21st Century Conflict: A New Perspective

21st Century Conflict: A New Perspective

Athul M. A.
Copyright: © 2017 |Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-0582-2.ch006
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Abstract

Warfare has evolved rapidly in the first few years of the 21st century. There are stark differences with conventional mode of warfare, which was the de facto mode for much of 20th century, and today's asymmetric warfare. In the conventional mode of warfare, if winning and losing a war could be defined by the traditional yard sticks of number of enemy dead, how much area of land occupied and number of prisoners taken, today these yardsticks no longer us get a clear picture of who is winning or losing it.
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What Is Asymmetric Warfare?

Definition of asymmetry: Asymmetric warfare is a conflict in which resource of opponents vary and in essence and in the struggle, interact and attempt to exploit each other's characteristic weaknesses. Asymmetric warfare is always used by the weaker opponent, most often Non State actors such as militant groups, insurgents and extremists. According to Department of Defence, asymmetry is defined “In military operations the application of dissimilar strategies, tactics, capabilities, and methods to circumvent or negate an opponent’s strengths while exploiting his weaknesses (Jorgensen, 2014).

The idea of asymmetric war is not a new novice. It has been in use for a long period of time. During World War I, Germany and Britain tried to incite each other’s colonial populations to revolt against their empires. The Arab Revolt in 1916 the Turkish empire and the attempts by Germany to incite the Muslim population of colonies, such as in India to rise up against the British Empire, with the declaration of Holy war by Ottomans can be seen as an attempt of asymmetry by great powers.

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