Female (Venus) symbol and Male (Mars) symbol (public domain)

(20) S€XUAL WARFARE

I like to reserve my final or twentieth special mention for a light-hearted kinky entry, but sadly despite the name of this entry there’s nothing light-hearted or kinky about its primary connotation.

That connotation, including slavery or trafficking, has a history or indeed prehistory as long as warfare itself, despite being the aspect of war we find most viscerally disturbing in the modern period and have hence defined as a war crime.

Outside that connotation, it is perhaps not surprising that two professions proverbially described as the oldest, pr0stitute and soldier, should go hand in hand – often literally. The proverbial oldest profession has often been foremost among the “camp followers” of armed forces, putting another metaphorical tail in tooth to tail ratio. Of course, when military forces seek to enforce that camp following, then it takes us right back to that connotation defined as war crime.

Beyond that, there are the liaisons between civilian populations and military forces throughout history, perhaps best encapsulated by British description for American servicemen in their country during WW2 – “overpaid, overs€xed, and over here”. Australians expressed similar sentiments. The Japanese played upon something similar for propaganda pamphlets it spread to Americans in the Pacific War – what the wives of American servicemen were getting up to with civilian males back home. Amusingly, American servicemen collected these pamphlets with enthusiasm.

Finally, the term might be used for the metaphorical Battle of the S€xes – the cultural and social conflict between men and women throughout history, but particularly in the modern period that gave us the phrase.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Blake Soller, a Military Working Dog (MWD) handler petting the head of MWD Rico, at the War Dog Cemetery on Naval Base Guam. The cemetery honors the dogs—mostly Doberman Pinschers—that were killed in service with the USMC during the Second Battle of Guam in 1944. US Navy photo 27 October 2006 by Petty Officer 2nd Class John F. Looney (public domain image – Wikipedia “Military animal”)

(19) ANIMAL WARFARE

All warfare is animal warfare, as humans are animals after all.

But seriously, with animal warfare we come full circle to prehistoric or primal warfare, the origins of war itself. It is commonly argued that human warfare is fundamentally different from other animal intra-species violence. I’m not so sure, as this argument is persuasively challenged by Azar Gat’s War in Human Civilization among others – Edward O Wilson memorably wrote in his book On Human Nature “I suspect that if hamadryas baboons had nuclear weapons, they would destroy the world in a week.”

So, one theme for animal warfare is intra-species violence among animals approximating human warfare, or at least organized, territorial conflicts. As Wilson continued from the above quote – “and alongside ants, which conduct assassinations, skirmishes, and pitched battles as routine business, men are all but tranquilized pacifists.”

One of the most famous examples of animal warfare, perhaps not surprisingly fought by our closest living relatives, was the Gombe Chimpanzee War, in which one band of chimpanzees systematically  targeted the males of another band, wiping out that other band in a period of over four years. This wasn’t an isolated event either – at least one subsequent chimpanzee war has been observed, with the Ngogo Chimpanzee War.

Another theme for animal warfare is the military forces of humanity being humbled by the forces of nature in historical wars, such as weather, which has swept away what have otherwise seemed overwhelming military forces, particularly in war at sea. It also applies to terrain – John Keegan in A History of Warfare noted how terrain (and climate) has been a limiting factor in wars throughout history, such that the majority of battles occur in surprisingly small or narrow territories on a global scale.

Occasionally, those forces of nature have included animals – with two of the most famous occurring in the Second World War, although unfortunately both are somewhat inflated and one almost so apocryphal as to be urban legend. The first involved sharks preying on the sailors from the cruiser Indianapolis when it was sunk by Japanese submarine in July 1945, made famous by iconic narration of it in the film Jaws.

The other involved crocodiles preying on Japanese soldiers trapped in mangroves by the British in the Battle of Ramree Island in Burma from January 1945 to February 1945. At one stage, they were reported to have killed all but twenty of a thousand Japanese soldiers, but sadly for fans of crocodile horror such as myself, this has been discounted to almost the reverse – at most they killed up to twenty soldiers, although they may also have scavenged on the bodies of Japanese soldiers killed by other causes.

Of course, in my special mention for biological warfare, I’ve already featured the true unsung champions of animal destruction of human forces at war – insect vectors and the diseases they carry, which have been as effective hostile weather in wiping out whole armies and even more effective in wiping out whole populations.

