Monthly Archives: February 2022

Contemporary warfare as contrasted with previous methods

Modern warfare is warfare that is in notable contrast with previous military concepts, methods, and technology, emphasizing how combatants must modernize to preserve their battle worthiness.[1] As such, it is an evolving subject, seen differently in different times and places. In its narrowest sense, it is merely a synonym for contemporary warfare.

In its widest sense, it includes all warfare since the "gunpowder revolution" that marks the start of early modern warfare, but other landmark military developments have been used instead, including the emphasis of artillery marked by the Crimean War, the military reliance on railways beginning with the American Civil War, the launch of the first dreadnought in 1905, or the use of the machine gun, aircraft, tank, or radio in World War I.[2] In other senses, it is tied to the introduction of total war, industrial warfare, mechanized warfare, nuclear warfare,[3] counter-insurgency,[4] or (more recently) the rise of asymmetric warfare also known as fourth-generation warfare.[5]

Some argue that the changing forms of third generation warfare represents nothing more than an evolution of earlier technology.[6]

Aerial warfare is the use of military aircraft and other flying machines in warfare. Aerial warfare includes bombers attacking enemy concentrations or strategic targets; fighter aircraft battling for control of airspace; attack aircraft engaging in close air support against ground targets; naval aviation flying against sea and nearby land targets; gliders, helicopters and other aircraft to carry airborne forces such as paratroopers; aerial refueling tankers to extend operation time or range; and military transport aircraft to move cargo and personnel.

A military situation in which two belligerents of unequal strength interact and take advantage of their respective strengths and weaknesses. This interaction often involves strategies and tactics outside conventional warfare.

Biological warfare, also known as germ warfare, is the use of any organism (bacteria, virus or other disease-causing organism) or toxin found in nature, as a weapon of war. It is meant to incapacitate or kill enemy combatants. It may also be defined as the employment of biological agents to produce casualties in man or animals and damage to plants or material; or defense against such employment. Biological warfare involves the intentional release of living pathogens either in their naturally occurring form, for example the diseased corpses of animals, or in the form of specific human-modified organisms.

Chemical warfare is warfare (associated military operations) using the toxic properties of chemical substances to incapacitate or kill enemy combatants. Chemical warfare nerve agents are potent anticholinesterase compounds deliberately formulated to induce debilitating effects or death during wartime hostilities. A key need for both community emergency preparedness, and restoration of military installations where agents have been processed and/or stored, is access to concise and timely information on agent characteristics and treatment, as well as health-based exposure guidelines derived in a clear manner by contemporary methods of data analysis.

Electronic warfare refers to mainly non-violent practices used chiefly to support other areas of warfare. The term was originally coined to encompass the interception and decoding of enemy radio communications, and the communications technologies and cryptography methods used to counter such interception, as well as jamming, radio stealth, and other related areas. Over the later years of the 20th century and early years of the 21st century, this has expanded to cover a wide range of areas: the use of, detection of and avoidance of detection by radar and sonar systems, computer hacking, etc.

Fourth generation warfare (4GW) is a concept defined by William S. Lind and expanded by Thomas X. Hammes, used to describe the decentralized nature of modern warfare. The simplest definition includes any war in which one of the major participants is not a state but rather a violent ideological network. Fourth Generation wars are characterized by a blurring of the lines between war and politics, combatants and civilians, conflicts and peace, battlefields and safety.

While this term is similar to terrorism and asymmetric warfare, it is much narrower. Classical insurgencies and the Indian Wars are examples of pre-modern wars, not 4GW. Fourth generation warfare usually has the insurgency group or non-state side trying to implement their own government or reestablish an old government over the one currently running the territory. The blurring of lines between state and non-state is further complicated in a democracy by the power of the media.

Ground warfare involves three types of combat units: infantry, armor, and artillery.

Infantry in modern times would consist of mechanized infantry and airborne forces. Usually having a type of rifle or sub-machine gun, an infantryman is the basic unit of an army.

Armored warfare in modern times involves a variety of armored fighting vehicles for the purpose of battle and support. Tanks or other armored vehicles (such as armored personnel carriers or tank destroyers) are slower, yet stronger hunks of metal. They are invulnerable to enemy machine gun fire but prone to rocket infantry, mines, and aircraft so are usually accompanied by infantry. In urban areas, because of smaller space, an armored vehicle is exposed to hidden enemy infantry but as the so-called "Thunder Run" at Baghdad in 2003 showed, armored vehicles can play a critical role in urban combat. In rural areas, an armored vehicle does not have to worry about hidden units though muddy and damp terrain that have always been a factor of weakness for tanks and vehicles.

