War

War is a sterile exercise, a waste of resources, and the source of a great quantity of pain.

It always been so, for all the length of human history.

Yet, there has hardly been a whole year without war, in the history of the world.

Or, if you like more restricted geographical scope, a whole decade without war in Europe, before the long peace period after WWII.

Why?

Is it a perversion of the human species?Yes, and no. It is an un- perversion of manhood.

In the past, I have wrote about these crazy idea of mines that the structured, complex society - anything with more inhabitants than the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers village is bound to have one - is more functional to the female biologic imperative than to the male one.

Actually, the more structured and stable it became, less and less space it left to the original nucleus of men instincts, that would be... fuck anything in sight, and go on to the next.

This is coming to the point that, if one takes a step back and look dispassionately to modern western societies and much of their social discourse, the impression arise  that these are actually trying to castrate their males as fair as possible.

These do so by branding the strand of aggressiveness associated to their higher testosterone levels as inherently dangerous, curtailing the actual spaces of sexual extroversion allowed to males that aren't directly tied to female's sexual satisfaction , and generally downsizing the need for the male gender workforce by a crescent automation, both in work and in the state-controlled exercise of violence (police, the military).

The emphasis on drones may be seen, so, not only about reducing military personnel losses - though, it is argued that drones are a supremely inefficient use of resources, as the rate of unintended death that they produce is above 90%, they are not very reliable and they do not come cheap either - but also about reducing the dependency of military action on violence-capable males - currently, these are still the bulk of fighting units personnel...
Opening the ranks to women was yet another step in that direction.

The fact that the higher echelons of said societies are still, mostly, occupied by Alpha males kind of obscure this evolution, but it can't really hide it.

Modern societies are becoming more and more feminized.

The future is the metro-sexual male, no matter how many of our great-grandfather would spit on one, if they met him in the street.

It is not bad for the many males that do not really have high levels of aggressiveness, it is not bad for the Alphas that manage to get a handle of how their social system works and exploit its weaknesses, it is quite good for many women.

But this "feminine slant" of structured society has always been a source of frustration for a sizeable portion of men, the ones with both higher aggressive tendencies and less social clout, the ones that had less to gain and more to lose - in term of unrewarded violation of their base instincts - by accepting their society and its rules.

These have always been amenable, along human history, to take arms and go to war and, hopefully, get killed in the process...

To be honest, they mostly went to  Pillage, Arson and Rape (PAR) the hell out of some neighbour, for the sake of showing that they had balls.

I like to argue that, in many ways, the cruelty of war has grown alongside the development of societies, due to the increased efficacy of the weapons that they could build, but also to the increased level of stress that "order" imposed on this part of the male population.

Also, a multiple centuries long effort from the ruling classes to isolate the fighters from seeing the true consequences of their action - usually by dehumanizing their adversaries through ideological fallacies -  powerfully contributed to it.

So, during a few millennia we have gone from squabbles among neighbours where a lot of screams were shouted, balls were showed and little to no blood was shed, to the carnage of WWI and of its natural sequel, WWII.

Which is where the mechanics of "traditional war" broke down - at least for European countries, for some decades (but as witnesses are dying and losing weight, the same old idiocies that cause those bloodbath may come back).

Traditional war involved mostly professional  soldiers - men that would likely become thugs, otherwise, and often reversed to a thug life the very moment that they were laid off - that were allowed a great degree of freedom in their war action, occasionally being afforded looting or raping on the enemy population. Most of the deaths came through illnesses, though, but the actual PAR/Deaths ratio  was relatively good.

WWI was a conscripts war, that involved a much vaster strata of the male population and literally burned it on the altar of ideas that many of them hardly understood - the national ideal made not necessarily sense to all, back then... God knows most Italians, today, do not really get what Italy is, and couldn't care less about it anyway, for example; my German-speaking, stone carving great grandfather died without understanding why he was killing the very same guys with whom he had worked many a summer, and he was not alone in the sentiment - for little of no "remuneration".

The  soldier deaths and casualties were out of scale with the PAR allowed, which was nearly none.

WWII was essentially an affair of WWI survivors, getting from their own societies what they could not get from the war... the scarred veterans unwilling to let violence down were the backbones of both the Fascism, in Italy, and, later, Nazism in Germany.

The very Adolf Hitler was an example of them - a veteran that fought, with courage, in a horrific war and did not get much out of it.

WWII, on the other hand, was the moment were another mainstay of "traditional war" was lost - soldiers were held responsible for the crimes that they committed during war activities, no matter if these were done following orders. Before the Nuremberg trials, "I was following orders" was a widely accepted defence for many an indefensible action. 

Also, it was the final nail in the coffin for another of the tenets of "traditional war" - war among modern states proved to be a far nastier affair, for the societies that waged it, than any of the precedent wars.

The destruction arrived everywhere, the society was disrupted more thoroughly than it had ever been, and the very economy of he warring countries had to be centralized and bent to fulfil war needs (kind of... the 3rd Reich and Italy unsurprisingly failed to rein in their oligarchic industrialists with the efficiency the UK and USA showed; regimes always pays cash for the support they get), to an extent never seen before - or since.

"Modern war" proved to be such a sorry affair, that it could not be repeated any time soon, at least as long as those that had lived it were around and had any power to impede it.

However, not all the countries involved in the sordid squabble had to endure the same level of stress - it can be argued that the USA, for example, got it relatively lightly.

The USA lost 420.000 persons, during the war - 407000 soldiers, which is in line with the casualties of other countries that didn't participate in the Germany-USSR death-match,  and 13000 civilians.

It suffered no attacks on its territory that are worth mentioning, and ended the whole shenanigan in far better economic shape than any of the European nations. 

For the USA, in many ways, WWII had been yet another bit of "traditional war".

The Viet-Nam war became the moment where the USA had more of a taste of what a modern war is really like, in that it adsorbed a notable amount of its economic output, it deeply upset its society - courtesy of a not yet embedded-bridled media industry -  and it democratically exposed members of its younger generations from various strata (with some dishonourable exception) to quite a selected choice of horrors.

It must come not as a surprise, then, that the USA military recognised the danger and took a set of steps to "de-modernize" the country experience of wars.

The USA Military is today made up of professionals, and exerts a tight control on the narrative that reaches the USA people from the front-lines of the wars that it had to fight, doing its level best to downplay and justify the damages that these have done on the target countries.

It doesn't recognize the International Tribunal for War Crimes, nor is it likely to recognize it in any foreseeable future, and it reserve the right to be the sole judge of eventual war crimes committed by its- own personnel.

Undoubtedly, today the USA look like a country intoxicated by a potentially dangerous military culture that has done its very best to rewind the clock, back to an era where war "made sense".

It rest to be seen how long this state of affairs will last, and how will it come to an end.

I really hope, some time after I died, thanks...

Of the candidates to world's sole superpower, USA is still, by far , the best (unless the UE finally gets its shit together, but I doubt it).