The War Thread

Have to go, but heres a short OP.

Talk about the evils or virtues of war.

It sucks that it happens. But as long as we're flawed, it'll happen, be it small-scale or large-scale.

It breeds amazing literature.

It's solved a great many evils in the world. Too many to count across the vastness of history.

Tis a pity that with the way the world works, you put down one evil by the sword and another only rises to replace him oftentimes worse than before. The only consolation to that is diplomacy while truly preferable for most things only allows evils to rise in the first place.

I don't know that war has solved anything. I've heard people say, "war stopped the Nazis" or similar, but the thing is, they kinda started it. You can't really say the problem is also the solution to itself.

That said, I hope we don't stop being warlike. When we eventually go into space and start colonizing other planets, we're gonna need our warlike nature to fight off the Klingons. I don't feel like being glassed by a bunch of aliens because humanity has adopted some dumb philosophy of non violence.

War itself is a huge waste of resources, too. Resources that can be better spent on improving the lives of the citizens, fixing problems, or preventing potential problems.

Just look at some boneyards in Iraq about all of our stuff that's been trashed and broken. All the brass wasted on cartridge cases, all the steel to be spent on a trashed truck, the fuel burned, all that mess.

As far ass raw material and finished goods are concerned, war is pretty much shovelling huge amounts of material into a landfill.

Nevermind all the collateral damage done to the area in which the conflict is actually fought. A soldier fires off hundreds of rounds just to get in a single confirmed kill - those bullets go somewhere - into a building, a parked car, whatever.

We're fortunate that we haven't been invaded by an opposing army in a very long time.

Also amazing (usually terrible, though I find most of it beautiful regardless) photographs.

One of the side-effects of engaging a war, is that technology developments will spill over to the civilian marketplace on occassion - or an obscure tech will become commonplace due to the military beginning to use it during the conflict.

...why such advances don't come about in peacetime eludes me.

Humans get +1 to weapons research.

There are plenty of peacetime developments that are often overlooked due to the prevalence of European military technologies transferring into civilian uses. Technological stagnation comes from social stagnation, not lack of war. I think we confuse a coincidental relationship between the two. The most militant and warlike experiences of East Asia are very much not the times when technological development was at its height.

War is a waste of resources. You want a simple theoretical but practice proof at it? Play any game. The trick in any game is to maximise economic output and spend the least amount of resources on the military as possible to win. Especially in games that are open-ended, war is extremely idiotic and very much a last resort.

While America today spends a trillion dollars on weapons R&D, places like China are increasing healthcare/education spending by 50% year over year and they're already exceeding some American medical advancements. For instance, China is now the first country to successfully use stem cells to restore a blind girl's eyesight. Or (I forget the country) in South America, they successfully used stem cells to regrow a trachea to implant into a patient which she lost due to cancer (instead of using a crappy artificial one). Preventative medicine advances are all peace-time.

People like to talk about GPS or whatever that came out of the military. It's opportunity cost. If you spent the same amount of money into civilian research, you would have gotten GPS and more. Instead you spent it into military research, you got ICB Ms and just GPS. If we didn't have ICB Ms, we could have had robotic exploration of Mars two decades ago.

Rapid focus on Boring, but Practical rather than hoping for Awesome Yet Practical.

As Asimov noted, "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." War doesn't solve problems, it creates them. Young people die without knowing why. Profiteers and demagogues fan the flames to benefit themselves without risking anything. If we don't mature as a species, we will destroy ourselves.

^^^ GPS and robotic exploration of Mars came about because of military advancements. Nobody in the last 300 years ever conceived originally of using rockets as mundane civilian shit. Rocket artillery has been around for 230 years or longer. The first rockets that sent people into space? Built from lessons learned from the terror weapons that were the V-2.

Likewise satellites were developed for military purposes first. Sputnik was not a civilian project.

Then you have other concepts like the Internet. Born of a need for a communications network that would survive a nuclear war. Civilians never would have thought of that without a military need or military application. (Or at least anywhere near as soon as the military did)

Also, did you know modern medicine is a result of the military? The first antibiotic penicillin gained a method of mass production in order to treat battlefield wounds and illnesses. The concept of triage in an emergency was originally a military application born of the First World War. As was the concept of speedy medical service. (The "golden hour" first coined in the Korean War in regards to significant physical trauma like a gunshot wound or a car crash comes to mind.)

Airplanes too. Prior to the First World War aircraft were niche contraptions barely advancing beyond the stuff the Wrights did. Now after a century of military innovations for military applications we have civilian aircraft that could breach the speed of sound, carry freight by the thousands of metric tons, and shuttle passengers all over the world.

