If you want peace, study war
persuasion.community
persuasion.community
One of the lessons from being a Stallman watcher for many years - people are profoundly evidence based. If there hasn't been a war in 30 years, then they assume there will not be a war next year no matter how the background is changing.
The fading of WWII in the public memory could be argued as the biggest single risk that society faces. There are too many people who just won't understand how bad and how possible total war is. There is a huge background risk that the age of abundance ends and then things get dicey.
Letting Soldiers & Generals control the military is the exact mistake which lead to Japan's military aggression. Keeping the head of the military a civilian/politician is perhaps one of the few ideas everyone should be able to agree is smart.
One thing that I cannot find a second citation for but really intrigued me is that there is apparently some kind of parallel-narrative around the double agent Oleg Penkovsky - at first glance he gave information to the west about the situation in Cuba, but on closer inspection some of his antics may be too good to be true (he apparently made it in and out of the Soviet Union alive despite being rumbled). Peter Wright in Spycatcher says that Penkovsky's assessments data of Soviet ICBM accuracy often didn't line up with satellite imagery of their missile testing ranges.
Ultimately we'll never know but its fascinating just how much we don't know about the cold war.
"I wouldn't want to be quoted on this.... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor."
The US's version was written by the white house's journalist. It is not objective and lots has been refuted from calls leaked by the soviets after the fact, and a few of the advisors too.
TruTV/Adam Ruins Everything has a take on it [0] (not saying that's the objective history but they raise some eyebrows).
Some facts we do know though:
1. JFK rode on an anti-communist wave to beat his opponent into office
2. The US moved missiles first
3. The military was following orders from the top
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5wc9V7ggVg
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EDIT: on some reflection, I think I actually just proved your point. If that was just left to the military then cooler heads may not have prevailed
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2606779-one-minute-to-mi...
For extra nightmare fuel "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" by Daniel Ellsberg:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25663779-the-doomsday...
The latter book literally gave me nightmares.
"The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.
I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."
https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html
"A hundred Holocausts" - that has haunted me ever since I first read it.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/03/you-and-almo...
My strong impression has been that the Japanese military in the 1930s was a catastrophically-extreme illustration of Dunning-Kruger syndrome when it came to understanding international affairs and in particular understanding the psychology and industrial capacity of the United States.
(Admiral Yamamoto was a noteworthy exception: Having spent considerable time in the U.S, he strongly favored friendly relations with the U.S. and opposed going to war. When he was overruled by the militarists in the Army, he planned Pearl Harbor and Midway as a roll of the dice for what he judged to be Japan's only hope of success, namely by striking hard blows and trying for a quick negotiated peace. It didn't work out that way.)
It doesn’t stop them from going to war, but it makes it less likely.
Engaging in something that can be spun as a just war is a viable re-election tactic.
If you have the public’s support for the war, then a war isn’t going to hurt your election chances.
For example, it seems that the civilian elite of Germany and Austria-Hungary was ambivalent about war in early 1918, especially in A-H, and willing to entertain possible ceasefire with subsequent negotiations; but serious peace negotiations were not possible anymore, because the de facto power shifted to general Ludendorff and other high officers, who were determined to go on.
Former Czechoslovak president Ludvík Svoboda, a general who fought in the WWII and went through some of the bloodiest battles involving Czechoslovak forces [0], was known to be very wary of militaristic ideas later.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Act_of_194...
I model this differently - people are very conservative about narrative change. I feel it works more generally.
Examples:
If we've had peace for 30 years, then war seems impossible.
If we've had government fiat currency for a centuries or more, then of course cryptocurrencies are a joke.
If we've been on the gold standard for long enough, then of course that's how money should work.
I think the pendulum can swing too far the other way, though. People imagine a blank slate, but we don’t live in a blank slate, so you’re essentially imagining a fantasy world. Or, you just end up recreating the old world in the new one but worse.
In particular, he argues that the way you avoid things like World War II is in part precisely by making sure the military does not make decisions of war and peace.
For context on that, Bismarck's abdication in 1890 left a leadership vacuum that was was gradually filled-in by military elites, who were more interested in the mechanics of warfare than the nuance of politics. Where Bismarck used military force as political tool, in his absence every problem began to look like something that only the military could solve.