Artillery in contemporary times is distinguished by its large caliber, firing an explosive shell or rocket, and being of such a size and weight as to require a specialized mount for firing and transport. Weapons covered by this term include "tube" artillery such as the howitzer, cannon, mortar, field gun, and rocket artillery. The term "artillery" has traditionally not been used for projectiles with internal guidance systems, even though some artillery units employ surface-to-surface missiles. Recent advances in terminal guidance systems for small munitions has allowed large caliber shells to be fitted with precision guidance fuses, blurring this distinction.

Guerrilla warfare is defined as fighting by groups of irregular troops (guerrillas) within areas occupied by the enemy. When guerrillas obey the laws and customs of war, they are entitled, if captured, to be treated as ordinary prisoners of war; however, they are often treated by their captors as unlawful combatants and executed. The tactics of guerrilla warfare stress deception and ambush, as opposed to mass confrontation, and succeed best in an irregular, rugged, terrain and with a sympathetic populace, whom guerrillas often seek to win over or dominate by propaganda, reform, and terrorism. Guerrilla warfare has played a significant role in modern history, especially when waged by Communist liberation movements in Southeast Asia (most notably in the Vietnam War) and elsewhere.

Guerrilla fighters gravitate toward weapons which are easily accessible, low in technology, and low in cost. A typical arsenal of the modern guerrilla would include the AK-47, RPGs, and Improvised explosive devices. The guerrilla doctrines' main disadvantage is the inability to access more advanced equipment due to economic, influence, and accessibility issues. They must rely on small unit tactics involving hit and run. This situation leads to low intensity warfare, asymmetrical warfare, and war amongst the people. The rules of Guerrilla warfare are to fight a little and then to retreat.

Propaganda

Propaganda is an ancient form of disinformation concerted with sending a set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of large numbers of people. Instead of impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense presents information in order to influence its audience. The most effective propaganda is often completely truthful, but some propaganda presents facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis, or gives loaded messages in order to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the cognitive narrative of the subject in the target audience.

Psychological

Psychological warfare had its beginnings during the campaigns of Genghis Khan through the allowance of certain civilians of the nations, cities, and villages to flee said place, spreading terror and fear to neighboring principalities. Psychological actions have the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of hostile foreign groups in such a way as to support the achievement of national objectives.

Information

Made possible by the widespread use of the electronic media during World War II, Information warfare is a kind of warfare where information and attacks on information and its system are used as a tool of warfare. Some examples of this type of warfare are electronic "sniffers" which disrupt international fund-transfer networks as well as the signals of television and radio stations. Jamming such signals can allow participants in the war to use the stations for a misinformation campaign.

Naval warfare takes place on the high seas (blue water navy). Usually, only large, powerful nations have competent blue water or deep water navies. Modern navies primarily use aircraft carriers, submarines, frigates, cruisers, and destroyers for combat. This provides a versatile array of attacks, capable of hitting ground targets, air targets, or other seafaring vessels. Most modern navies also have a large air support contingent, deployed from aircraft carriers[dubious discuss]. In World War II, small craft (motor torpedo boats variously called PT boats, MTBs, MGBs, Schnellboote, or MAS-boats) fought near shore. This developed in the Vietnam War into riverine warfare (brown water navy), in intertidal and river areas. Irregular warfare makes this sort of combat more likely in the future.

Network-centric warfare is essentially a new military doctrine made possible by the Information Age. Weapons platforms, sensors, and command and control centers are being connected through high-speed communication networks. The doctrine is related to the Revolution in Military Affairs debate.

The overall network which enables this strategy in the United States military is called the Global Information Grid.

Nuclear war is a type of warfare which relies on nuclear weapons. There are two types of warfare in this category. In a limited nuclear war, a small number of weapons are used in a tactical exchange aimed primarily at enemy combatants. In a full-scale nuclear war, large numbers of weapons are used in an attack aimed at entire countries. This type of warfare would target both combatants and non-combatants.

Space warfare is the hypothetical warfare that occurs outside the Earth's atmosphere. No wars have been fought here yet. The weapons would include orbital weaponry and space weapons. High value outer space targets would include satellites and weapon platforms. Notably no real weapons exist in space yet, though ground-to-space missiles have been successfully tested against target satellites. As of now, this is purely science fiction.

Read more:

Modern warfare - Wikipedia

On September 20, 1950, a US Navy ship just off the coast of San Francisco used a giant hose to spray a cloud of microbes into the air and into the city's famous fog. The military was testing how a biological weapon attack would affect the 800,000 residents of the city.

The people of San Francisco had no idea.

