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The tags and are pretty much synonymous with each other (war being armed conflict between 2 or more states).

Request: Can be made a synonym of or vice versa?

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    The Troubles in Northern Ireland could be classifies as an "armed conflict", but not really as a "war". A number of questions seem to be about non-war armed conflicts like that. – user11249 Jan 15 at 9:24
  • @MartinTournoij, while I agree that it sounds odd to classify the armed conflict in Northern Ireland as a "war", I have seen and read it being referred to as such. I think the problem was more with the framing than with the reality of what was happening. We didn't think of Ireland and UK as being "at war", and yet they were more "at war" then nations which were "officially" at war (such as China and Taiwan), – grovkin Jan 15 at 11:40
  • @MartinTournoij I don't have the source on hand now but I saw a government run library somewhere classify war (conflict between 2 states) and civil war (conflict inside a country) as armed conflict. Will update with source if/when I get to it. – sau226 Jan 15 at 13:29
  • Isn't placing of bombs by terrorists and armed response by government forces armed conflict as well? I suspect the better thing to do is remove armed-conflict tag and retaf those entries – Mark Jan 15 at 15:23
  • most of the armed-conflict questions seem to be about terrorism, civil conflicts. Meanwhile, the war tags tend to be about wars between nations. I don't think they need to be made synonyms – Sam I am♦ Jan 15 at 18:31
  • @SamIam Perhaps then armed-conflict could be renamed to more clearly be distinct from war? I don't know a better term, but if it makes sense to distinguish them then it seems best for the tag names to also be distinct. On the other hand, if existing questions are almost always tagged correctly then I might be overreacting. – Kamil Drakari Jan 15 at 18:56
  • @SamIam Maybe ditch the armed-conflict tag and replace it with civil-war or link civil-war and armed-conflict somehow? – sau226 Jan 16 at 7:54
  • How about reversing it, and merging war in to armed-conflict? – user11249 Jan 16 at 9:52
  • The point is that war, civil war and armed conflict pretty much mean the same thing. Ideally war and civil war should be tied to armed conflict somehow however I'm open to additional suggestions as stated above – sau226 Jan 17 at 8:31

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