Although, it's worth taking this opportunity to repeat: the same military elites responsible for the tragedy of WWI and the Dolchstoss myth were responsible for appointing Hitler into power and legitimizing his militant tactics. Hindenburg and Ludendorff created Hitler, from inside and outside the establishment, respectively.
The significance of that, while it shouldn’t be dismissed either, often exaggerated; while, yes, that absolutely did happen, you see in the entirety of Europe, no matter the role of military vs. civilian authority, the myth of offense dominance, aggressive mobilization plans and hair-trigger activation, etc.
Basically everyone, civilian and military, had drawn the wrong conclusions about the direction of the evolution of warfare, and it affected every major powers diplomatic strategy, military posture, etc., because everyone saw the other side getting ahead of them as an existential threat.
Think of a corporations that make all decisions at top level vs corporations that at the top level mostly worry about creating correct environment for the individual contributors and low level managers to be able to make right decisions, individually.
US military won the IIWW war because it created that right environment.
Mobilizing people (people who are not interested in achieving goal are almost useless), keeping spirit (for example US military will always do what's necessary to save individual solders vs Japanese that treated soldiers mostly as expendable), ensuring that people are promoted on merit and not birth, ensuring people are trained and are given right tools.
All those things are so that soldiers can make the right decisions, on the spot.
It is naive to think that a general can say whatever he wants and make it happen. It will only happen if all those people want to make it happen and are prepared to make it happen.
The US did win the Pacific war, despite that its torpedoes were wholly almost wholly non-functional until 1944. It won at monstrous cost in wasted Marine Corps lives, apparently because blockade work was not dramatic for home audiences.
But it had beaten back most if the invasion before US materiel showed up in substantial quantity, and its industrial output (also) grew dramatically throughout the war.
Whether it could have secured enough food to sustain that output, without US SPAM, is unclear; the Soviets openly acknowledged the importance of the SPAM. The hundreds of thousands of trucks, millions of tires, millions of tons of steel, and corresponding amount of refined petrolem the US delivered probably mattered too, when it finally got there. Soviet pilots liked the P-39s, sort of proto-A10s.
The Soviet materiel placement in 1941, immediately before Germany invaded, was consistent with immediate plans to invade Germany.
US had declared Axis powers to be the enemy and then the enemy was defeated. Nobody questions that US was key to winning WWII. It seems impossible that soviets would hold if Nazi Germany was able to send all their resources to eastern front. Even with the help on the western front, soviets held JUST BARELY. And at key moment US troops landed in Italy forcing Hitler to divert his forces that were necessary to win battle of Kursk.
I don't see how you can question that US won the war, it is a fact documented by representatives of states involved in the war signing their capitulation to US.
In a sense it is true, but not in the sense we are talking about.
On that question, it is dead clear that the Soviets were, and by a huge margin.
Did US and British troops contribute? Yes. Did P-51s and P-38s help clear the skies of effective German air power? Sure. Would the outcome have been notably different without them? Probably not.
The biggest single setback for Germany, driving deep into original German territory, happened while the US and Britain were pinned down in Belgium and Southern France by a tiny fraction of German assets. Without, the war might have gone on for up to another year, and the Soviets would have ended up owning all of Europe and, probably, Africa. We must be satisfied that that did not happen.
> It only joined the war after Europeans had already killed more than 23 million Germans, and destroyed most of its military.
German military casualties were only 5.3 million by the high estimate. Total German casualties were only 7.4 million by the high estimate - for the whole war. So... I don't know where you get your ideas, but they are objectively very wrong.
That said, the US was far from ready to advance on the German heartland until after the time they were pottering about in Africa. It was a way to look busy.
Staying out long after the split, while Germany and Russia gored one another, was clearly the wiser course. Entering before the Soviets could subdue Germany and overrun western Europe was necessary. But any claim that the US had any sort of primary role in defeating Germany remains nonsense.
Individual soldiers don’t plan wars, obviously they don’t have a high enough level view to do that adequately. So much of war planning is logistics and not tactics or strategy. The idea is to get the troops there, make sure they have enough weapons and ammo, give them their objectives, then let field commanders do their jobs.
soldiers devotion to duty is ingrained in their head from day zero because they MUST be better than their enemies to win the fight, and the people in comfy chairs MUST devote themselves to the study and strategy of war, not tactics, to enable proper deployment of said soldiers. The danger is when innovation on the battlefield outpaces innovation in strategy, and leads to situations like the American Civil War and World War 1...real life meatgrinder horror.
