Here’s how much of your life the United States has been at war | Hacker News Reader

Here’s how much of your life the United States has been at war

washingtonpost.com

73 pointsdrawkbox89 comments

The terror wars are the most alarming because it has also militarized our police, created a lower bar for our justice system or two justice systems, created secret courts, attacked our Constitution with the Patriot Act, abolished privacy, and the cost is more than all other wars combined.

In the end, every war since WWII, where the world was decimated and we got the advantage of rebuilding, has left the country in a worse economic condition than the last. Every single war creates a sideways market and has created more imbalance.

We now have the possibility of losing the people internally and that is typically how all empires fall, from within due to overextended wars and lack of spending internally.

You could also throw in the War on Drugs as another war not recognized by this but that is the war that has taken the most of our freedoms since the War on Terror. Overriding the justice system to force moralistic laws, taking freedoms from individuals on a grand scale, general warrants that we crossed the ocean to get away from. There may be an end to the War on Drugs in some ways soon, but the War on Terror seems to have no end or way to end it until it has broken the US internally.

If 'terrorists hate our freedoms' then why are our lawmakers taking away our rights?

Both wars are on abstract ideas, and are pretty unwinnable wars.

American wars will never stop precisely because the war has no great adverse impact on American lives.

When other countries go to war, like Pakistan against India for example, their citizens feel the pain. So sooner or later they realize war is not all that good and they form an uneasy peace agreement. Americans have no such compulsion towards peace, because the wars they finance always ruin some other country and kill some other people. At the same time, it sustains a good war economy and keeps the public occupied. These wars are win-win from the perspective of the American establishment.

As a side note, this is why 9/11 was such a monumental event from an American point of view: it was one of the very few times that Americans were in the crosshairs. As Chomsky put it "This is stuff that we do to you, you don't do it to us."

Except it does. We hurt our performance on the world stage by predominantly throwing away something close to a trillion dollars a year, plus the millions of able bodied Americans wasting their lives killing or enabling it.

Take away all the waste from the DoD - from the war on terror - hell, go back, and undo all the rampant spending and insanity that existed throughout the Cold War, without all the nuke stockpiling, all the R&D and intense investment in newer and better arms, all the money we poured into foreign states to play a game of chess on the International stage with lives, cultures, and nations. Instead, spend it on research, NASA, borrow less, tax less, give us a citizens dividend, maintain infrastructure, anything even remotely productive with that money (and I do not want to hear any of that "defense spending = ROI from R&D", you are so much more efficient researching helpful things rather than ways to kill people. Where would we be? How much potential has been lost to the bloodlust of some American plutocrats playing a game of money with the lives and potential of billions?

You don't feel it directly because the Fed and DoD have gotten smarter about how to act as a cancerous leech on society. Rather than forge a war economy and make it a temporary thing, that you cannot maintain long term, you simply apportion huge swathes of tax revenue and borrowed money to funding your murder games. You use your hold on mainstream media to manipulate the culture into favoring your goals. You use your position as ushers of military might to label any formidable opposition as national traitors.

But no, a black hole of hundreds of billions of dollars and unfathomable amounts of human potential is a tremendous drain on any society. It will kill us. It is a slow death, by design. You are not supposed to feel it. But it is self destructive in a way only war can be.

You sound like one of those crazy guys in the movies who walks around with a sign around his neck that says "The end is near."

And yet here we are. Doing better than ever.

Better than ever? That's factually incorrect. The majority of Americans were better off in the late 70's. Median wealth has been declining.

LOL. No.

Ahem. Lol, yes.

I challenge you to find a single source backing up that assertion. Even the most pessimistic show that median household wealth has stayed flat since the 70s. None show it declining.

It was von Clausewitz or Bismarck, I don't recall offhand, who called these "cabinet wars", that a country could quietly fight in the background without citizens really being affected at all.

The cure for the American love of war is to have more of these wars fought on the American mainland.