You have the theme of humanity’s use of animals in or for war or military operations. Of course, the horse is standout here as featured in my entry for cavalry warfare, but war has seen a whole range of animals used in it – from more commonplace ones such as elephants, camels, donkeys or mules, oxen or cattle, dogs and pigeons, to more exotic animals such as pigs, moose, rats, dolphins, sea lions and others.

And then you get to the truly bizarre, such as entomological warfare or animal-borne bombs – with my personal favorite example of the latter being the American bat bomb project against the Japanese, taking my quip that the Americans fight wars like Batman to a literal extreme

To that you can add wars named for animals, of which there are a surprising number, albeit including non-military conflicts such as the Cod Wars over fishing between the United Kingdom and Iceland, or border conflicts or near-war situations such as the Crab Wars or Pig War – with perhaps the Beaver Wars being the most intense actual wars named for animals.

The original culture war, Germany’s Kulturkampf between the Kingdom of Prussia and the Catholic Church (in Germany), depicted here by Otto von Bismarck and Pope Pius IX in a cartoon from the German satirical magazine Kladderadatsch, 1875 (public domain image – Wikipedia “Culture War”)

(18) CULTURE WAR & MEMETIC WARFARE

Metaphorical war essentially along the lines of psychological warfare, but with cultural or social conflict substituted for military conflict – as such, it can be wide-ranging (as in virtually anything can be culture war) as well as the subject of controversy.

Typically, it is portrayed more in terms of civil warfare within nations, although often as occurring in a similar form across nations (such as the West in general), usually by design. Not coincidentally, culture war is often reported as involving or at least alleging disinformation by foreign agents or other nations, consistent with psychological warfare for other conflicts involving those agents or nations.

It has come to particular prominence with the internet, especially with memes – hence my term memetic warfare, in turn often adapted or used in memes, for example online declarations of being veterans of meme war.

However, culture war as a term has a surprisingly long history of usage – surprising to me at least, looking up the use of the term, which apparently dated back to the Kulturkampf or cultural struggle in 1871-1878 between the Prussian state and Catholic Church in Germany. The term has then been adapted from the twentieth century onwards, in the United States and elsewhere.

Cover SF Masterworks edition of Barefoot in the Head by Brian Aldiss (fair use)

(17) PHARMACOLOGICAL WARFARE

Sadly not a special mention entry for the psychedelic warfare in Barefoot in the Head, the classic SF novel by Brian Aldiss where a drugged out post-apocalyptic Europe is devastated by the Acid Head Wars, in which hallucinogenic “psycho-chemical” aerosols were the primary weapon.

I suppose that would be a form of ehemical warfare, only a lot more fun.

Instead, this is a special mention entry for my fascination with the interconnection between drugs and war, as also reflected in my corresponding special mention (to my top ten wars) for the Opium Wars. The Opium Wars are the closest thing to a war fought over drugs like the modern stereotype of wars fought for oil – in this case, a war fought over Britain smuggling opium into China. Beyond that, it is fascinating to think how much of European colonialism (and slavery) was born from the plantation production of drugs – tobacco, coffee and tea. Even more so if you count sugar as a drug.

Of course, modern drug smugglers or cartels tend not to have the force of the world’s largest maritime empire behind them, but often play a role in more low-level war or insurgency as in Colombia. And notoriously, drug smuggling – particularly in cocaine and opium – has often laid beneath the surface of larger modern conflicts, particularly for financing them.

There is also the use of drugs in war. I’ve read that narcotics have been as much a part of war as bullets and bombs. While that appears to be an overstatement, historically drug use was often sanctioned and encouraged by militaries including alcohol and tobacco in troop rations. Of course, alcohol is something of a law of diminishing returns – what it adds in ‘Dutch courage’, it can often take away in effectiveness, famously as in the Russo-Japanese War on the Russian side.

Germany was also notorious for drug use in the Second World War, notably for amphetamine use by its armed forces, but also drug use by its leadership. However, stimulants such as cocaine and amphetamine were widely used by belligerents in both World Wars to increase alertness and suppress appetite. Drug use was also notorious in American forces in Vietnam – and has been a feature of other conflicts

And then you have the more trippy use of drugs – the Viking berserkers possibly as a result of agaric “magic” mushrooms, the Assassins named for hashish, even MK-Ultra by the CIA in the Cold War.

(16) SPACE WARFARE

Less Star Wars, more Sputnik – that is, space warfare is more about ballistic missiles and satellites, for now at least.

