to make a well-balanced comparative essay.
Persuasive essay - A persuasive essay is an essay that attempts to convince the reader to agree with a particular opinion or point of view. The idea is to write a piece of paper that sounds so credible that no one can dispute it. In such circumstances, it is highly recommended to use rhetorical tricks. Appeals to emotion, authority, and logic are the most common persuasive strategies.

Don't forget that these are just a few of the common types of essays you can use to write about war. There are other essay types that can also be used, such as definition essays, descriptive essays, and process essays. Ultimately, the type of essay you use will depend on your specific topic and what you want to focus on.

War Essay Outline

Let's assume you've chosen to write an informative essay about the causes and effects of World War II. The first step in crafting your essay will be to create an outline. This will help you organize your thoughts and ideas and ensure that your essay flows smoothly from beginning to end.

Here is a basic outline for an informative war essay:

Introduction . Introduce the topic of your essay and provide background information on the conflict you will be discussing. A given topic stretches over many years, so you should limit your focus to a specific aspect of the war. It can be something like the political causes, the social effects, or the economic consequences.
Body paragraphs . This is the core of your paper. Each section should focus on a specific cause or effect of the war. The idea is to present your thoughts and support your thesis statement with evidence. For example, if you are discussing the political causes of World War II, your body paragraphs could focus on specific events like the Treaty of Versailles or the rise of Adolf Hitler.
Conclusion . Remind readers of your thesis statement and summarize the main points of your essay. Discuss the larger implications of the war and how it has affected the world today. You might also want to discuss the lessons that can be learned from the conflict.

How to Write a War Essay: A Short Guide

War is one of the most complex and brutal phenomena in human history. For many people, war is a fascinating subject, full of dramatic stories and lessons about human nature. This short guide offers some tips on how to write a war essay that will engage your reader and offer new insights into this complex subject.

First, it is important to choose a specific focus for your essay. Trying to elaborate on the entire history of the war would be impossible and would likely result in a scattered and superficial paper. It is better to focus on a specific conflict or aspect of war. This will give you the opportunity to go into depth and explore the subject in greater detail.

Once you have picked your focus, you need to do some research. In addition to reading history books, there are many other sources that can provide valuable information for your essay. These include first-hand accounts from participants in the conflict, as well as newspaper articles, government documents, and academic journals.

When you are writing your essay, it is important to maintain a clear and logical structure. Your paper should have a strong introduction that states your thesis, as well as body paragraphs that support your argument with evidence. Remember to back up your statements and claims with specific examples, and conclude your essay with a thought-provoking conclusion.

Finally, keep in mind that war is a controversial topic, and there are many different interpretations of events. When presenting your own view, be respectful of other perspectives and avoid making sweeping statements about right and wrong. By taking these aspects and factors into account, you can write an essay on the war that will offer a fresh perspective on this complex and fascinating subject.

What to Write About in Essay on War

War is an essential topic of discussion and contemplation for many reasons. It is a reality that has shaped our world throughout history and defined the course of nations. It is also a complex subject with a multitude of causes and effects. When writing an essay on war, there are many different angles that you can take.

You could discuss the history of war and its impact on civilization. You could examine the causes of war, such as economic or political interests or religious or ideological differences. You could also explore the personal experiences of soldiers and civilians caught in the midst of conflict.

Whatever direction you choose to take, make sure to back up your arguments with evidence and thoughtful analysis. By doing so, you can create a well-rounded and insightful essay on war.

How To Choose a War Essay Topic

Picking a war essay topic is difficult simply because you have so many ideas to choose from. You can discuss the history of war, the causes of war, and the effects of war, or you can concentrate on a specific conflict. You can also choose to write about a personal experience with war, either your own or that of someone you know. We will help you out by presenting a few interesting ideas.

Essay on War in Ukraine

War in Ukraine is the most recent military conflict in the world - it lasts some 150 days. However, the war already has extreme consequences for the global economy, social life, and political situation. Hundreds of people died, and millions became refugees. So, if you want to write a paper that is more relevant than any other, don't hesitate to write an essay on the war in Ukraine. We can suggest a few interesting aspects of the topic:

The History Of The Conflict And The Events That Led To It
How The War Has Affected Ukraine And Its People
The Power Of Russia: How Long Can It Keep Fighting?
The Role Of NATO In The Ukrainian War
The Future Of Ukraine In Light Of The War

Essay About World War 1

World War 1 is one of the most significant events in human history. It began in 1914 and ended in 1918. The war saw two sides: the Allied Powers, which included Britain, France, Russia, and the United States, and the Central Powers, which included Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire.

It resulted in the death of several million persons, as well as the downfall of empires. It also set foundations for the new era of global conflict, characterized by the rise of nationalism and the use of modern technology in warfare. If you are interested in writing about World War 1, here are a few potential topics:

The Causes of World War 1
The Battle of the Somme: Why Was It So Bloody?
The Impact of World War 1 on Civilian populations
Warfare in World War 1: Trench Warfare, Poison Gas, and Tank Battles
The Treaty of Versailles: What Did It Achieve?

Essay About World War 2

World War 2 was the biggest and most destructive conflict in human history. It began in 1939 and lasted for six years, involving over 30 countries and resulting in the deaths of over 60 million people. The cause of the war was the rise of Nazi Germany and its aggressive expansionist policies.

WW2 resulted in the death of millions of people, as well as the destruction of entire cities, while Holocaust is one of the most tragic events of this war. The war also had a profound impact on the course of world history, leading to the rise of new nations and the fall of others. If you are interested in writing about World War 2, here are a few potential topics:

The Causes of World War 2
The Battle of Stalingrad: Why Was It So Important?
The Holocaust: How Could It Have Happened?
D-Day: The Turning Point of the War
The Atomic Bomb: Was It Necessary?
The Holocaust: The Tragic Fate of European Jewry

Essay About The Vietnam War

This war took place from 1955 to 1975 and is considered one of the most controversial conflicts of the 20th century. This event was a long and costly conflict that pitted the communist regime of North Vietnam against the government of South Vietnam and their main ally, the United States.

More than 2.5 million Americans served in Vietnam, and more than 58,000 were killed. The war had a profound impact on the course of world history, as well as on the lives of those who were involved in it. If you are interested in writing about the Vietnam War, here are a few potential topics:

The History of the Vietnam War
The Causes of the Vietnam War
The American Involvement in the War
How Did the Vietnam War Impact Local Civilians
The Legacy of the Vietnam War

Civil War Essay

A civil war is a military conflict between different factions within the same country. Civil wars can be caused by political, social, or economic differences, and they often have an unprecedented influence on the course of world history. If you are interested in writing about a civil war, here are a few potential topics:

The American Civil War
The Russian Civil War
The Spanish Civil War
The Chinese Civil War
The Lebanese Civil War

Cold War Essay

The Cold War was a period when the world was divided between two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The war was characterized by a lack of direct military conflict, as well as by an intense arms race and a series of proxy wars. If you are interested in writing about the Cold War, here are a few potential topics:

The Causes of the Cold War
The Cuban Missile Crisis
The Fall of the Berlin Wall
The Arms Race: The Danger of Mutual Destruction
The proxy wars of the Cold War: Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan
How did the Cold War shape the world we live in today?

All those warfare events and corresponding topics deserve to be elaborated on in separate essays as each of them is very important on its own. That's why you won't make a mistake if you choose any of the topics mentioned above.

It's impossible to find a single person on Earth who understands the phenomenon of war inside out. This is because war is such a complicated, multi-faceted thing. With this in mind, when you're looking for a topic to write about in your war essay, it's important to choose something specific to focus on. This way, you can really delve into the details and offer new insights into this complex subject.

But even if a small topic sounds too intimidating, don't be afraid to give it a try. The writing process is easier than you might expect, while you can always order an essay and get a high-quality paper in record time. So, what are you waiting for? Pick your topic and start writing your war essay today!

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Essay on War and Peace

No doubt war is an evil, the greatest catastrophe that befalls human beings. It brings death and destruction, disease and starvation, poverty, and ruin in its wake.

One has only to look back to the havoc that was wrought in various countries not many years ago, in order to estimate the destructive effects of war. A particularly disturbing side of modern wars is that they tend to become global so that they may engulf the entire world.

But there are people who consider war as something grand and heroic and regard it as something that brings out the best in men, but this does not alter the fact that war is a terrible, dreadful calamity.

This is especially so now that a war will now be fought with atom bombs. Some people say war is necessary. A glance at the past history will tell that war has been a recurrent phenomenon in the history of nation.

We have had advocates of non violence and the theory of the brotherhood of man. We have had the Buddha, Christ and Mahatma Gandhi. But in spite of that, weapons have always been used, military force has always been employed, clashes of arms have always occurred; war has always been waged.

War has indeed been such a marked feature of every age and period that it has come to be regarded As part of the normal life of nations. Machiavelli, the author of the known book, The Prince, defined peace as an interval between two wars Molise, the famous German field marshal declared war to be part of God’s world order.

Poets and prophets have dreamt of a millennium, a utopia in which war will not exist and eternal peace will reign on earth. But these dreams have not been fulfilled. After the Great War of 1914-18, it was thought that there would be no war for a long time to come and an institution called the League of Nations was founded as a safeguard against the outbreak of war.

The occurrence of another war (1939-45), however, conclusively proved that to think of an unbroken peace is to be unrealistic And that no institution or assembly can ever ensure the permanence of peace.

Large numbers of Wars, the most recent ones being the one in Vietnam, the other between India and Pakistan, or indo-china War, Iran-Iraq war or Arab Israel war, have been fought despite the UN. The fact of the matter is that fighting in a natural instinct in man.

When individuals cannot live always in peace, it is, indeed, too much to expect so many nations to live in a state of Eternal peace. Besides, there will always be wide differences of opinion between various nation, different angles of looking at matters that have international importance, radical difference in policy and ideology and these cannot be settled by mere discussions.

For example, Germany wished to avenge the humiliating terms imposed upon her at the conclusion of the war of 1914-18 and desired to smash the British Empire and establish an empire of her own. Past wounds, in fact, were not healed up and goaded it to take revenge.

He wants something thrilling and full of excitement and he fights in order to get an outlet for his accumulated energy. It must be admitted, too, that war Has its good side. It spurs men to heroism and self-sacrifice. It is an incentive to scientific research and development. War is obviously an escape from the lethargy of peace.

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The Ethics of War: Essays

Saba Bazargan-Forward and Samuel C. Rickless (eds.), The Ethics of War: Essays , Oxford University Press, 2017, 304pp., $78.00, ISBN 9780199376148.

