A pair of AMX-30 main battle tanks and a truck of the French 6th Light Armored Division pause outside Al-Salman during Operation Desert Storm.
(9) GROUND WARFARE
Yes, all warfare except naval and air warfare is ground or land warfare – and even those two overlap with ground warfare in things such as amphibious or airborne warfare.
This special mention is for ground or land warfare by terrain and weather conditions, which both are, and are not, surprisingly diverse.
Not surprisingly diverse – as observed by John Keegan in an interlude chapter on the limitations of war-making in his history of warfare, war on land tends to have the same default terrain and weather conditions, avoiding difficulties of both.
Surprisingly diverse – because you can’t always pick your battles or where you fight them, such that there are some distinctive or specialized types of warfare within ground of land warfare in general.
Perhaps not quite enough for a top ten of ground warfare, but at least enough for six distinctive types of warfare (although I think arguments can be made for airborne and amphibious warfare as types of groundwarfare, at least in part, with island warfare within the latter, as well as wet-weather wrfare as its own distinct type of ground warfare):
- (1) Urban warfare as featured in my top ten entry of siege and urban warfare
- (2) Desert warfare – which I suspect might be the next most common after siege and urban warfare (at least on a large scale), because of the Middle East (going all the way back to the ancient Near East)
- (3) Jungle warfare
- (4) Mountain warfare, often overlapping with…
- (5) Cold-weather, winter or arctic warfare, including ski warfare.
- (6) Subterranean warfare – or in other words, my next special mention entry…
RATING: A-TIER (TOP TIER)