I find it very interesting that in modern times we can debate whether to bomb a country publicly, under the knowledge of the potential enemy, without there being much they can do about it.“Should be a full-scale invasion or just some limited airstrikes, councilmen? Hey can someone fill up my teacup over here?”
To add to that point, it seems in general that war is something less than it used to be. We are in war right now and as a civilian I don’t feel it has affected me very much, other than perhaps owing some extra money at the national level. But certainly my day-to-day life is indistinguishable from the times that we were not at war. Were civilian populations of past wars in the United States as detached from the conflict as we are? I doubt it.
In the future I wonder how advances in remote control or full tomorrow autonomy of war machines could impact our ability to fight wars at minimal cost. Boot up the equivalent of a Pentagon level Xbox, have some new cadets fresh from playing Call of Duty try their hand at an aerial bombardment followed by a robot-led frontal assault, and then after the objective is taken two hours later log off and go to sleep.
In your opinion, are the costs and other similar barriers to engaging in warfare increasing or decreasing?
Certainly not. During WWII, Americans at home had to put up with rationing of everything from rubber tires to gasoline to sugar. This was not a trivial matter, as the rationing was strict enough to have a serious effect on people. Driving in the USA went way down during the war, because of the rationing of gasoline.
Then there were the various drills. People were honestly afraid that the Germans would be able to bomb us, even though in reality they had no aircraft that were anywhere close to flying the required distance. Civilian patrols were set up to watch for the enemy on both coasts.
And there was the issue of blackouts. German submarines did make it to the coast of the USA, hunting for ships to torpedo. It was much easier for them to find ships when there were lights on shore. The logical response was a total blackout of the shores, but wealthy tourist towns were opposed to that policy. It was a huge controversy.
War is still expensive in terms of actual dollars and the lives of those who fight it. But the military-industrial complex has conspired to make sure that it doesn’t inconvenience the lives of civilians. If they hadn’t done so, the American people would not have agreed to most of the wars fought since 1945.
I think the financial cost of war has gotten much higher as the weapons have become more sophisticated. Example, on the news the other day, they mentioned a possible Syria attack scenario involving a few hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles. They’re amazing devices, able to deliver their payload to with a few feet of the target - but they cost about $1.5M apiece. Contrast this with the Mark 84, a brainless ballistic bomb which costs about $3100 apiece. They’re less accurate than the T’hawks, but I doubt you’d need 500 times as many to reliably destroy your selected targets. The downside side is that dropping dumb bombs requires overflying your target (putting your personnel at risk), and accepting the certainty of collateral damage (putting enemy civilians at risk).
One upside of the more expensive weaponry is of course that it’s more accurate, meaning we don’t need as much. That may be part of why your life hasn’t been disrupted by the military actions of the past few decades: we haven’t needed to engage in any rationing of fundamental resources (rubber, steel, petroleum, etc.) in order to make sure our military is well-stocked. Even if we were to fight a war today as big as WW2, we wouldn’t need that many resources. Back then, you’d launch a mission with hundreds of bombers, each one requiring a crew of maybe ten men to drop 10-20,000 pounds of ordnance. Now you can put four men in a B-1B, and they can drop a staggering 130,000+ pounds of ordnance. Or keep them on the ground - save all that food, fuel, and rubber - and use those Tomahawks.
Bottom line, we’ve gotten much more efficient at killing people and breaking things, all at reduced risk to our own personnel, so a smaller military can achieve our foreign policy goals with less resources than it used to require. All of which means your civilian life doesn’t get nearly as disrupted.
One caveat is that we’ve never fought a war quite like WW2. In Gulf War 1, Gulf War 2, and the Afghan war, the really resource-intense fighting was over in a matter of weeks; it was over before the military could even use up the resources it had lying around at the outset. In WW2, the heavy fighting went on for several years; people were making planes, tanks, bombs and bullets as fast as they could in order to keep up with the need. Even the Vietnam war wasn’t that intense: WW2 cost the US about 400,000 dead in four years, but Vietnam took 20 years to kill 58,000 American soldiers. If we use fatalities as a proxy for the total effort, then it’s fair to say that the Vietnam war didn’t affect availability of resources nearly as much as WW2.
The primary impact of modern military conflicts on the daily life of US civilians is the possibility of a servicemember you know personally being injured or killed. And compared to WW2, that possibility is relatively small:
WW2: 4 years, 418,000 American fatalities from a population of about 130M (0.08% of the population per year)
War in Afghanistan: 12 years, 3275 American fatalities from a population of about 316M (0.00009% of the population per year)
There is no question at all that the financial cost of war has grown phenomenally over the years. In inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars, the Revolutionary War cost $1.8 billion. We currently spend that amount every week or so in Afghanistan.
But it is also obvious that the effect of war is not being felt as widely in our population. We have an all-volunteer military and a draft is nowhere in sight. We are so resource rich now that there’s not a significant impact to our economy after a decade of war.
Wars now happen too fast. You don’t have a lead time where you can take six months after the war starts to build up your military to fighting strength. The new doctrine is “come as you are” wars - you have to fight with the men and equipment you had ready when the war started.
The result of this is you have to pretty much always keep your standing military up to wartime strength - which is a lot more expensive. But when you do fight an actual war, this means there’s relatively little extra expense because you were already spending the money.
The main cost of war is human life lost. Since we moved war out of Europe the cost has gone down dramatically, since life in the third world ain’t all that valuable.
I believe the two world wars were exceptions to the general condition of the country (US). Excluding those two periods, war hasn’t impacted the US all that much. Think of the period from 1865 to 1917. Too many interventions and Indian wars to count and invasions of foreign nations (Cuba and the Philippines. China around 1900). Little impact on the civilians in the US. Yes, war is becoming more bloodless-for both sides. Much more so for the US side. But the real effect if any of video game wars will occur in the future-if it occurs at all.
Maybe we should just move war over to a MMPORPG. Full out virtual warfare. That way we don’t have to spend so much rebuilding some countries infrastructure.
You can’t really compare “total wars” between global superpowers or empires like the World Wars to the largely regional conflicts and police actions of the past half century. I imagine the more recent wars would be similar to colonial wars fought by the British or Roman empires. Largely interesting news stories that rarely affected the people themselves, unless someone they knew happened to not come back from a place they had never heard of.
I don’t know if “conspired” is the right term. As the leading economic power in the world, it’s much easier for us to sacrifice material wealth over human lives. And certainly it’s more desirable. After a decade of fighting in Iraq, people consider 4000 American casualties a great tragedy. In comparison, it’s about the same number of causalities after one day of fighting at Normandy or Iwo Jima. Even though we dropped more bombs than were dropped in all of WWII.
Future emphasis on drones and other remotely controlled weapons may lead in that direction. It will certainly lead to fewer casualties (most especially fewer friendly-fire casualties.)
Or, we could just have Obama and Assad meet in the ring with boxing gloves. North Korea, you’re next!