Not just that. Neighbor dies of COVID, people are careful for a few days. Then they forget what the virus can do
Perhaps this is really what peace means. It is the security of being able to live and plan a life or a business without ever once worrying about "but what happens if there is a war?". The collective impact of that on psychological security and the free movement of goods, people, ideas across the world is huge.
> The fading of WWII in the public memory could be argued as the biggest single risk that society faces. There are too many people who just won't understand how bad and how possible total war is.
People who started WWII were WWI veterans - that is who Nazi leadership were. Starting from Hitler, through Goebbels, down the rank. Not being veteran was seen as weakness. For that matter, Stalin was veteran too.
A lot of veterans would disagree about your "on average" thought. Sure, there are belligerent vets out there, but most have a better idea about the not-so-good stuff that happens in a war.
What's 'scary' are the stakes involved.
People in 'comfortable offices' are right now deciding who gets vaccines, and who will not until later.
People are dying in the US due to lack of access to healthcare due to other people making decisions in 'comfortable offices'.
We entrust those in positions of power with such legitimate authority.
And finally: "I think this option is more favourable to us than peace" - is an inappropriate analogy because it's generally never the case. If the US were to have entered WW1 and 2 earlier, a lot of lives would have been saved. While those were easier decisions in hindsight, they're all nuanced, for example, the US+Coalition decision to liberate Kuwait after Saddam's incursion.
Let me tell you, this is the main way to drive nationalistic divide, because the other half of the people in the country recognize for what it is -- evil manipulation of people's emotions for political gain (through conflict, much like Trump was doing in US).
The latter is what militant regimes do and did.
Trade imbalance is responsible for nearly 100% of wars. It is always about backing a nation into a corner where their status quo is untenable.
And despite nationalism being part of the fuel of WWII, trade imbalance was both the biggest log and the match.
Weimar Republic's economic problems were mostly related to hyperinflation caused by their unsustainable debt, not sure how you're factoring trade deficits into that.
I agree nationalism is just an excuse like any other, but it's a remarkably good one: it's a cancerous mind virus that makes solving problems impossible, everyone is too busy calling everyone else unpatriotic or something.
It caused central banking failures all throughout Central Europe. Germany's banking system collapsed in the early 30s. In the wake of the Depression, European nations had very protectionist trade policies. With weakened international trade as a result of such policies, countries like Germany that did not have global empires had to resort to military force to acquire raw materials.
WWII was inevitable and that summary of the Weimar Republic's problems is overly-simplistic to the point of being misleading.
It's not enough just to look at trade imbalance from the lens of balance sheets. It's about what resources markets are (un)able to provide. You can look at the Opium wars similarly, which we think based on the name are about Opium but really were largely about the Silver trade from West to East and China's refusal to circulate that Silver back into the market.
Defecits are fine as long as everyone thinks they have reasonably fair access to the same resources. Notice the soft trade war that started mostly as a result of global manufacturing shifting to China and China's theft of IP...
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Hermann Goering
The sexist language is historically correct. Sorry ladies, history wasn't kind to you in general.
Nationalism is about building a strong us/them split, about having people internalize clear categories of Our Nation and The Others. This directly facilitates war.
This seems accurate, but time will tell.
Peacetime commerce requires free waterways. Everyone can "just trade" because the U.S. Navy has guaranteed free navigation of the seas since Bretton Woods[1]. When America withdraws from its security obligations, others will fill the vacuum, with all the uncertainty that implies.
A national leader who fears being cut off from essential resources will very logically view war as an option.
Edit:
I'd argue that the real reason for being able to "just trade" is simply that most countries aren't interested in warring and impeding this: The agreement works out for many. The organizations set up at Bretton Woods would be in place even if the US fails completely.
Sure it does. Every dictator knows that if he builds up a little navy to extract advantage over his neighbors by claiming sea lanes, there's a good chance he'll get smacked down by the world's largest navy. Navies are expensive to build, and this threat keeps most (exception: China) from even trying. That creates certainty for shippers, their customers, their insurance companies, and the economies in which they operate.
no one can really expect the US to keep any sort of agreements
To the extent you're correct, national leaders will feel the need to build up their own navies. If the US isn't going to protect their sea lanes, they will be forced to take on that responsibility themselves.
most countries aren't interested in warring
Most. What about the others? All it takes is one bully in your neighborhood to cause serious problems. Will the enlightened nations of the world come to your rescue? Maybe. Maybe not. It may cost you.
