Laotian Civil War
The Laotian Civil War was fought between the Communist Pathet Lao and the Royal Lao Government, with both sides receiving heavy external support in a proxy war between the global Cold War superpowers. It is called the Secret War among the CIA Special Activities Division and Hmong veterans of the conflict; the Kingdom of Laos was a covert theater for other belligerents during the Vietnam War. The Franco–Lao Treaty of Amity and Association transferred remaining French powers to the Royal Lao Government, establishing Laos as an independent member of the French Union. However, this government did not include representatives from the Lao Issara anti-colonial armed nationalist movement; the following years were marked by a rivalry between the neutralists under Prince Souvanna Phouma, the right wing under Prince Boun Oum of Champassak, the left-wing Lao Patriotic Front under Prince Souphanouvong and half-Vietnamese future Prime Minister Kaysone Phomvihane. Several attempts were made to establish coalition governments, a "tri-coalition" government was seated in Vientiane.
The actual fighting in Laos involved the North Vietnamese Army, U. S. troops and Thai forces and South Vietnamese army forces directly and through irregular proxies in a struggle for control over the Laotian Panhandle. The North Vietnamese Army occupied the area to use for its Ho Chi Minh Trail supply corridor and as staging area for offensives into South Vietnam. There was a second major theater of action near the northern Plain of Jars; the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao emerged victorious in 1975, as part of the general communist victory in all of former French Indochina that year. A total of up to 300,000 people from Laos fled to neighboring Thailand following the Pathet Lao takeover. After the communists took power in Laos, Hmong rebels fought the new government; the Hmong were persecuted as traitors and "lackeys" of the Americans, with the government and its Vietnamese allies carrying out human rights abuses against Hmong civilians. The incipient conflict between Vietnam and China played a role with Hmong rebels being accused of receiving support from China.
Over 40,000 people died in the conflict. The Lao royal family were arrested by the Pathet Lao after the war and sent to labor camps, where most of them died in the late 1970s and 1980s, including King Savang Vatthana, Queen Khamphoui, Crown Prince Vong Savang; the Geneva Conference established Laotian neutrality. The People's Army of Vietnam, continued to operate in both northern and southeastern Laos. There were repeated attempts from 1954 onward to force the North Vietnamese out of Laos, but regardless of any agreements or concessions, Hanoi had no intention of withdrawing from the country or abandoning its Laotian communist allies. North Vietnam established the Ho Chi Minh trail as a paved highway in southeast Laos paralleling the Vietnamese border; the trail was designed to transport North Vietnamese troops and supplies to the Republic of Vietnam, as well as to aid the National Liberation Front. North Vietnam had a sizable military effort in northern Laos, while sponsoring and maintaining an indigenous communist rebellion, the Pathet Lao, to put pressure on the Royal Lao Government.
The U. S. Central Intelligence Agency, in an attempt to disrupt these operations in northern Laos without direct military involvement, responded by training a guerrilla force of about thirty thousand Laotian hill tribesmen local Hmong tribesmen along with the Mien and Khmu, led by Royal Lao Army General Vang Pao, a Hmong military leader; this army, supported by the CIA proprietary airline Air America, the Royal Lao Air Force, a covert air operation directed by the United States ambassador to Laos, fought the People's Army of Vietnam, the National Liberation Front, their Pathet Lao allies to a seesaw stalemate aiding U. S. interests in the war in Vietnam. The status of the war in the north throughout the year depended on the weather; as the dry season started, in November or December, so did North Vietnamese military operations, as fresh troops and supplies flowed down out of North Vietnam on newly passable routes, either down from Dien Bien Phu, across Phong Saly Province on all-weather highways, or on Route 7 through Ban Ban, Laos on the northeast corner of the Plain of Jars.
The CIA's covert operation's clandestine army would give way, harrying the PAVN and Pathet Lao as they retreated. When the rainy season six months rendered North Vietnamese supply lines impassable, the Vietnamese communists would recede toward Vietnam; the war in the southeastern panhandle against the Ho Chi Minh Trail was a massive air interdiction program by the USAF and United States Navy because political constraints kept the trail safe from ground assault from South Vietnam. Raven FACs directed air strikes in the southeast. Other Forward Air Controllers from South Vietnam, such as Covey FACs from the 20th Tactical Air Support Squadron and Nail FACs from the 23rd Tactical Air Support Squadron directed strikes. Other air strikes were planned ahead. Overall coordination of the air campaign was directed by an Airborne Command and Control Center, such as those deployed in Operation Igloo White; the existence of the conflict in Laos was sometimes reported in the U. S. and described in press reports as the CIA's "Secret War in Laos" because details were unavailable due to official government denials that the war existed.