The Navy continued the tests for seven days, potentially causing at least one death. It was one of the first large-scale biological weapon trials that would be conducted under a "germ warfare testing program" that went on for 20 years, from 1949 to 1969. The goal "was to deter [the use of biological weapons] against the United States and its allies and to retaliate if deterrence failed," the government explained later. "Fundamental to the development of a deterrent strategy was the need for a thorough study and analysis of our vulnerability to overt and covert attack."

Of the 239 known tests in that program, San Francisco was notable for two reasons, according to Dr. Leonard Cole, who documented the episode in his book "Clouds of Secrecy: The Army's Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas."

Cole, now the director of the Terror Medicine and Security Program at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, tells BusinessInsider that this incident was "notable: first, because it was really early in the program ... but also because of the extraordinary coincidence that took place at Stanford Hospital, beginning days after the Army's tests had taken place."

Hospital staff were so shocked at the appearance of a patient infected with a bacteria, Serratia marcescens, that had never been found in the hospital and was rare in the area, that they published an article about it in a medical journal. The patient, Edward Nevin, died after the infection spread to his heart.

S. marcescens was one of the two types of bacteria the Navy ship had sprayed over the Bay Area.

It wasn't until the 1970s that Americans, as Cole wrote in the book, "learned that for decades they had been serving as experimental animals for agencies of their government."

San Francisco wasn't the first or the last experiment on citizens who hadn't given informed consent.

Other experiments involved testing mind-altering drugs on unsuspecting citizens. In one shocking, well-known incident, government researchers studied the effects of syphilis on black Americans without informing the men that they had the disease they were told they had "bad blood." Researchers withheld treatment after it became available so they could continue studying the illness, despite the devastating and life-threatening implications of doing so for the men and their families.

But it was the germ warfare tests that Cole focused on.

"All these other tests, while terrible, they affected people counted in the hundreds at most," he says. "But when you talk about exposing millions of people to potential harm, by spreading around certain chemicals or biological agents, the quantitative effect of that is just unbelievable."

"Every one of the [biological and chemical] agents the Army used had been challenged" by medical reports, he says, despite the Army's contention in public hearings that they'd selected "harmless simulants" of biological weapons.

"They're all considered pathogens now," Cole says.

Here are some of the other difficult-to-believe germ warfare experiments that occurred during this dark chapter in US history. These tests were documented in Cole's book and verified by Business Insider using congressional reports and archived news articles.

Read more here:

US Military Released Bacteria to Test Biological Warfare

By Bartee Haile

Just when Texans started to think the Spanish Flu had finally run its course, on Feb. 4, 1920 the State Health Department reported 2,514 new cases in the past 24 hours.

The deadly strain of influenza that caused the worldwide epidemic at the end of the First World War was called the Spanish Flu because the outbreak in that country that killed eight million in May 1918 received the most attention. As a noncombatant, Spain had no wartime censorship. Interestingly enough, the Spaniards themselves named the scourge the French Flu.

The Great Pandemic was genuinely global in scope. The only place on the planet to escape the calamity was a small island deep in the Amazon jungle. No one really knows how many lives were lost, but estimates of the worldwide death toll ranged from 40 to 100 million making the twentieth-century pandemic the deadliest in human history.

The Spanish Flu struck healthy individuals, usually the young rather than the old, without warning. In a matter of hours, victims were too weak to walk and had to take to bed. Of those that died, the end often came the very next day. The stricken rarely lingered longer than three days after infection.

The symptoms were ghastly. As the lungs failed, victims turned black or blue from lack of oxygen and bled from the nose, ears and eyes. And, as one historian wrote, Patients would writhe from agonizing pain in their joints.

Although victims were advised to send for a doctor as soon as they came down with Spanish Flu, there was little a physician could do when he arrived. Penicillin would not be discovered until 1928, and it was not until 1943 that an influenza vaccine became available.

The first documented case in the United States occurred on March 11, 1918 at Fort Riley, Kansas, when army cook showed up at sick call with a temperature of 103. Forty-eight hours later, 522 soldiers were flat on their backs.

Later that summer, a more virulent form of the Spanish Flu, undoubtedly carried by returning doughboys, hit Boston. The sickness spread like wildfire through the crowded cities on the East Coast, killing 800 a day in New York City, before heading west.

In the absence of a scientific explanation for the cause and with no cure, hysteria and ignorance filled the void. One popular theory was that the Spanish Flu was part of a germ-warfare attack by the Germans, while others blamed cat hair and coal dust. The long list of useless home remedies included everything from onions and garlic to goose grease.

The Surgeon Generals antidote for such nonsense was four basic precautions: 1) Keep out of crowds. 2) Cover up each cough and sneeze. 3) Do not spit on the floor or sidewalk. 4) Shun the common drinking cup and the roller towel in public places.