The organizations set up at Bretton Woods would be in place even if the US fails completely.
Bretton Woods is an agreement, and an agreement is only as good as its enforcement. Free global trade can only happen as long as someone enforces it, by keeping those sea lanes open. When the US withdraws, how long before a country decides it can exploit that insecurity to its advantage?
I do not share your optimism.
If the US cedes the sea, every other oceangoing nation will be forced to build up its navy to preserve its trade security. More armed ships at sea under more flags will lead to more flashpoints, more clashes, and more opportunities for small conflicts to spin out of control.
Withdrawing from the sea may turn out to be the smart move for the US, but I believe it will portend bad things for the rest of the world.
They're showing strength because they want to keep the waterways open for international use.
> and less on making sure folks can trade or have safety.
The US has plenty of anti-piracy efforts across the globe.
These questions don't exist in a vacuum, and wars are terrible ways to secure resources as the US's adventurism in the Middle East has shown.
If your goal is say, oil, it's still cheaper to just buy it.
Perhaps US action in ME gasp isn't to seize physical resources then?
> the U.S. Navy has guaranteed free navigation
The sea has never belonged to anyone but this statement implies that the US has ownership rights with regards to ocean usage that they now let others use at their whim.
The only word I can use to describe that is hubris
However on the open sea, there is no such authority. What's to stop someone from sailing up and seizing your crew and cargo? You don't know the nationality of these pirates, and even if you did you have no way of forcing their government to do anything about it. Indeed they may be working for that government. You could try to defend yourself, but then the pirates will just better arm themselves and the odds of violence escalating dramatically increases.
Someone needs to prevent piracy and unlawful seizure for international shipping to be possible at its current scale. Having a single power guarantee free navigation allows ships to cross the world while avoiding complicated jurisdiction divides (if one nation won't give you permission to sail through its waters, you can go around) and eliminates jurisdictional overlap (Country A says Country B's ship is committing piracy and vice versa) which could lead to conflict. It's also just more efficient as the vast majority of nations don't need to duplicate the infrastructure to maintain a navy that can protect assets on the other side of the world - which also means countries don't need to enter arms races to protect themselves from their neighbors' defensive fleets "just in case" they aren't really that defensive.
> Having a single power guarantee free navigation allows ships to cross the world while avoiding complicated jurisdiction divides
So the rest of us are to assume the US taxpayer and their government are acting in good faith? nothing in return for having all those ships and men out there for months at a time? Whats the cost to the US for protecting assets from Guinea-Bissau?
> Someone needs to prevent piracy and unlawful seizure for international shipping to be possible at its current scale
I don't think you get the gist of my argument. To put it simply, to whom does the US account in their capacity as police of international waters?
Who said the US must be that 'someone'? Even the UN - if we won't kid ourselves is a US institution - might have been acceptable. A single power's whims are to be trusted for what reason? How do we know they wont collaborate with Pirates and other bad actors? Who will bring them to book or answer questions?
In practice the US has such an immense navy that while it guarantees free navigation there is no real need for other nations to, and if it were to oppose free navigation there is no navy that could stop it, so at the moment the US de facto decides if free navigation is guaranteed, but there is nothing de jure entrenching the US in that position - should it ever derelict its duties or otherwise grow weak there is nothing stopping another nation, or group of nations, from taking up the mantle.
On the other hand if an international body were to be set up to do the job, then we become totally reliant on its efficacy. It's impossible to have a truly independent organization - the people who compose it, as well as the people who provide material resources to it, are not independent and unbiased - and unlike a nation which benefits from the trade it protects, this organization's only incentive would be to appease its backers. Even if it avoided malicious corruption, it would fundamentally entrench the geopolitical status quo, and getting everyone to agree to remove it may be impossible even if it strays woefully far from its mission.
