COVID-19 is the climax to this 4T

[pbrower2a]

(04-08-2020, 02:51 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(04-08-2020, 08:57 AM)freivolk Wrote: Partly for that, mostly because the time, where you could win a war by mobilising milions of cheap rifle-men, are gone.  Modern armies are capiital-intensive, even rag-tag guerrilla groups (Syria!) seems to have an upper limit. Second, the potential gains are mostly not worth the risks and costs (Example Iraq or Eastern Ukraine). And third, over a certain level, there is still a chance, that nukes will fly.

War was capital intensive in the late medieval cycle, though, and the Wars of the Roses still occurred.  I grant it would include fewer people.  I don't know if it would result in fewer casualties.

Potential gains not being worth the costs, maybe, though Russia didn't see that as a problem for seizing Crimea.  There's definitely a chance that nukes will fly, and that would affect the approach to war.  I'm not sure if it would prevent it.  John Xenakis considers nuclear war a certainty.

I think it might be great if the necessary destruction could happen without war, but I'd like to get a better handle on the mechanism.

War has become much less attractive. It can be profitable to the merchants of armaments, but a real war now means that the manufacturing plants for those armaments are more likely to be destroyed in airstrikes. I can also imagine tycoons, executives, and lobbyists for such warmongers being dispossessed or even prosecuted as war criminals. War has become risky for even the profiteers. 

Add to this, smart youth have read such books as All Quiet on the Western Front, The Good Soldier Schweik, Doctor Zhivago, Catch-22, and Corelli's  Mandolin that give views of war as bleak, destructive, and absurd. If they don't read, then they can see such movies as Full Metal Jacket , Platoon.  and The Hurt Locker . It is getting far more difficult to find semi-literate boys on the verge of adulthood who see no better prospect in life than being a farm laborer or a servant a rifle and telling him that nothing could be more glorious than to charge a machine-gun nest in a human-wave attack. Maybe the horrible Iran-Iraq war in which the opposing sides showed consummate disregard for human life of the sort that one associates with World War I allowed such; Henry Kissinger said about that war that he wished that both sides could lose. Kissinger knew who would pick up the pieces.

It remains possible to get young men who know what war is to join an army, navy, or air force; even so they need to receive some promises from the political leaders and the senior officers. The best military leadership endeavors to minimize casualties of the troops, which is good for ensuring that the armed forces can avoid running out of soldiers and supplies. World War I ended basically when the German Army ran out of cannon fodder. Minimizing casualties is one way to ensure that an army has plenty of competent NCO's who might have been raw recruits two or three years earlier instead of a gigantic toll of "fallen for God and Country". Soldiers, sailors, and airmen may be promised secure employment and after service advantages in the workplace, educational opportunities, and cheap loans for housing -- which gives them all the more reason to not be treated as cannon fodder. 

Wars between Great Powers have been rare, although interventions and proxy wars that look at the time to have small costs for participants at the political and economic apex have happened frequently. Unless one counts India and Pakistan both as Great Powers (India is) in the war of Bangaladeshi Independence, the last war between Great Powers was for all practical purposes the Korean War in which the People's Republic of China and the USA were fighting each other for all practical purposes. That war was 70 years ago.

Great wars depend upon great hatred, but most people now know enough to recognize that the political leadership, however odious (you know how I have frequently described Saddam Hussein), comes with pity for the people under the rule of that leadership. It wasn't German culture that slaughtered Jews who often had much the same culture, and it wasn't Japanese culture that performed the Bataan Death March or brutally treated captive laborers on the Burma Railway. Does anyone hate German or Japanese high culture anymore? I did not have to be around during World War II to hate Nazis: I hate Nazis for disgracing nearly half of my ethnic origin and murdering people that I consider my cultural and moral brethren. I consider Japanese aesthetics delightful (the other part of my ethnic origin does not include "Japanese" origin), but don't ask me to forgive the culprits for the Bataan Death March. 

The Axis Powers made the gross blunder of giving much to hate. As I once told a neo-Nazi on the Internet, if I had to choose between becoming a Nazi and converting to Judaism I would convert to Judaism because a Jew could easily hold moral and cultural values like mine. I loathe having to make moral compromises. Let's put it this way -- I was broke and I had to drive on bald tires until I got a little income, and my first purchases was a set of new tires to replace the bald tires. I preferred that to some long journey to a delightful and enriching place, an upgrade to my sound system, or some nice new clothes.