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This doesn't seem right.
I get the sense that there are certain weapons and tactics that end up as a race to the bottom. Governments and their soldiers would rather not compete on those things. Even if they have an advantage on one race to the bottom, they don't have it in all areas.
The soldiers themselves are often interested in compliance. American POWs were treated well in Nazi Germany, even while they were sending their own population to gulags and gas chambers.
All weapons and tactics are a race to the bottom, war is a race to the bottom.
NBA players are often interested in the enforcement of foul rules. They are also interested in skirting those rules when possible to gain advantage in the game. Half the weaponry the US fields is built to skirt the Geneva Conventions in some way too technical or expensive for other people to duplicate.
But war has no actual rules, the other guys don't have to follow shit, that's why they're fighting you.
That's some quite superficial thinking. I think you really underestimate how far we could have gone with biological and chemical weapons, for one thing. Modern wars are in no way maximally brutal yet. Big states do avoid the logical endpoint of a race to the bottom where all personnel on both sides is writhing in agony within 72 hours.
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Yeah I just think you are misunderstanding some fundamental incentive structures man.
Race to the bottom gets to the bottom when there is only a singular driving incentive. And modern war often seems that way, but its not.
An example of something that is ruthless is biological evolution. Any tactic works. Any genes that can replicate and gain energy are acceptable. You get parasites, viruses, mind controlling fungi, etc.
Human war (especially in the modern era) is not really like that. Politicians at the top would like it to be that way for the sake of their own success. But they have to operate through lots of intermediaries. And those intermediaries are playing iterated prisoner's dilemmas with other nations, troops, and their descendants.
Or, to return to the Clausewitzian classic- war is the extension of politics by other means.
There may well be a theoretical 'pure' war, that ultimate bottom to race to... but that theoretical is stupid, because getting to it requires various disregards of political and even physical considerations and limitations. Even North Korea, the most hyper-militarized country on earth, spends soldier time supporting the harvest, and engineering, and enough other things that after a point you realize the military is also a jobs program for the state.
This, in turn, leads to how politics works in a context of anarchy with no higher power or inherent limiting principle. Unsurprisingly, it leads to cooperation and agreements that often self-limit. These are often unstable agreements, but the reasons that people agree to self-limit, and often uphold such self-limitations, are legion and not exactly new or novel.
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