Thats the greatest ruse. There will never be another war on American soil. At least anything other than opportunistic strikes - suicide bombers, untraceable ICBM strikes, or attacks by non-governmental groups. You will never see Chinese, Russian, Mexican... any foreign nationalities soliders walking down the streets of New York or LA. A real war, in the modern world, without all the bullshit proxyisms and toying with lives, is resolved with nuclear arms first and foremost.

Don't think for a second this country would tolerate anything less than nuclear retaliation to a ground invasion of the mainland USA by a foreign government. Hell, an organized terrorist group would see themselves nuked out of existence if they tried to do a land invasion. It is instant suicide to attack America directly. Why do you think the entire point of the Taliban during the 80s against Russia, and of all the myriad terrorist groups operating against the USA today, was to lead a band of nomads to commit suicide raids and guerrilla attacks against them? They knew they could never "win" a war. They could just make their enemy lose. They worked to help bleed the USSR dry, and are winning by all their own metrics to this day by doing the same to the USA. They hide in caves while we flush a trillion a year down the toilet in the name of security against them. And people wonder how Rome fell.

This kind of thinking, the same of Fox News and the media uses, is what support this "war on terror". All of great empires thought they would never been invaded or destroyed. Until they were. It would not be that impossible to invade USA if the country's foreign policy keep turning every country in the world into an enemy. A full war against Americans (which is not impossible to happen, as the US is doing bad even to european countries) would put US in a very fragile situation.

All the great empires did not have weapons that could render the planet uninhabitable a hundred times over. Don't act like nuclear arms did not change war.

No, the USA would not survive a global war versus every other power. The US has enough missile subs, secret launch bases, and distributed silos to make it impossible to do a joint strike to eliminate the entire American nuclear arsenal. But very few would survive that war - most of the planet would be an irradiated uninhabitable wasteland. I would expect you would have survivors of a global nuclear war, but it would not be a pleasant world to live in.

There is no situation where you could do a ground invasion and takeover of any sufficiently nuclear armed first world country where that country would not use nukes as a final measure. That is what they are for. I mean go ahead, try taking over Pakistan and see if they don't nuke you for it, for example.

"All the great empires did not have weapons that could render the planet uninhabitable a hundred times over"

Like Ukraine's nuclear weapons protected it from Russia ?

Here is a clue. As the world situation changed, Ukraine lost its nuclear weapons. Want to bet that will NEVER happen to the USA or the successor of the USA ?

I see the country's involvement in war as an inevitability born from the continued evolution of the military industrial complex. Like any organization, a primary goal of the military is for it to self sustain. To reduce its size to a level suitable for peace time you'd need to fight back against so many incentives to keep things the way they are. It's a Herculean task.

This pressure to scale it back was supposed to come from Congress but it's no secret that the public's faith is in Congress's ability to do their job is at an all time low.

So now you always have to have a conflict. Slowly the bar for what merits involvement gets lower. Other comments here have echoed my fear that the bar may get so low that the focus to find a suitable enemy turns inward.

I spent almost six years working for the Department of Defense. From my perspective, the entire organization is engaged in a giant game with two objectives. One, funnel as much money as possible to defense contractors. Two, keep the game going for as long as possible, by any means possible.

What's more interesting than the "definitions of 'at war'" are the definitions of "young men and women [who have] died," "children [who] lost a parent or sibling" and "life-altering injuries".

Apparently ABC's Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent thinks only U.S. men, women and children are worth counting.

Well, it is Memorial Day, an American holiday to remember Americans who have died in wars.

The speech was given on May 16. Moreover, the definition of what constitutes a human doesn't change on Memorial Day.

I don't want to diminish the difficulty and danger the soldiers at the front today face, or the danger that the civilians in those areas face, but I'm not sure that the war on terror belongs to the same category of conflict as world war two.

Actually, because Congress or the President have not yet acted, we have been in a period of war since 1990.

http://www.benefits.va.gov/pension/wartimeperiod.asp

source: am Veteran/Military lawyer

Good information, so essentially the Gulf War never ended, and war powers have been active since 1990.

