In your opinion,how has war evolved from from the past to present? Please use examples to justify your opinions.

Human history is a history of wars. The few thousand years of history was all replete with wars.  With the advance of the human civilisation,war, whose meaning is brought about by man himself, is thus bound to experience the impact of this. As man's thinking matured and his intellectual capacity expanded in its development, his perspective towards war changed continually. The most immediate factor to this change would be the constant betterment of man's technology, and technology plays an integral part in the occurrence of a war.

With it, man could create tools for killing-weapons to their own advantage and with more scientific discoveries made, more kinds of these weapons could be churned out and can be improved upon to raise its efficiency. This can be noted as one of the most significant difference between ancient and modern warfare. The primary function of weapons is basically to inflict as much destruction on the enemy as possible in order to achieve total victory. Thus, all the modifications made on it were to allow it achieve more of this. Technology was also applied to beef up the defence of  an army.In the past, primitive weapons such as knife and axe were utillised. At this current stage of our development, these had already vanished from our arsenal. Replacing them are modern terms like nuclear missiles and jet fighters. These new inventions of man had indeed achieved its objective. The destruction wrought by these modern weapons is indeed notorious. It is so vile that it was possible for mankind to annihilate itself. Melee weapons used in olden days, however, could only deal damage individually, but not to the entire population. Nuclear or atomic bombs such as those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and shells dropped from a helicopter or fighter could instantaneously obliterate an entire city,and even cause deformation in birth after years.The heavy gunfire of machine guns and assault rifles could whittle and decimate an entire platoon within a few seconds. Mankind has seen unprecedented destruction to itself,not from nature but from its very own sentient beings that has become so shockingly ruthless.Thus, in light of the magnitude of these carnage,we should reconsider whether technology is a really a boon or bane to man. 

The cause for waging a war in the past also varied from now. When ithe first human war broke out, it was most probably meant to satisfy the basic surviving needs of the human beings, such as food and other essential living resources. However, as man lived in increasing abundance, his innate vice, greed or avarice,became incited. His heart yearned for more and by nature, greed was a bottomless abyss drilled deep through the pure human heart. There is virtually no way to put an end to it once it takes root . He would covet for anything that brings pleasure and happiness to him to fill up that void in his heart. Nothing is ever sufficient for him. As such, his morals have been greatly corrupted. Today we observe an array of causes for a conflict or a war, all of which are simply manifests of greed. Hitler's justification of starting World War II, namely to avenge the humilliated Germans and to carve out "living space" for his fellow Germans were nothing but a pretext for his mass territorial expansion across Europe to comply his ambitions to become the ruler of the world. So was the case of Napoleon.  Currently, we hear from the news everyday about territorial conflicts, civil strives worldwide. All these are the clashes of interests between different parties. On the other hand, there are also alliances signed among different countries who share common interests in times of war . They actually hope to make use of one another to better protect their self-interest against others. The Axis and Allied blocs were formed in The Great War by Austria-Hungary, Germany and Ottoman Empire against Russia,France and Britain, producing a situation termed "The Balance of Powers" which deters both side from attacking each other. This shows how scheming man to use the manipulation of others as a strategy.

Keeping abreast with the birth of new hardwares, man has also devised new war strategies to better deploy them in order to use them to their fullest extent possible. The new motto of war is to "use less, kill more". One of those examples that would fulfil this would be population bombing campaigns conducted airborne by  bombers. This was first inducted in The Great War following the invention of airplanes. Initially the airplane was used for dogfights against enemy air forces to gain air superiority for reconnaissance purposes. The Spanish Civil War two decades after saw Germany unleashed the true destructibility of this war machine, with horrendous damage witnessed in Spanish cities. This was further highlighted by the Battle of Britain and the bombing of Dresden.Casualties numbered up to thousands in the cities only just overnight. The Japanese used massacre and mass raping in Nanking for the same purpose. All these atrocities were meted out to dampen the morale of the population to reduce war efforts. Other more inhumane examples could be raised.

Besides all these weapons, man does not yet seem to be contented.  Even harmful chemicals were not let off.Thus started chemical warfare, which involves the deployment of chemicals in fighting, i.e, German chlorine gas in WW2, and napalm spraying by Americans in Vietnam War. These weapons are unimaginably lethal to the vital organs to the body, and that is the way they kill. Poison gases like chlorine and Nova 6 corrupt the lungs into disgusting froth, and tormenting the victim in his death throes. Similarly, napalm incinerates the entire body into charred ashes within a matter of seconds. These are more than enough to prove how gruesome and abominable war is. Last but not least, new war strategies have also been constantly drawn up to adopt to the 21st century environment. A salient one would be terrorism, the ingenious terrorist kingpin Osama's brainchild deployed by Muslim extremists against the Americans. In the war against terrorism, there will be no limited battlefield or frontier whatsoever. Attacks from terrorists would be in the form of secret suicide bombing on crowded areas in metropolises to terrorise the world. The scattered presence of these people is elusive, and any spot in the world could turn out to be the "battlefield" for these terrorists to strike. This is the only method for the terrorists to survive, given USA's military prowess.So far, terrorism is still flourishing and has yet to be exterminated by even superpower America.Terrorism seems to have proven that it is successful and viable, and this protracted war looks to go on, bringing only more destruction in its path.

Mohammed Gandhi once said,"An eye for an eye makes the world go blind", more wars and conflicts will only bring about deeper feud, and this probably had formed the framework for the evolution of wars, which may all end well in an apocalypse.