The Logic of War

I caught a few moments of a show where somebody was questioning children about war. A well-socialized child, about ten years old, expressed that he didn't think that there was ever a reason to have a war - that it should always be possible to reach a compromise to avoid war. In essence, he was arguing that war results from a failure of reason.

This, of course, is not the case. As anybody who has played chess can attest, sometimes to win you must sacrifice a pawn to win the game. In their quest for wealth, power, and empire, the world's leaders have historically been quite satisfied to view soldiers and civilians as expendable. Certainly, there's a cost-benefit analysis - they had to weigh the potential losses among their populations of soldiers and civilians against not only the fruits of victory, but the possibility that their weakened post-war state might be targeted by another. Today, the goals may be different, the calculus may be different, but the same type of cost-benefit analysis applies. And when the leaders decide that the cost of war is sufficiently low or the cost of diplomacy or compromise is sufficiently high, war "makes sense".

I am reminded of a conservative friend's comments on the character "Spock" in Star Trek. He was amused by the notion that Vulcans were supposed to be creatures of pure logic, as the Vulcans were also depicted as being extremely moral and protective of the lives of others. Logically, he argued, if the Enterprise were faced with a crisis that could easily be resolved by obliterating all life on a planet that was otherwise of no interest, Spock should have been advocating that resolution rather than risking the ship or the lives of crewmembers to reach a peaceful resolution. When applying pure logic, morality doesn't necessarily compute. Despite the claims of the Vulcans, it was the "immoral" Romulans who were the creatures of cold logic.

The British tradition of having the sons of the wealthy fill the officer ranks, while the working classes served as infantry, was arguably transformative of that society after World War I, where the men of the "upstairs, downstairs" society fought shoulder-to-shoulder and couldn't easily transition back into the former master-servant relationship. But for most wars, those making the decision to go to war, and those deciding who will do the dying on the battlefield, are well-insulated from the bloodshed. Their assessment of whether the costs outweigh the gains may be based on goals ranging from pure greed and self-interest to pure egalitarianism, but they are making decisions that primarily affect the lives (or result in the deaths) of others.

If you could save the lives of 10,000 people by killing one person, would you do so? If you could save the lives of 10,000 people by dying, would you volunteer to die? Many people would give very different answers to those two questions - they would sacrifice the other, but not themselves. (And many who would state in the abstract that they would sacrifice themselves, in my humble opinion, are not being entirely honest.) Yet this is the calculus of the egalitarian war - the "war of liberation". How many people (other than me) should perish in the name of their own freedom? (And, when arguing that thousands of soldier and civilian deaths are "worth it", are they making that assessment as "Romulans" or as "Vulcans"?)

Life is easier, I suppose, or at least a lot less complicated in the faux-Christian, "might makes right" world of somebody like Ann "What's Wrong With A War For Oil" Coulter.