> Mexican Border Period (May 9, 1916 – April 5, 1917 for Veterans who served in Mexico, on its borders, or adjacent waters)

> World War I (April 6, 1917 – November 11, 1918)

> World War II (December 7, 1941 – December 31, 1946)

> Korean conflict (June 27, 1950 – January 31, 1955)

> Vietnam era (February 28, 1961 – May 7, 1975 for Veterans who served in the Republic of Vietnam during that period; otherwise August 5, 1964 – May 7, 1975)

> Gulf War (August 2, 1990 – through a future date to be set by law or Presidential Proclamation)

That makes the Gulf War the longest war combined with the terror wars from the article (2001-present). We are only 15 years into this century and already have seen as much war as last century which included the world wars. I guess perpetual war has already started.

So the durations increased monotonically, except for WWII as kind-of-surprisingly defined to last through 1946 making it edge out Korea. I didn't expect such a simple pattern.

Odd that they don't seem to count the Cold War. I understand that their measure of what they count as a war is subjective, but surely the Cold War impacted the average person's life at least as much as the War on Terror and had a significantly bigger economic impact.

http://www.visaliatimesdelta.com/story/news/local/2014/08/09...

Killed last year in Afghanistan at age 19. He was six years old on 11 September 2001.

Is there something particularly noteworthy about this case?

Both sides have youth signing up in droves to kill each other, and each individual is simultaneously a courageous hero fighting for freedom, or subhuman trash.

Wow that's very sad.

What I'm going to say seems like extremely unpopular opinion, but why exactly is it sad? Because somebody died? Yeah, sure, this part could be sad, except people die all the time.

Because "Young Brave American Soldier" was killed by "the enemies"? Oh hell no. He didn't die on someone's behalf: he was the one who invaded somebody's home country and was killed by people protecting that place from people like him. I'm more grieving for people he killed, than for himself.

Maybe it's sad because he died because of USA government, who is so fond of making war? For me, it doesn't seem to work either: as far as I know USA has a volunteer military, nobody forced him into it. He has consciously chosen killing others (and, possibly, being killed himself) as his professional activity. For me, the fact he voluntarily made such choice is more sad than the fact he suffered from it.

So why exactly is it sad?

I found it sad simply because we now have soldiers dying on foreign battlefields who were only children when our government - speaking for the will of the majority at the time - decided to get into these conflicts.

We now have soldiers dying for a war that they were too young to understand or debate about whether they should enter it at that time. So even if a young man or woman wants to enter the military with the ideal to serve their country, but not necessarily on the old battlefields of the last decade, he or she really has no choice. Either you enter the military and sign on to the fact that you may enter a war that you had no say in or you choose a different path in life. For some, that could be a difficult, sad position to be in. When they lose their life, it's even sadder.

it's sad because the fact that he thought that his choice was the best for his country - a sort of misplaced, misguided loyalty. And it's being taken advantage of by those in power to propagate an agenda that doesn't benefit many americans at all.

Would you extend the same courtesy to fighters on the other side?

Yes.

"More than 6,500 young men and women died in these wars"

I love how the hundreds of thousands of people WE killed somehow don't make it into this count.

MILLIONS that we killed, not hundreds of thousands.

The body count in just Iraq is over 200,000.

https://www.iraqbodycount.org/

This is the way the American world looks. Bleak and littered with corpses.

Don't conflate the mindset and vision of the sociopaths in charge of the United States with the mindset and vision of the people trapped within their grasp.

Actually the way the American world looks, is one in which no major world powers have gone to war since WW2 ended, with America maintaining the peace and protecting Western Europe from the Soviet Union.

Global poverty and global violence - in fact, nearly every major negative measurement has plunged in the last 70 years during which America has reigned. The global median income and standard of living keeps rising. The world has never had it so good, as it has during the time in which America has been the leading superpower.

Endless war among major nations for centuries. America becomes the global superpower, not a single major war between major nations in 70 years.

