What are traditional wars, non-traditional wars and asymmetric wars?

Traditional war refers to the conventional war triggered by national security, sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The so-called non-traditional war refers to the war caused by non-traditional security threats. At present, it mainly includes energy security, water security and conflicts and wars caused by separatism, extremism and terrorist activities.

Another meaning of asymmetric war is "unconventional war". The U.S. Department of Defense mentioned in the Quadrennial Defense Assessment Report of 1997 that "the advantage of the United States in the conventional weapons competition urges its opponents to attack the United States in an asymmetric way". Asymmetric warfare has many characteristics, such as asymmetric combat time, asymmetric combat space, asymmetric combat power, asymmetric technical level, asymmetric combat means, asymmetric combat style, asymmetric tactical tactics, and the most obvious one is asymmetric combat power. Take the Kosovo war as an example: one side of the war is NATO led by the United States, and the other side is the weak Yugoslavia. The overall economic strength of the two sides is 700 times different, the overall military strength is 400 times different, and the technical level of weapons and equipment is one or two generations different. This kind of war with great disparity in strength is called "no suspense war".