Let’s chat about war, because I want to get this out of my head, and the best way for me to do that is to blast my thoughts out onto a blank screen. I started a piece on war and prayer, and I might finish it, but I need to release the steam valve in my head, so bear with me as I get into war. Like Richard Feynman did with his Los Alamos companions in his talk “Some Interesting Properties of Numbers,” let’s begin at the beginning1.
From the time that men carried spears and traveled in tribes, there has been war. When one band of hunters encountered another after the same antelope, they had to resolve the conflict. If it came down to one group eating and the other group starving, things got violent. A stabbed man, bleeding from a wound, was a dead man in those days. From that, we got vengeance and blood feuds.
Then when larger groups of people settled down in agricultural communities, complete with domesticated cattle, one strong man decided to take what he could, because might made right. From that, we got kings, as the strong would tax the weaker, and in turn, offer protection. Kings defended their property, and their population. Combined with the same imperatives over land and resources that fueled the blood feuds and tribal battles, we got war and conquest.
All of this is really basic stuff, self-evident. Even the Bible, in 2 Samuel 11:1, is matter of fact about it. “In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel.” It’s spring, so ancient kings drew up an army, and went out to battle, because if a king didn’t do that, some other king would lay seige to his cities, conquer his land, take his women, murder his men, and rob his wealth. A significant portion of a king’s budget would go to weapons development and manufacturing. This is why kings taxed their subjects, because it takes money to build chariots, forge swords, hammer shields, construct walls—you get the picture.
Going to war is a human thing, and history is fairly convincing that peace is a relatively new innovation for our species. We don’t mark our calendars by the seven years’ peace, after all. We don’t all get together to honor peace, and suffer glory for the peaceful. War is a human estate, and we cherish it for various reasons, but most close to the heart is blood, soil, and the honor of what today we call patriotism.
I won’t get too into political philosophy here, but there’s a difference between patriotism, which I would define as a considered love of country, and nationalism, which I would define as a desire to imbue the state with godlike qualities and supreme authority. Nationalism makes patriotism a required property, as the will of the state is naturally the will of the people in that system. Patriotism, outside of nationalism, is a voluntary, personal walk, and doesn’t require the state’s blessing. It can manifest itself in various ways, even in protest of the government. Related to war, patriotism is the fuel which moves us to fight. Nationalism is a whip that forces people to serve. I’d rather have patriotism than have it branded on me by a nationalist state.
One interesting property of war is that the prospect of losing one tends to prevent it in the first place. Most nations don’t go out to war with the expectation of losing. Tsar Alexander II didn’t send the Russian fleet to fight Japan with the intention of the fleet ending up at the bottom of the harbor at Port Arthur. Napoleon didn’t assemble his army on the fields of Waterloo with the intention of losing to Wellington. But in the age of nuclear weapons, biological weapons, and chemical weapons, such considerations pale in comparison to the mass destructive power of these weapons.
So we, meaning the United States and the Soviet Union, built enormous stockpiles of nuclear death, and delivery systems to try and get the smallest advantage out of an apocalyptic nightmare. In the end, it was economics that tumbled the USSR, and that’s because communism doesn’t work, while the capitalism that fueled the arsenal of democracy produces far more goods. But Russia never lost its lust for war. And once stung by terrible forces that hate us, America picked up our war lust pretty fast.
Where we are now is that war has found a new expression. Groups that are not really nations go out to war in guerrilla, or terrorist, fashion, using asymmetric, or irregular, strategies and tactics. From that, we have narco-terror, narco-states, criminal states, theocracies like Afghanistan and Iran, and various combinations of these elements.
Modern Russia is a revanchist version of the old tsarist great power system. The E.U. is some kind of hyper-democratic reinvention of the many alliances of past European rulers, like the Holy Roman Empire, the Hapsburgs, the League of the Three Emperors, and the like. NATO is really a vestige of the Cold War nuclear MAD (mutual assured destruction) policy. NATO never really wanted to fight a conventional war on European soil. Despite American weapons and troops, the purpose of NATO was to make it evident that when the Soviets (Warsaw Pact) attacked, the inevitable result would be general nuclear war. So trying to shoehorn NATO into the new Russian-European war scenario makes an uncomfortable fit.
Ergo, Poland just shot down Russian drones that flew over its airspace intended for targets in Ukraine. Poland is a NATO nation, and diplomatically it will employ the chicanery of the drones were not intended to hit Polish targets, but national sovereignty being what it is, the Poles have the right to shoot them down. Russia, for its part, has intensified its aerial drone and missile war against Ukraine, seeking to soften up that country’s infrastructure and will to fight, while continuing the pressure of ground attack, attritting Ukrainian defenders using its greatest military doctrinal weapon: quantity has a quality all its own.
It seems to NATO and the European powers that attacking Ukraine, which is not part of NATO and is unlikely to be while Russia continues its war (or afterwards), is not a cause for war against Russia, but is a cause to supply more weapons, money, and technology to Ukraine. There is a cynical self-interest in this, as Ukraine has served as an incubator for all kinds of new war tech, mostly drone-related. If Russia ever finishes digesting Ukraine, know that the entire drone industry flourishing in that country will certainly be evacuated, extracted, to other places, while the Russians will continue to develop their own versions of drone and missile swarms.
