Maritime Forces in Future Warfare - Essay Example

The maritime forces had been considered vital in such environment where crises outside long-established alliances and bases exist are frequent. This is due to its inherent characteristics of flexibility, self-sustainability, and mobility. There is wide agreement that today, the world is under the fourth generation of warfare and the reasoning behind this is that, because the US military is now so preternaturally strong, the strategies and tactics that must be adopted by future adversaries will have to be so radically different from those employed hitherto as to constitute a completely new generation of warfare.

1 Lind (2004), stressed that modern war began at the end of the Thirty Years War - brought to a close with the Peace Treaty of Westphalia - and established for the world states’ the monopoly on war.2 The Treaty was historically known as the signed agreement that established the nation-state as the principal actor in world politics.3 Since 1648 up to the present, the nation-states became the primary and prominent actors of warfare. They hold the legitimate right to forge war if there is any need to.

This is essentially what consist of interstate war – nations waging war against each other .4 Although many interstate wars in the last one hundred years have been relatively small, the two world wars – with their global scope and magnitude, their attacks on domestic infrastructure and civilian populations, and their massive mobilizations of resources – made the twentieth century the age of total war. The end of World War II saw the introduction of the nuclear weapon while the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Iran-Iraq War each resulted to over a million battle-related casualties.