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This is pretty interesting. I have always thought of war as a political and economic phenomenon. Why try to get by with what you currently have when you can jus

This is pretty interesting. I have always thought of war as a political and economic phenomenon. Why try to get by with what you currently have when you can just take what your neighbor has? In some cases it's just cheaper to go beat someone up and get their lunch money than to earn your own. Junger is saying that war is really emergent behavior: young men are violent, so they are not just willing to go to war, but want to. It's certainly a new perspective to me. I suppose it makes some sense, though it feels to me that wars today are "not what they used to be". Take WWI and WWII. There was mass draft and the country was generally behind these. I am sure there was a great number of people who were unhappy to be drafted, but it seems that here people actually believed in the existential threat to the US. Then take the Vietnam war. Hugely unpopular. Look at this widely circulated picture of a lighter supposedly carried by a US soldier in Vietnam: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/07/10/article-2171404-14002534000005DC-124_306x423.jpg http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/07/10/article-2171404-14.... Now, today our military is volunteer-based and tiny compared to, say, what it was during WWII. Only a small percentage of the population serves, and are pre-selected. Is it then fair to say that all or even most young men want to go to war? It seems to me the answer is no. So the remaining question is whether war happens because of this emergent behavior or for other reasons. Basically, if we gave that small percentage of young men something better than war, would war stop? Or would we continue to wage war anyways?

brc 12y ago
The truth about Vietnam is that it is an unpopular war now, and towards the end of it, but when American involvement escalated in the beginning, support was pretty widespread. When thinking about war, it's better to exclude ww1 and ww2 from the sample as outliers. Of course they are the default war experience and the worst wars around, but they aren't typical. It's emergent behaviour - it has to be, as it is endemic with human history - I think you're no more likely to stop wars than you are to stop men looking at women's breasts. You can temper the behaviour with morals and ethics but it's ready to surface at the slightest slip of those things. It's not that young men want to go and start a war, but that some men crave power for powers sake, and it's easy to talk young men into getting involved once a war is in the offing. Ironically the best thing you can do to temper the behaviour is to let men gather wealth and power via peaceful means, such as commerce and trade. Where this happens they usually don't go into war with their neighbours. Having the majority of the worlds people not under the sway of religion would be a good start as well, but I'm of the belief that religion is hard wired in as well - remove an ancient text and god and people usually start tot replace it with some other belief system anyway. And it would be those belief systems clashes that would probably be the 'cause' of wars down the track.
- zby 12y ago
  Really spot on. Just one thing - according to Rene Girard religion is a way to control and confine aggression. It controls aggression by aggression in a very dangerous way - but at the core it is a 'social technology' with the goal of limiting the outcomes of conflicts. I believe that theory has a lot of truth in it.
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  Agreed with you re. Vietnam. That is a good point. Not quite agreed on WWI/II. Lots of modern military and foreign policy is based on the aftermath of WWII. After all, that was the last war that the US was involved in. All the ones after that were "operations", and the US never formally declared war on another country since. They aren't typical, yet they are always the ones other wars are compared against. So war is emergent behavior because some percentage of young men is always available to fight it, and because old men in power are more than willing to send the young men into war. That's at least two different behaviors we've identified so far. Up until reading this article I had the point of view that war was just too cheap vs alternatives. Want land/power/oil/money/whatever? Just go and take it rather than building your own. And the solution is the opposite: make war expensive. Then again, neither our war on terror, nor the terror attacks on the US and its allies quite fit this paradigm.
  - brc 12y ago
    My point with ww1 and ww2 is that, if you graphed wars by people involved, destruction, whatever, they stick out of the group by a long way. I think your looking at the picture with too much of a us-centric view. The US is not involved in the majority of wars, at least not directly with men nondescript materials. You're right in that the world wars are all part of the same narrative about destabilisation that leads to other wars - arguably the majority of conflicts around today have roots in both. But if you look at some more topical wars/conflicts - say the Arab/Israel conflict from 1948-present you see that it's not just about gaining territory but far deeper things (territory is the score, but the purpose is much deeper) plus the military conflicts during this period have been much more conventional with the majority of attacks being primarily military. Lately it has gone more asymmetrical and terrorism v conventional military but initially it was tanks on battlefields. Again other conflicts in the he second half of the twentieth century were far make typical wars in that they were relatively localised, didn't involve things like carpet bombing civilian population and didn't involve mass troop movements. Even Vietnam and Korea, wars with direct US involvement, had a fraction of the men deployed as compared with Ww2. Also, it's a good point about making the cost of a war prohibitive - we have the means to do this now - but the costs of a war don't usually fall onto the main aggressors on all sides. Typically it falls onto the soldiers, refugees and ordinary citizens. If powerful countries were prepared to apply the costs of war to those who start them, the incidence would go down. But you spiral into an eye-for-an-eye retaliation which is a worse mess.

