Only ants and people engage in large-scale warfare (though other animals conduct raids).
Colonel Bank believed that areas where large-scale warfare was no longer probable, like the Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe, would be particularly good environments for unconventional warfare.
Large-scale warfare is not usual (because of the lack of political leadership) but raids, cannibalism, torturing of captives, and other forms of belligerence are.
After the general European peace established by the Congress of Vienna that ended the Napoleonic wars, many people believed that the progress of civilization had moved well beyond the barbaric practice of large-scale warfare.
The Halabja killings, considered the largest chemical warfare attack ever directed at civilians, led to the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, in force since 1997, which bans not just the use but also the possession, manufacture and transfer of chemical weapons.
Last April, a conference at Yale University attended by the world's leading environmental scientists, who reviewed the latest research, concluded that in Vietnam the US had conducted the "largest chemical warfare campaign in history".
They were the transition group between the old Indian-fighters and the young officers who marched from their West Point classes into the first World War and whose minds were formed in the mold of large-scale warfare.
It's almost a feeling of déjà vu, and I don't know where that comes from because I don't think I've ever spent much time thinking about what large-scale warfare would be like to experience through early 21st-century media.
The Maya preferred raiding and ambush to large-scale warfare, using spears, arrows and wooden swords with inset obsidian blades; the Xinca of the southern coastal plain used poison on their arrows.
We investigated fitness, military rank and survival of facial phenotypes in large-scale warfare using 795 Finnish soldiers who fought in the Winter War (1939 1940).
