Do wars suck more now than they did in the past?

Great Debates
1

The other day I had a conversation with a friend of mine about whether wars suck more now or if they sucked more in the past. “In the past” is of course a rather broad category of wars and we ranged between the Napoleonic wars and pharaohs getting pissed at their neighbours. I decided to put this essential issue to the SDMB.

I think there are three key factors:

  1. Civilians. They were robbed, raped and killed in past wars too, but today they are also blown up by bombs, deliberately and by mistake. When battles were fought on battlefields between people with swords, the battles themselves didn’t kill civilians. Today, they end up in the line of fire all the time.

  2. Soldiers’ conditions. In past wars soldiers died in droves from noncombat hazards like diseases, battlefield fever, lack of hygiene, and rotten food. That hasn’t been eliminated, but severely reduced. Today, if you don’t get killed by the enemy, you actually have an odds-on chance of making it home alive. That wasn’t the case even a couple of hundred years ago.

  3. Actual fighting. Beyond nonlethal fisticuffs I’ve never been in combat, but I imagine I’d rather have a sword (and training) and be up against another guy with a sword than stalk through jungle with a gun hoping that I’ll see the enemy before he sees me. On the other hand, on a battlefield of yore you might end up having to stand in the way of a lance charge or getting three swords in your back while you’re trying to fight the fourth guy.

What factors have I missed?

2

I think it’s safe to say that warfare now is nowhere near as bad as it used to be. Just take a look at the number of casualties, both civilian and military, and you’ll see that the scope of modern fighting is very narrow. (I’m talking about organized war as opposed to tribal fighting and regional warlord activity)

But, I think the most unfortunate thing is that the nature of war itself is so horriffic that even with modern targeted strikes and tactics to reduce collatoral deaths, it’s still a nasty, NASTY business.
Except for those who have actually experienced combat, the terror and raw carnage of battle can’t even be imagined.

So, in all I think it’s not as bad as it used to be, but in total, it’s still a grotesque, and horrific spectacle.

“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war” – GEN MacArthur

3

Two things. First, when armies would go around conquering cities it wouldn’t be too abnormal to just go in and massacre everyone if they showed any resistance. This set an example to others. This goes doubly so at the end of a protracted siege war, because those are expensive in both gold and morale and can end campaigns even if your side “wins.” Also, large armies require food and supplies, and the local civilian population would provide it, whether they liked it or not.

Second, you’re all too right that civilians get the short end of the stick with modern, industrial war. It has become increasingly worse ever since WWI. I remember a chart, I wish I could find it, that was rather striking. Something like 10% of deaths in WWI were civilians and it kept climbing with each war, becoming the majority of deaths in WII, continuing until Vietnam it was something like 70 or 80%. I don’t even want to think about Iraq.

The only big “advantage” I see with industrial war is that you’re more likely to be killed instantly, without even knowing what happened. Whether you’re charging with a spear or going house to house with a rifle, being a soldier isn’t pretty.

4

I agree with the above two posters that in an absolute sense, war sucked much more in the past. That said, our tolerance for casualties has declined so much over the years that it sort of comes to the same – that is, if we regard 3,000 casualties in the same way that our ancestors regarded 30,000 casualties, then the horribleness factor of the war becomes just about equivalent.

5

I guess it depends on your definition of “modern” and “war” or what counts as organized as compared to tribal but there are conflicts going on right now where hundreds of thousands of people have died. What about fairly recent history like the attempted absorption of Afghanistan by the USSR? The Second Congo War(ended 2003)? The Iran-Iraq War? Indonesia’s cleansing of East Timor? What about civil wars in Liberia, Sudan and Burma which have claimed millions and in many cases continue to pile on the bodies by the thousand in the most brutal ways imaginable?

Maybe you meant the western world, where you could maybe make the case, as long as you compare current, ongoing conflicts to WWII or Vietnam and the like. The number of dead in Iraq (how long ago was Lancet…maybe Bush will beat Clinton’s 1.5 million soon) is certainly nothing to scoff at, especially if the percent were scaled to our population base in the U.S., where it would be comparable to a major catastrophe.