Two world wars in 25 years. Zero world wars - despite vast global military armament, including two aggressive communist powers that murdered a hundred million of their own people combined - in 70 years. America has been the sole thing holding it all in check.

Global wealth - at an all time high. Global charity - at an all time high. Global median income - at an all time high. Global median standard of living - at an all time high. Child death rates, at all time lows. Science, space, manufacturing, global trade, innovation, opportunity, education, pick a topic - the world has never been better off than it has been the last 70 years on average, and especially since the collapse of the USSR and old-line Communist China, both of which occurred on America's watch.

That is one way of seeing it.

Here is another way: global period of prosperity in which a world superpower has (momentarily?) solved the problem of maintaining its supremacy (mainly economic, but also military and political) by leeching the rest of the world using various mechanisms: dollar as reserve country, military occupation of resource rich countries - sometimes by tacit alliances with repressive regimes - international intellectual property agreements skewed to favor the home economy, rigged international financial markets ...

Which is fine, but here is the problem: it is not that America has chosen the "peace-americana", it is that the "peace-americana" is working in its favor. As soon as it does not work anymore, the US will very willingly fight other major powers, in a race to the bottom.

All this, of course, discounting the fact that during the "peace-americana" the US has killed millions of people (most of whom are innocent bystanders), while at the same time suffering the loss of a couple of thousand people. Every person killed is a big loss, and that means the millions of people killed are a very big loss, even if you do not care.

So, what is the grudge we in the rest of the world have with the US? Speaking for myself, just the fact that you are not using the chance that this period of prosperity is giving the world to engage in a permanent and objective international state of affairs, which is not just a way for you to control us and maintain your supremacy.

You are just a bully, which is to be expected: everybody would do exactly the same thing in your situation. Just don't try to sell it as something that it is not.

And let me tell you one more thing: even if it is in your short-term interest to act as you are doing, long-term it is just stupid. Instead of fostering collaboration you are creating enemies (Russia, China, some parts of south america, now even Europe); in the long run, your supremacy will be eroded and you will fall, like all empires fall. The question is if another empire will come, or an international cosmopolitan establishment will be created to regulate the relations among people on Earth (hopefully not country-based anymore). You could have lead this path, but my impression (based on the status of the world and particularly the US economy, as related to the upcoming powers) is that that chance has already passed.

This is a very salient and valid point. Life really sucks for a lot of people, but it is very good for more of humanity than it's ever been.

Here here! Very well said!

> Young Americans have lived in a country at war for almost their whole lives, but they have to be reminded of it.

This statement would benefit from a historical chart of journalism practices in war reporting.

There's something more to it, though.

America has such a massive commercial and industrial apparatus (regardless of what anybody trying to puff up the Chinese or Russians might say) that we have effectively made it entirely possible to maintain a relatively high state of war without the general economy really ever feeling it.

In concert with this, the clever manipulation of the populace by both mainstream media, government agencies, and also by internet news outlets has allowed the populace to at once constantly fear for their safety while never actually building to the point of questioning why, exactly, the same officials and policies are held day in and day out. This isn't the matter of conspiracies, mind you, it's simply business.

The utterly terrifying thing is that, in the meanwhile, all of us nice techies have been training people to accept ubiquitous surveillance and even outright writing the tools ourselves.

And so, the credible foreign enemies gone, we see all this apparatus beginning to turn inwards.

Can us nice techies put our minds towards a non-violent economic migration plan for the entire military-industrial complex :) Other industries are regularly lectured on the merits of adapting to a changing economy.

The best way to think of the military industrial complex is a giant social and corporate welfare program. Just like there are prison towns, where the entire non-imprisoned population depends on the prisoners for jobs, there are entire swaths of our country dependent on military bases, contractors, etc.

There is also a disturbing ratchet effect. It is almost always easier to argue for more (weapons/surveillance/police/prisons) in the name of safety. Far more difficult to argue against them. So we only seem to be moving in one direction.

