FORGOT TO ADD LINK...its 3 pages..print it out..well worth the read...
http://www.thehistorynet.com/mhq/blutilityofwar/index.htmlThe end of the draft in the early 1970s, the creation of professional armies, and the collapse of a bellicose and nuclear Soviet Union have removed the immediate threat of war from the public consciousness. Yet an increasingly affluent and suburban citizenry is more abstractly sensitive to war's potential dangers and costs than ever before. Perhaps because of a dramatic rise in the standard of living in most Western countries, it is difficult to contemplate forgoing the good life in order to endure the misery and material sacrifices of battle. Instantaneously televised images from the battlefield also ensure that killing appears in our living rooms in brief sound bites-often broadcast apart from tactical, strategic, or moral contexts, and with instant editorializing by inexperienced journalists. Split-second scenes of shooting flash by, often accompanied by narration characterizing such acts as senseless and evil-without explaining who is shooting at whom, and why. There is also a great inconsistency in thinking about the utility of war. Anti-war activists and internationalists sometimes urge the United States to unilaterally employ its overwhelming military force against corrupt, authoritarian, and mostly weak states that spread mayhem among innocent civilians. Intervention of U.S. troops or warplanes to thwart the dictators in Haiti, Somalia, or Bosniaclear-cut moral causes to save thousands-seemed to entail few American casualties, confirming a real need for war. Yet riskier operations against more formidable powers like Iraq are often derided as "bellicose," even though Saddam Hussein has killed as many innocents as other dreadful despots. Modern Westerners perhaps increasingly define war as just and even necessary when victory is assured and cheap, but sometimes amoral and avoidable when real carnage and sacrifice are possible.
A common tenet of the new pacifism is the notion that war is altogether rare or, in fact, unnatural to the human species. A United Nations body of experts has recently declared war antithetical to man's nature, as an array of behavioralists adds that we have no innate bellicosity in our genes. Such rosy findings give "scientific" weight in turn to our sociologists and political scientists who favor international conferences and peacekeepers in lieu of U.S. aircraft carriers and Special Forces. Such faith accordingly argues that military investment is unessential, and so defense spending is reluctantly agreed to only when there are immediate adversaries on the horizon. Peace, in contrast, is assumed to be the natural order of events. Yet history more often proves otherwise. Note the use of the plural to describe chronic conflict-the Persian Wars (490 B.C.; 480-79 B.C.) or the Punic Wars (264-146 B.C.). Sometimes the noun "years" is necessary nomenclature-Seven Years' War, Thirty Years' War, or Hundred Years' War-to describe chronic fighting. Battles as well are often identified by numerical adjectives-Second Mantinea, First Bull Run, or Third Ypres-suggesting that the same places are the repeated sites of major campaigns. The Germans scattered the French in the Ardennes in spring 1940, before themselves retreating through the same forest in a failed second try in December 1944-a landscape pockmarked by the artillery of World War I. Epaminondas called the great plain of Boeotia the "dancing floor of war"-since the battles of Plataea, Coronea (first and second), Oinophyta, Delium, Haliartus, Tegyra, Leuctra, and Chaeronea were all fought within a few miles of each other.
At the very beginning of Western warfare during the Athenian fifth century, Athens fought wars in two out of every three years. Its power during the twentyseven-year-long Peloponnesian War was finally ended not through the brief armistice of 421 B.C., but only when the Spartans destroyed its last fleet at Aegospotami and forthwith sailed into the Piraeus. Similarly, it would be hard to find a year in the twentieth century in which American troops were not fighting some type of small-scale war in South America, the Pacific, Asia, or Africa. In our own time, we have even resorted to Roman numerals for theater wars on a global scale (World War I and World War II).
Americans often assume that we have not really been at war since Vietnamforgetting in the last two decades alone the occasional bloody fighting in Lebanon, Panama, Grenada, the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, and Afghanistan. And the enemies in those conflicts have not been uniform or their agendas predictable, as we have tried to enforce armistices, overthrow rightwing dictators, kick out left-wing strongmen, reclaim entire countries, escort oil tankers, stop the genocide of Muslims, feed the starving, and shut down a country-size Islamic terrorist haven. Almost every region of the globe in just the last decade or two has been in turmoil. India has fought three wars against Pakistan for Kashmir. Nearby China has engaged in border skirmishes with Russia and invaded Vietnam-after annexing and occupying Tibet. And the former Soviet Union, whether Russian against Chechen or Azerbaijani against Armenian, has been in as much commotion as during the Cold War when the Communist empire invaded Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan.
The ancient Greeks were empirical rather than theoretical thinkers and therefore based their conclusions on what they saw rather than imagined. They accepted the tragedy of war's ubiquity-an unfortunately common time, Herodotus said, "when fathers bury sons, rather than sons fathers." The philosopher Heraclitus remarked that war was the "father of all things," while Plato remarked that peace, not war, was the true parenthesis of human experience.
The Greeks found tragic the entire idea that innocent young men who neither knew each other nor shared any personal grudges would nevertheless seek to kill each other on the field of battle, without fear of criminal penalty and indeed encouraged to do so by the state. This wastage of manhood was deemed lamentable and often tragic, but not necessarily rare or always unnecessary, given man's innate craving for the things not his own and his propensity on a collective level to use force to satisfy those illegitimate appetites. So whether we like it or not, war seems to be omnipresent. We should keep in mind that more people have been killed in fighting in the fifty years of "peace" since, rather than during, the great tragedy of World War II, which saw fifty million destroyed.
