History's Shortest Wars (and Why They Ended So Fast)

There is something irresistible about the phrase shortest war in history. It suggests an argument that got out of hand and was tidied up before lunch. Some of these conflicts really are that absurd in outline, and it is worth enjoying the absurdity. But brevity in war is almost never a sign that nothing serious happened. It is usually a sign that the outcome was never actually in doubt, and the shooting simply confirmed what the map and the inventories already said.

So here are the famous brief ones, with what caused them, why they finished so quickly, and one detail each that is worth carrying around.

The Anglo-Zanzibar War, 1896: roughly forty minutes

The record holder by most reckonings. Zanzibar was a sultanate under British protection, and the arrangement included a British say in who became sultan. When the sultan died in August 1896, Khalid bin Barghash occupied the palace and claimed the throne without that approval, gathering a few thousand defenders and a small armed force around him.

The British issued an ultimatum expiring on the morning of 27 August. Several warships were already in the harbour, guns bearing on the palace at short range. When the deadline passed the bombardment opened, and the palace, largely a timber structure, came apart quickly. Estimates of the duration run from about thirty eight to forty five minutes.

Why so fast: absolute asymmetry at point blank range. Naval artillery against a wooden building with no counter-battery of consequence is not a contest. The memorable detail is the casualty ratio, catastrophic on the defenders' side and effectively nil on the other, which is the whole story in a single line. The claimant fled and was granted refuge at a nearby consulate.

The Six-Day War, 1967: six days

The best known short war of the modern era, and one that remains politically live, so this stays strictly to the military facts. In early June 1967, after weeks of rising tension, mobilisation and the closure of a strategic waterway, Israel launched pre-emptive air strikes against Egyptian airfields, followed by operations on the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian fronts. Fighting ceased under United Nations brokered ceasefires within six days, with substantial territorial change.

Why so fast: air power destroyed on the ground at the outset. Once one side had effective control of the sky, ground formations could be observed, struck and outmanoeuvred at will, and the campaign became a matter of movement rather than attrition. Speed also had a political engine, since the superpowers pressed for a ceasefire quickly and the participants understood the window was narrow.

The durable military lesson, separable from the politics, is how completely the removal of one capability can decide a campaign before ground forces meaningfully engage.

The Football War, 1969: about one hundred hours

El Salvador and Honduras fought a brief war in July 1969 that lasted roughly a hundred hours. The name is a journalist's gift and a historian's headache. The two countries had met in a set of qualifying matches for the following year's World Cup, and those matches came with riots and inflamed press coverage on both sides, which made for an unforgettable label.

The actual causes were land and migration. Large numbers of Salvadoran farmers had settled in Honduras over decades, and a Honduran land reform programme displacing them, together with a long unsettled border, produced the grievance. Football supplied the spark and the headline, not the fuel.

Why so fast: the Organization of American States applied immediate diplomatic pressure and secured a ceasefire, and neither military could sustain operations long, being short of fuel, ammunition and spare parts. The memorable detail is aeronautical. Both sides flew propeller-driven aircraft of Second World War vintage, and the conflict is generally cited as the last time piston-engined fighters fought each other in aerial combat.

Others that barely got started

• The Indo-Pakistani war of December 1971 lasted about thirteen days and ended with a decisive result, an unusually short duration for a conflict of that scale.
• The Greek-Turkish war of 1897, sometimes called the Thirty Days War, ran roughly a month before great power intervention imposed terms.
• The Serbo-Bulgarian war of 1885 lasted about two weeks, notable because a well-drilled smaller force defeated a larger one that had assumed the matter was settled in advance.
• The Georgian-Armenian war of December 1918 lasted around three weeks and stopped under British mediation rather than by military decision.
• Some famous cases were never wars at all. Long standing formal states of hostility with no fighting, and border stand-offs that ended with an apology, get folded into these lists but belong in a different category.

The four reasons short wars are short

1. 1A technology gap. Artillery against timber, aircraft against no aircraft. When one side cannot reach the other, the fighting phase compresses to whatever time the shooting itself takes.
2. 2Decisive geography. A capital within range of a harbour, a single pass, a front with no depth to retreat into. Where there is nowhere to fall back to, there is no long war to fight.
3. 3Outside pressure. Alliances, mediators and international bodies frequently stop these conflicts faster than either combatant would have. Several entries above ended at a negotiating table, not on the field.
4. 4Logistics. Wars run on fuel, ammunition and spares. Armies without deep stocks or domestic production hit their ceiling in days, which is a limit no amount of resolve extends.

What the brevity actually teaches

The tempting reading is that short wars are the comic footnotes of military history. The more accurate reading is that they are the clearest measurements of power imbalance available. A long war means two sides could each keep going, which is a kind of parity. A forty minute war means one side never had a move, and the fighting was the formality that made that public.

It is also worth noticing how often these conflicts are remembered by the wrong cause. The Football War was about land, not football. The Anglo-Zanzibar War was about who controlled a protectorate's succession, not a palace occupation. Labels stick because they are memorable, which is much the same mechanism that keeps historical misinformation alive, a habit we poked at in history's greatest hoaxes.

And each of these turns on a moment where someone had to decide in a hurry with bad information. If you like pulling that thread, the counterfactuals in history's greatest what ifs are the natural next stop, and our Turning Points scenarios put you inside one of those decisions and make you commit before revealing the outcome. Disclosure: MindSnap is our app, and if this is the kind of thing you collect, you can wander through more of it at topics.