The seemingly-now-inevitable decriminalization of marijuana and lessening on the Drug War in the US notwithstanding (which is a welcome development, but I'm not sure it is because of a general discontent with the militarized state of daily life)

When it comes to military conflict we're certainly only moving in one direction: smaller.

if you were the president, how would you solve this problem? and solve it without upsetting the large number of people who currently rely on the military/war machine to sustain themselves? It's probably true that those people offer next to nothing of real value - but the current system is set up such that they are at least living a middle class lifestyle (think military subcontractors), and would do much to try and perserve their way of life.

It's a hard problem because the productive economy doesn't require so many people, and yet, overt welfare is shunned.

One starting point would be a public dialogue about the topic.

This is dumb. Being "at war" is not binary and it's silly to think of it as such. Call the US's involvement whatever you want, but saying it's the same thing as WWI or WWII is insane.

It's not at all, at least from a financial standpoint:

http://cironline.org/sites/default/files/legacy/files/June20...

We've spent more on the Middle East than WW1 and Vietnam combined.

Not in terms of % of GDP which is the only measure that actually matters.

It doesn't strike you as, I don't know, a little odd, that we have paid for a Vietnam and a WW1 without noticing it?

Yes, the sheer performance of the rest of the economy has enabled the % GDP to be smaller than previously, but that doesn't make the scale of the thing any less impressive.

It doesn't strike me as odd at all. We are vastly richer now than we were in the 1970s. When I was 12 years old $10 was a huge amount of money for me. Now it's lunch. You've gotta look at things relatively, not on an absolute scale.

it doesn't strike me as odd that 1% is less than 13%. We have a lot more money now.

WWI had 116k deaths. Vietnam had 58k deaths. Post 9/11 wars have had about 6500.

All of them are tragic, but the fact that we spent a similar amount of inflation adjusted money is not really that important.

1. the human loss of life isn't remotely comparable. 2. as a % of GDP, it's still significantly less.

I think it would be hard to grow up during WWI and not notice. I've been an adult for most of the post 9/11 wars, and it's only had a small effect on my life as I've had close friends who have gone to Iraq and Afghanistan (and thankfully returned). If not for those few friends, it would have had almost no effect on me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Janus_%28Roman_Forum%...

> But that state of war, we are told (I am too young to know better) feels different than America during World War II...

Whenever my dad or grandparents would talk about war, they'd always mention how less involved our current wars are.

During those wars, it was an all-out effort on the homefront and you were constantly reminded that you were under attack.

It's crazy how shut-off we are from current conflicts because of 1) the scale, and 2) the distance. Even though the news _constantly_ reported on the Iraq War and the conflicts over in the Middle East, it wasn't something I thought about while I was growing up.

I wonder how much more respect our soldiers would see, and how less willing we'd be to go to war if we actually felt impacts day-to-day. (E.g., rationing, everybody knowing somebody overseas, women taking over factories, etc.)

The fact that the conflicts of today are much much smaller (by any measure you choose to use) than those of last century is a WONDERFUL THING. It's not crazy. It's AWESOME. Fewer people are dying or being injured. It's costing less money. Fewer people's lived are impacted. It's one of the biggest areas of progress for mankind. Celebrate it!

This is true only if the effects are symmetrical. If we're barely feeling the effects and our opponents are in agony, that's not a step forward, as we have no motivation to end the conflict and the total suffering may actually increase.

The effects are symmetrical:

http://d35brb9zkkbdsd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013...

Don't take it wrong! I love that we're decreasing the number of deaths.

I hope and pray the wars continue to dwindle and become smaller. But I also hope people _feel_ the effects of wars. If wars are painless for us, save for the few who lose loved ones, then it becomes so easy to ignore just how terrible they are.

As shown elsewhere, especially from the American side, this is simply not true. Your assertion about fewer people's lives being impacted is also quite false--just look at any airport on holiday.

This is no progress at all. Instead, we've gotten to the point where we can maintain any number of flashpoints we like, at any time, with any amount of media coverage desired, and all without ever having to have a useful policy discussion about it with our citizens.