And yes, Star Wars is essentially WW2 dogfights, bomber runs, and naval battles in space, where they wouldn’t work or make no sense as depicted.

But seriously, while we tend to think of space warfare as SF “space opera” battles between spaceships, we’ve been fighting space warfare in various degrees since WW2, just in more mundane forms (to the extent that you count ballistic missiles and satellites as mundane).

While the usual flightpath of German V-2 rockets to their targets in WW2 was not through space, they could on vertical launch traverse the edge of space when that was defined as 100 kilometers – hence the vertical launch of V-2 rocket MW18014 on 20 June 1944 retroactively became the first artificial object to travel into space by that definition.

After that, ballistic missiles have routinely had flight paths which transit the upper atmosphere or space. As such, nuclear warfare is space warfare, at least as represented by ballistic missiles, so not surprisingly defensive measures for nuclear warfare have also been planned to operate in space – most famously the Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI by the US, dubbed Star Wars.

However, ballistic missiles used in combat with conventional warheads have also operated in space, mostly in conflicts in the Middle East, along with the defensive measures against them. “In November 2023, Israel claimed an interception of a Houthi ballistic missile as the the first combat in space”.

It’s in the deployment of (or against) satellites, originating in the Cold War, that space warfare really comes into its own.

“The Cold War prompted the start of the militarization of space. Military satellites have been launched since the later 1950s for communications, navigation, reconnaissance, and munitions guidance. The Gulf War is sometimes called the “first space war” because of the use of these capabilities by the US.”

Intriguingly (to me at least), space warfare is occasionally broken down into components of ground-to-space warfare (such as targeting satellites from Earth), space-to-space warfare (such as satellites targeting other satellites), and space-to-ground warfare (such as satellites attacking targets on Earth).

Even more intriguingly, there is ground-to-space warfare that involves weapons capable of being deployed by a single soldier for satellites or other targets in space – with the amusing acronym of MANPASTA. I’m feeling the urge to take out the International Space Station with one of those babies – it blocks my view of Venus.

There have even been nukes in space, although international treaties prohibit the permanent basing of weapons of mass destruction in space or the military use of celestial bodies – but do not prohibit the military use of orbital space or military space spaces. I suppose there goes my dreams of moon buggy battles (or where opposing forces lob asteroids at each other). However, back to the nukes, “the US and Soviet Union carried out nine nuclear explosions in space from 1958 to 1962, which damaged satellites”.

Even without nuclear weapons in space, the logic of mutually assured destruction in space – as the accumulation or creation of space debris can endanger your own satellites or spacecraft, particularly in the scenario of Kessler Syndrome in which we effectively paint ourselves into a planetary corner with our own space junk. It’s a pity that the term, coined at almost the same time as the first Star Wars film, was not adapted by the latter – it would have put a whole new spin on it as the Kessler Run instead of the Kessel Run.

United States Space Force personnel operating a satellite antenna during an electromagnetic warfare military exercise – photograph by Tech. Sgt. Luke Kitterman in California on 20 September 2022 and released released by the United States Space Force with the ID 220920-X-VE588-1004 (public domain image used in Wikipedia “Electronic Warfare”)

(15) ELECTRONIC WARFARE & CYBERWARFARE

Electronic warfare – evocatively defined as “warfare involving the use of the electromagnetic spectrum” or “directed energy to control the spectrum, attack an enemy, or impede enemy operations”.

In other words – intercepting, jamming or targeting modern communication, radar, “or other military or civilian assets” such as electronic guidance systems for drones, missiles or planes. Or the less destructive way of “sending them back to the Stone Age”.

Interestingly, electronic warfare dates back further than you’d think, albeit still at the dawn of the twentieth century – with Morse code in the Boer War, followed closely by radio interception or jamming elsewhere, including in the Russo-Japanese War. Churchill colorfully called the electronic warfare of WW2 as the “Battle of the Beams”.

Cyberwarfare on the other hand is the use of cyberattacks or the various means of “technological force within computer networks” against an enemy state, “causing comparable harm to traditional warfare” – “espionage, sabotage, propaganda, manipulation, and economic warfare” – or deploying defensive measures against the former.

In other words – essentially war by hacking (and counter-hacking).

International biohazard symbol (public domain). I mean, otherwise it would be an image of a bunch of test tubes or something…

(14) BIOLOGICAL WARFARE

War by disease or pestilence. Germ warfare – using biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, insects, and fungi.

