The MegaMilitary Project | Online Edition #339

Conflicts & Wars

An understanding of world conflict is vital in order to prevent future wars and predict their consequences: famine, massacres, mass displacement, persecution, collapsed governments, genocide, wartime deaths, and retribution killings.

Violent conflict still is the dominant condition for tens of millions of people and, alongside progress in governance, defines the momentum of history for most of the world’s peoples. Most of today’s wars are in the poorer countries of the world. As well, where one finds violent conflict, one also finds authoritarian governments.

Inevitably, there will be more horrible wars and innovations in mass destruction. War continues to be part of the birthing pain of emerging democracies. Peace in our time will depend, in part, on a broader international understanding of these problems, which can be promoted by more people reading websites like MegaMilitary.

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The Arab Revolt was directed against the Muslim Ottoman Empire which had ruled most or the Middle East for centuries. The Revolt also began at the very heart of the Muslim world: in the Hijaz, with its holiest of Muslim cities, Mecca and Medina.
Although the Ottoman high command in Damascus was expecting trouble and had even begun moving reinforcements into the region, the outbreak of the revolt seems to have taken the local commanders by surprise.
Despite the positive trend, there were also a series of internal problems. Intelligence showed that the Turks were attempting to buy the loyalties of Auda abu Tayi and although he did not defect, such overtures were made to other Arab leaders, including Feisal, later in the campaign.
Two wars had destabilized the region (First and Second Balkan War), and although the Western powers intervened to restore peace, neither of the Balkan Wars resolved the tensions that had been mounting in this part of Europe.
For the people of Arabia and the Syrian provinces, the implosion of Ottoman power following the war had profound effects. Few who became involved in the revolt could have imagined that the final dispensation would turn out as it did. The Middle Eastern region had been changed entirely.
Although the western front of World War I has received the most attention from historians, the war on the eastern front was a tremendously costly, large-scale conflict, which did much to precipitate the Russian revolutions of 1917 and bring an end to czarist rule.
Despite its alliance with the Central Powers, Italy maintained neutrality at the outbreak of war while the Allies applied adroit diplomacy, promising Italy territorial gains at the expense of Austria-Hungary in exchange for an alliance.

East Africa during World War I

Involved Nations WWI
When Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck stepped ashore in German East Africa in January 1914, nobody guessed that within five years he would not only be feted by his own countrymen for being the last German commander in the field to lie down his arms, but also admired and respected by his British opponents much as Rommel was to be d...
As the British initially saw it, the strategic importance of Mesopotamia lay in its oil fields. Although most of the Royal Navy ran on coal in 1914–18, oil was still essential as a lubricant and as fuel for land vehicles.
Enver Pasha (1881–1922), a “Young Turk,” was one of the cadre of determined Turkish military officers who engineered the transformation of the archaic and ailing Ottoman Empire into modern Turkey.
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