netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
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User ID: 647
p
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
User ID: 647
p
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
User ID: 647
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
No bio...
User ID: 647
Not quite. War goals have gotten more abstract, but this is a side effect of the underlying cost/benefit analysis.
When most humans were right on the edge of subsistence farming, you could pay for conquest by extracting tribute, taxes, or slaves. As technology got more complex, the value of a conquered peasant’s labor went down, but you still needed raw materials and food.
Now the first world has basically all the unskilled labor and cheap goods it could want. It produces unbelievable amounts of food. Its most successful businesses are three, four, five steps removed from actually manufacturing stuff out of normal, boring materials. So how are you supposed to monetize a conquest?
National security. When everything your country does has a better rate of return than fighting, you only fight to get back to the other stuff. Hence “making the world safe for democracy.” Hence the Cold War. Now it’s counterterrorism and FONOPs. We slogged through the War on Terror because we had a war goal of never letting anybody try that shit again. Wanton destruction didn’t actually bring that any closer to fruition.
So yeah, we’re setting stupid, impractical war goals. All the old-fashioned ones are economic non-starters. What’s left is power projection supporting our other, more valuable activities.
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