6

I don’t see any reason to think this is true. “Modern” fighting would surely include the Iran-Iraq War, which killed a million people and was thus every bit as devastating as, say, the American Civil War. The Vietnam War, a very modern war, killed at least two million people and possibly as many as four million, most of them killed between 1965 and 1973. Civilians were routinely targeted. Soldiers died in the tens of thousands.

And of course, weren’t the World Wars “modern” wars? Even if you’re arguing war has since become less brutal, however, that’s not a meaningful comparison. WWI and WWII were historical outliers; no wars before or since killed as many. That we have gone 62 years since the last World War is not historically remarkable; prior to 1914, Europe had gone a very long time without any really long, bad wars.

7

You’re not seeing the forest through the trees, and you’re pretty much making my point.

The OP wanted to know if wars suck more or less when compared to the past. They didn’t ask about raw numbers. That’s only one facet of conflict. What about the weapons and tactics used to achieve victory, what targets are selected, where will the bulk of conflict occur? These are the things that have lessened the impact of war on non-combatants among organized nations in recent history.

Like I said, when organized government entities (recognized nations) enter the arena of war, how victory is obtained is far more controlled when compared to 30-50 years ago. In the past 30 years when was the last time a major city was carpet bombed? Maybe the Russians did it in the 80’s but that’s about it. I have to admit, when groups (non-governmental entities, such as african warlords and religious sects) enter the arena of war all bets are off as far as rules of engagement and military specific targeting.

In total I think we (western nations) are decreasing the amount of “suck” in war.
But, as I mentioned in my post…

So, war still sucks really REALLY REALLY REALLY bad, but not as bad as it used to.

8

I failed to mention that in my earlier post I was refering to western nations… Sorry.

9

I think, if we can agree, we can pin the date of “modern wars” down to the first world war. (Not discounting the similiar, peripheral wars around the same time, but let’s say the start of the 20th century)

Positing those dates, many horrible things have been introduced to modern warfare. Airplanes, tanks, incendiary bombs, rifles that can kill from two and a half kilometers away, fragmentary AP mines, the overhanging chance of chemical, viral and nuclear retaliation and tactics that apply the above; “Scorched Earth” and “Shock and Awe.”

Most of those things existed in rudimentary forms in pre-modern warfare, but their efficience can hardly be compared to the current incarnations.

With those in mind, I think medieval-and-onward warfare were a lot harder on both the population and the soldiers than modern warfare has been, but I think modern war has the potential to be far worse again, by several orders of magnitude. We simply haven’t experienced two capital modern states with the technology go all-in, yet.
For the civilian populace, it’s always been harsh. In pre-modern warfare, the least of your worries would be that the armies would both lay claim to your crops. In some cases, they’d also burn the crops down in a swathe behind them to ensure a following army didn’t get supplies. Women were usually very much at risk of rape, robberies were commonplace, you could get killed indiscriminately and if you were very much lucky, you wouldn’t get drafted. At the very least, you stood at risk of losing your entire livehood.

In modern warfare, the armies are more self-contained, and usually won’t forrage for local food unless badly pressed or in for the long haul. The civilian populace usually suffer under reprisal attacks for giving their invaders or freedom fighters aid, and civilian infrastructure suffer greatly under the destructive nature of explosives. Roads, civic buildings, vehicles, etc. The chance of getting murdered or raped out of hand is diminished, but still very much there, depending on the origin of the army. The worst part of the civilian suffering is usually the refuge camps, which still suffers from spreading sicknesses, bad water, little food and poor housing.

For the soldiers, well, I dunno. I haven’t fought in any modern wars and the only experience I have with medieval warfare is a few years of re-enactment. That said, I’d take my odds on a sword, shield and armour against a guy equipped with the same, with people I trust at my side, any day. I sometimes freeze up at the thought of the helplessness of the modern soldier, who can be picked off from a mile away and never see the shooter, get bombed into orbit or have to face children with guns. Even the thought of house-to-house warfare makes me want to spit.

That said, there is more to be said of being on the winning side today than there was before, for the soldier. A good chance of coming home, for one. Psychiatrists, for another.

I have to admit, I don’t know the numbers, but I’d imagine the losses would be worse in this day and age, if the two wars compared went on for a similiar period of time, simply because there are more people in the world.