Reviewed by Uwe Steinhoff, University of Hong Kong

On the back cover the book is advertised as "The authoritative anthology on the ethics and law of war." This might be an overstatement. While the best-edited volumes on just war theory focus on a particular issue (for instance, preventive war, humanitarian intervention, or legitimate authority), this volume does not really form a coherent whole.

In fact, Nancy Sherman's "Moral Recovery After War" has very little to do with either the laws or the ethics of war, dealing instead, as she herself acknowledges, with "philosophical moral psychology" (244). Moreover, the contributions by Adil Ahmad Haque on the principle of discrimination, of Kai Draper on the doctrine of double effect, and of Larry May on the rights of soldiers have appeared in very similar if not almost identical versions in other publications by these authors (as chapters of their books in the first two cases, and as a contribution to another edited volume in the latter case.) There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these three chapters (on the contrary, all are intelligent contributions). But in my view, such extensive recycling would only be justified if the three chapters had either established themselves as classics, which is certainly not the case given that these publications are very recent, or would clearly contribute to an "authoritative" or at least representative picture of the ethics of war. However, I see no indication for this. In any case, given that these chapters have appeared in similar form elsewhere, I will not discuss them further here. Furthermore, I only mention in passing Andrew Altman's very good chapter on the law and morality of targeted killing via drones (which together with Draper's and Haque's contributions is grouped in the laws of war section of the book.) Instead, I focus on the remaining philosophical contributions.

These contributions, according to the editors, belong to a new, allegedly "revisionist" school of just war theory: "Since the writing of the scholastics and jurists of the late Renaissance and Early Modern periods . . . two precepts have underwritten accounts of the morality of war," namely, that war is a "relation not between individuals but between states" and that "the rules governing conduct in war should proceed independently of whether the war fought is just or unjust" (xi). Bazargan-Forward and Rickless provide no textual evidence in support of these claims. This is not surprising as these claims -- although they have for some time now been the basis of self-proclaimed "revisionism -- are simply wrong. [1] Accordingly, the term "revisionism" in this context is a misnomer and should be rejected as misleading. [2] More importantly for present purposes, if the editorial foreword already makes sweeping but mistaken assertions about the just war tradition, then this undermines the volume's claim to be an "authoritative" contribution to this tradition.

Be that as it may, let us have a closer look at some of the individual contributions. Jeff McMahan believes in "liability justifications" for the infliction of harm. That is, he thinks that a person's being liable to the infliction of a certain harm (which means that she has forfeited the right that the harm not be inflicted) provides a defeasible justification for inflicting this harm on her. [3] Given that he also believes that mere moral responsibility -- which need not amount to culpability -- for a threat of unjust harm is the basis of liability to defensive harm, he faces the problem that a defender would, on his account, be justified in killing an infinite number of responsible but morally entirely innocent threats (like drivers who foresaw that driving would impose a tiny risk of harm on pedestrians, and then, through no fault of their own, lose control over their cars and pose a substantial threat to a pedestrian). McMahan's solution to this problem is to suggest a third kind of proportionality. In the past, he has already distinguished between "wide proportionality" and "narrow proportionality," where the former refers to harms inflicted on threats or aggressors, and the latter to harms inflicted on bystanders. Yet these conceptual innovations are unnecessary. The actual distinction, at least in law, is not between different kinds of proportionality, but between different justifications: the self-defense justification on the one hand, and the necessity or choice of evil justification on the other hand. In any case, McMahan now suggests solving the problem by an appeal to " proportionality in the aggregate " (25, emphasis in the original). However, this solution seems to be entirely ad hoc and to rely solely on McMahan's intuitions, without any theoretical foundation or further explanation.

This is precisely David Rodin's charge against McMahan's approach (45). Rodin's own solution to the problem involves what he calls a "lesser evil obligation" (28). Bear in mind that, as already mentioned, a liability justification is supposed to be defeasible . It is, for example, defeasible if acting on the liability justification would have consequences that are bad enough to override the justification. Regarding such consequences, Rodin states that "harm inflicted on a liable person is still an evil from an impersonal view" (36). Accordingly, if the number of liable persons is large enough, the overall evil that would be produced by acting on the liberty to kill all these persons can override this liberty -- thus producing an all-things-considered lesser evil obligation not to do what one has a Hohfeldian liberty to do. Unfortunately, the quite correct idea that harming a person constitutes an evil is incompatible with the very idea of a liability justification: if persons have intrinsic value, then the mere fact that they have forfeited a right not to be harmed does not yet provide a justification to harm them. [4] Your lacking a Hohfeldian right that I not kill you provides me with a Hohfeldian liberty to kill you, but it does not yet provide me with a justification to kill you (and to thereby destroy something of value). [5]

As an aside, while Rodin, to his credit, does not claim that the concept of a lesser evil obligation is a novelty, the editors make this claim in his stead (xiii). Yet, the idea that a "right bearer is all things considered obligated to behave in a certain way toward a person despite the fact that they have the right with respect to that party to behave otherwise" (33) is most definitely not novel at all; it has been known in the German legal literature for at least 200 years. [6] Anglo-Saxon legal scholars are acquainted with this idea too.

Richard Arneson sets out to resolve what Seth Lazar has called "the responsibility dilemma." Yet he apparently misunderstands what solving the dilemma means. Lazar rejects outright McMahan's responsibility account of liability (that is Lazar's external criticism) but makes it very clear that his "critique of McMahan's argument" in terms of the responsibility dilemma "is internal" to that account. [7] The challenge is basically that McMahan's account makes either too many civilians or too few combatants liable to attack. Accordingly, a solution would require a demonstration that McMahan's responsibility account is able to escape the dilemma. [8] Offering a completely different account of liability, in contrast, does not so much solve the dilemma as change the subject. This, however, is precisely what Arneson does. In fact, he offers two different accounts of liability (which are supposed to interact with each other.) . First, he "proposes abandoning" the idea that a right can be overridden although it is still present; that is, he seems to reject the idea that non-liable persons can be permissibly harmed. Instead, he states: "For any moral right not to be treated in certain ways, the right gives way if the ratio of the badness to nonrightholders if the right is not acted against to the badness to rightholders if the right is acted against is sufficiently favorable" (70). In other words, the availability of a lesser evil justification would not give one a justification to override existing rights. Instead, it would show that the harm inflicted on the basis of the lesser-evil justification does not infringe any rights in the first place -- the rights have "given way." This would mean that a war waged in accordance with a lesser-evil justification violates no one's rights, not even the rights of all the innocent people, including children, who have been killed, burned, and mutilated. While this might indeed be a way to avoid contingent pacifism, as Arneson is determined to do, it also leads to not taking rights seriously. Arneson's second account of liability is "fault forfeits first" (85). Since I demonstrate elsewhere that this account has entirely counter-intuitive implications and justifies all kinds of acts that Western jurisdictions quite reasonably qualify as murder, [9] I will not go into it further here. [10]

Victor Tadros's aim is "to show that there are circumstances in which duress can justify killing a person where that killing would otherwise be wrong" (115). He claims: "Duress justifies [an act v ] where X's [the threatener's] threat is sufficiently credible and grave to render it permissible for D to v ." (96) However, it should be quite obvious that it is not duress that is providing a justification here, but the threat's being sufficiently credible and grave to render the act permissible. That is, the actual justification is a lesser-evil justification. So all that Tadros shows is that acts committed under duress can sometimes be justified with a lesser-evil justification. However, first, that is nothing new, and second, the same can be said about acts committed against payment. In short, there is no such thing as a separate and independent "duress justification," just as there is no separate and independent "monetary-reward justification."

Mattias Iser tries to refute Richard Norman's and David Rodin's claim that it is always disproportionate to kill in defense of civil and political rights. (208) He does this in the context of revolutionary violence. However, it would appear that a refutation of the claim would be applicable to both national self-defense (which is the context in which the claim is usually discussed) and revolution. In other words, it is unclear what difference the reference to revolution is supposed to make. In any case, Iser puts heavy emphasis on "respect" and its "expression," and he claims that although individual attacks may "express utter disrespect, they can never humiliate as deeply as an unjust, for example racist, basic structure" (216). Thus, it seems that Iser's strategy is to accept -- at least for the sake of argument -- Norman's and Rodin's claims about individual self-defense, [11] but then to argue that much more is at stake in the case of revolution against an unjust regime. However, it seems to me that Iser is confusing things here. If according to the state's basic structure I have no right to vote, then the state will constantly keep me from voting. It is not so much that the state thereby "expresses" more "disrespect" than an individual who keeps me from voting on a single occasion; rather, the difference lies in constantly being kept from voting on the one hand and occasionally being kept from voting on the other. Moreover, if the state denies everyone the right to vote, it denies them democracy . In contrast, an individual who falsely imprisons me on election day does not deny me democracy. [12] Thus, the material harms are very different, and it is quite reasonable to suppose that this difference, not the expression of disrespect, is doing most of the work. To show that Iser might severely overestimate the evil that is the expression of disrespect, note that merely attempted murder expresses as much disrespect as successful murder, while accidental (non-negligent and non-reckless) killing expresses no disrespect at all. It is safe to assume that people would vastly prefer the former to the latter, and thus are far more concerned with material harm than with expressions of disrespect. After all, people can quite literally live with attempted murder. They cannot live with accidental death.

François Tanguay-Renaud examines the question whether there could be something like corporate state liability to attack. He thinks that the idea is intelligible but that such liability might be "of very limited relevance to the morality of war" (137). I am even more skeptical the Tanguay-Renaud, but his exploration of the question is thoughtful, cautious, and interesting.

Finally, Seth Lazar suggests new ways of structuring just war theory. He suggests that what he calls "Command Ethics" serves to "govern the morality of war as a whole," while "Combatant Ethics governs the morality of specific actions" (231). He rejects the suggestion that this distinction corresponds to the familiar distinction of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, between "analysis of the war as a whole and of individual actions and operations that compose it," as "confused" (231-232). His reasons for this assessment are, first, that "each individual combatant must also consider whether his resort to war is justified," and second, that "we should not confine Command Ethics to focusing only on the resort to war" (323). However, both reasons are unconvincing. The first is unconvincing because an individual combatant's jus in bello consideration of whether his acts of participation in the war are justified is clearly different from an individual combatant's jus ad bellum consideration of whether the collective war effort as a whole is justified. The second is unconvincing because the view that jus ad bellum concerns only the resort to war but not the question as to whether war should be continued is mistaken. [13] Lazar also proposes distinguishing "between the positive justifying reasons that count in favor of fighting, and the constraints that must either be satisfied or overridden for fighting to be permissible" (242). There is nothing wrong with this distinction, but it is unclear why it should affect the structure of just war theory. In any case, once one gives up the obsessive focus on liability common among self-proclaimed "revisionists" and avoids the misleading talk of "liability justifications," one might come to realize that any actual moral or legal justification necessarily comprises both elements.

