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The War Of The World War I

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It’s been over a century since Austria declared war on Serbia. The assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, sparked a war that was to end all others. It clearly did not. Countless wars and conflicts have been fought since each evolving into something different than the last. As a result, modern warfare has evolved into something completely different than that of a century ago. Although war is fought for fundamentally the same reasons, warfare, as it is practiced today, is different from that of World War I. This is primarily due to the rise of counterinsurgency operations, the focus on air superiority and the use of technology, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, which have led to the decline of mass army against army war. Characterized by the declaration of war, the amassing of vast battlefield formations, and the use of new technologies, such as the machine gun and airplane, World War I was the epitome of conventional war. The myriad of alliances across Europe in the early 20th century allowed military leaders to carefully craft offensive plans of war focused on the weaknesses of known enemies and designed to swiftly defeat opposing military forces. For example, Germany’s Schlieffen Plan “assumed that the Reich could only win a two-front war by crushing France before Russia could mobilize.” Capitalizing on the lightly defended French north, a result of France’s assumption that Belgium’s neutrality would not be violated,

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