The denials were seen as necessary con
Punitive expedition
A punitive expedition is a military journey undertaken to punish a state or any group of persons outside the borders of the punishing state. It is undertaken in response to perceived disobedient or morally wrong behavior, either as revenge or to apply strong diplomatic pressure without a formal declaration of war. In the 19th century, punitive expeditions were used more as pretexts for colonial adventures that resulted in annexations, regime changes or changes in policies of the affected state to favour one or more colonial powers. Stowell provides the following definition: When the territorial sovereign is too weak or is unwilling to enforce respect for international law, a state, wronged may find it necessary to invade the territory and to chastise the individuals who violate its rights and threaten its security. In the 5th century BC, the Achaemenid Empire launched a series of campaigns against Greece to punish certain Greek city-states for getting involved in the Ionian Revolt. In the 1st century AD, Germanicus engaged in punitive expeditions against the Germanic tribes as repercussion for the Roman Legions that were destroyed in the Battle of Teutonburg Forest.
In the 13th century, Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol Empire engaged punitive expeditions, either as a pretext or to quell rebellions against his rule. Some notable examples include his invasion of Khwarazim and his campaigns against the Western Xia kingdom. In the 13th century, Kublai Khan, a grandson of Genghis and the founder of the Yuan Dynasty, sent emissaries demanding tribute from the Singhasari kingdom of Java; the ruler of the Singhasari kingdom, refused to pay tribute and tattooed a Chinese messenger, Meng Qi, on his face. A punitive expedition sent by Kublai Khan arrived off the coast of Java in 1293. Jayakatwang, a rebel from Kediri, had killed Kertanagara by that time; the Mongols allied with Raden Wijaya of Majapahit against Jayakatwang and, once the Singhasari kingdom was destroyed, Wijaya turned against the Mongols and forced them to withdraw in confusion. In 1599 the Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate ordered his nephew Vicente de Zaldívar to engage in a punitive expedition against the Keres natives of Acoma Pueblo.
When the Spanish arrived, they fought a three-day battle with the Keres leaving about 800 men and children dead. During the First Anglo-Powhatan War, Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, an English nobleman was appointed Virginia's first royal governor and ordered to defend the colony against the Powhatan. Lord de la Warr waged a punitive campaign to subdue the Powhatan after they had killed the colony’s council president, John Ratcliffe, his tactics against the Indians proved effective and included raiding their villages, burning their homes, torching their cornfields and crops, plundering their provisions. In the summer of 1614, Ottomans led by Damat Halil Pasha engaged a successful punitive expedition against Sefer Dā'yl, an insurgent in Tripoli. From 1838 to 1842 ships of the United States Exploring Expedition engaged in three punitive expeditions against Pacific islanders; the First Opium War, in retaliation of the burning of opiate products by Commissioner Lin Zexu, which resulted in the opening of a number of ports, the cession of Hong Kong to Great Britain, the Treaty of Nanjing.
The 1842 Ivory Coast Expedition was led by Matthew C. Perry against the Bereby people of West Africa after two attacks on American merchant ships; the Battle of Kabul in 1842 was undertaken by the British against the Afghans following their disastrous retreat from Kabul in which 16,000 people were killed. The French Campaign against Korea in 1866, a response to the earlier execution by Korea of French priests proselytizing in Korea; the 1867 Formosa Expedition, a failed punitive operation of the United States. The United States expedition to Korea in 1871, in retaliation to the General Sherman incident, where a U. S. merchant ship was burned. The 1874 Japanese expedition against Formosa. Benin Expedition of 1897 British punitive action that led to the annexation of the Kingdom of Benin; the New York Times reported on January 13, 1897 that a "punitive expedition" would be formed to "punish the murderers of the Benin City expedition." The Herero and Namaqua genocide in German South-West Africa by the German Empire During World War I the battle of Asiago nicknamed Strafexpedition was a counteroffensive launched by Austria-Hungary against the Kingdom of Italy, the Italian army was able to contain the offensive.