This volume is not all bad, and some of the contributions are good, but on the whole it leaves much to be desired. It certainly is not "authoritative."

[1] As regards the (mistaken) claim that traditional just war theory saw war as a relation between states, see Gregory M. Reichberg, " Historiography of Just War Theory, " in Seth Lazar and Helen Frowe (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War (Oxford University Press, 2015), Oxford Handbooks Online: DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199943418.013.18, section 1; Daniel Schwartz, " Late Scholastic Just War Theory, " in Lazar and Frowe, op. cit. , DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199943418.013.13, section 2.3; Uwe Steinhoff, " Doing Away with ‘Legitimate Authority,’ " Journal of Military Ethics , forthcoming. As regards the alleged independence of jus ad bellum and jus in bello in the tradition and the related claim that it endorses a " moral equality of combatants " – it should by now be clear that these charges against the tradition are flatly wrong (the claim to be " revisionist " seems to stem from a complete misunderstanding of the tradition). For proof, see, for instance, Cheyney Ryan, " Democratic Duty and the Moral Dilemmas of Soldiers, " Ethics 122 (2011), pp. 10-42, at 13-18; Uwe Steinhoff, " Rights, Liability, and the Moral Equality of Combatants, " Journal of Ethics 13 (2012), pp. 339-366, section 2; Gregory M. Reichberg, " The Moral Equality of Combatants – A Doctrine in Classical Just War Theory? A Response to Graham Parsons, " Journal of Military Ethics 12(2) (2013), pp. 181-194. All the texts just referenced do provide ample textual evidence for their claims.

[2] Seth Lazar suggests that the " revisionists" at least revise Walzer, and that one becomes revisionist by revising something. See http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2015/05/ethics-discussions-at-pea-soup-cecile-fabres-war-exit-with-critical-precis-by-helen-frowe.html . By the same logic, Walzer would also be a revisionist (he revised a lot), and virtually all present-day just war theorists deviate from Walzer in one way or the other (so who would be a non-revisionist?). Also, again by the same logic, all just war theorists would also be conservative at the same time – because they conserve something .

[3] In my view, liability is one thing and justification another. Liability provides no justification at all, neither defeasible nor otherwise. See Uwe Steinhoff, "Self-Defense as Claim Right, Liberty, and Act-Specific Agent-Relative Prerogative," Law and Philosophy 35(2) (2016), pp. 193-209.

[4] See ibid.

[5] To be sure, this problem could be "solved" by redefining liability in such a way that one can only be liable to harm that is inflicted on one for a certain reason. McMahan indeed often talks in this way: "people can be liable to harm only in relation to a goal …" See Killing in War (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 9. However, first, stipulative definitions do not solve substantive moral questions. Second, it is unclear how such a reason-dependent account of liability squares with McMahan's (and Rodin's, for that matter) simultaneously "objectivist," "fact-relative" account of liability. McMahan says that "justification provides exemption from liability only when it is objective ," and something is "objectively … justifiable when what explains its … justifiability are facts that are independent of the agent's beliefs" (ibid., p. 43). Since when, however, are an agent’s goals "facts that are independent of the agent’s beliefs"? McMahan’s account of liability seems to be incoherent: there is no objective and reason-dependent “liability justification” for harming someone – you simply cannot have it both ways.

[6] The now common term Rechtsmißbrauch (rights abuse) was introduced into the German legal literature more than 80 years ago, but the concept is at least 200 years old; in fact, some even trace it back to Roman Law. See Elke Widmann, "Der Rechtsmissbrauch im Markenrecht," dissertation, available at http://kops.unikonstanz.de/handle/123456789/3384;jsessionid=E5CC60B87151CA8B1C77FD3777EC6D24 . Incidentally, I mentioned this idea in a footnote in "Rights, Liability, and the Moral Equality of Combatants", p. 457, n. 15. Elsewhere I talk of a "necessity prohibition," see Uwe Steinhoff, "Shortcomings of and Alternatives to the Rights-Forfeiture Theory of Justified Self-Defense and Punishment," available at https://philpapers.org/rec/STESOA-5 . I took myself to be stating the obvious there, not to be "add[ing] an important resource to the reductive individualist's conceptual arsenal," as Bazargan-Forward and Rickless would have it (xiii).

[7] Seth Lazar, "The Responsibility Dilemma for Killing in War: A Review Essay," Philosophy and Public Affairs 38(2) (2010), pp. 180-213, at 189.

[8] McMahan tried on several occasions to show this – unsuccessfully, in my view. Seth Lazar's most recent reply to such attempts looks to me like a coup de grâce. See Lazar's "Liability and the Ethics of War: A Response to Strawser and McMahan," in Christian Coons and Michael Weber, The Ethics of Self-Defense (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 292-304.

[9] See Uwe Steinhoff, "Replies," San Diego Law Review, forthcoming (see the part on Arneson).

[10] Incidentally, Arneson's account is very similar to Gerhard Øverland's in "Moral Taint: On the Transfer of the Implications of Moral Culpability," Journal of Applied Philosophy 28(2) (2011), pp. 122-136 (but Øverland is somewhat more cautious than Arneson). Arneson does not mention Øverland.

[11] There is actually no reason to do so. See Uwe Steinhoff, "Rodin on Self-Defense and the 'Myth' of National Self-Defense: A Refutation", Philosophia (2013), pp. 1017-1036; "Proportionality in Self-Defense," Journal of Ethics 21(3) (2017), pp. 263-289. Accordingly, there are more straightforward ways of refuting Norman's and Rodin's "bloodless invasion" (or a corresponding "bloodless tyranny") argument than Iser's appeal to the "expression of disrespect."

[12] Compare Helen Frowe, Defensive Killing (Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 143-145.

[13] See Uwe Steinhoff, "Just Cause and the Continuous Application of Jus ad Bellum ," in Larry May, Shannon Elizabeth Fyfe, and Eric Joseph Ritter (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook on Just War Theory (Cambridge, forthcoming).

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World War 1 Essay | Essay on World War 1 for Students and Children in English

February 14, 2024 by Prasanna

World War 1 Essay: World War 1 was started in July 1914 and officially ended on November 11, 1918. Conflicts emerged among the most powerful forces in the modern world with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany and the Ottoman Empire (and briefly Italy) on one side, and Britain, France, Russia, and later the United States on the other side during the war.

The war took the lives of some 20 million people and the world’s great empires fell. Czarist Russia turned into reinstated as the communist Soviet Union. Imperial Germany turned into reinstated as the Weimar Republic and lost some parts of its territory in the East and West.

You can also find more Essay Writing articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Long and Short Essays on World War 1 for Students and Kids in English

We are providing students with essay samples on a long essay of 500 words and a short of 150 words on the topic of World War 1 for reference.

Long Essay on World War 1 Essay 500 Words in English

Long Essay on World War 1 Essay is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

World War 1 started with a European conflict and gradually it developed into a World War. Militarism, nationalism, imperialism, and alliances increased the tensions among the European countries. The first reason, militarism, is known as the trend toward developing military resources, both for national defense and the protection of colonial interests.

Militarism indicated a rise in military disbursement and it extended to military and naval forces. It put more impact on the military men upon the policies of the civilian government. As a solution to problems militarism had a preference for force. This was one of the main reasons for the First World War. The second reason is there were too many alliances that frequently clashed with each other. Every country was pawning to safeguard others, creating intertwining mutual protection schemes.

They made alliances in secret, and they created a lot of mistrust and intuition among the European powers. Their general intuition stopped their diplomats to find a proper solution to many of the crises leading to war. Imperialism was the third reason for the First World War. As some areas of the world were left to colonize, nations were competing for subsisting colonies, and they were looking for enlarging their borders with adjacent countries. The fourth cause was nationalism. Nationalism is frequently insinuated to as identification with one’s own country and support for the country. Nationalism contains a strong recognition of a group of personnel with a political entity.

The support of individuals for their own country can become of one’s nation can become hatred of other nations. These were just some of the basic reasons for the war. Many people think that the instant reason for the war was because of the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the successor to Austria-Hungary’s throne. Archduke Ferdinand was fired and murdered due to what was thought to be a political conspiracy. The Austro-Hungarian Empire suddenly doubted Serbian conspiracy in the assassination and looked to frame a response that would both punish Serbia, and make the world respect Austria-Hungary’s prestige and determination.

You can now access more Essay Writing on this topic and many more.

The Great War lasted four years. The war was finally over after four years and it took the lives of many people. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, a cease-fire went into effect for all fighters. Though the war has been finished, the effects, are still seen perceptible in the world today.

In the aftermath of World War 1, the political, cultural, and social order of the world was drastically changed in many places, even outside the areas directly involved in the war. Old nations were removed, new nations were formed, international organizations set up, and many new and old ideas took a stronghold in people’s minds.

As Europe fell in debt from war investment, inflation beset the continent. In addition to this, the buoyancy of previous decades was relinquished and a discouraging, gloomy outlook on life was adopted after people had experienced the ferocity of warfare and the effects of the war were brutal.

Short Essay on World War 1 Essay 150 Words in English

Short Essay on World War 1 Essay is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

The War took the lives of approximately 20 million people and put a break in the economic development of several nations. The war happened between two parties consisting of more than one hundred nations. Though all of them did not send armed forces to the battlefield, they were a hoard of commodities and human resources and provided moral support to their companions. It continued for 4 long years from 1914 to 1918. Indian soldiers also took part in World War 1 as a colony of Britain from Africa and West Asia.

India had an aspiration that they might win independence. World War 1 war laid down the economy of the world. It led to food shortage, an outbreak of a pandemic, scarcity of vital items, etc. At the end of 1918, the war came to an end. The Allied Powers won the war. Both parties signed the Peace Treaty called an armistice.

10 Lines on World War 1 Essay in English

1. The First World War was instigated in 1914 by Serbia. 2. The cause of the war was a competition between countries to acquire weapons and build military powers. 3. In 1914, Serbia aroused anger by assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir of Austria-Hungary throne. 4. The Allied Powers, and the Central Powers fought against each other. 5. The Central Powers include countries, such as Germany, Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. 6. The Allied Powers consisted of Serbia, Russia, The United Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan, and Belgium. 7. India, as a British colony, supported Britain. 8. The German adopted a militaristic Schlieffen approach. 9. World War 1 was fought from trenches, so it is also called the Trench War. 10. The War ended in 1918 after both allies signed an armistice.