Texans could only wait and hope for the best. Maybe by some sort of miracle the Spanish Flu would skip the Lone Star State. But it didnt.

The suspense ended on Sept. 23, 1918 with the first confirmed sightings of the sickness in Williamson, Kaufman and Bosque counties. Eleven days later, 35 counties were under siege, and a week after that the number had grown to 77.

Towns throughout Texas moved quickly to protect the public over the objections of local merchants and skeptics, who pooh-poohed the danger. On Oct. 9 alone the following communities closed schools, theaters and other gathering places: Lewisville, Plano, Marshall, McKinney, Bonham, Wills Point, Clarksville, Cleburne, Temple, Wichita Falls, Waxahachie, Houston and Corsicana.

By late October, the Spanish Flu had reached the Panhandle with the death of the president of Wayland Baptist College in Plainview on the 28th, and El Paso, where the number of cases neared 5,000 by the 23rd. On the 29th, the State Health Department reported 106,978 cases and 2,181 deaths and that was just in the cities.

Galvestons response to the worst public health crisis since the yellow fever epidemics of the 1800s was typical of most towns. City officials and the daily newspapers saw panic as the greatest enemy and in their efforts to keep everybody calm often painted too rosy a picture of a truly grave situation.

Any decline in the daily death toll was hailed by politicians and The Daily News as a sign the worst was over. Carried away by encouraging numbers in early November, the health commissioner lifted the ban on public places and reopened the schools.

But this unfounded optimism ignored the fact that the Spanish Flu came in waves and would hang on in Texas well into 1920. When the disease returned with a vengeance killing 65 Galvestonians between Nov. 15 and Dec. 15, the commissioner was forced to shut the city down again.

The final figures for the United States, nothing more than educated guesses, had one out of every four Americans stricken by the Spanish Flu and at least half a million fatalities in a population of 105 million. As for the four and half million Texans, 30 to 40 percent contracted the disease and five to ten percent of the afflicted perished. Thats 70,000 dead in the best case and upwards of 175,000 in the worst.

Bartee welcomes your comments and questions at barteehaile@gmail.com or P.O. Box 130011, Spring, TX 77393 and invites you to visit his web site barteehaile.com.

See the rest here:

This week in Texas History: Spanish flu, our ancestors' pandemic - Hays Free Press

Many of us continue to steady our steps. The germ warfare has us on a carousel going up and down and all around.

We have learned that vaccinations and good health practices make a difference. We know the high vaccination rate on Guam is a safety net for our health care system.

Emotionally, stressors come from all points. Closures, work, prices, empty shelves challenge us to be even more patient, focused and creative. Our hope for better times keeps us steady.

A lack of decorum from elected officials unsettles that hope. If the Guam Legislature has organizational issues with attendance practices, it can address that internally. If the Guam Legislature has issues with the performance of committee members and officers, it can address that in joint caucus.

As a former senator, I learned when I was present at a majority, if not all, public hearings and committee meetings, there were a variety of acceptable strategies to fully engage in legislative business. I learned that Families First should concentrate on its office and while it should certainly foster relationships with others, it should trust individual senators to be accountable for their efforts.

The people are astute enough to know who is getting the peoples work done. The people will decide, as they always do.

Do not misunderstand me. Heated discussion about policy, programs and practices is vital. Best steps result as discourse, data, research, stakeholder input and visionary sights take the stage. We elect our leaders to make the best decisions possible for all of us to live, work, pray, learn, dream and play safely, fairly and happily to our potential.

As officials live in glass houses, boundaries should be respected for private matters, especially when we already know tragedy and high-risk health issues are being addressed, especially when we already know health care being sought isnt available on Guam, especially when we know that deliverables continue to be addressed.

We have little control over many Guam decisions. We do have control over our relationships with each other. Even as we disagree, respect and regard especially as we are just healing from the health crisis are expected from our officials. Further concern hampers recovery.

Vice Speaker Tina Mua Barnes tele-working has made progress on Guam issues transshipment, COFA renegotiations, affordable homes. She continues to do her work on the Guma Mami Board. Most recently, her measure to identify haul-road highways that aims to help control Guam prices passed.

I dont know if Tina is seeking re-election. What I do know is that she continues to deliver for our families as she cares for hers. What I do know is that she is deserving of respect, regard and restraint as she steadies her footing.

We may not be able to control treatment from others, but certainly we can temper treatment among ourselves. Respect, regard, restraint standards of behavior we expect from those who call Guam home.

Aline Yamashita, Ph.D., is a teacher, single mother and former senator.

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Yamashita: Boundaries should be respected | Opinion | guampdn.com - Guam Pacific Daily News