The Pancho Villa Expedition from 1916 to 1917, led by General John J. Pershing, was an operation in retaliation against Pancho Villa's incursion into the United States. Suppression of the 1920 Iraqi Revolt against the British Mandate of Mesopotamia. In World War II, einsatzgruppen were involved in the mass murders of civilians in Poland and USSR as the punishment for the acts of resistance and collaboration with the communists; the 1979 invasion of Vietnam by China was characterised by Deng Xiaoping as an act of punishment necessitated by Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia, saying that "Children who don't listen have to be spanked.". The destruction of half of the operational ships of the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy by the United States Navy in 1988 during Operation Praying Mantis for damaging USS Samuel B. Roberts by mining international waters of the Persian Gulf; the 2016 Indo-Pakistani military confrontation began with punitive surgical strikes carried out by India. These strikes were a punitive action in response to Pakistan's inaction in curbing the activities of terrorist organisations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, which India held responsible for the Uri attack.
Letter of marque and reprisal Gordon, Leonard. "Japan's Abort
United States
The United States of America known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U. S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D. C. and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico; the State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean; the U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The diverse geography and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century; the United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776; the war ended in 1783 with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties; the United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848. During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery.
By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a global military power; the United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Sweeping civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawed discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U. S. Moon landing; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower. The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation, it is a representative democracy.
The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, other international organizations. The United States is a developed country, with the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for a quarter of global GDP; the U. S. economy is post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U. S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country. Despite wide income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, worker productivity.
The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, is a leading political and scientific force internationally. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America in honor of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci; the first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" is from a letter dated January 2, 1776, written by Stephen Moylan, Esq. to George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army, Lt. Col. Joseph Reed. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort; the first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776. The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed by June 17, 1776, at the latest, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the'United States of America'".
The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence; this draft of the document did not surface unti
World War II
World War II known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries; the major participants threw their entire economic and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China, it included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, the only use of nuclear weapons in war. Japan, which aimed to dominate Asia and the Pacific, was at war with China by 1937, though neither side had declared war on the other. World War II is said to have begun on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and the United Kingdom.
From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Finland and the Baltic states. Following the onset of campaigns in North Africa and East Africa, the fall of France in mid 1940, the war continued between the European Axis powers and the British Empire. War in the Balkans, the aerial Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the long Battle of the Atlantic followed. On 22 June 1941, the European Axis powers launched an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the largest land theatre of war in history; this Eastern Front trapped most crucially the German Wehrmacht, into a war of attrition. In December 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the United States as well as European colonies in the Pacific. Following an immediate U. S. declaration of war against Japan, supported by one from Great Britain, the European Axis powers declared war on the U.
S. in solidarity with their Japanese ally. Rapid Japanese conquests over much of the Western Pacific ensued, perceived by many in Asia as liberation from Western dominance and resulting in the support of several armies from defeated territories; the Axis advance in the Pacific halted in 1942. Key setbacks in 1943, which included a series of German defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy, Allied victories in the Pacific, cost the Axis its initiative and forced it into strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained its territorial losses and turned toward Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in Central China, South China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy and captured key Western Pacific islands; the war in Europe concluded with an invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the capture of Berlin by Soviet troops, the suicide of Adolf Hitler and the German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945.
Following the Potsdam Declaration by the Allies on 26 July 1945 and the refusal of Japan to surrender under its terms, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August respectively. With an invasion of the Japanese archipelago imminent, the possibility of additional atomic bombings, the Soviet entry into the war against Japan and its invasion of Manchuria, Japan announced its intention to surrender on 15 August 1945, cementing total victory in Asia for the Allies. Tribunals were set up by fiat by the Allies and war crimes trials were conducted in the wake of the war both against the Germans and the Japanese. World War II changed the political social structure of the globe; the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The Soviet Union and United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the nearly half-century long Cold War. In the wake of European devastation, the influence of its great powers waned, triggering the decolonisation of Africa and Asia.
Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic expansion. Political integration in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities and create a common identity; the start of the war in Europe is held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred and the two wars merged in 1941; this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935; the British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the fo
Cambodian Civil War
The Cambodian Civil War was a military conflict that pitted the forces of the Communist Party of Kampuchea and their allies the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Viet Cong against the government forces of the Kingdom of Cambodia and, after October 1970, the Khmer Republic, which were supported by the United States and the Republic of Vietnam. The struggle was complicated by the influence and actions of the allies of the two warring sides. North Vietnam's People's Army of Vietnam involvement was designed to protect its Base Areas and sanctuaries in eastern Cambodia, without which the prosecution of its military effort in South Vietnam would have been more difficult; the Cambodian coup of 18 March 1970 put a pro-American, anti-North Vietnamese government in power and ended Cambodia's neutrality in the Vietnam War. The PAVN was now threatened by a newly unfriendly Cambodian government. Between March and June 1970, the North Vietnamese moved many of its military installations further inside Cambodia in response to the coup and the establishment of a pro-American government, capturing most of the northeastern third of the country in engagements with the Cambodian army.
The North Vietnamese turned over some of their conquests and provided other assistance to the Khmer Rouge, thus empowering what was at the time a small guerilla movement. The Cambodian government hastened to expand its army to combat the North Vietnamese and the growing power of the Khmer Rouge; the U. S. was motivated by the desire to buy time for its withdrawal from Southeast Asia, to protect its ally in South Vietnam, to prevent the spread of communism to Cambodia. American and both South and North Vietnamese forces directly participated in the fighting; the U. S. assisted the central government with massive U. S. aerial bombing campaigns and direct material and financial aid. After five years of savage fighting, the Republican government was defeated on 17 April 1975 when the victorious Khmer Rouge proclaimed the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea; the war caused a refugee crisis in Cambodia with two million people—more than 25 percent of the population—displaced from rural areas into the cities Phnom Penh which grew from about 600,000 in 1970 to an estimated population of nearly 2 million by 1975.
Children were used during and after the war being persuaded or forced to commit atrocities. The Cambodian government estimated that more than 20 percent of the property in the country had been destroyed during the war. In total, an estimated 275,000–310,000 people were killed as a result of the war; the conflict was part of the Second Indochina War which consumed the neighboring Kingdom of Laos, South Vietnam, North Vietnam individually referred to as the Laotian Civil War and the Vietnam War respectively. The Cambodian civil war led to one of the bloodiest in history. During the early-to-mid-1960s, Prince Norodom Sihanouk's policies had protected his nation from the turmoil that engulfed Laos and South Vietnam. Neither the People's Republic of China nor North Vietnam disputed Sihanouk's claim to represent "progressive" political policies and the leadership of the prince's domestic leftist opposition, the Pracheachon Party, had been integrated into the government. On 3 May 1965, Sihanouk broke diplomatic relations with the U.
S. ended the flow of American aid, turned to the PRC and the Soviet Union for economic and military assistance. By the late 1960s, Sihanouk's delicate domestic and foreign policy balancing act was beginning to go awry. In 1966, an agreement was struck between the prince and the Chinese, allowing the presence of large-scale PAVN and Viet Cong troop deployments and logistical bases in the eastern border regions, he had agreed to allow the use of the port of Sihanoukville by communist-flagged vessels delivering supplies and material to support the PAVN/Viet Cong military effort in South Vietnam. These concessions made questionable Cambodia's neutrality, guaranteed by the Geneva Conference of 1954. Sihanouk was convinced that the PRC, not the U. S. would control the Indochinese Peninsula and that "our interests are best served by dealing with the camp that one day will dominate the whole of Asia – and coming to terms before its victory – in order to obtain the best terms possible."During the same year, however, he allowed his pro-American minister of defense, General Lon Nol, to crack down on leftist activities, crushing the Pracheachon by accusing its members of subversion and subservience to Hanoi.
Sihanouk lost the support of Cambodia's conservatives as a result of his failure to come to grips with the deteriorating economic situation and with the growing communist military presence. On 11 September 1966, Cambodia held its first open election. Through manipulation and harassment the conservatives won 75 percent of the seats in the National Assembly. Lon Nol was chosen by the right as prime minister and, as his deputy, they named Prince Sirik Matak. In addition to these developments and the clash of interests among Phnom Penh's politicized elite, social tensions created a favorable environment for the growth of a domestic communist insurgency in the rural areas; the prince found himself in a political dilemma. To maintain the balance against the rising tide of the conservatives, he named the leaders of the group he had been oppressing as members of a "counter-government", meant to monitor and criticize Lon Nol's administ
War
War is a state of armed conflict between states, governments and informal paramilitary groups, such as mercenaries and militias. It is characterized by extreme violence, aggression and mortality, using regular or irregular military forces. Warfare refers of wars in general. Total war is warfare, not restricted to purely legitimate military targets, can result in massive civilian or other non-combatant suffering and casualties; the scholarly study of war is sometimes called polemology, from the Greek polemos, meaning "war", -logy, meaning "the study of". While some scholars see war as a universal and ancestral aspect of human nature, others argue it is a result of specific socio-cultural or ecological circumstances; the English word war derives from the 11th century Old English words wyrre and werre, from Old French werre, in turn from the Frankish *werra deriving from the Proto-Germanic *werzō'mixture, confusion'. The word is related to the Old Saxon werran, Old High German werran, the German verwirren, meaning “to confuse”, “to perplex”, “to bring into confusion”.