FAQ’s on World War 1 Essay

Question 1. List the names of the two allies of the First World War 1914-1918.

Answer: The Allied Powers and the Central Powers.

Question 2. Who declared the First World War?

Answer: Austria-Hungary.

Question 3. Name the countries of Allied Powers.

Answer: Britain, Japan, France, Italy, Russia, the USA.

Question 4. Why did the First World War end?

Answer: The First World War ended in November 1918 when both allies signed the Peace Treaty known as an armistice.

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Guest Essay

America’s Military Is Not Prepared for War — or Peace

A photo of U.S. Navy sailors, in silhouette, aboard an aircraft carrier.

By Roger Wicker

Mr. Wicker, a Republican, is the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

“To be prepared for war,” George Washington said, “is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” President Ronald Reagan agreed with his forebear’s words, and peace through strength became a theme of his administration. In the past four decades, the American arsenal helped secure that peace, but political neglect has led to its atrophy as other nations’ war machines have kicked into high gear. Most Americans do not realize the specter of great power conflict has risen again.

It is far past time to rebuild America’s military. We can avoid war by preparing for it.

When America’s senior military leaders testify before my colleagues and me on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee behind closed doors, they have said that we face some of the most dangerous global threat environments since World War II. Then, they darken that already unsettling picture by explaining that our armed forces are at risk of being underequipped and outgunned. We struggle to build and maintain ships, our fighter jet fleet is dangerously small, and our military infrastructure is outdated. Meanwhile, America’s adversaries are growing their militaries and getting more aggressive.

In China, the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has orchestrated a historic military modernization intended to exploit the U.S. military’s weaknesses. He has overtaken the U.S. Navy in fleet size, built one of the world’s largest missile stockpiles and made big advances in space. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has thrown Europe into war and mobilized his society for long-term conflict. Iran and its proxy groups have escalated their shadow war against Israel and increased attacks on U.S. ships and soldiers. And North Korea has disregarded efforts toward arms control negotiations and moved toward wartime readiness.

Worse yet, these governments are materially helping one another, cooperating in new ways to prevent an American-led 21st century. Iran has provided Russia with battlefield drones, and China is sending technical and logistical help to aid Mr. Putin’s war. They are also helping one another prepare for future fights by increasing weapons transfers and to evade sanctions. Their unprecedented coordination makes new global conflict increasingly possible.

That theoretical future could come faster than most Americans think. We may find ourselves in a state of extreme vulnerability in a matter of a few years, according to a growing consensus of experts. Our military readiness could be at its lowest point in decades just as China’s military in particular hits its stride. The U.S. Indo-Pacific commander released what I believe to be the largest list of unfunded items ever for services and combatant commands for next year’s budget, amounting to $11 billion. It requested funding for a raft of infrastructure, missile defense and targeting programs that would prove vital in a Pacific fight. China, on the other hand, has no such problems, as it accumulates the world’s leading hypersonic arsenal with a mix of other lethal cruise and attack missiles.

Our military leaders are being forced to make impossible choices. The Navy is struggling to adequately fund new ships, routine maintenance and munition procurement; it is unable to effectively address all three. We recently signed a deal to sell submarines to Australia, but we’ve failed to sufficiently fund our own submarine industrial base, leaving an aging fleet unprepared to respond to threats. Two of the three most important nuclear modernization programs are underfunded and are at risk of delays. The military faces a backlog of at least $180 billion for basic maintenance, from barracks to training ranges. This projects weakness to our adversaries as we send service members abroad with diminished ability to respond to crises.

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Taking an Azimuth on the US Military’s Recruiting Crisis: What We Learned from MWI and TRADOC’s Essay Competition

Zachary Griffiths , Laura Keenan and Max Margulies | 12.20.23

“One of the toughest recruiting landscapes I’ve seen in over thirty-three years of service.” That was how Major General Johnny K. Davis, the commanding general of US Army Recruiting Command, described the challenges facing the Army during his testimony , alongside his counterparts from the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month. In the wake of consecutive recruitment shortfalls, the US Army is transforming its recruitment strategy. Despite setting an ambitious target of sixty-five thousand recruits for 2023, the Army managed to secure only fifty-five thousand enlistments , further solidifying the need for a recruitment overhaul.

Recognizing the changing social and economic landscape in America, the Army is recalibrating its focus. Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth announced sweeping changes to the recruiting enterprise on October 3, 2023. After decades of focusing almost exclusively on a traditional recruitment pool of individuals with a high school education, officials are now aiming for at least a third of all new recruits to have a college education by 2028. This shift acknowledges the evolving labor market, in which nearly 40 percent of all those between twenty-five and thirty-four years old have a bachelor’s degree or higher—up almost nine percentage points from only 2010.

But it’s not just about the who; it’s about the how. Secretary Wormuth also revealed plans to introduce a specialized “talent acquisition” enlisted occupational specialty , under the designator 42T. This move aims to transition from a transient recruiting force to a permanent, specialized team, reflecting practices in the private sector. Furthermore, US Army Recruiting Command (USAREC) is set for a significant elevation, reporting directly to the Pentagon and transitioning its leadership from a two-star to a three-star general. This reorganization will integrate the Army Enterprise Marketing Office and the Army’s Cadet Command, emphasizing the critical nature of recruitment for the Army’s future.

As the Army’s senior leaders geared up for this comprehensive overhaul of recruiting, the Modern War Institute and US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) launched an essay competition to mine the wisdom of the commons. Specifically, the prompt asked: What novel approaches can the United States military employ to solve the recruiting crisis? The responses we received describe the strategic environment and challenges against which the Army released this new recruiting plan and offer useful insights for what will surely be a continuing effort. Two rounds of judging by the essay contest committee, leaders in the recruiting enterprise, and TRADOC’s senior leaders selected our winners:

“ Rethinking the Military’s Promotional Content Strategy to Address the Military’s Recruitment Crisis ,” by Jonathan Li and Max Xie.
“ Addressing Military Recruitment Challenges Through Data Sharing ,” by Jake Steel and Chad Aldeman.
“ Sustaining the All-Volunteer Force Means Streamlining Army Recruitment ,” by Jesus M. Feliciano and Travis M. Prendergast.

Despite this broad prompt, submissions focused overwhelmingly on the Army, though we hope the Department of Defense and the other services consider these findings as well. The number of submissions—318 in total, more than any essay competition at MWI to date—suggests passion across the military for solving this important problem. Submissions came from across the joint force, with a majority from the Army authors (249 essays), followed by the Air Force (twenty-two), the Navy (eighteen), and others.

Within these submissions, there was a varied representation of ranks, from junior enlisted personnel to senior officers, illustrating the depth and breadth of insights across the military hierarchy. Civilian perspectives also enriched the discourse, contributing twenty-four essays to the collection. A notable segment of these essays, specifically thirteen, hailed from the Army’s Recruiting Command, offering specialized insights from those with the most direct experience with the Army’s recruitment challenges. This range of backgrounds and experiences provided a comprehensive view of the challenges and potential solutions for the Army’s recruiting crisis.

From forming formidable teams at Army bases to foster recruiting to fueling the future with entrepreneur loans for veterans’ ventures to fashioning a fresh approach that applies techniques from corporations with chief marketing officers, the depth and diversity of discussions in these essays are impressive. Overall, they tend to identify two broad categories of ways the Army needs to renew its recruiting efforts. First, the Army needs to embrace new methods of communicating its message to the American public so that more people know what it can offer. Second, it needs to adopt a more diverse and creative approach to how it incentivizes people to serve.

Embrace Modern Communications Channels

One recurring challenge throughout the essays is the notion that too few people think about the army as a job option, a concept that is often referred to as the propensity for military service . The idea here is that the public lacks familiarity with military service, but if there was more high-quality information available, people would realize the military is an attractive option. A large group of essays in this vein argued for more community partnerships with the military. Current practices, such as Air Force flyovers and servicemember tributes at sporting events, do not sufficiently educate potential recruits about military life. Essays here put forth a range of recommendations, including incentivizing veterans to volunteer as mentors, embedding military liaisons within secondary and postsecondary educational institutions, and organizing military base open houses and ride-along opportunities. Such strategies not only demystify military roles but also empower potential recruits to visualize their places within the Army.

In the evolving world of recruitment, understanding and adapting to the changing educational landscape is paramount. This perspective is underscored by ten essays that highlighted the value of targeting individuals with postsecondary education. The growing prevalence of higher education in the American workforce signifies that the Army can tap into a pool of candidates with diverse skill sets and perspectives; it just needs to reach them. These individuals’ analytical skills from rigorous academic training, combined with the discipline of military life, would make them valued contributors as servicemembers.

Suggestions did not limit themselves to expanding the physical presence of the military in society. The era of digital transformation is reshaping myriad sectors, and military recruitment is no exception. Among the submissions, eighty-six insightful essays converged around the pivotal role of modern communication channels in reaching potential recruits. In particular, many essays argued for meeting Generation Z—and soon Generation Alpha—where they already are, rather than expecting them to come to the military. These approaches prioritize marketing and recruiter outreach through digital platforms, especially social media, to exploit technology to its fullest potential.

Essay authors did not fail to notice that recruiters need additional tools for these new tactics. Several thought-provoking essays suggest that USAREC should delineate its recruiters based on their aptitudes for varied roles, such as social media engagement, contact management, administrative tasks, and content creation. By fine-tuning the training of recruiters and cultivating cross-functional teams that harness these diverse talents, the Army can foster a sense of accomplishment among its recruiters while optimizing recruitment outcomes for a twenty-first-century environment.

Redefine and Diversify Recruitment Approaches

Of course, getting the message out there is only helpful if people like what they hear. Many essays provided creative suggestions for how the Army can refine its value proposition, or what if offers to potential recruits. Part of this is recognizing that there are different reasons people join the Army. While combat arms may still require the most recruits, the Army needs troops with a variety of skills. Moreover, the Army should recognize that marketing campaigns emphasizing high operational tempos and dangerous and exciting opportunities may resonate with only some recruits.

In terms of branding and marketing, some essays applauded the return of the “Be All You Can Be” campaign as a way to appeal to broader populations. Others argued for additional narratives. By tapping into the universal “ hero’s journey ” motif, Army messaging could resonate with young individuals, aligning with their intrinsic desires to chart meaningful life trajectories.

