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War is an international relations dispute, characterized by organized violence between national military units. In his seminal work “On War”, Carl Von Clausewitz calls war the “continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means.”[1] War is thus an alternative (and violent) form of diplomatic interaction in which two or more militaries have a “struggle of wills”.[2] When qualified as a civil war, it is a dispute inherent to a given society, and its nature is in the conflict over state governance rather than sovereignty. War is different from murder or genocide because of the usually organized nature of the military's participation in the struggle, and the organized nature of units involved.
War is also a cultural entity, and its practice is not linked to any single type of political organisation or society. Rather, as discussed by John Keegan in his “History Of Warfare”, war is a universal phenomenon whose form and scope is defined by the society that wages it. [3] The conduct of war extends along a continuum, from the almost universal tribal warfare that began well before recorded human history, to wars between city states, nations, or empires.
A group of combatants and their support is called an army on land, a navy at sea, and air force in the air. Wars may be prosecuted simultaneously in one or more different theatres. Within each theatre, there may be one or more consecutive military campaigns. A military campaign includes not only fighting but also intelligence, troop movements, supplies, propaganda, and other components. Continuous conflict is traditionally called a battle, although this terminology is not always fed to conflicts involving aircraft, missiles or bombs alone, in the absence of ground troops or naval forces. A civil war is the use of force to resolve internal differences.