10

I don’t think they regarded it that way then. 30,000 people was a huge chunk of any nation’s populace, whereas 3000 is a very small chunk of ours. Getting righteously indignant and media reporting of casualties but being relatively unaffected by the results, is not the same thing as knowing multiple people who died, and in many cases being unable to raise crops because a majority share of the youth in your town were killed or maimed in battle.

Also, war in the past was often predicated upon the whims of the sovereign based upon personal slights, and was much more constant and all pervasive than it is today. There were never any UN food drops or reconstruction efforts afterward either. Treating the conquered people like dirt was not considered a moral defect.

I don’t see any equivalent to the salting of Carthage in modern war.

11

In the sense of Modern War I think it’s important to stipulate where you are talking about. Idi Amin’s Uganda was much like a war of the past with modern weapons.

Also, sheer numbers are not a good way to judge things as the total world population is something like 6 times today what it was in 1900. You have to think about proportion and the ability of a society to continue functioning when it loses a great number of its young men.

12

I wonder how many Iraqis have been killed by bombing so far? Far, far more non-combatant Iraqis have been killed than combatants. Many civilians were killed in the Kosovo war. The U.S. hasn’t had to fight anyone who put up a really tough fight since Vietnam, but on the occasions they did have, civilians die in bombing.

Carpet bombing of cities essentially happened en masse in two wars: WWII, and Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos. Again, you’re taking a histprical outlier and drawing a distinction between “modern” and “not modern” that doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’m not at all confident there won’t be any more carpet bombing.

13

You should read some William Lind. His conception of the generations of war talks about this. Carpet Bombing is basically useless against 4th Generation entities, which are terrorists and non-state actors. If we went to war with a country that actually could threaten us like Russia or China, you’d better believe we’d carpet bomb.

We could completely destroy Iran’s capacity to fight, and have a functioning economy without carpet bombing. Take out all their airstrips, tanks, highways, power stations and communications infrastructure.

14

I think it’s very hard to give an answer to this.

Many of the wars that go on today are well out of the public eye, in Africa where many in the West just don’t care what happens. Some of these wars have been pretty damn brutal. As brutal as the stuff the Romans did? I don’t know, again, very hard to say.

The Romans would enslave those who fought against them, but reward those who did not. All in all, once the Romans established a government in your part of the world your lot was probably slightly better than it was before (although except for the wealthiest persons in the Roman Empire, life sucked pretty bad anyway.)

Rome wanted to make conquered territories an asset before they were willing to destroy it outright. Carthage got the ancient world’s equivalent of a nuclear strike because it had been a thorn in Rome’s side for so long Rome did not believe it possible to ever turn that particular Carthage into an asset. The Romans gave the Jews several chances to accept Roman rule before wiping out many of their villages in campaigns of mass-murder and then enslaving and forcefully migrating the rest.

By comparison, in many of the ethnic conflicts in Africa the sole and only goal is to destroy the other ethnicity completely. That’s arguably a lot more brutal than your typical Roman war, designed around conquest and subjugation of a conquered people, not outright genocide of said people.

The tactics and customs in the West have certainly more or less improved, though. In the Middle Ages a common tactic for striking at another lord was to take all of their serfs and kill them, no serfs means no one to work the lord’s land. It effectively eviscerates the Lord’s economy.

Even the carpet bombings of World War II were not undertaken with the goal of wiping out the entirety of the population. They were done to target economic resources like factories that were being used in the war effort as well as to instill fear in the civilian population (a much less noble goal than the former.)

FWIW the country that got it the worst in World War II was Poland who lost 18.5% of its population. The closest country to suffer that much was Lithuania which lost 13.7% and then the Soviet Union which lost 13.5%. Germany for all its massive losses both civilian and military, lost 10% of its population.

Ten percent is nothing to take lightly. For comparison though, during the Thirty Years War it is estimated that up to one third of the German population was killed. With any conflict taking place in the Early Modern era you have to realize that record keeping is not near what it is today (and even today we can’t say for sure how many civilians have been killed in Iraq) and exaggeration by local historians was likewise common. It’s also not known how many died from battle, pillaging, or from disease spread by the large armies that devastated Germany. What we can probably safely say is the Thirty Years war was more devastating to the German people than World War II, as Germany was quite recovered by 1955 compared to the German states ten years after the end of the Thirty Years War, the conflict literally left Germany bloodied and broken for more than a generation.