War must entail some degree of confrontation using weapons and other military technology and equipment by armed forces employing military tactics and operational art within a broad military strategy subject to military logistics. Studies of war by military theorists throughout military history have sought to identify the philosophy of war, to reduce it to a military science. Modern military science considers several factors before a national defence policy is created to allow a war to commence: the environment in the area of combat operations, the posture national forces will adopt on the commencement of a war, the type of warfare troops will be engaged in. Asymmetric warfare is a conflict between belligerents of drastically different levels of military capability and/or size. Biological warfare, or germ warfare, is the use of weaponized biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria and fungi. Chemical warfare involves the use of weaponized chemicals in combat. Poison gas as a chemical weapon was principally used during World War I, resulted in over a million estimated casualties, including more than 100,000 civilians.
Civil war is a war between forces belonging to political entity. Conventional warfare is declared war between states in which nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons are not used or see limited deployment. Cyberwarfare involves the actions by a nation-state or international organization to attack and attempt to damage another nation's information systems. Insurgency is a rebellion against authority, when those taking part in the rebellion are not recognized as belligerents. An insurgency can be fought via counter-insurgency warfare, may be opposed by measures to protect the population, by political and economic actions of various kinds aimed at undermining the insurgents' claims against the incumbent regime. Information warfare is the application of destructive force on a large scale against information assets and systems, against the computers and networks that support the four critical infrastructures. Nuclear warfare is warfare in which nuclear weapons are the primary, or a major, method of achieving capitulation.
Total war is warfare by any means possible, disregarding the laws of war, placing no limits on legitimate military targets, using weapons and tactics resulting in significant civilian casualties, or demanding a war effort requiring significant sacrifices by the friendly civilian population. Unconventional warfare, the opposite of conventional warfare, is an attempt to achieve military victory through acquiescence, capitulation, or clandestine support for one side of an existing conflict. War of aggression is a war for gain rather than self-defense. War of liberation, Wars of national liberation or national liberation revolutions are conflicts fought by nations to gain independence; the term is used in conjunction with wars against foreign powers to establish separate sovereign states for the rebelling nationality. From a different point of view, these wars are called insurgencies, rebellions, or wars of independence; the earliest recorded evidence of war belongs to the Mesolithic cemetery Site 117, determined to be 14,000 years old.
About forty-five percent of the skeletons there displayed signs of violent death. Since the rise of the state some 5,000 years ago, military activity has occurred over much of the globe; the advent of gunpowder and the acceleration of technological advances led to modern warfare. According to Conway W. Henderson, "One source claims that 14,500 wars have taken place between 3500 BC and the late 20th century, costing 3.5 billion lives, leaving only 300 years of peace." An unfavorable review of this estimate mentions the following regarding one of the proponents of this estimate: "In addition feeling that the war casualties figure was improbably high, he changed "approximately 3,640,000,000 human beings have been killed by war or the diseases produced by war" to "approximately 1,240,000,000 human beings...&c."" The lower figure is more plausible, but could be on the high side, considering that the 100 deadliest acts of mass violence between 480 BCE and 2002 CE claimed about 455 million human lives in total.
Primitive warfare is estimated to have accounted for 15
Cambodian–Vietnamese War
The Cambodian–Vietnamese War, otherwise known in Vietnam as the Counter-offensive on the Southwestern border, was an armed conflict between the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and Democratic Kampuchea. The war began with isolated clashes along the land and maritime boundaries of Vietnam and Kampuchea between 1975 and 1978 involving division-sized military formations. On 25 December 1978, Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Kampuchea and subsequently occupied the country and removed the Communist Party of Kampuchea government from power. During the Vietnam War and Cambodian communists had formed an alliance to fight U. S.-backed regimes in their respective countries. Despite their open display of cooperation with the Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge leadership feared that the Vietnamese communists were scheming to form an Indochinese federation with Vietnam as the dominant force in the region. In order to pre-empt an attempt by the Vietnamese to dominate them, the Khmer Rouge leadership began purging Vietnamese-trained personnel within their own ranks as the Lon Nol regime capitulated in 1975.
