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Comment by wolframhempel | Hacker News Reader

I believe this will be an unpopular opinion - but I agree with your article. Conflict and war exists - today as much as ever - and shying away from engaging in it early doesn't make the war go away, it just makes it come to you.

So, in the spirit of "if you want peace, prepare for war", I believe the best way to life in peace is to remain peaceful yourself, but CONSISTENTLY engage in EARLY and AGGRESSIVE action which you see through to its CONCLUSION. And yes, in order to be successful, you have to have all of these four elements.

Unfortunately, western democracies repeatedly have fallen short on at least some of these aspects which emboldens everyone from giant countries like Russia or China down to tiny groups like the Huthis.

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The bad thing for the US is that one cannot win wars based on the Navy (or on Navy airplanes) alone, which I guess that's where Stavridis's take comes from. In order to win wars you need hundreds of thousands of people actually on the ground, holding the terrain, and even then the odds are not all in the attacker's favor (just look at the results of the infamous US surge in Iraq).

I get it though, with more than 30% of the US defence budget the Navy feels left out of the whole war thing recently (not that much the Navy can help with in the war against Russia), similar to how the Japanese admirals felt left out of China and Manchuria back in the late '30s, so they'll take any opportunity of a war that they think they'll win easily with the most open of arms.

> Conflict and war exists - today as much as ever

This is simply not true. With the exception of the recent Ukrainian war, violent deaths on Earth have been massively trending downward for decades.

There is much less war affecting many fewer people than ever before. This is no accident, and it is the result of hard work by people who don’t espouse these sorts misguided of “more aggression is better” beliefs. :(

> violent deaths on Earth have been massively trending downward for decades.

Right after they spiked to an all time high during WW1/WW2/Stalin/Mao reign.

I know what you mean and I don't want to dismiss it outright - a lot of the small conquests that dominated Europa for millennia have indeed vanished and the motivations for war in a knowledge economy are very different. But I think we've mostly switched lots of small wars between small countries for fewer big wars between bigger countries - with bigger intervals in between.

The trending downwards for decades statement requires to take measurement only in very specific timeframes and regions. If we take the last 100 years as a whole, they certainly have not.

The first and only use of nuclear weapons in war, ending the largest war in history, serves as a useful objective demarcation point.

There is indeed much less war now than then. It seems that the doctrine of mutually assured destruction is working, for better or worse.

Cold wars, proxy wars, limited in scope and scale wars - these are better than what came before.

> Right after they spiked to an all time high during WW1/WW2/Stalin/Mao reign.

But it wasn’t an all time high, if you look at proportions, as we should.

Pinker has talked a lot about this, and going far back in history [0] has estimates that 15% of people died from violent deaths compared to 0.15% during the peak of ww2 Germany.

[0] https://longnow.org/seminars/02012/oct/08/decline-violence/

> Pinker has talked a lot about this, and going far back in history [0] has estimates that 15% of people died from violent deaths compared to 0.15% during the peak of ww2 Germany.

7.5% of Germany's population died during WW2, that is just military deaths, excluding civilians dead from bombing raids by the Allies, hunger, disease, etc.

The 0.15% number is absolute nonsense, and anyone who is seriously using it, knows nothing about history (which is just about right for a fraud like Pinker)

>With the exception of the recent Ukrainian war, violent deaths on Earth have been massively trending downward for decades

You're clearly out of touch here.

The war in Ukraine was going on sice 2014, and you also missed the Armenian Azerbaijan war in Nagorno-Karabakh, then the Papua conflict, then the dozens of other conflict on the African continent. And don't forget the war on terror which cost thousands of lives, trillions of dollars, 4 US presidents and 20 years just to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.

War has never stopped. You just stopped looking for it since it's not happening in your back yard, if the only one you can mention is the one in Ukraine.

War didn’t stop, but even counting all of these, violent deaths on the planet are way, way down.

We don’t wage wars anywhere near the scale that we used to, and that’s a good thing.

The money is a different matter, of course.

Deaths went down compared to what? WW2 and Stalin and Mao's cleansings? That's not a high bar.

In relative terms (violent deaths per capita due to war) it went down compared to any period before the end of WW2.

French revolution, Napoleonic wars, American Civil War, wars of independence in Latin America, etc. comprise some 100 years. In the last 80 years we had markedly less deadly wars across the whole world...

Nobody said that war stopped. The claim is that per capita conflict deaths have declined. This is a precise claim which can't be addressed by simply listing a handful of wars that have occurred.

> result of hard work by people

Do you not think the hard work of people backed up by carrier strike groups is part of the equation? Ideally forced never has to be used, but sometimes it does.

Let me guess, you read Pinker recently.

> This is simply not true. With the exception of the recent Ukrainian war, violent deaths on Earth have been massively trending downward for decades.

"Decades" is a really short time frame IMO, especially if you're comparing to thousands of years of human history. It could totally just be a lucky "blip".

> This is no accident, and it is the result of hard work by people who don’t espouse these sorts misguided of “more aggression is better” beliefs. :(

Or, it's the result of the latter half of the 20th century being mostly dominated by two incredibly powerful countries, poised for war at any time. It could exactly be the result of the massive increase in potential for aggression that nuclear weapons pose.

I think it's very far from obvious that the reason for the relative peace of the last 70 years is because of work by people advocating peace.

Have you never encountered the idea of a proxy war before?

what's your point?

That the missiles target needs to be 35.7219° N, 51.3347° E

To prevent lots of HN'rs finding where that leads: it's Teheran, Iran.

When people talk about "diversifying their income stream", whose to say this cannot be applied from a geopolitical or much less an ideological view?

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