The US's position may rub a lot of people the wrong way, they see the US as being some sort of self-appointed overlord and fear if it has nefarious intent. They fail to realize the level of gross indifference that the US has towards the larger world. We just want to be able to import cheap crap, any benefit to other nations is purely ancillary, and we will continue on our course for precisely as long as it is the easiest way of maintaining our steady supply of cheap crap.
I'd say we are in the beginning/mid stages of that now.
As long as politicians didn't fear for their own precious lives, they didn't mind throwing heaps of others' lives to shift the balance of power by 1%. They weren't starting these wars for merely economical value of land or money - it was always about (non-economical) value of power. Since 1945-1949, the stakes are suddenly too high and that's why don't have major wars anymore.
Information about other powers is much more accessible now and spying is easier given the internet. If they weaker power knew beforehand that they were in fact weaker, it makes no sense to challenge.
...except for that tiny detail where we're still critically dependent on raw materials that can only be economically extracted in certain parts of the world.
Maybe mathematicians only need a blackboard and some chalk to do their work, but the remaining "knowledge based" economy needs computers, of which many parts are produced in a country [1] which is claimed by another country [2] that's been growing increasingly aggressive in recent years.
[1] Taiwan.
[2] China.
Whereas with raw materials, like rare earths: China has a lock on rare earth's because they're willing to completely destroy their own land's to get them, not because they're actually "rare".
We are arguably in a local minima with regards to rare earth extraction because nothing has pushed us to automate the human element out of it and they're not needed in sufficient quantity yet.
That’s a contingent, not a necessary fact. The Haber-Bosch process was invented to provide nitrogen for German armaments faced with the same kinds of difficulties. If you really need something the fact that it just got ten times more expensive matters very little.
Extreme events are really badly understood by many popular writers as demonstrated by Harari's 2016 book "Homo Deus" which stated pandemics are a thing of the past.
If the OP refers to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War there's thousands of deaths involved
How do you figure that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Ukrainian_cr...
Or even more broadly, if you want peace, study history and make it an important part of your decision making process.
I've always heard: if you want peace, prepare for war
I’d always interpreted this to imply that deterrence was good - appear strong to prevent others picking a fight with you, rather than studying.
I always wondered if the 9mm Parabellum cartridge was named after the saying too, but no such enlightenment is available on the Wikipedia page at least [1]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_vis_pacem,_para_bellum
That and the fact that war is not like in books or movies: it is ugly and best avoided.
Can't speak for all instructors, but mine went directly to technique for those who ran/cycled to the gym and stretched before the class, letting the rest warm up in the meantime... running.
Also most demonstrations you can see on the Internet always end with running and most comments make fun of that, so it's certainly included in the practice.
Yes, this is conventional wisdom. But it's time to give it up and try something new before someone accidentally annihilates the world as we know it.
Studying history is not a bad start.
While this is a quote about civil war, it points out a key fact. A country with a strong middle class is much less likely to send its children to war over stupid things. Even the USA barely sent 177,000 troops to Iraq and, despite a jingoistic upswell from 9/11, it was still terribly unpopular.
In my opinion, if you want peace, study poverty.
Unless you force drafts with hard punishments for those avoiding of course, but such an army would have very low morale not only these days.
This is my qualitative sense from studying history, and it seems to hold up quantitatively based on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll
I submit the first few chapters of Wages of Destruction as my source. I am totally unqualified to summarize it, but it's shock full of data that support this thesis. It's a really good book.
It's an excellent book if you're into economics. It gives you a much better understanding of Germany's hand, and how it affected its politics.
However, I'm not referring to the wealth of the countries themselves, but the concentration of wealth within them. Both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were desperately poor with a starving citizenry. Germany from paying reparations completely devaluing their currency and Japan from a lack of natural resources. The empires of the 18th and 19th century would be third world states by our standards. Life was cheap and people dying en masse wasn't a big deal.
Modern USA hardly even engages in full scale warfare since Vietnam. Now we have a few limited engagements against small countries without any real backers. Even then the tiny US losses from those wars has killed our taste for them. Even Donald Trump is disengaging from them.
It's hard to send a bunch of people to die when they are the ones holding the wealth of your nation. It's much easier to send the poor huddled masses if they exist.
For a somewhat objective example, look at the life expectancy around those years ... Japan and especially Germany are near the top both before and after the war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_life...
Modern USA hardly even engages in full scale warfare since starting one of the deadliest wars of the late 20th century, except for the time we started the deadliest war of the 21st century?
Your reasoning strikes me as kind of post-hoc, but maybe I'm mistaken .. could you say more precisely what you think causes countries to go to war, in a way that I could take a random country and see if it fits the criteria?
In this instance, I'm talking about preventing war. A major factor is ensuring that those most responsible for paying for the war in taxes and blood (Lower and middle classes) have the wealth and the power to say no. (Convincing them that NO is the right answer is another thing!)
The wealth of the countries themselves is not necessarily the wealth of the people who live within them. Take a look at the so called "Banana republics."
I don't know exactly what you disagree with in my reasoning or what exactly is ad-hoc but I always love to talk about it.
Now, to address a few of the facts above:
Japan and Germany were both desperately poor following World War I. It was only after significant military expansion that they reached the prosperity you mention above. Japan gained most of their wealth through their expansion during the Showa era and consecutive wars.
Nazi Germany started from the poverty of 1933 with the suspension of civil liberties after the burning of the Reichstag. Their economic success was mostly spurred by efforts to gear up their military. By that point it was too late for any middle class to object and they hardly had the power to avoid being sent to concentration camps.
China makes us all look like pikers when it comes to war. Mao Zedong and the Chinese Nationalist party before him engaged in mass killings to make your blood turn cold. The modern PRC is the result of almost constant wars consolidating the region we now refer to as "China." Before the 20th century, the countries that make up modern China were engaged in almost constant warfare.
As for Mexico, they barely have anyone to go to war with anymore. In fact, part of the reason there is a wall between the US and Mexico in Nogales is because of a war between the two about 100 years ago after World War I.
Mexico seems to mostly be wrapped up in insurrections and criminal organizations lately though. I wouldn't be surprised if some intelligence agency cooked up most of Mexico's problems during the 1960s to keep them weak and it's just been burning since then. Sort of a Cold War toxic waste spill... But that's pure speculation of the quality used in light fiction.
> Roger: As my mother used to say, your options were dishonor or war. You chose dishonor, you might still get war.
> Don: That was Churchill.
It's almost oddly metaphysical, and relevant in zero-sum games.
Also:
"evidence of how you have come to understand the barriers faced by others, evidence of your academic service to advance equitable access to higher education for women, racial minorities, and individuals from other groups that have been historically underrepresented in higher education, evidence of your research focusing on underserved populations or related issues of inequality, or evidence of your leadership among such groups.”
It's funny how some forms of censorship are evil, but other forms are lauded.
They are essentially demanding that research 'be in service to' a specific intersectional perspective, which has to be the opposite of academic freedom.
I wonder if any studies have done on military/intelligence/political leaders who were War Studies graduates? I.e were they better at it?
...
> history overall is worryingly in decline as an academic subject
There might be a connection there.
People who want to think about social justice will go to the political science department. Nothing wrong with that. But people who are passionate about history want professors who are also passionate about history.
History and social justice can go together, of course, but the passion really goes behind one or the other.
- Georg Hegel
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12801-we-learn-from-history...
Slightly related, because they have "He who wants peace shall speak of war" at their entrance: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/Be...
How much is left as an open question.
It is also very hard to grasp that a war can start just like that, so people tend to dismiss clues too: 'Nah, they won't do it.'
Any validity to this theory?
Carol Quigley's theory is that technology changes the balance of power, sometimes favoring centralized power other times favoring decentralized power. Cavalry/knights/castles favored centralized power because equipping knights with armor and feeding their horses required a lot of peasants. The invention of cheap firearms led to the masses having more power (and around this time democracy began to spread). Then tanks, ICBMs, aircraft, submarines, etc. centralized power again, where we remain today, although that may be changing with cheapish drones and semi-successful insurgency tactics.
Cavalry could not break many infantry formations. You were safe in a square.
Cavalry was great at harassing supply lines in raids, and importantly running down fleeing infantry.
This is all purely a European perspective, steepe cavalry was very different, but many of their benefits were at a larger scale than a single battle.
Generally the whole thing is too complicated to draw some simple conclusion from. War is, and always has been complicated and messey, not a game of chess.
