A weapon is an instrument of any kind, (as a club, knife, or gun ) used to injure, defeat, kill, or destroy, or in warfare or combat to attack and overcome an enemy. Weapons may be used to attack and defend, and consequently also to threaten or protect. Metaphorically, anything used to damage (even psychologically) can be referred to as a weapon. A weapon can be as simple as a club or as complex as an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Artillery are usually large caliber weapons firing projectiles one at a time. Artillery pieces are crew serviced weapons that provide direct or indirect trajectories for the shell. Military vehicles are land combat or transportation vehicles, excluding rail-based, which are designed for or in significant use by military forces. Military aviation includes any use of aircraft by a country's military, including such areas as transport, training, disaster relief, border patrol, search and rescue, surveillance, surveying, peacekeeping, and (very rarely) aerial warfare.
Naval
warfare is combat in and on seas and oceans.
Military robots are autonomous or remote-controlled
devices designed for military applications. Military
tactics is the collective name for methods of
engaging and defeating an enemy in battle. Military
strategy is a collective name for planning the
conduct of warfare. Military doctrine is a level of
military planning between national strategy and
unit-level tactics, techniques, and procedures. A
military unit is an organization within an armed
force.
It
may consist of any number of soldiers, ships,
vehicles, or aircraft. Armies, navies, and air
forces, are organised hierarchically into groups of
various sizes for functional, tactical and
administrative purposes. Military communications is defined as the transmission medium that links military components on the battlefield. Fortifications are military constructions and buildings designed for defence in warfare.
As the speed of technological advance accelerated in the civilan world, so warfare became more industralised. The newly-invented machine gun and repeating rifle brought awesome new fire power to the battlefield and in part explains the high casualty rates of the American Civil War. The next big breakthrough was the new highly-mobile, recoilless field gun, the French Soixante-Quinze in the 1970s. During World War I, the need to break the deadlock of the trenches saw the rapid development of many new technologies, particularly in military aviation and tanks. Military tactics can take the form of ambushes, encirclements, frontal assaults, air assaults, hit-and-run (which is used mainly by guerilla rebels) and in some cases suicide attacks. Often, deception, in the form of military camouflage or misdirection using decoys, is used to confuse the enemy. A major military tactic that came to prominence in the 19th and early 20th century is trench warfare.
