What are War Factors?
War Factors are an affect, aspect, attitude, behavior, capability, catalyst, cause, circumstance, characteristic, clue, component, consideration, constituent, decision, detail, driver, element, event, evidence, facet, fact, feature, indicator, influence, ingredient, intension, interest, item, motive, opinion, part, phenomena, point, reason, statement, statistic, strand, symptom, or warning, that impacts and contributes to a cause of war that could result in an effect, outcome or result.
Factors are open source intelligence code trends and patterns of capabilities and intentions that need to be analyzed in order to bring their meaning into context. They represent the basic research documents that are needed to analyze the possibility or probability of major armed conflict.
War Factor Elements
Factors are comprised of one or more soft power (stage one) and hard power (stage two) elements. There are seven soft power elements and three hard power elements.
The soft power elements are:
coercive diplomacy
hard edged diplomatic actions
economic sanctions
including blockades, embargo, investment policy, trade barriers, tariffs
covert and overt subversion
including annexation, criminal actions, cyber attacks, espionage, proxy wars, sabotage, terrorism
legal
international law
media
propaganda
moral
imperatives
psychological warfare
deception, disinformation
The hard power elements are:
preventive armed conflict
armed conflict initiated to prevent another Nation State from acquiring a capability for attacking
preemptive armed conflict
armed conflict commenced in an attempt to repel or defeat an imminent military offensive or invasion
responsive armed conflict
guerrilla tactics, covert and overt conventional and nuclear strategy-operations-tactics
Factors also can be classified into one or more of the following fourteen discipline subjects:
military; technological; historic; political; economic; legal; psychological; sociological;
anthropological; linguistic; visual; intelligence; trend; polling.
War Factors and Related Causes
All Factors and their related causes are impacted by background conditions that can be considered independent variables affecting causes of war leading to the dependent variable of war itself. (Please refer to the Causes of War, Defeat, Victory, Peace section on the Homepage of this website.)
Factors also have to be carefully chosen as some are relevant to causes and others are not. Only certain Factors impact causes of war, causes of defeat, causes of victory and causes of peace. This is not unlike the problem that historians and lawyers have when selecting only relevant facts to present their arguments, cases and opinions.
In should also be noted that the concept of incidents as well as Factors needs to be considered in analyzing the likelihood of major armed conflict. Incidents are those actions taken by the government and/or the military of one Nation State against another Nation State’s interests leading to feelings of fear and reduced honor. The idea is that fear, honor and interests are key concepts relating to the causes of war. Factors are also other general data that affects, either positively or negatively, the relationships between Nation States.
War Factor Documents
The War Factor documents are to be used by citizens as an educational tool to aid them in estimating the likelihood of armed conflict breaking out between America and its allies and their adversaries. In this way, The WAR Times website is to be utilized as a type of crowd sourced analytic geopolitical intelligence.
Most War Factor documents are freely accessible, but some others require subscriptions to the publications they link to.
All documents are sourced from reliable publications, however, they should still be deconstructed for bias and questions should be asked regarding what is actually known, what is only presumed, and what is uncertain.
The War Factors chosen should be considered as only a statistical sample, not a complete inventory, as they represent only a small number of Factors that affect the possibility of major armed conflict.
The War Factors that comprise The WAR Times are like pieces of a huge puzzle. The more that are put in place, the clearer the picture becomes. The more Factors that are known increases the possibility that a major armed conflict can be predicted.
It should also be understood that the use of Factors as historical documents relate to time frame issues. The oldest Factors from past years can be considered as long-term preconditions for war; the more recent Factors can be considered as medium-term precipitants; and the current Factors that could start a war can be considered as near-term triggers. Of course if war does not break out in the near-term, then the current Factors recede further into the background as also do the medium-term and long-term Factors.
War Factors are updated on a regular basis and are organized into the following categories: