I’m reading a scary book called how everything became war and the military became everything

[Poof]

And it’s saying that there won’t be a distinction between war and peacetime anymore

[PhilosipherStoned]

I beg to differ as a veteran. Technically the operations the u.s. has under went recently can't really even be defined

as wars.. ;O

[ghostrek]

i can under stand how one has that veiw

but i a agree with PhiloipherStoned

[KreiaDidNothingWrong]

There's an idea that wars between States are pretty much over save for rare exceptions and it's mostly going to be operations against insurgencies.

The majority of my life has pretty much seen this, aside from Iraq.

[SwimModSponges]

Yep, thems the breaks all right.

Weve been at forever war since 2001.

Weve been at forever peace since 2001 too.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

[Poof]

12 hours ago, PhilosipherStoned said:

I beg to differ as a veteran. Technically the operations the u.s. has under went recently can't really even be defined

as wars.. ;O

They you aren’t differing.

[Poof]

12 hours ago, ghostrek said:

i can under stand how one has that veiw

but i a agree with PhiloipherStoned

Then you also pretty much agree w/this lady (who worked in the pentagon)

[SwimModSponges]

Theyre not wars, we're just sending soldiers and bombs overseas.

[Poof]

3 minutes ago, SwimModSponges said:

Theyre not wars, we're just sending soldiers and bombs overseas.

Definitely not a war

[Poof]

11 hours ago, KreiaDidNothingWrong said:

There's an idea that wars between States are pretty much over save for rare exceptions and it's mostly going to be operations against insurgencies.

The majority of my life has pretty much seen this, aside from Iraq.

It’s also about the other end. Like enlisted soldiers running Dunkin’ Donut shops.

[Poof]

12 minutes ago, SwimModSponges said:

Yep, thems the breaks all right.

Weve been at forever war since 2001.

Weve been at forever peace since 2001 too.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

Put that in your fanfics.

[SwimModSponges]

Orwell already did in 1984.

[Poof]

2 minutes ago, SwimModSponges said:

Orwell already did in 1984.

Wat

[SwimModSponges]

INGSOC DAWG.

[scoobdog]

Perhaps the highly unusual global campaigns of the first part of the twentieth century have changed some people's perspective, but smaller counter-insurgency actions have been the norm for the vast majority of human history.  That book sounds stupid.

[Poof]

8 minutes ago, scoobdog said:

Perhaps the highly unusual global campaigns of the first part of the twentieth century have changed some people's perspective, but smaller counter-insurgency actions have been the norm for the vast majority of human history.  That book sounds stupid.

Well a lot of generals disagree with you

[scoobdog]

I would hope not.

[SwimModSponges]

I think i see both of your sides; wars were, generally speaking, small skirmishes between groups. Many of these groups were defined as states and countries, but still, small things, relatively speaking. 

Then in wwi, we applied industrialization to war; making large scale conflicts between world powers inevitable.

After wwii, the world powers were like "jesus, maybe full out war was a bad idea."

So after that, they started stockpiling weapons in a war without battles, an arms race. 

Then we realized, "fuck, we have a lot of goddamn weapons," and so the war industry went from simply stockpiling to actively usong their excesses in a near infinite amount of small skirmishes that will never end as long as cash goes in one end of the machine and bodies wrapped in flags come out the other.

[nameraka]

so it's just a history of the u.s. then?

[scoobdog]

22 minutes ago, SwimModSponges said:

I think i see both of your sides; wars were, generally speaking, small skirmishes between groups. Many of these groups were defined as states and countries, but still, small things, relatively speaking. 

Then in wwi, we applied industrialization to war; making large scale conflicts between world powers inevitable.

After wwii, the world powers were like "jesus, maybe full out war was a bad idea."

So after that, they started stockpiling weapons in a war without battles, an arms race. 

Then we realized, "fuck, we have a lot of goddamn weapons," and so the war industry went from simply stockpiling to actively usong their excesses in a near infinite amount of small skirmishes that will never end as long as cash goes in one end of the machine and bodies wrapped in flags come out the other.

About that, I don't really see how us stockpiling weapons that we will likely never use as much different than paying for half a million soldiers in a standing army during, say, a two century period of peace.  It's something of a modern (read: capitalistic) perspective that "if you build it, they will come" when it comes to creating war machines, when, in reality, the skirmishes themselves tend to be generated as normal part of human interaction.  What tends to cloud that perspective is the means by which catastrophic failure is administered.  Today, its the the threat of a nuclear holocaust; in the 2nd Century BCE, it was a massive barbarian coalition - in either case, panics are/were generally an opportunity for over zealous military commanders to build a complex that fortified the martial industries.

At the turn of the 20th Century, there was a unique situation that actually contributed more to the worldwide nature of the conflict more than the fruits of the Industrial Revolution.  In particular, the fact that most of the industrialized countries drawn in to World War I were colonial powers tended to extend the theater of the conflict across continental boundaries.  If it wasn't a direct conflict between colonies with competing masters, it was the influence of European combatants on neutral countries on other continents due to trade (which became global because of colonial expansion).  Much is made of the new, deadly machines introduced and refined for this global conflict (tanks, portable automatic firearms, chemical warfare, and, to a limited extent, combat aircraft), yet it was the fact that the battles involved so many intercontinental players that contributed the most to the deadly results of these conflicts.  Furthermore, World War II would not have happened if these same global conflicts had been properly resolved prior to the rise of Hitler.

That being said, we have a long memory when it comes to war.  Just about everyone living today was born after the collapse of the colonial system, and that tends to color our perspective when it comes to the nature of conflict.   We still see war as being a global event even though it always has been a series of perpetual small scale skirmishes.  Intrinsically, conflict has always been a general-use balance between marginalized groups and society as a whole, so it should be no surprise that conflicts continue to happen even though we're supposedly in a time when the fear of global war haunts us into believing that war of any type can't ever happen again.