Modern war is not what previous wars were. World War I and World War II were total wars, pulling all elements of the economy, manpower, and fighting abilities of the countries involved. Then there were proxy wars, like Vietnam. Then there were vengeance wars, like Afghanistan and Iraq, which were masked beneath the altruistic “exporting democracy” talk. And with Russia, it has been all about rebuilding the kingdom, one former SSR at a time.
Two elements of war have become quite interesting in terms of what we’re seeing play out: stealth and precision. Israel has employed both when it took the last leap into global reach by attacking Hamas leaders in the middle of Doha, Qatar, just a few miles from thousands of U.S. troops. Qatar has made billions playing both sides in the long-running conflict between Arabs who were 80 years ago brought in to the Holy Land under the British Mandate to counter Jewish immigration tit-for-tat, and the Jews who claim the State of Israel as the proper owner of that land.
Now, we don’t know what the response will be after Israel crossed a line paved with American interests. I do suspect that this is something President Donald Trump knew about, and was briefed on, for quite some time. Why our government decided to greenlight it now (if indeed we did) is more opaque. Will it widen the war Israel is fighting? Or will the Europeans and many who disagree with Israel’s “jungle war” strategy against its enemies sit back and criticize and issue arrest warrants that will never be executed? I don’t know. For Israel’s part, they already have war baked into their society, so whoever fights them, they will fight back.
But I also suspect that nobody wants to tangle with a country that has Israel’s military tech. And Russia is decidedly neutral on Israel, given that Vladimir Putin relies on some very wealthy and influential Israeli citizens to help him with various financial and business arrangements. Moscow has never been closed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in person, or by telephone.
Another interesting property of war, is that it’s addictive. “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result,” said Winston Churchill, who served in the Second Boer War and also in World War I. Donald Trump found his lesson not in war but in a would-be assassin’s bullet. He has said he feels called by God to do the nationalist things he’s doing in office, including ordering the military to do his bidding, overseas and in this country. Trump 47 doesn’t seem nearly as reticent to use the military as in his first term, except I don’t see him using it to fight Russians.
Here’s where I see it going. There’s going to be more war. Either more wars, as in smaller conflicts that utilize the new drone and remote reach technology we’re seeing in Ukraine and other theaters, or one big honking war that embroils us all. If it’s one big war, drones are the least of our worries. The domains of space, cyber, and social unrest will be unleashed in ways we can barely imagine. The nefarious tools of AI, supercomputers, quantum computers, and cryptography will make our lives extremely difficult, even basic commerce might be disrupted. IOT devices will spy on us. Images on our televisions will be difficult to determine if they are genuine or deepfakes meant to fool us. The very articles we read online might not be the ones written by the writers we trust, but under their names.
That war will not end well, as we will have to decide if our patriotism is in the right place. One last interesting property of war: one thing that nobody in a war knows until after the fact (other than the people who started the war, but sometimes not even they know), is if we are fighting on the side of the right and the good, or if we are fighting for criminals and evil. The other thing is if we are fighting on the winning side. This might not be a property of war, but it’s certainly related: the winner writes the story.
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I am no Richard Feynman.
"One last interesting property of war: one thing that nobody in a war knows until after the fact (other than the people who started the war, but sometimes not even they know), is if we are fighting on the side of the right and the good, or if we are fighting for criminals and evil."
This is a surprisingly relativistic take from you. In World War II, it was pretty clear who the evil criminals were - they were the ones harassing and driving entire races from their borders, lobbing missiles into other cities, and conquering other nations without their consent. Even if the Allies lost the war to Germany, there was a clear right side and a clear wrong side to that conflict.
Now, you might say that's because the Allies were victorious and wrote the histories, not the Nazi and Japanese regimes. So, let's take Ukraine - an active war where the outcome is far from assured and the history hasn't been written yet. I have ZERO doubt that Ukraine is fighting on the side of the right and good, and the Russian invaders are the evil criminals (see Bucha). If Ukraine loses that fight and is absorbed into a new Russian empire, that doesn't change the fact that the bad guys won that fight.
There are factors OTHER than victory and who writes the histories that we can look at to decide if we're on the side of the right and good, or whether we are unwitting pawns for evil. The Nazis weren't evil because they lost - they were evil because they consigned "undesirables" to concentration camps, invaded their neighbors, and committed a long list of other sins and crimes.
This is why I pointed out the actions of the Israeli sniper murdering Palestinians yesterday. Maybe this fellow is just one "bad apple" that the IDF will deal with, or it's evidence that the Israelies are no longer fighting on the side of the right and good, and have tipped over into evil.
This is why I decry the actions of Trump's ICE goon squads - I see echoes of Hitler's Germany: concentration camps, thugs rounding up people that they (not the law or courts) decide are undesirable, and holding themselves up as unaccountable to the communities that they presumably are serving.
You can argue that ICE is justified acting within the bounds of the law. Germany's Enabling Act of 1933 was the legal umbrella under which much evil was carried out. Germany's concentration camps were erected under the theory that only the executive had the power to decide who was due legal protection and due process, and who were exempt from the laws that protect and bind. Sound familiar?
Deciding whether you're on the right (and good) side of history isn't an exercise that you do once the dust has settled and a victor has been declared. It's a question that has to be asked and answered continuously, as these moral positions are not static and can change, and they say - the road to hell is paved with good intentions. History may rhyme more than it repeats, and we better damn sure be listening.