I do not think that there is a higher form of war, that "war" in the usual sense is the greatest use of human violence, and that all of them should be viewed from the perspective of contemporary history.
To put it simply, whether it is a tribal war fought by primitive people with knives, guns and sticks, or a war fought by modern people with computers, satellites, radars, robots, and laser cannons, there is essentially no distinction between high and low, people in different periods have different material conditions, and matter constitutes the external form of human warfare in different periods.
Therefore, from a material and historical point of view, there is no "high-level war" or "low-level war", and we can laugh at the backwardness of primitive people today, and in 10,000 years our descendants will also treat us as primitive people.
According to von Clausewitz's "Theory of War", "war is a kind of violence that forces the other side to obey its own will", although human society does have some restrictive behaviors on war violence, especially with the liberation of civil rights ideas and changes in social architectural forms, human beings have begun to have a trend of thought "anti-war" sentiment, and evolved international law to defend war participants, but in the final analysis, these acts can not weaken the intensity of war violence.
What is war violence? This kind of violence is a means, an extension of politics, a means to achieve the fundamental end of "forcing the other side to submit to its own will", and in order to ensure that this end is achieved, the loss of the ability of the other side to resist is the external and direct goal of war.
In many cases, this external goal of "making the other side lose its resistance" is also above the intrinsic purpose of "making the other side submit to its own will", which constitutes the barbarism of war and the most contradictory part of the philosophy of war. Many times they are interpreted as "the passion of war", or simply "irrationality in war", and we can clearly understand from this that war has never been a fully rational act, whether it was initiated by an ancient dictator or a modern democratic government.
So we do not have to classify war at all, there is only one kind of war, no matter how much fantasy, humanism, romanticism or modern humanistic ideas are mixed in it, its forced subservience and subjugation are eternal.
There are some currents of thought that human war is actually gradually getting rid of the influence of all the factors of passion, is constantly evolving towards reason, and even in the end even the existence of the material power of the "army" can be eliminated. This kind of thinking is very good, but at least for the time being, we still pessimistically see that human beings have not changed the nature of war because of the increase in civilization, and the purpose of war is still to eliminate the other side.
Because of this, the use of war violence is unlimited, unless you want to face defeat, then of course you can submit to the other side until the other side continues to yield to destruction. This contradiction promotes the catalytic effect of war on each other, which leads to the expansion and extreme of war without a bottom line.
At least so far, the form of civilization in human society has not essentially changed the ability to change war, even in philosophical discussion, war is war, and there is no difference between high and low wars.