But marketing cannot do it all. The Army needs to provide a wider array of incentives to attract people who are aware of the Army but are not convinced to serve. For example, the infusion of behavioral economics principles presents an intriguing proposition for refining recruitment strategies by targeting the subconscious decision-making processes of potential recruits. One essay introduces the notion of leveraging concepts like choice architecture and availability heuristics to address the Army’s recruiting challenges. By marrying these behavioral principles with a deep understanding of the unique environment, the Army can craft impactful and resonant campaigns. Many essays argued that more flexible career options and family stability could both strengthen the force and attract more recruits—not least by reinvigorating retention rates so that current servicemembers continue to pitch the military as an attractive career option. Other insightful submissions highlighted a multifaceted approach: not just new monetary and educational incentives, but also clear career pathways, mentorship opportunities, and other intangible benefits.

These essays emphasize the critical importance of continuous training and development, not just for the recruits but also for the recruiters. One noteworthy essay detailed the advantages of ensuring recruiters, as ambassadors of the Army, are armed with the latest knowledge, skills, and tools. Revisions to USAREC career incentives and structures, many of which seem to have been included in the Army’s recent announcement, would create stronger links between recruiters and their communities, so they can better identify what works for the population they work with. The incentive structure must be diversified and enhanced, incorporating a mix of tangible rewards and intangible benefits to cater to the varied aspirations of potential recruits.

Similarly, the importance of feedback and iterative improvement was a recurring theme in three essays. One such submission championed the idea of establishing channels for recruits and recruiters to voice their experiences. This feedback, coupled with evidence-based evaluation, can ensure recruitment strategies remain both effective and relevant. The recruiting enterprise can be a data-rich environment, and it is important to maximize what we can learn from it. Structured feedback mechanisms must be firmly established, with an emphasis on consistently collecting, analyzing, and integrating feedback into the recruitment process, ensuring strategies are always aligned with the changing needs and aspirations of the modern recruit.

The United States, and especially the US Army, stands at a waypoint in its recruitment journey. The challenges faced in recent years underscore the pressing need for a comprehensive overhaul of its recruitment strategies. As the United States’ social, political, and economic systems evolve, so too must the Army’s approach to attracting the best and brightest to its ranks. The essays submitted in response to MWI and TRADOC’s prompt have illuminated a rich tapestry of insights, strategies, and innovative solutions. They emphasize the importance of modern communication channels and the need to diversify recruitment approaches.

The Army’s recent announcements, including the shift toward recruiting more individuals with more advanced education and the introduction of specialized talent acquisition teams, are promising steps in the right direction. The journey doesn’t end here, but perhaps that is where it starts. The wealth of ideas presented in the essay competition serves as a testament to the collective wisdom and commitment of both military and civilian thinkers. Although only three winners were selected, our judges read all submissions carefully, and appreciated the view that these submissions provided in aggregate. Submissions not selected provide a collective azimuth to guide recruiting efforts into the future. Thanks to those who submitted.

As the Army embarks on this transformative journey, it must remain open to these diverse perspectives, ensuring that its recruitment strategies not only are effective but also resonate with the aspirations and values of the next generation. The future of the US Army, and by extension the nation’s security, hinges on its ability to adapt, innovate, and inspire.

Zachary Griffiths is a major in the United States Army and the director of the Harding Project to renew professional military writing.

Laura Keenan is a lieutenant colonel in the District of Columbia Army National Guard. She is a United States Military Academy graduate and a distinguished graduate of the National War College. In her civilian career, she has worked at LinkedIn for almost seven years in sales and employer branding.

Max Margulies is an assistant professor and director of research at the Modern War Institute at West Point.

Special thanks to Lieutenant Colonel TJ Spolizino, Lieutenant Colonel Adriana Ramirez-Scott, and Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Pallas for reviewing essays.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Sgt. Jared Simmons, US Army

I have a solution to the problem, it’s brilliant. I recommend making service a requirement for years for all citizens starting at age eighteen military & medical service.

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Doug Chayka

The Rise of the American Oligarchy

What targeting russia’s wayward billionaires revealed about our own..

Tim Murphy January+February 2024 Issue

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When the US targeted Russia’s oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine, the trail of assets kept leading to our own backyard. Not only had our nation become a haven for shady foreign money, but we were also incubating a familiar class of yacht-owning, industry-dominating, resource-extracting billionaires. In the January + February 2024 issue of our magazine, we investigate the rise of American Oligarchy—and what it means for the rest of us. You can read all the pieces here .

For the last 18 months one of the most opulent and unnecessary vessels ever constructed has been floating in a narrow channel next to a jungle gym and a fleet of industrial cranes at the Port of San Diego. Built in Germany, and formerly managed by a firm in Monaco and flagged to the Cayman Islands, the superyacht Amadea is 348 feet long, with a helipad, a swimming pool, two baby grand pianos, and a 5-ton stainless steel art-deco albatross that extends outward from the prow like a bird reenacting Titanic . It can accommodate 16 guests and 36 crew, and costs $1 million a month just to maintain. Who, exactly, has been picking up that tab in the past is a matter of some dispute, tangled up in a web of trusts and LLCs, code names and NDAs, and legal proceedings in two countries. But the ship’s current owner is a bit less ambiguous: Congratulations— it’s you .

The Amadea ended up in California after a family vacation gone wrong. In 2022, after a long summer in Italy and the south of France, the ship refueled in Gibraltar and crossed the Atlantic, arriving in the Caribbean just in time for Christmas. There, according to emails between the ship’s captain and its management company that were later submitted in court by the Department of Justice, deckhands were to be joined by the children and grandchildren of a wealthy Russian national—four adults, three kids, as well as a coterie of bodyguards and nannies. Crew members were preparing for a cruise to Antigua, a sojourn in Mexico, and a visit to the Galapagos. They had picked up new scuba gear for their rarefied passengers.

But a few weeks into the trip, the Amadea abruptly changed its plans. All large boats, from pleasure craft to container ships, are required by the International Maritime Organization to signal their location at regular intervals, except in the case of emergencies. When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, the Amadea dropped off the map for days, according to court documents. In Panama, the captain alerted the management company that government inspectors had collected information on the ship’s Russian VIPs. In Mexico, the yacht took on a quarter of a million dollars of diesel fuel and left. The Galapagos were off. The Amadea was heading west.

When the vessel arrived in Fiji, more than 6,000 miles later, local authorities searched the ship at the request of US investigators. Inside, they found what appeared to be a Fabergé egg , and paperwork stating that the yacht belonged to an LLC owned by a trust controlled by a Russian businessman named Eduard Khudainatov. The egg was likely a fake. And according to the US government, the records were too.

Khudainatov, the Justice Department argued in court filings , was a “second-tier oligarch (at best)” who lacked the means to own such a ship. Agents concluded that the Amadea was fleeing to Russia at the behest of Suleiman Kerimov, a billionaire who made a fortune in aluminum and gold, serves as a senator in the Russian parliament, and once tried to build a global soccer powerhouse in Dagestan. Kerimov has been barred from doing business in the US since 2018 , because of his position in Putin’s government. The feds, calling Khudainatov a “straw owner,” seized the ship for violating US sanctions, replaced the crew, and sent it to California.

Khudainatov, who has not been sanctioned by the US, has been appealing the decision ever since. His lawyers—and Kerimov’s—assert that the second-tier oligarch really did spend most of his reported net worth on two of the world’s largest yachts. They even deny that the ship ever went dark; any confusion over its ownership or whereabouts was just a matter of shoddy policing. But in the meantime, the US has been systematically unspooling Kerimov’s wealth. The government added his wife and three kids to its sanctions list, as part of a crackdown on “those who support sanctioned Russian persons.” It targeted a private-jet company the Kerimovs used, and the yacht managers too. And not long after the Amadea arrived in San Diego, the Treasury Department froze a far more valuable asset with considerably less fanfare: a $1 billion family trust . The Kerimovs had allegedly sought a safe harbor for this asset too, beyond the reach of hostile governments, in a place where for decades the wealth of the world’s ultrarich has pooled in blissful anonymity.

Not Fiji—Delaware.

The capture of the Amadea was perhaps the most spectacular piece of a larger international reckoning. In the nearly two years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US and its allies have blocked, seized, or frozen more than $280 billion in assets from hundreds of sanctioned Russian businessmen, politicians, family members, and fixers. They have taken boats, planes, and helicopters; artwork by Diego Rivera and Marc Chagall ; and some of the most coveted real estate on Earth. By putting the squeeze on what the Treasury Department called Putin’s “enablers,” the thinking goes, these governments can hit him where it hurts, isolate his regime, and pressure Russia to wind down the war.

The Biden administration has embraced these stories of decadent Russians, burning their corrupt spoils in Bond-villain excess. “Let’s get to the juicy stuff—the yachts,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco told an audience at (of all places) the Aspen Security Forum in July 2022, where she discussed the work of the DOJ’s Task Force KleptoCapture. The seized ships are not just assets but morality tales—the overripe fruit of a society in which the levers of government have been turned to the enrichment of a few. You are supposed to gawk, less with envy than with an air of self-satisfaction, at people like the Kerimovs, lounging offshore in their teak-floored cocoon, drinking warm milk—according to court records—out of Hermès mugs . In the language of political messaging, “oligarch” is code for Second World and seedy.

But underpinning the sordid Russian saga was an inescapably American one. As investigators pored over bank statements and real estate records, they added new layers to a map journalists and watchdogs have been piecing together for years—of a sometimes underground but often wholly legal international network in which the wealth of autocratic regimes was funneled through the firms, markets, and institutions of places that fashion themselves as the antithesis of Putin’s Russia. Through a labyrinth of corporations, trusts, and false fronts, oligarch money made its way into the hands of nannies in California, fracking firms in Texas, wealth managers in New York, startups in Silicon Valley, and factory workers in the Midwest .

Pay enough attention to this robust American infrastructure of wealth, secrecy, and tax avoidance, and you might find yourself asking an uncomfortable question: If the Amadea is a symbol of a failed political and economic system, what exactly does that make all of our superyachts?

“We talk all the time about Putin and his oligarchic friends,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders told me recently. “But for obvious reasons we don’t talk about oligarchy in the United States.”

Increasingly, though, a wide range of voices on the left and right are speaking in exactly those terms. Steve Bannon has complained that his party had been hijacked by “ oligarchs ” such as Rupert Murdoch and hedge-funder Ken Griffin. A bestselling book described Bannon’s former bosses, the Trumps, as American Oligarchs . Donald Trump Jr., for his part, complained that China controls “America’s oligarchs.” A group of congressional Democrats is pushing the OLIGARCH Act to tax and audit the wealth of the richest Americans. “We’re clearly living in the age of the petulant oligarch,” Paul Krugman wrote recently, in reference to Elon Musk. Pick any billionaire with a media company—or any billionaire who’s tried to bankrupt one—and chances are you can find a prominent critic lambasting them in language once reserved for upwardly mobile ex-Soviets.

