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If you want society to be more vulnerable to military action, then the biggest innovation is health care. Improved health care is what allowed nations to create
by belorn 10mo ago
If you want society to be more vulnerable to military action, then the biggest innovation is health care. Improved health care is what allowed nations to create and maintain larger military forces. Through out history, disease and malnourished caused more death by a large margin than actually violence in combat, and many war campaign stopped suddenly because one or both sides became unable to continue.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> Improved health care is what allowed nations to create and maintain larger military forces Isn’t it the other way? With a lot of medicine’s modern advances being rooted in combat medicine?
- wat10000 10mo agoI think they mean communicable diseases, not combat injuries. For example, around 2/3rds of the military deaths in the American civil war were from disease, not combat. I don’t think much of the medical advances that prevent that came from combat medicine.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> don’t think much of the medical advances that prevent that came from combat medicine Triage and ambulances come from battle medicine [1]. (Not sure about communicable-disease prevention.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Jean_Larrey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Jean_Larrey
- wat10000 10mo agoRight, those are relatively minor improvements compared to soldiers no longer dying en masse from typhoid, smallpox, measles, etc. Good improvements to be sure, but not quite as significant.
- _DeadFred_ 10mo agoAmerica's school lunch program was created so that it would have healthier soldiers. We better stop feeding children. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_School_Lunch_Program https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_School_Lunch_Prog...