brc 12y ago

The truth about Vietnam is that it is an unpopular war now, and towards the end of it, but when American involvement escalated in the beginning, support was pretty widespread. When thinking about war, it's better to exclude ww1 and ww2 from the sample as outliers. Of course they are the default war experience and the worst wars around, but they aren't typical. It's emergent behaviour - it has to be, as it is endemic with human history - I think you're no more likely to stop wars than you are to stop men looking at women's breasts. You can temper the behaviour with morals and ethics but it's ready to surface at the slightest slip of those things. It's not that young men want to go and start a war, but that some men crave power for powers sake, and it's easy to talk young men into getting involved once a war is in the offing. Ironically the best thing you can do to temper the behaviour is to let men gather wealth and power via peaceful means, such as commerce and trade. Where this happens they usually don't go into war with their neighbours. Having the majority of the worlds people not under the sway of religion would be a good start as well, but I'm of the belief that religion is hard wired in as well - remove an ancient text and god and people usually start tot replace it with some other belief system anyway. And it would be those belief systems clashes that would probably be the 'cause' of wars down the track.

zby 12y ago
Really spot on. Just one thing - according to Rene Girard religion is a way to control and confine aggression. It controls aggression by aggression in a very dangerous way - but at the core it is a 'social technology' with the goal of limiting the outcomes of conflicts. I believe that theory has a lot of truth in it.
IgorPartola 12y ago
Agreed with you re. Vietnam. That is a good point. Not quite agreed on WWI/II. Lots of modern military and foreign policy is based on the aftermath of WWII. After all, that was the last war that the US was involved in. All the ones after that were "operations", and the US never formally declared war on another country since. They aren't typical, yet they are always the ones other wars are compared against. So war is emergent behavior because some percentage of young men is always available to fight it, and because old men in power are more than willing to send the young men into war. That's at least two different behaviors we've identified so far. Up until reading this article I had the point of view that war was just too cheap vs alternatives. Want land/power/oil/money/whatever? Just go and take it rather than building your own. And the solution is the opposite: make war expensive. Then again, neither our war on terror, nor the terror attacks on the US and its allies quite fit this paradigm.
- brc 12y ago
  My point with ww1 and ww2 is that, if you graphed wars by people involved, destruction, whatever, they stick out of the group by a long way. I think your looking at the picture with too much of a us-centric view. The US is not involved in the majority of wars, at least not directly with men nondescript materials. You're right in that the world wars are all part of the same narrative about destabilisation that leads to other wars - arguably the majority of conflicts around today have roots in both. But if you look at some more topical wars/conflicts - say the Arab/Israel conflict from 1948-present you see that it's not just about gaining territory but far deeper things (territory is the score, but the purpose is much deeper) plus the military conflicts during this period have been much more conventional with the majority of attacks being primarily military. Lately it has gone more asymmetrical and terrorism v conventional military but initially it was tanks on battlefields. Again other conflicts in the he second half of the twentieth century were far make typical wars in that they were relatively localised, didn't involve things like carpet bombing civilian population and didn't involve mass troop movements. Even Vietnam and Korea, wars with direct US involvement, had a fraction of the men deployed as compared with Ww2. Also, it's a good point about making the cost of a war prohibitive - we have the means to do this now - but the costs of a war don't usually fall onto the main aggressors on all sides. Typically it falls onto the soldiers, refugees and ordinary citizens. If powerful countries were prepared to apply the costs of war to those who start them, the incidence would go down. But you spiral into an eye-for-an-eye retaliation which is a worse mess.