With that said: I think that whenever a human or organization has a stable situation with their current affairs, they can afford to take more risk. Attacking weapons don't necessarily make a situation stable, they simply give an edge when you have them. However, when you're the only one that has them and are stable enough, then you might be able to annihilate entire civilizations (e.g. the Aztecs versus a few hundred Spanish people). But when more people have them, then they can point them at you, making your own situation more unstable if you provoke those people.
The Castle was built as a place to live on your land so you could keep it. If there was a peasant revolt the castle meant they couldn't do anything about you, while your army could leave anytime the peasants were busy elsewhere to harass them. Thus the castle enabled war as you said, but the castle generally came after raising the army in the first place.
> If you're in a castle, it's easier to send armies around, knowing that you'll be safe.
I do not think that is how it worked historically.
Well that escalated from extolling the benefits of studying war to extolling the benefits of waging them rather quickly.
“Although anthropologists and archeologists still wonder why human beings have for so long organized themselves to fight...”
Do they? Surely that bit is just an obvious extension of conflict in evolution, i.e. it’s the thinking meat’s equivalent to organisms taking nutrients away from each other instead of from the sun.
Not sure there’s really any evidence that teaching military history is going to somehow diffuse future conflicts to be honest. The most likely candidates for our long peace have little to do with us becoming students of military history.
But why the elite of a nation will start a war will all the consequences and the danger of loosing territory. Of course, this elite believes they will never suffer the consequences of war. That's why nuclear weapons are a terrifying deterrent.
However, something I read recently was very illuminating: every time somebody decides to go to war, believes it is going to be short and quick. You don't start a war when you don't believe you have a clear advantage. We can also see that many times this thought was wrong and led to lengthy with a high cost on human lives.
I think any idea of the noble war between great nations died in the trenches of the first world war, although it was definitely preempted by the Army Napoleon assembled.
"It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."
With the current technology, computer, genetics, and just the sheer creativity of the human mind, any country can contribute to the world trade, and start making bricks from sand using bacteria, any amount of food if they plant pine trees or palm trees which they both have an edible and highly nutritious bark, poison free too. The bark of these trees diminish the thirst so humans need a lot less water, contrary to, say producing livestock for meat. It is not economically viable any more, to create an educated and highly productive population, just to send them killed in a moments notice.
I am all about occasionally suspending the peace for a war, for one philosophical reason. The only truth in the world, is death. Someone can bribe a basketball team to lose, but not an army. No one dies for money. When one male kills another in a fight, we all know the dead gave it all to stay alive. When there is too much unhealthy peace in place, people start believing in lies.
That recent covid hysteria, i think it proves me right.
> Do we ever want another president asking, as Donald Trump did during a visit to the Pearl Harbor memorial: “What’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?”
Yeah, but Donald Trump is old and studied before decline of military history. And I dont think it was failure of his school, someone who dont care and insists on not caring, wont remember.
Also, I read about military group having that logo, it was written about due to crossing the lines.
War culls human populations, and carries out natural selection.
So it's "good" for something even if we don't want to admit it or to use the word "good" when bringing up those things.
These aren't good things. I mean, war does accomplish them, but… I'd rather they weren't accomplished.
War is a terrible selection pressure, if you value the light and good in this world. (Probably) less bad than the ones genocidal dictators apply, given how indiscriminate (and therefore bad at selection) it is, but it's certainly not in the “good” category.
Yes, natural selection at the civilization level. Those survivors will be the ones to write history and continue the species’ civilization.
Civilization gave rise to the warring forces and allowed them to come into power, and those forces in turn shape civilization.
> it’s certainly not in the “good” category.
Our sentiments don’t matter to the grand picture, which has been painted by thousands of wars and continues to be.
War is certainly not a natural calamity. It’s caused by millions of humans who willingly want it to happen, so maybe we “deserve” it, to be sentimental.
(of course I predict you will cherry pick some wars to be perfectly justified)
You’re just replacing a stone tablet with one in your head.
1.) There is massive random factor.
2.) The fittest are often selected for unit that have large mortality. That was the case of SS in Germany - supposed to be the fittest selection. And as result going to hardest fights dying the most.
In Russia, it was year of birth that made difference. The guys who were 18 by the start of the war died almost all. You was better off if you was 17 or 22.
3.) The fact is, the fit male goes to combat and is more likely to die. The weaker one who wont be selected for that, survives.
Sex education and free access to birth control, sterilization, and abortion lowers population without the trauma of war.