War is so often accompanied by disease or pestilence in its wake that they join each other along with famine and death as the proverbial Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – proverbial, that is, because the original Biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were conquest, war, famine, and death (but conquest seemed too much like doubling up with war so pestilence was substituted or proposed for the original image).

Biological warfare takes that to the next level – as war waged by pestilence or disease.

Yes, biological warfare is that “offensive use of living organisms” as weapons that I pre-empted in my previous entry for chemical warfare (and distinguishing chemical warfare’s use of the toxic properties of non-living chemical substances, albeit including those produced by living organisms such as botulinum toxin, risin, and saxitoxin).

Or in other words, disease as a weapon – the use of bacteria (sometimes distinguished as bacteriological warfare), viruses, insects (sometimes distinguished as entomological warfare), and fungi (disappointingly not distinguished as mycowarfare) “with the intent to kill, harm, or incapacitate humans, animals, or plants as an act of war”.

And yes, it evokes our visceral horror in reaction to it arguably exceeding that to chemical warfare – and depending just how pandemic it is, arguably rivalling the existential horror of nuclear war. Hence the taboo against it helping to uphold the prohibition of it by international law – that has seen the modern use of biological warfare to be more hypothetical or rarer than chemical warfare, and even nuclear warfare for deployment and testing.

Of course, it helps for the taboo against and prohibition of it that biological warfare has a similar logic of mutually assured destruction as nuclear war, hence the similar existential horror (and visceral horror more than chemical warfare). However, that might change with genetic engineering, which potentially might allow for more targeted biological warfare.

There is some rudimentary use of biological warfare in history, going all the way back to the Bronze Age – the Hittites driving plague victims into enemy territory, the Assyrians poisoning wells with ergot, the use of excrement or cadavers to cause or spread infection.

Perhaps the most famous historical examples are the Mongols catapulting the bodies of those who died from Black Plague into the Crimean city of Kaffa they were besieging, or the use of blankets to spread smallpox to native Americans – although in both cases, it is debated the extent to which this actually spread the disease as opposed to other vectors.

However, it was only with modern science, not least germ theory, that biological warfare became a matter more of design than chance – while at the same time, our greater visceral and existential horror in reaction to it.

RATING: A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Australian infantry wearing respirators at Ypres in 1917, Australian War Memorial (public domain image)

(13) CHEMICAL WARFARE

“You’re poison running through my veins”

That’s right. Chemical warfare is basically just poison. Well, even more so than the song by Alice Cooper.

Nerve agents, blister agents or vesicants, blood agents or asphyxiants, and choking or pulmonary agents

Yes, chemical warfare uses different types of poison, generally categorized by their effects on the human body, by different means of delivery, but still poison nonetheless.

“Chemical warfare (CW) involves using the toxic properties of chemical substances as weapons”.

It is distinct from radiological warfare or the radioactive effects and fallout of nuclear warfare. While it can include the “use of non-living toxic products produced by living organisms (toxins such as botulinum toxin, ricin, and saxitoxin)”, the “offensive use of living organisms” as weapons is also another type of warfare (in the very next special mention entry).

The use of poisons in warfare or as weapons goes all the way back to ancient history – and indeed prehistory, if the use of poisons by contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes is any guide. (The example that always comes to mind are the poison dart frogs named for their use as a source of poison for darts or arrows by native American tribes in Central and South America).

However, it was modern industrialization that provided the basis in production and delivery for chemical warfare on a substantial rather than sporadic scale – with the use of poison gas in First World War as the archetype and apogee of chemical warfare (unless you count the H0l0caust which remains the deadliest use of poison gas), such that it is only fitting chemical warfare follows after trench and tunnel warfare.

Apogee, that is, because our visceral horror in reaction to chemical warfare is arguably exceeded only by that of the next entry, or the existential horror of nuclear war. Hence, the taboo against it (similar to the taboo against those other two forms of warfare) as well as the prohibition of it by international law, with the former helping to uphold the latter despite intermittent chemical warfare since WW1.

Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers under construction on an assembly line (public domain image – Wikipedia “Industrial Warfare”)

(12) INDUSTRIAL WARFARE & TOTAL WAR

“Say hello to Ford, and General F…g Motors…You have horses! What were you thinking?”

War in mass – mass conscription, mass mobilization, mass production. Home front and total war.

Economic warfare segues nicely into industrial warfare, the type of warfare that can only be fought by industrialized economies “capable of creating and equipping large armies, navies, and air forces”.

