obvious Child

In the past 50 years of conflict, can conventional war be considered abnormal?

In the past 24+ conflicts in the past 20 years, how many of them have been conventional?

sotrueblue

Very few in comparison. Good point. Often the cry is against the more normal, less conventional kind. Conventional war, due to its devastation is restrsicted in every way by all the major powers. Yet often the cry goes out against those who practise the other kind but what choice do they have?

Red_Dave

That would defend how you define conventional.

gunner

what do you class as conventional?

conventional in terms of tactics.... conventional in terms of enemy... conventional in terms of setting?

paul.

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Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Scucca

I'd go with the distinction between traditional and non-traditional conflict. Given the rapid rise in the cost of military hardware, power inequalities have grown such that traditional conflict is increasingly an irrational option. We therefore move to other forms, with terrorism the most visible

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obvious Child

Malayan/African civil wars as unconventional compared to Korea/Desert Storm

obvious Child

Of course. Only a moron would fight a superior enemy on their choice of terrain and their choice on weapons. There is a reason the Iraqi army faded into the cities, to negate the overwhelming superiorities of the US.

I strongly believe that this new era of warfare will be heavily unconventional and that we should stop training for conventional warfare so much.

gunner

The military will never cease conventional training. Its there bread and butter, its like saying skip learning the times tables and go straight to Algebra.
unconventional Warfare is just another branch of a soldiers capabilities.
The need for change comes in dealing with the aftermath of success on the "Battle field".

Paul.

Iriemon

Conventional wars are wars between two separate nations. They've been around for ages.

An Insurgency type war in which a portion of the populace is in armed conflict or revolt against either the government (civil war) or an occupying force. Also been around for ages.

The only way an insurgency type war is won is either 1) extermination of the opposing populations, or 2) coopting the opposing forces so they lose their motivation to continue fighting.

You can win a convenional war with superior military force. Unless you have a genocidal mass murderer as a leader and are willing to follow him in genocide, an insurgency war is much harder to fight because it is difficult to distinguish the insurgent fighters from the rest of the population, and this is especially true where the population is sympathetic tothe insurgents.

The US occupation of the Iraq and Afganistan are of the latter type. Unless we are prepared to go course 1) they are very hard to win, because as a foreign occupier, it is more difficult to coopt the opposing force (which may be virtually the entire nation being occupied. This is especially true where the occupying force is viewed as having unjustifiably attacked and occupied their country.

Which is why the Iraq war has gone so much worse than the neocons mislead us into believing.

Europeans spent centuries fighting insurgency wars (conventional wars too) in the nations they occupied. They all eventually gave it up, not because it was the right thing to do, but because of centuries of occupation, they never were able to completely coopt the local population (or if it was coopted became hostile again) after centuries, and it just wasn't worth it.

The great dillemma with winning an insurgency is in the irony of the fact that the harder you fight it, the less likely you are to coopt the population to your position, and the more likely you are to induce the population to support the insurgents.

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Billo_Really

It is becoming that way.

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