{"id":248771,"date":"2023-11-20T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2023-11-20T12:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=248771"},"modified":"2023-11-20T11:51:07","modified_gmt":"2023-11-20T11:51:07","slug":"how-do-wars-end-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/11\/how-do-wars-end-2\/","title":{"rendered":"How Do Wars End?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Only about 400 rebels had been in the fight at the bridge, but as the day wore on the number increased to several thousand.\u00a0 They would shoot at the enemy column from behind fences, trees, barns, walls, from inside houses, then reload, hurry ahead, and then shoot again.\u00a0 This was a strange, new type of warfare to the British, who were neither experienced, nor trained for it.\u00a0 To them it seemed dishonorable, hiding and shooting at men in the open who could not even see their enemies.\u00a0 As one Redcoat wrote his family: They did not fight us like a regular army, only like savages.” [i]<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sounds familiar, today. And as the American Revolution, the War of Independence beginning April 19 1775, on the road Boston-Lexington-Concord in Massachusetts.\u00a0 The savages won.\u00a0 235 years later they are with the British against “savages” in Iraq, in Afghanistan and against terror.\u00a0 Is the victory foretold?\u00a0 No, the future holds not only victory and defeat for these three wars.<\/p>\n

We may search for warfare origins in Greece, as told by the over-quoted Thucydides or under-quoted Xenophon.\u00a0 Or in feudal tournaments, armored men with lances on horseback unsaddling, ultimately killing each other, with umpires, later field marshals, naming the victor, and the vanquished conceding.\u00a0 Sport turned war, with beginning and end.<\/p>\n

This was carried into modernity and the state system of the “Peace” of Westphalia 24 October 1648 by declaration and capitulation, bracketing the war as a succession of battles.\u00a0 The right of killing was contingent on the duty of risking being killed, with honor and courage and the ultimate honor to the most courageous of being a hero<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The nineteenth century witnessed the erosion of chivalry and sport to total war, “to the utmost limit”, “continuation of politics by all necessary means” (Clausewitz, even more brutal than French Jomini on Napoleon’s staff and the American Dennis Hart Mahan).\u00a0 Not limited to a battlefield: mobility, hitting the supply lines, massive attacks on one part after the other for the total destruction of enemy forces, and violence as a demoralizing force, attacking women, children, the old.<\/p>\n

Historically we sense three, not exclusive,<\/em> consequences.<\/p>\n