Industrial warfare includes the technology of rapid transport and communication, mechanization and motorization, small arms and machine guns capable of rapid rates of fire, high velocity artillery, mechanized naval warfare, armored warfare, and aerial warfare.

Industrial warfare is virtually synonymous with the concepts of total war and the home front – “where a society’s entire economy, population, and infrastructure are considered part of the war effort…blurring the line between military and civilian”.

Apparently, “the term was coined during World War I by Erich Ludendorff” and it became coupled with “waging warfare with absolute ruthlessness”, including “the reintroduction of civilians and civilian infrastructure as targets in destroying the enemy’s ability to engage in war”. Not coincidentally, it also became coupled with unrestricted warfare – “”unrestricted in terms of the weapons used, the territory or combatants involved, or the objectives pursued, especially one in which the laws of war are disregarded”.

Trenches of the 11th Cheshire Regiment at Ovillers-la-Boisselle, on the Somme, July 1916. One sentry keeps watch while the others sleep. Photo by Ernest Brooks (public domain image in Wikipedia “Trench warfare”

(10) TRENCH & TUNNEL WARFARE

I quipped about trench warfare as a subterranean form of land warfare but that’s taking its subterranean elements too far – it is more akin to a form of fortification and the siege warfare from which it originated.

While it has those predecessors in pre-modern warfare, it particularly arose from the firepower in modern warfare, with the increased rate of fire in small arms, firstly breech-loading firearms and secondly machine guns, and the increased power of artillery.

“Trench warfare is a combat strategy where opposing armies fight from fortified, dug-in networks of trenches to seek cover from heavy firepower and artillery. It typically emerges when defensive weaponry—such as machine guns and automated artillery—outpaces mobility, often resulting in a prolonged, grinding stalemate or war of attrition.”

The archetype of trench warfare is of course famously the Western Front in the First World War, although increasing modern firepower saw it occur from the Crimean War and American Civil War onwards.

Ironically, the First World War saw both its famous archetype and its decline.

“The development of armored warfare and combined arms tactics permitted static lines to be bypassed and defeated, leading to the decline of trench warfare after the war. Following World War I, trench warfare became a byword for stalemate, attrition, sieges and futility in conflict.”

However, trench warfare has recurred in subsequent conflicts “where technological parity or drone threats restrict rapid troop movement, as seen in the Russia-Ukraine War”.

Tunnel warfare on the other hand is subterranean warfare, albeit overlapping with the semi-subterranean warfare of trench warfare, and it goes, well, deep into history, back to the Bronze Age “with recorded uses by the Assyrians”.

“Historically, besieging forces employed sappers to dig tunnels beneath a fortress wall, collapsing the tunnel to bring the wall down. Defenders would counter by digging their own tunnels to intercept the invaders in brutal hand-to-hand combat beneath the surface”.

A fascinating example of ancient subterranean or tunnel warfare is in the Roman-Persian Wars, with “well-preserved evidence of mining and counter-mining operations…unearthed at the fortress of Dura-Europos, which fell to the Sassanians in 256/7 AD”. From what I’ve seen or read of it, it looks literally hellish – not only hand-to-hand combat in cramped and suffocating conditions underground, but also at risk of accidental or deliberate collapse as well as burning sulphur and pitch to create poisonous gas.

If anything, it has been more commonly used in modern warfare – “a military strategy involving combat conducted underground, typically utilizing dug networks, natural caves, or existing urban infrastructure”, used to “bypass surface gridlocks, escape aerial bombardment, and neutralize the technological advantages of more powerful armies”. The focus of the latter two involves force protection but it’s also used for infiltration (as at Dura-Europos in the Roman-Persian Wars), logistics hubs, and tactical deflection. Perhaps the most famous use of tunnel warfare in modern warfare was in the Vietnam War.

“It includes the construction of underground facilities in order to attack or defend, and the use of existing natural caves and artificial underground facilities for military purposes. Tunnels can be used to undermine fortifications and slip into enemy territory for a surprise attack, while it can strengthen a defense by creating the possibility of ambush, counterattack and the ability to transfer troops from one portion of the battleground to another unseen and protected. Tunnels can serve as shelter from enemy attack…Tunnels are narrow and restrict fields of fire; thus, troops in a tunnel usually have only a few areas exposed to fire or sight at any one time.”

RATING: A-TIER (TOP TIER)