Some of these voices, like Sanders, are quite serious about how we’ve gotten into this new Gilded Age, and how we can get out of it again. Others are just seriously messed up. But this rhetorical shift is driven by a common awareness that all is not well: The same tools and systems that have made the United States a safe space for the world’s hoarded wealth have frayed our own social contract, broken our domestic politics, and incubated a new class of ultrawealthy barons in its place. It’s the age of American Oligarchy.

America’s oligarchs, like Russia’s, are both the results of a system failure, and active engineers of that failure. They hang in many of the same circles. They dock their boats at the same marinas, compete for the same real estate and works of art, and stash their money under the same couch cushions. Their worlds converge on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, and in the corridors of power. There has been so much Russian oligarchic money sloshing around the United States, in fact, that it is sometimes hard to say where exactly one system ends and another begins.

But there is something new at work here. This American oligarchy offers a twist on the pilfering of the commons that produced Russia’s. It is built on a different kind of resource, not nickel or potash, but you—your data, your attention, your money, your public square. These men (mostly) exult in their almost godlike status over the politicians they fund, the platforms they own, and the industries they’ve effectively monopolized. They are prone to grandiose proclamations about outer space and immortality . But the day-to-day effect of their power is felt less in the glitter than in the gravity it exerts on everything else—the accumulated burden and strain that hardening political and economic inequality puts on public services, on policy, and on the places we live and work. This world ropes you in with its yachts and private jets, but the story of American oligarchy is not just about the spoils. It’s about what everyone else is losing in the process.

Fear of an out-of-control oligarchy was once as American as Appomattox. In the runup to the Civil War, abolitionists routinely condemned the “oligarchs” of the planter class, who used their grip on slave states to dominate national politics until even the courts worked for them. The idea that an aspiring democracy had adopted the wrong Greek political system represented an existential crisis. Campaigning for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Charles Sumner invoked “Slave Oligarchy” more than 20 times in one speech. They had “entered into and possessed the National Government,” he said , “like an Evil Spirit.”

Reconstruction was an attempt, among other things, to break the structures of oligarchy. But in the century that followed, the term took on a now-familiar hue—provincial, elemental, and foreign. “The word captures the archaic, slightly feudal nature of social relations,” the New York Times suggested in 1981, “in countries like El Salvador and Guatemala.” Or it connoted the backroom politics of bureaucrats and bosses . Oligarchy marked a primitive state. It wasn’t something you became. Then, in 1996, Boris Berezovsky went to Davos.

Boastful and balding, with a background in applied mathematics, Berezovsky was part of the new breed of Russian businessmen, a little bit grifty and a little bit thrifty, who were building huge fortunes as President Boris Yeltsin privatized the former Soviet state. In a bonanza known as “ loans for shares ,” Yeltsin agreed to quietly unload a dozen government-owned companies for cents on the dollar. But the deal would only go through if he won a second term. So between sessions at the World Economic Forum, Berezovsky and his allies hatched a plan to use their wealth and control of the media to save Yeltsin. After the election, Berezovsky took a victory lap. The seven men who had joined forces, he boasted (with more than a little exaggeration), now held 50 percent of Russia’s wealth.

The defining trait of this “new class of oligarchs”—as the postelection coverage dubbed them —was that they seemed to want people to know they were oligarchs. Berezovsky called his system “corporate government.”

This oligarchy could not have existed if Russia were not Russia, but it also bore the imprimatur of Harvard and Wall Street. In the early 1990s, American lawyers, bankers, and academics descended on Moscow to mold the post-Soviet landscape in their image, helping to set up markets, draft laws, and cut deals. The Russian businessmen who thrived in this new system, for their part, “adopted the style and methods of the great robber barons,” the journalist David Hoffman observed in his 2002 book, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia . They studied tycoons like Rupert Murdoch. They were even influenced by a text about the American Gilded Age that had once been used to scare Soviets away from capitalism—Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier , in which the protagonist, Hoffman wrote, “exploited banks, the state, and investors, manipulated the whole stock market and gobbled up companies.”

That form of oligarchy was short-lived. When Putin took office a few years later, he demanded fealty from the moguls, and Berezovsky later died in exile. But if Putin inverted the power structure, the effect was the same: Russia remained a place where an elite few grew rich off a rigged economy, while funneling their money outside the country for safekeeping. Wealthy Russians transferred as much as $150 billion out of the country in the 1990s. By the time Trump took office, Russia’s ultrawealthy were storing 60 percent of their holdings offshore. Much of the money made its way to the same country that helped shape the Russian system in the first place. It was as if an invisible pipeline suddenly switched on.

The spoils of Russia and other countries flowed to the United States not just because of its stability, but because the American political and financial system put up a big flashing sign inviting the world’s wealth hoarders to come and stay a while. Here, they could achieve near-total anonymity if they purchased real estate in cash or routed the transaction through a shell company or a trust—which were increasingly based in decidedly onshore US jurisdictions such as Wyoming and South Dakota . In New York and Miami, gleaming new high-rises sat empty; a penthouse, for the asset-hoarding class, was not a home but a different kind of bank.

This great transnational wealth transfer was eased along by the booming, multitrillion-dollar American private-investment industry. If a foreign investor wanted to put money in a US-based financial institution or publicly traded company, notes Gary Kalman, the executive director of Transparency International US, those shops are required to perform due diligence. But hedge funds, venture capital, and private equity are bound by no such rules and have fought efforts to impose them.

“The reason we haven’t crippled the oligarchs as much as we would like, or the sanctions haven’t been quite as effective as we had hoped,” Kalman told me, “is because a bunch of these assets are hiding, likely in Western democracies, in everything from anonymous companies to anonymous trusts funneled into investment structures that are largely hidden from law enforcement.”

Through shell companies and middlemen, ultrawealthy Russians funneled huge sums of money into American investments. The Delaware trust linked to the Kerimovs pumped $28 million into Silicon Valley firms, according to court records , including a venture capital fund, a self-driving car company, and a “startup temple” for young disrupters that was housed in a San Francisco church previously slated to become a homeless shelter. Roman Abramovich, who bought a state oil company with Berezovsky and later sold it for a 5,100 percent profit, reportedly directed billions of dollars to a boutique investment manager in New York’s Hudson Valley. According to a complaint the Securities and Exchange Commission filed against the company in September for allegedly violating registration rules, the firm managed more than $7 billion in assets for just one client, an unnamed wealthy Russian politician and businessman who made a fortune in privatization and sure sounds a lot like Abramovich. While some of those funds reportedly made their way to heavyweights like the Carlyle Group and BlackRock , Abramovich also backstopped a private ambulance company and a fracking startup, and gave $225 million in seed money to what is now the weed dispensary chain Curaleaf. (Abramovich, who did not respond to a request for comment, has not been accused of wrongdoing by the SEC or sanctioned by the United States.)

A succession of government investigations found that lax regulations also made the American investment and real estate markets magnets for money laundering, but the US was in no rush to tighten its rules. Cashing in on the Russian exodus was a boon for American budgets and American business. Prior to getting elected president, it was practically Donald Trump’s entire job .

Just as telling as the money that was secret was all the money that wasn’t. Aluminum magnate Viktor Vekselberg, a star in the tech sector , made large donations on his own or through his company to MIT, MoMA, and the Clinton Foundation. Others sprinkled their money to the Kennedy Center, the Mayo Clinic, and the Guggenheim. With big parties and large checks, they courted America’s gatekeepers. What is so much money good for, after all, if you can’t buy acceptance?

One night in 2013, Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York City, held a soiree at an Italian restaurant on Park Avenue on behalf of Abramovich and his then-wife, Dasha Zhukova, who would soon unveil plans to turn four adjoining townhouses on the Upper East Side into the city’s largest private home. For months that spring, Abramovich’s 533-foot yacht, Eclipse , had docked on the Hudson, drawing spectators to marvel at its pools and helipads, and wedding-cake deck. Photos of the ship have a surreptitious quality, like a hasty snapshot of a rare woodpecker; a sophisticated network of lasers had reportedly been deployed, to deter the paparazzi.

At the party, according to HuffPost , Jared Kushner rubbed shoulders with Wendi Deng Murdoch and Leonardo DiCaprio. The media mogul Barry Diller, who once warned that corporate consolidation was creating an “oligarchy” in his industry, showed up, and Gayle King too. When it was time to speak, Bloomberg praised the guests of honor for their philanthropy, and announced that he was naming Abramovich an honorary citizen of New York.

The influx of foreign money had been a “godsend,” he later told New York magazine. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?”

Over the last decade, stories of foreign oligarchs have been a pervasive and insidious presence in national politics. But all of this overseas money sloshing around did not corrupt the American system so much as it made unavoidable the ways in which it was already compromised. Affluent arrivistes did not get special treatment per se; they availed themselves of the services that American elites so often do. Oleg Deripaska’s top lobbyist was Bob Dole . His lawyers worked for the pill-pushing Sackler family. Shady foreign officials store their money in Great Plains trusts just like Pritzkers . The great irony of the post-invasion reckoning is that Putin’s billionaires were escaping a country that is not, in fact, much of an oligarchy anymore, for the comforts of a place that increasingly is.

“We need a translator,” Bloomberg quipped at that 2013 event. “Roman’s going to have a heart attack thinking he has to pay taxes.”

But the defining feature of American wealth today is that our oligarchs don’t really have to. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who built one of the world’s largest companies around a loophole in sales taxes and has raked in millions in tax breaks designed for impoverished communities, paid no income tax at all in 2007 and 2011, according to ProPublica — a period in which he owned part of a mountain range. His rival for the title of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, paid nothing at all in 2018 . (In Cameron County, Texas, where SpaceX has scorched a state park and uprooted a beachfront community, Musk’s company will finally begin paying taxes in 2024.) Peter Thiel has used a loophole in the tax code to stash $5 billion in a Roth IRA. While the IRS targets working-class Black Americans, the list of billionaires who have paid no income tax in recent years is long. Bloomberg could have set his special guest straight—after all, the mayor was one of them .

Taxing labor but not wealth starves state coffers to fill personal ones. Instead of public works and universal programs, you get Big Philanthropy—donor networks and foundations that validate monopolistic fortunes under the pretense of disbursing them. Discretionary giving provides America’s ultrawhite ultrawealthy a kind of agenda-setting, extra-political power to go with their agenda-setting political power: Make enough money and you don’t have to fund essential services; you can run your own projects on your own notions of benevolence, remaking entire sectors of public life. From media to public health to elections to city halls, everyone in a jam wants a billionaire to come plug the suspicious billionaire-sized holes in their budgets. Many of the hospital wings and college libraries our oligarchs choose to build are quite nice. Plenty of the programs they choose to fund are quite well intentioned. But the creator of a Hot-or-Not app for Harvard kids pumping $100 million into a school district—as Mark Zuckerberg once did in Newark —does not support a civil society so much as it supplants one.