The thing about the large wars of the past? After a while the citizenry lost their taste for it, because it cost them directly. Our current state of affairs is, sadly, not evolving in that direction.

Having to trudge through slightly more annoying security is vastly different than 400,000 Americans (give or take) that died in combat during WW2.

I by no means am saying things are perfect, but if you can't see progress in this chart than you're holding your hands over your eyes:

http://d35brb9zkkbdsd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013...

It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs man. We're doing a hell of a lot better on the bottom level of the pyramid. It's gonna take some time to work it's way up to the top.

We're just going to have to agree to disagree.

There are still people out there who think the world is flat or that we faked the moon landing. I'll happily agree to disagree with them as well.

At least those people aren't standing on a pile of corpses, cheering for more.

Appalling (from the speech):

"More than 6,500 young men and women died in those wars"

Strangely typical that people forget that "human" is a definition that applies to more than just "American". Just take one of the wars, the Iraq war, and include in your definition of "young men and women" at least the Iraqi civilians that also died and you should have a number above 112,000+ that died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

This slip of the tongue speaks volumes.

What really drove it home for me was how much my Mom freaked out when the war in Kuwait broke. I was seventeen at the time, and she was worried that I would get drafted.

My wife didn't realize until yesterday (we're in our 30s) that all young men 18-25 still have to sign up for the Selective Service database

It drove home what for you exactly? The fact that your mom was irrationally worried about something that was never going to happen?

No one in the US has been drafted in over 40 years.

The last time it happened, people my mother's age were the ones being drafted. It really looked like a flashback experience.

And if you want to insult my mother, please do it to my face. Thanks.

what about the "war on drugs", which If I recall was 1990? Or the Cold war? How are these not the same as the war on terrorism (which gets some sort of recognition specially here, maybe just to make things look more dramatic)? Wars against ideals or ambiguous targets make this binary thing very difficult to pin down.

1971 by Richard Nixon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs

sure, the question of "what is a war?" fits what you're describing but not the question of "is the US at war?" which is a binary matter of whether Congress and the President have taken us to a war

There have been very few years when the USA military wasn't engaged in a military conflict: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_milit...

"We've always been at war with Eastasia".

This is not true. The US hasn't been at war since WWII. Everything since has been a conflict. Even Vietnam.

It's too bad the article didn't say "Using somewhat subjective definitions of "at war"".

"Using somewhat subjective definitions of "at war" -- Korea counts but Kosovo doesn't in our analysis, for example"

How could we be at war? We don't even have a War Department anymore.

Vietnam meets anyone's definition of war.

Debates like these are why international law now tends to speak of 'armed conflict' instead of 'war'.

Certainly the casualty count on both sides makes Vietnam count as a 'war'. And yet, Congress actually declaring a state of war would have given Presidents Kennedy or Johnson vast and sweeping powers, which was something that Congress would be loath to do when the President was already able to kill Commies sufficiently well by simply letting him engage in 'armed conflict' without the state of 'war'.

Except United States' technical definition of war, which must be authroized by Congress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Unit...

> However, that passage provides no specific format for what form legislation must have in order to be considered a "declaration of war" nor does the Constitution itself use this term.

Furthermore, there's no doubt that the U.S. can be at war without an official declaration by Congress: those instances when another country formally declares war on the U.S. first.

For example, the U.S. was officially at war with Japan from 7-8 December 1941, for a few hours with Germany and Italy on 11 December following their declaration of war against the U.S., and from 13 December 1941 to 6 June 1942 against Bulgaria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_declaration_of_w...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_declaration_of_wa...

The American Civil War doesn't count either, then?

It would be rare to see any civil war count as anything other than infighting.

The American Civil War was considered an insurrection by the victor (Lincoln), thus that's what it'll go down as in the history books.

So it's an illegal war. Still a war.

No, Congress explicitly authorized all the conflicts the article is talking about.

This is depressing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com