Some of these things like the Internet would have come about much later than they did if purely thought of by civilians without the need for a military need or application.

edited 11th Jan '11 11:32:29 AM by MajorTom

Urgency does tend to speed forward the imagination.

That's nice and all, but I don't see anyone saying we should go around starting wars all over the place just because we might get some neat tech as a side effect.

^ Nobody ever starts or advocates war for war's sake.

Well, (coming back to my first post) everyone except the Klingons...

I wouldn't say that no one does this, but yes, few people use war in this manner. War is probably the worst form of a means to an end taken to an extreme.

edited 11th Jan '11 11:51:58 AM by Aprilla

Uh, Major Tom, you seem to sprout those alternative tech birth concepts that I hear quite often, yet you can hear completely different stories from civilians.

Internet was born out of the need for universities to share correspondence on an uncontrolled network. The DARPA aspect was built for a network that wanted to survive nuclear war. Without the civilian aspect, you would not have the internet as you know it with TCP/IP protocol, which was civilian developed, nor would you have the neutrality aspect of the network lanes, which was civilian developed (and most certainly not military). You ask any computer engineer, they'll tell you hippies built the internet (because they did) not the US military as military advocates like to claim.

Rockets have existed for civilian use since the Chinese invented gunpowder. That the warlike societies of today didn't think does not mean they would not have developed rockets for civilian use. Did we develop airplanes out of the need to bomb cities from the sky? No, we developed it because we wanted to fly in the air. What would have been any different out of the need to explore outer space? We would have settled on rocket power no matter what. I think you vastly underestimate the power of a civilian to develop technology for some strange reason.

The first antibiotic penicillin was an accidental discovery of a biologist working in an academic environment. You think we would have thrown that shit out if war didn't happen?

You pull the logic out of your ass that civilians would have developed it later. From my perspective, there is only indication that we would have developed it faster. Neither you or I can prove that statement. War happens because there are militant individuals who insist on the practice so we've no control environment to test against to see if war didn't happen whether development would be slower or faster.

EDIT: And yes this is a beserk button for me. Let me just put it another way as well.

All those awesome B2 bombers, C130 spectres and M1 tnaks and vast warehouses full of surplus m16s. You gave working hospitals for that. You gave up well funded schools. You gave up cleaning up your ghettos. You gave up paving broken roads. You gave up a good subway system at a major city.

You don't just get military techs for free.

edited 11th Jan '11 12:02:49 PM by breadloaf

Fact remains that war will lead to advancements. But yes, it doesn't follow that R&D doesn't happen without a conflict - our drive to explore our environment is a very powerful one.

The peacetime advancement is gained at a bargain-basement price compared to the advancements gained during a conflict. Given a choice between spending a few million dollars in university reserach or spending a few billion, collateral damage, wasted resources, political difficulties, and young men sent to early graves, who would willingly pick the latter as a viable method to encourage resaerch?

War is a very ugly thing.

^ Yes thanks exactly.

Civilian development is always preferable to military development.

All that being said, you can hang yoru hat on the fact that nations will on occasion be unable to resolve their differences using diplomatic means, and will go off to war.

However, I'm not going to pretend, since I dislike war that we have no need for a military, because that's a pretty.... huh - I don't want to say stupid, but I'm having trouble expressing the thought - well anyway.

I hate it when my train of thought derails itself like that.

Well war happens because those who are competent and intelligent will outcompete a number of nations who runs things incompetently or inefficiently (to a point where even if they have a larger resource base, they don't use it properly and lose to a smaller nation). Their only option is war.

I find this largely stems from the misconception that the world is a zero-sum game. If you believe that, war is perfectly legitimate. If you don't then you think it is idiotic.

Like I said before, a competently run nation will spend as little as possible on the military and reduce any which way they can in order to maximise economic improvements.

^ Except that's not how the world is working. China and India the most prominent countries outside the US and Russia are both vastly expanding the size and budget of their militaries. China especially if you paid attention to the Chinese F-22 knockoff that dick-slapped the doves' thinking the US could afford to reduce the size of the military.

Bah, their % GDP military spending ratio has been flat for 15 years at 2.0% (Which I might add is a 6x multiplication of the official Chinese figure, an estimate made by SIPRI and CIA) of which almost no NATO country is even close to that, except Canada which is 1.6%. They are most certainly not expanding their military whatsoever and when's the last time China made huge incursions? They've gone quite dovish since the 80s.

edited 11th Jan '11 12:32:36 PM by breadloaf