15

Look at Rwanda, or the Armenia, or the Darfur region, every bit as horrific as any war ever has been, but generally on a systematic and large scale. I should imagine the conflict in Chechnya would not be popular among both the locals or the Russians, plenty of abuse there.

The events in parts of Yugoslavia were pretty awful too.

I think perhaps ‘modern’ in this sense would mean within living memory, with WW1 just passing out.

This would make WW2, along with the protracted Sino-Japanese conflict the most absolute brutal of all wars, incuding genocide, medical experimentation, systematic slavery and death factories along with famine… add in the crowning glory of first active use of atomic weapons, which was seen as actually being a less worse option than the alternative, and it probably was too.

Certain arms of the military suffered incredible casusalty rates - eg submariners, and especially the kamikaze pilots :slight_smile:

You could make a reasonably good case for saying that from around 1870 on to around the 1990’s was one period of warfare that had periods of greater intensity, since these wars were pretty closely linked.

When you look at it this way, and the scale of deaths from direct and indirect causes, I think that Ghengis Khan can only look upon these hundred or so years with some envy.

16

I think the question of whether war “sucks” more now than before is entirely up to the perspective of the person being asked.

If you’re asking an average infantryman, I’d guess it’s better now than before for most Western soldiers, probably not much different for many others. Generally speaking, medical care, food and water, and transport have improved a great deal. Nothing like scrounging for food, walking 25 miles a day, and getting left for dead on the battlefield if you were seriously wounded!

If you’re a civilian, again, it depends on where you’d be. If you’re talking about a conflict betwen relatively civilized nations, then it’s almost certainly better than before- no 3 days of pillaging after taking a city, much less rape, murder and pillaging among the soldiers of either side. Much less targeting of civilian populations. If you’re in a conflict where one side is not so nice, or it’s one with an insurgency of some kind, then it gets more similar to wars in the past.
For example, if France & Britain were to go to war again, it would almost certainly be better to be a combatant or civilian nowadays than in say, 1812.

However, if you’re talking about the fighting in the Sudan, or Sri Lanka, then it’s probably not much different.

About the only place it’s definitely and incontrovertibly gotten better is in Naval warfare. Compare the life of a sailor as described in O’Brian’s or Forester’s novels with the life of a sailor today. Even in wartime, it’s a damned sight better than it was!

17

This is most definitely true. There’s really not a single area of a modern sailors life that isn’t demonstrably better than it was for a sailor operating in say, the 19th century. A modern U.S. ship of war isn’t going to be confused as a cruise ship by anyone, the officers live in cramped quarters and the enlisted men are sometimes bunked pretty tight, with constant flow traffic through their sleeping area. Still way better than any ship from the Age of Sail.

18

Without directly adressing the overall question, I do want to respond to this point. The Rwandan Genocide is clearly distinct from the actual invasion that in some respects helped create it – which is to say, there is no military element to random civilians going and chopping up random neighbors who are not in any military or loyalist/political way hostiles. In Darfur, the humanitarian crisis appears to have caused the rebellion, not vice versa – people simply responded to being brutalized by rebelling. The Armenian Conflicts (and I must admit a certain amount of ignorance on the topic) seems to have followed a similar pattern.

We don’t regard the death toll of chattle slavery as casualties of war, even though there were rebellions against slavery – the same applies to the Inquisition. I don’t know why that same standard shouldn’t apply to the present day.

19

I’ve always heard that the American Civil War and the Western Front in WWI were the suckiest.

20

There is a lot more technology brought to bear since Vietnam - precision guided munitions are several orders of magnitude more accurate. Not perfect by any means - but the military has changed tactics in part because of political pressure. Somebody wrote a book about this phenomenon recently. Thesis basically that because casualties are so politically sensitive, the military has become, ironically, far more lethal and effective - better medical care, and quicker - advanced schooling and “after action reviews” and “lessons learned”, increasing accuracy and pinpoint targetting, minimizing civilan “collateral damage” etc.

Speaking from my own perspective , I saw the military went to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, there is absolutely no way around that. In fact, my view was that they had taken things much too far and were placing everyone at excessive risk, I doubt anyone would honestly disagree in the same circumstance.