Such a system has profound consequences for the rest of us. In a 2009 paper , two Northwestern professors singled out the robust American wealth-protection industry—the one those Russians were eagerly taking advantage of—as both a driver and a symptom of this country’s descent into hyper-minority rule. America’s ultrawealthy, they argued, “hire armies of professional, skilled actors” to “labor as salaried advocates and defenders of core oligarchic interests”—lobbyists, lawyers, think-tankers, and consultants. The political system still maintains many of the trappings of a democracy, in part because the ultrawealthy who fund campaigns disagree about a lot of things. But politics functions within the boundaries defined by this cohort. Another study a few years later put this point more finely: The most determinative factor on whether a policy would become law was how much support it had from “economically elite Americans.” A Supreme Court justice taking a vacation on a billionaire’s yacht isn’t the peak of American oligarchy. That same billionaire using the vacation to reduce his tax bill is.

In 2021, Bezos traveled to the edge of space aboard a vessel called New Shepard . The launch pad, on a ranch in Far West Texas he had purchased with what he called his “winnings,” was not far from the site of another pet project he was building under the guise of a charitable foundation: a $42 million clock inside of a mountain Bezos also owned, which he hoped would last 10,000 years. For a few minutes, 66.4 miles above the Earth, Bezos exalted in his own weightlessness, attempting to catch floating Skittles with his mouth. After landing, still dressed in his custom blue jumpsuit, he took a moment to acknowledge the gravity of the moment.

He wanted to thank “every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer,” he said . “Because you guys paid for all of this.”

It is uncommon for someone in such a position to describe the balance sheet so plainly—to point with a smile to a phallic rocket ship that goes nowhere new and assert that this is what delivery drivers peed in a water bottle for. But this is the nature of oligarchy: Your sweat is their jet fuel.

Perhaps no one has worked harder to make “oligarchy” a feature of American political discourse than Bernie Sanders, the 82-year-old democratic socialist whose two campaigns for president tapped into dissatisfaction with structural inequality. In his most recent book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism , “oligarchy” is the central villain.

Sanders isn’t just throwing out a pejorative. The United States checks all the boxes he’s laid out, he told me—“a system in which a small number of people have enormous power, and they have enormous wealth, and they create a system, which is designed to protect their interests.”

It is not simply about being rich, in this line of thinking. Oligarchy is about people with money using that money to reshape society to their benefit in a way that everyone else feels. Sanders rattles off the basic symptoms: Astronomical inequality. (By one measure , the richest Americans control a greater share of the wealth now than their counterparts did during the Gilded Age.) A political system dominated by ultrawealthy donors and, increasingly, ultrawealthy candidates. And decades of consolidation that has reduced whole industries into a handful of megacorporations.

“You have more concentration of ownership in sector after sector today than we have ever had,” he says. “Whether it is financial services, whether it’s transportation, whether it’s agriculture, whether it’s media, you have fewer and fewer large corporate entities controlling those sectors, and that is one of the reasons we’re able to see an incredible amount of corporate greed taking place in recent years.”

When Sanders and I spoke last spring, Elon Musk was in the early stages of a salt-the-earth takeover of Twitter, which seemed to largely entail firing the people who made it work and tweeting “interesting” about the sort of people who are facing jail time in Romania. It was an example of the market concentration Sanders was talking about—of what happens when a single company owns an entire mode of communication, and then that company is acquired by the world’s oldest 14-year-old boy. But Musk’s behavior underscored something else about the American oligarchy. It’s not just about the money they make, but the ways they make it.

For all the chaos, there was a linear kind of logic to the system that made Russians like Kerimov and Abramovich rich—there is money, of course, in precious metals. The information economy, too, is built on natural resources in the traditional sense. Track the supply chains to their end and you’ll find workers toiling in mines , and power plants burning coal to keep the server farms running. Behind the rise of artificial intelligence is an underclass of “ ghost ” workers, filtering abusive content out of chatbots for a few bucks an hour.

But American oligarchy is extractive on a deeper level than the resources it consumes. You “paid for all of this,” as Bezos put it, not just with your hard-earned cash and your labor, but with a little piece of yourself. Shoshana Zuboff, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, has written about a class she calls the “ information oligarchs .” These tech giants like Google and Meta are driven by what she calls the “extraction imperative”—in which the entire scope of operation was built around harvesting your data and attention for the purposes of selling it or tailoring products. Your time is the precarious foundation of the entire internet economy, the basic unit upon which all else is organized. Reed Hastings, the executive chairman of Netflix, once said that his biggest competitor was sleep .

“Surveillance capitalists know everything about us , whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable to us ,” Zuboff argues in her 2018 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . “They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us , but not for us .” To Zuboff, this represents a challenge not just to democracies—because of the imposition of a new and unaccountable hierarchy—but also to individual autonomy. There is no alternative technological space to turn to; they own a plane of existence. And the rise of AI, powered by the likes of Zuckerberg, is taking this extraction imperative to new levels—mining vast reams of data and written content so that a machine might better take your job or commodify your identity. Tech companies even have a term for the human inputs they use to build their products: “ data exhaust .” Since last July, dozens of writers have filed suit against both Meta and the Microsoft-backed OpenAI, alleging that their respective machine-learning projects are built, in part, on copyrighted materials. (Meta and OpenAI both claim that their reliance on published works was “fair use.”) Musk, who is developing his own line of brain implants, warned last spring that artificial intelligence could bring about “ civilizational destruction ”—before announcing that he, too, would be launching his own AI venture .

The relationship between government and oligarchy is defined by a kind of groveling—the clacking of a dozen mayors begging Musk to build them a simple tunnel. During the bidding war for Amazon’s second headquarters, hundreds of cities and states debased themselves for a shot at the prize. Dallas offered to build an “ Amazon University ” next to City Hall. A city in Georgia offered to change its name to “Amazon.” It was loans-for-shares in reverse: Bezos wasn’t bidding for the state; he’d developed something so big—and had been allowed to develop something so big—that states were bidding for him. The company once set a goal of raising $1 billion in government incentives in a single year; in oligarchic America, taxes pay you.

Even as they get their way with municipalities, these American oligarchs still harbor fantasies of simply running their own. For years, Reid Hoffman, VC billionaire Marc Andreessen, Laurene Powell Jobs, and a handful of other Silicon Valley heavies quietly bought up a huge swath of Northern California to build an entirely new city—one where they could model, as the New York Times put it, “ new forms of governance .” A Thiel-linked fund has invested in an effort to start a new monarcho-capitalist metropolis somewhere on the Mediterranean coast. Musk, who is building a model community outside Austin while tightening control over his South Texas “Starbase,” fantasizes about one day using SpaceX to colonize Mars—of building an entire society as he sees fit, while extending “ the light of consciousness .” Lurking behind his projects is an often explicitly stated desire to reimagine shared spaces. The never-completed Hyperloop, which Musk promised would transport passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco at 600 miles per hour, was a ploy to stop high-speed rail, according to his first biographer, Ashlee Vance. A critic of public transit, which he says “ sucks ,” Musk envisions a future in which cities will instead devote more and more of their underground and overhead space to his own fleet of self-driving Tesla electric cars, transforming the entire idea of what cities should be. The Musk-owned satellite network, Starlink, controls more than half the satellites in the night sky—giving its owner so much power over communications that he effectively vetoed a Ukrainian military operation. The billionaire’s stewardship of Twitter (which he’s now named X) is uncommonly slapstick compared to the ventures that made him rich, but it does share something essential: He is attempting to commandeer something that was held in common and leave in its place something individualized and worse.

The sum of American oligarchy is not just withering democracy and so much inequality, but a kind of omnipresence: They are something more than rich—oligarchs are the main characters of our timeline. But even as our lives are increasingly subject to the whims of bored kingpins, their spaces are detached from our own. Some can retreat to private islands (Larry Ellison owns Hawaii’s sixth largest). Others live in communities so exclusive that the help has to come from one state away . Embedded in this system is the capacity for escape. They can send their wealth across borders without really moving it. They can choose where they pay taxes, or by which methods they don’t pay them at all. They can insulate themselves from the world they’ve sold for parts. And if all else fails, they can take to the sea.

In the runup to the invasion of Ukraine, Alex Finley, a former CIA officer who is based in Barcelona, began periodically visiting the city’s luxury marina to check on the status of Russian-owned boats. Finley, who had researched the industry for a satirical novel about Putin’s security services, found that vessels that might otherwise spend weeks preparing for a voyage were disappearing overnight. “I went down one day and the Galactica Super Nova was there, and there was no hustle and bustle around it,” she told me, referring to a 230-foot yacht reputed to belong to a Putin-allied Russian petro-billionaire , who was named, a few weeks later, on a UK sanctions list “targeting those who prop up Russian-backed illegal breakaway regions of Ukraine.” “I thought, you’ll see them loading food on it, or they’ll be filling it with gas and water, that type of thing—there was nothing. And then I went down the next day and she was gone.” As oligarch-linked ships made their escape, Finley began tracking their whereabouts using open-source data and writing up their exploits for Whale Hunting , a newsletter dedicated to all things kleptocracy. More than just a novelty, “the yachts are symbols of the corruption which is corroding democracy,” Finley said—and a road map to understanding both the flow of dubious wealth to the West, and the tools that Russian elites deploy to obscure it.

But these days, people aren’t just monitoring the yachts of sanctioned oligarchs. They’re also following the movements of the American ones. While Finley was tracking Putin’s cronies and the Amadea was making its way to San Diego, a long-suffering football fan in Northern Virginia started keeping an eye on the Lady S , the boat belonging to then–Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder. It’s reportedly the first yacht in the world with a 12-seat IMAX theater .

Snyder was a model of what DOJ filings might call a second-tier oligarch—a telemarketing magnate and megadonor who unsuccessfully sued an alt-weekly for $1 million after it caricatured him on its cover. (Snyder promised to use any monetary award to fight homelessness, his lawyers wrote in their complaint —“Mr. Snyder is heavily involved in philanthropy.”) His stewardship of the football team was the embodiment of American capitalism’s perverse gravity—managing to grow his investment sevenfold while presiding over an ever-worsening product that seemed to deliberately insult the people who paid for it. When, in June 2022, the House Oversight Committee asked Snyder to testify about his franchise’s misogynistic culture, the billionaire’s lawyer informed members that the owner had “longstanding plans to be out of the country on business matters.”