In May 1975, the newly formed Democratic Kampuchea, dominated by the Khmer Rouge, began attacking Vietnam, beginning with an attack on the Vietnamese island of Phú Quốc. In spite of the fighting, the leaders of reunified Vietnam and Kampuchea made several public diplomatic exchanges throughout 1976 to highlight the strong relations between them. However, behind the scenes, Kampuchean leaders continued to fear what they perceived as Vietnamese expansionism. Therefore, on 30 April 1977, they launched another major military attack on Vietnam. Shocked by the Kampuchean assault, Vietnam launched a retaliatory strike at the end of 1977 in an attempt to force the Kampuchean government to negotiate. In January 1978, the Vietnamese military withdrew because their political objectives had not been achieved. Small-scale fighting continued between the two countries throughout 1978, as China tried to mediate peace talks between the two sides. However, neither country could reach an acceptable compromise at the negotiation table.
By the end of 1978, Vietnamese leaders decided to remove the Khmer Rouge-dominated regime of Democratic Kampuchea, perceiving it as being pro-Chinese and too hostile towards Vietnam. On 25 December 1978, 150,000 Vietnamese troops invaded Democratic Kampuchea and overran the Kampuchean Revolutionary Army in just two weeks, thereby ending the excesses of Pol Pot's regime, responsible for the deaths of a quarter of all Cambodians between 1975 and December 1978. Vietnamese military intervention and the occupying forces' subsequent allowing in of international food aid to mitigate the massive famine is viewed as ending the Cambodian genocide. On 8 January 1979, the pro-Vietnamese People's Republic of Kampuchea was established in Phnom Penh, marking the beginning of a ten-year Vietnamese occupation. During that period, the Khmer Rouge's Democratic Kampuchea continued to be recognised by the United Nations as the legitimate government of Kampuchea, as several armed resistance groups were formed to fight the Vietnamese occupation.
Behind the scenes, Prime Minister Hun Sen of the PRK regime approached factions of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea to begin peace talks. Under heavy diplomatic and economic pressure from the international community, the Vietnamese government implemented a series of economic and foreign policy reforms, which led to their withdrawal from Kampuchea in September 1989. At the Third Jakarta Informal Meeting in 1990, under the Australian-sponsored Cambodian Peace Plan, representatives of the CGDK and the PRK agreed to a power-sharing arrangement by forming a unity government known as the Supreme National Council; the SNC's role was to represent Cambodian sovereignty on the international stage, while the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia was tasked with supervising the country's domestic policies until a Cambodian government was elected by the people through a peaceful, democratic process. Cambodia's pathway to peace proved to be difficult, as Khmer Rouge leaders decided not to participate in the general elections, but instead they chose to disrupt the electoral process by launching military attacks on UN peacekeepers and killing ethnic Vietnamese migrants.
In May 1993, Sihanouk's FUNCINPEC movement defeated the Cambodian People's Party the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party, to win the general elections. However, the CPP leadership refused to accept defeat, they announced that the eastern provinces of Cambodia, where most of the CPP's votes were drawn from, would secede from Cambodia. To avoid such an outcome, Norodom Ranariddh, the leader of FUNCINPEC, agreed to form a coalition government with the CPP. Shortly afterwards, the constitutional monarchy was restored and the Khmer Rouge was outlawed by the newly formed Cambodian Government. Angkor, the seat of the Khmer Empire, was subjected to Vietnamese influence as early as the 13th century. Vietnamese influence spread and indirectly, it was not until the early 19th century that Vietnam exercised direct control. In 1813, Nak Ong Chan gained the Cambodian throne with the help of Vietnam, under his rule Cambodia became a protectorate. Following his death in 1834, Vietnam colonised Cambodia. Throughout the 1830s, Vietnam attempted to erase Khmer culture, which had derived the basis of Cambodian society and religion from India rather than China.
The trend of Vietnamese dominance continued during French colonization, under which
