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∙LOW-INTENSITY WAR aims at establishing, mainlining or regaining control of land areas threatened by guerrillas revolutionaries or conquerors. The U.S. might initiate a low-intensity war in a Latin American nation in order to preclude a Castroite takeover or to carry off a coup as it did in 1954 against Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz. The Congolese rebellions of 1960-62 and 1964 were of low intensity, as were most of the Latin American and Middle Eastern conflicts of the past two decades. The battle between India and Pakistan over Kashmir has fluctuated between low intensity (as in such diversions as last spring's Rann of Kutch fighting) and mid-intensity (as in the current conflict, where neither side has weapons enough to carry the battle to total victory).
The Perfect Volley
The shift away from large-scale, high-intensity war marks a significant turning point in the history of warfare, an atavism of arms that reverses a trend begun in 1793 with the French Revolution. Before then, war had been mostly a professional concern. The 10,000 Greeks who marched up-country with Xenophon were fighting for pay, not glory, early Rome practiced a limited conscription, but by the Augustan age (27 B.C.-14 A.D.), Rome's empire was firmly enough established to be secured by a tough army of 300,000 professionals. Apart from the mob-scene Crusades, the wars of medieval Europe were brief and relatively bloodless-Edward III had no more than 30,000 men at Crécy and Henry V at Agincourt only 15,000.
From the mid-17th century to the end of the 18th, European warfare grew less savage, more scientfic. Gunpowder replaced cold steel; siege work and precision drill supplanted the wild charge. The key to victory lay in the "perfect volley" delivered at point-blank range by tautly disciplined infantrymen, as Wolfe demonstrated on the Plains of Abraham The key to defense lay in maneuver: French Marshal Comte Hermann Maurice de Saxe wrote, "I am sure that a clever general can wage war as long as he lives without being compelled to battle."
Mass war, precursor of this century's two world wars, began when Napoleon instituted universal conscription. The generals of the 19th century also turned away from the minimal-loss thinking of their predecessors. "I desire nothing so much as a big battle," declared Bonaparte. U. S. Grant in the American Civil War concurred; indeed, only by the constant bloody pressure he put on the Army of Northern Virginia was the war won for the North. In World War I, Foch and Haig, Hindenburg and Ludendorff pressed the attack for four years—with the goal of lasting just 15 minutes longer than the enemy army.
With World War II and the arrival of the heavy bomber, that strategy was broadened to include destruction of the enemy economy as well. And the atom bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved the effectiveness of ending a war by wholesale destruction. In 1949 Russia acquired its own nuclear bombs, and the postwar peace that so many had believed would last forever now appeared threatened by the possibility of all-out nuclear war between the two giants. Any war at all, it was feared, must inevitably lead to a catastrophic blowup between the two great nuclear powers.