Snyder’s unbreakable commitment turned out to be an award show in Cannes for ad-industry execs. Inspired by the Russian yacht-watchers and a Florida college student who had created an account called ElonJet to track Musk’s private planes, the fan decided to look up the Lady S using publicly available data. In the weeks that followed, while the committee unsuccessfully sought to serve the owner with a subpoena, @DanSnydersYacht —the proprietor of which spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of incurring the notoriously vindictive billionaire’s wrath—amassed thousands of followers by tweeting out the whereabouts of the owner’s boat and private jet, as Snyder made his way across the Mediterranean to Israel.

“I think what kind of made it popular…was just, hey, here’s what a billionaire can get away with,” he told me. “If you or I got subpoenaed, we’d be freaking out and have to show up immediately or face consequences. If you’re a billionaire on your yacht, you can dodge a lot of legal consequences for a while.” (Snyder eventually did testify, sans subpoena and via Zoom, where he answered with some variation of I-don’t-recall “ more than 100 times ,” according to the final congressional report.)

There is something kind of subversive about tracking these vessels. It’s a sliver of sunlight in a world that’s designed to keep such things out. But not long after he purchased Twitter, Musk shut down ElonJet. He claimed it had put his family at risk, although the story he first told soon fell apart . The details, in any event, seemed superfluous; that is just what happens when an oligarch buys the platform you use to track the oligarchs.

In the meantime, American oligarchs are eagerly filling the vacuum left by the retreating Russians. The proceeds from sanctioned steel-magnate Dmitry Pumpyansky’s seized yacht went to the bank to whom he owed money— J.P. Morgan . Eric Schmidt paid $67.6 million at auction for a superyacht alleged to belong to a sanctioned Russian fertilizer billionaire—but rescinded the bid after the oligarch’s daughter claimed it was hers all along. Last April, a new boat pulled into the harbor in Mallorca, and tied up at the dock a few hundred feet away from where Viktor Vekselberg’s Tango had been impounded for 13 months. It was Harlan Crow’s Michaela Rose .

And this past summer, while taxpayers were spending big to maintain the Amadea ’s teak deck, a Dutch shipbuilder put the finishing touches on a 417-foot-long ship for its newest client. The Koru , named for a Maori spiraling pattern, was a gleaming, three-masted sailboat, with room for 18 guests and a swimming pool. The company had designed a 246-foot motor-powered support yacht to go with it—with its own helipad to boot. In lieu of an albatross, a wooden carving on the Koru ’s prow was said to bear an uncanny resemblance to the fiancée of a certain Skittle-munching oligarch. The owner may be Jeff Bezos, but you guys all paid for it.

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Essays About War: Top 5 Examples And 5 Prompts
Then, argue your case and show how its effects are positive, negative, or both. 4. Moral and Ethical Issues Concerning War. Many issues arise when waging war, such as the treatment of civilians as "collateral damage," keeping secrets from the public, and torturing prisoners.
War Essay in English
100 Words Essay on War. The greatest destroyers of people in modern times are wars. No matter who wins a war, mankind loses in every case. Millions of people have died in battles during the past century, with World Wars I and II being the worst. Wars are typically fought to protect a nation.
How to Write an Essay About War (A Guide with Example)
2. Body. In the body section of your war essay, you need to provide information to support your thesis statement. A typical body section of a college essay will include three to four body paragraphs. Each body paragraph starts with a topic sentence and solely focuses on it. This is how your war essay should be.
An Essay On War : Rooney, Andrew A. : Free Download, Borrow, and
An anti-war essay by Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes fame. This is from 1971 when he was 52 years old. He was a veteran of WWII when he wrote for Stars and Stripes. He appears in the beginning of the film and the remainder is his voice over stock war footage from WWI through the Vietnam conflict. He presents his compelling argument against war in his ...
Essay on War and Peace
500 Words Essay on War and Peace Introduction. War and peace are two polar opposites, yet they are inextricably linked in the complex tapestry of human history. They represent the dual nature of humanity: our capacity for both destruction and harmony. This essay explores the intricate relationship between war and peace, the impacts they have on ...
How to Write an Essay on the Israeli War on Hamas
This essay goes into the controversies, causes, and consequences of the Israeli War on Hamas. In doing so, it examines the historical roots of the conflict, the issue of antisemitism, the differing perspectives of Israel and Hamas, and the implications of the war. The goal of this essay is to provide a balanced view of the conflict so that the ...
How to Write War Essay: Step-By-Step Guide
How to Write War Essay with a War Essay Outline. Just like in compare and contrast examples and any other forms of writing, an outline for a war essay assists you in organizing your research and creating a good flow. In general, you keep to the traditional three-part essay style, but you can adapt it as needed based on the length and criteria of your school.
635 War Topics to Write about & Essay Samples
The Effects of War and Destruction in Poetry. This essay aims to analyze the theme of the effects of war and destruction in the poem The End and the Beginning by Wislawa Szymborska and the lyrics Harry Patch by Radiohead. Mueller's "The Banality of 'Ethnic War'".
The Conduct and Consequences of War
Summary. The academic study of warfare has expanded considerably over the past 15 years. Whereas research used to focus almost exclusively on the onset of interstate war, more recent scholarship has shifted the focus from wars between states to civil conflict, and from war onset to questions of how combatants wage and terminate war.
The Ethics of War: Essays
The Ethics of War continues and pushes past this trend. This anthology is an authoritative treatment of the ethics and law of war by eminent scholars who first challenged the orthodoxy of Just War theory, as well as by "second-wave" revisionists. The twelve original essays span both foundational and topical issues in the ethics of war ...
War
war, in the popular sense, a conflict between political groups involving hostilities of considerable duration and magnitude. In the usage of social science, certain qualifications are added. Sociologists usually apply the term to such conflicts only if they are initiated and conducted in accordance with socially recognized forms. They treat war as an institution recognized in custom or in law.
Essay on War and Its Effects
500 Words Essay on War and Its Effects Introduction. War, an organized conflict between two or more groups, has been a part of human history for millennia. Its effects are profound and far-reaching, influencing political, social, and economic aspects of societies. Understanding the impact of war is crucial to comprehend the intricacies of ...
On War
Michael Howard (1922-2019) was a leading British military historian who held professorships at the University of Oxford and Yale University.His many books included The Franco-Prussian War and War in European History.Peter Paret (1924-2020) was professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His many books include Clausewitz in His Time, The Cognitive Challenge of War ...
World War II: [Essay Example], 1360 words GradesFixer
World War II also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from September 1, 1939 to September 2, 1945. The war conflicts began earlier, it involved the vast majority of the world's countries. They formed two opposing military alliances, the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved ...
How to Write an Essay on War
For writing essays on war, college students should be well-read about the war for which they are writing an essay. The essays on war should be informative in terms of the war topic that the student is assigned to write on. In an essay on war, you should give certain aspects of wars, such as the causes of the war, the after-effects of the war ...
War Essay: Things To Write About
Civil War Essay Prompts. The Civil War of 1861-1865 was the bloodiest in US history. Losses in the North killed and died from wounds and diseases amounted to 360 thousand people, in the South - 258 thousand people. As a result of the battle, the United States' state unity was restored.
(PDF) The Russian-Ukrainian war: An explanatory essay through the
The issue is also seen as a resurgence of the Cold War inside the global system. This essay aims to examine a realist's perspective on the continuing conflict by analysing its key assumptions and ...
Project MUSE
Buy This Book in Print. summary. The most authoritative and feature-rich edition of On War in English. Carl von Clausewitz's On War is the most significant attempt in Western history to understand war, both in its internal dynamics and as an instrument of policy. Since the work's first appearance in 1832, it has been read throughout the world ...
Essay On War: Writing Tips and Topic Ideas
Essay About World War 2. World War 2 was the biggest and most destructive conflict in human history. It began in 1939 and lasted for six years, involving over 30 countries and resulting in the deaths of over 60 million people. The cause of the war was the rise of Nazi Germany and its aggressive expansionist policies.
Essay on War and Peace
It spurs men to heroism and self-sacrifice. It is an incentive to scientific research and development. War is obviously an escape from the lethargy of peace. Essay on War and Peace - No doubt war is an evil, the greatest catastrophe that befalls human beings. It brings death and destruction, disease and starvation, poverty, and ruin in its wake.
An Essay On War : Rooney, Andrew A. : Free Download, Borrow, and
An Essay On War by Rooney, Andrew A. Publication date 1971 Collection internetarchivebooks; americana Contributor Internet Archive Language English. Addeddate 2017-01-19 21:48:16 Bookplateleaf 0005 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier essayonwar00roon Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t35193221 ...
Vietnam War Essay
10 Lines on Vietnam War Essay in English. 1. The Vietnam War was a conflict between the communist and the capitalist countries and was a part of the Cold War. 2. The Vietnam War was a controversial issue in the United States. 3. It was the first war to feature in live television coverage. 4.
The Ethics of War: Essays
Saba Bazargan-Forward and Samuel C. Rickless (eds.), The Ethics of War: Essays, Oxford University Press, 2017, 304pp., $78.00, ISBN 9780199376148. On the back cover the book is advertised as "The authoritative anthology on the ethics and law of war." This might be an overstatement. While the best-edited volumes on just war theory focus on a ...
World War 1 Essay
10 Lines on World War 1 Essay in English. 1. The First World War was instigated in 1914 by Serbia. 2. The cause of the war was a competition between countries to acquire weapons and build military powers. 3. In 1914, Serbia aroused anger by assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir of Austria-Hungary throne. 4.
Opinion
America's Military Is Not Prepared for War — or Peace. Mr. Wicker, a Republican, is the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. "To be prepared for war," George ...
Taking an Azimuth on the US Military's Recruiting Crisis: What We
Zachary Griffiths is a major in the United States Army and the director of the Harding Project to renew professional military writing.. Laura Keenan is a lieutenant colonel in the District of Columbia Army National Guard. She is a United States Military Academy graduate and a distinguished graduate of the National War College.
The Rise of the American Oligarchy
A bestselling book described Bannon's former bosses, the Trumps, as American Oligarchs. Donald Trump Jr., for his part, complained that China controls "America's oligarchs.". A group of ...

Essays About War: Top 5 Examples and 5 Prompts

1. War Is Not Part of Human Nature by R. Brian Ferguson

5. ​​Is war a pre-requisite for peace? by Anna Cleary

4. The Psychosocial Impacts of War and Armed Conflict on Children by Iman Farajallah, Omar Reda, H. Steven Moffic, John R. Peteet, and Ahmed Hankir

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