I typically classify wars into one of three 'types', that I've assigned to the colors below.
A White War
is a selfless [1] war. It is undertaken at expense to the belligerent party for the purpose of rectifying some evil or wrongdoing. Examples include:
United Nations peacekeeping operations
Pirate patrols
War on Crime [2]
[1]Selfless in the sense that the belligerent party doesn't stand to directly gain from it. They may still receive indirect benefits, like safer trade routes, or less stress over terrorism events.
[2]While it's ambiguous whether the war on crime (and drugs, and terrorism) are proper 'wars' per se, I am including them because they see the deployment of armed forces (e.g. police), and may result in violence.
White wars typically feature a large power disparity between the belligerent and their target. They are typically small in scale [3], and longer in duration, with the long-end pulling in continuous or ongoing operations.
[3]Wars are extremely expensive; they are the most frequent bankrupters of states (probably even beating sheer mismanagement, from a historical perspective). For this reason the only wars that are undertaken out of something other than necessity tend to be small ones.
A Red War
is a war undertaken to defeat an opponent in a competetive standoff. When you think of war, this is probably the kind that comes to mind. If there are any pitched battles [4] in the war, it is probably of this kind. The victor in the war is expected to receive some rewards, and the loser is expected to maintain their independence. Examples include:
The World Wars
Wars of Independence
[4]A pitched battle is one in which the time and place has been agreed upon by both parties. They'll line up on either side of it, have a tense standoff, and then join in full force once the tension is broken.
Red wars typically feature a fairly even power distribution between its participants [5], and (at least until modern times [6]) principally occurs between immediate neighbors.
[5]Nobody starts a war unless they think they can win it. When one party knows they have the advantage, they don't need to go to war to gain concessions, they just have to threaten to. The end scenario is that wars occur when both parties think they can win, and the war is the test to determine who it actually is.
[6]Note that cold wars and proxy wars are indirect red wars.
A Black War
is a war which is undertaken to annihilate the enemy. Examples include:
Genocides
The Third Punic War
The Russian Civil War [7]
[7]The Russian Civil War is also a good demonstration that wars' colors can be asymmetric. The whites (capitalists) were waging a red war, and the reds (communists) were waging a black war.
Wars of other colors may convert into black wars (e.g. when at the end of a red war, the victor decides to push their advantage as far as they can take it). Black wars are almost always asymmetric; it's very rare to find a war where both parties want the total elimination of the other [8].
[8]Know of one? Please share →. I'd be super interested.
While it may be fun to sit around and debate which color any particular war might be [9], the main value I've found is this classification schema is that it can illustrate different incentives for war, and the conditions necessary to cause them. I think it also does a good job of nailing down the principal three reasons why states and statelets go to war.
[9]Is the War on Terror a white war, or a black one? While it's main purpose is to reduce and manage the number and severity of terrorist attacks, a deliberate side-aim has been to eliminate the taliban as a geopolitical entity.
Bonus [10]
[10]Why do the colors red, white, and black come together so frequently? As it turns out, they're basic ⬈. This means that languages which only have three colors almost always have those three colors (or rather, three color terms that loosely can be captured by these English-equivalents). It's not by chance either. The human eye is most sensitive to the red-frequency spectrum, which explains (a) its attractive aesthetic power, and (b) the relative ease we have in distinguishing different shades of red from each other.