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Modern warfare is divided by some historians into four "generations" of war.
First generation warfare
First generation warfare reflects tactics of the era of the smoothbore musket, the tactics of line and column. Operational art in the first generation did not exist as a concept although it was practiced by individual commanders, most prominently Napoleon.
Second generation warfare
Second generation warfare was developed in response to the rifled musket, breechloaders, barbed wire, the machinegun, and indirect fire. Tactics were based on fire and movement but they remained essentially linear, with defenses still attempting to prevent all penetrations and attacks laterally dispersed along a line advanced by rushes in small groups.
Third generation warfare
Third generation warfare was first developed by the Germans in World War I, to compensate for their inability to match their enemies' industrial output. Its tactics were the first truly nonlinear tactics; attacks rely on infiltration to bypass and collapse the enemy's combat forces rather than seeking to close with and destroy them, and defense was in depth and often invited penetration to set the enemy up for a counterattack.
Fourth generation warfare
Fourth generation warfare is widely dispersed and largely undefined, with a blurred distinction between war and peace and few clear battlefields or fronts. Indeed, it may be difficult to even identify which organizations and individuals are actively participating in the war. Actions will occur concurrently throughout all participants' depth, including their society as a cultural, not just a physical, entity. See also Asymmetric warfare.
References
- Bond, Brian. The pursuit of victory : from Napoleon to Saddam Hussein. Oxford; New York : Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Fuller, J. F. C. The conduct of war, 1789-1961 : a study of the impact of the French, industrial, and Russian revolutions on war and its conduct. New York : Da Capo Press, 1992.
- Keegan, John. The face of battle : a study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. London : Barrie & Jenkins, 1988.
- Paret, Peter. Gordon A. Craig. Felix Gilbert. ed. Makers of modern strategy : from Machiavelli to the nuclear age. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1986.
- Ropp, Theodore. War in the modern world. Baltimore, MD : John Hopkins University Press, 2000.
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