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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Sex education and free access to birth control, sterilization, and abortion lowers population without the trauma of war.
