War and Peace and Money

On this Memorial Day, it’s well to remember that one of the darker talents of humanity is how good we are at killing each other.  That’s a claim never made for meadow larks.  Looking back over the grim statistics of history, one sees that the Chinese civil wars of the 1^st through 8^th centuries C.E. top the list with total death tolls, including disease and famine, estimated at well over 130 million.  That’s almost matched by the combined deaths from the wars of the 20^th century, with estimates of over 100 million.  Those were peaks, when we were at the top of our form, though other centuries show we were no slouches even on a day off.  The 30 Years War, even though it involved casualties of only about 11 million, managed to reduce populations in parts of Germany by about 75 percent.  The first decade of the 21^st century has seen less than 200,000 casualties of war, but we’re working at it.

Further examination of history reveals interesting patterns in our rampages.  David Rothkopf, in Power, Inc., reports these trends: the 16^th century C.E. included 34 wars between major powers, the 18^th included 17 such wars, and the 20^th included 15. He also reports a decline in the average duration of wars from 1.6 years down to .4 years and an increase in periods of no active major wars from 5 percent up to 47 percent.  Our wars are becoming less frequent, shorter and more violent.  They also have become much more expensive.

It’s tempting to cite Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex at this point, but the credit or blame goes back to Napoleon.  When Gustavus Adolphus and the Swedish army became the decisive factor in the resolution of the 30 Years War, he had done it with 73,000 troops, of whom 30,000 were mercenaries, and with cheap muskets.  150 years later, Napoleon accomplished his conquests of Europe with a universal draft mustering about 1 million troops, with an equally elaborate military infrastructure,  and with cannon.  That was the birth of modern warfare, with its huge armies and complex weaponry, all of which are expensive.  The estimates are that the U.S. has spent between one and two trillion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past ten years, an amount critics have noted that about equals the federal deficit.  As Rothkopf notes, the expense of war has priced all but a few major nations out of the market.  That in turn produces effects that reach beyond war itself.

For one, the ability to project coercive force has always been perceived as a defining power of sovereignty.  States with no army to speak of are not regarded as major, no matter how prosperous or well run.  The defining measure of military power these days is nuclear weaponry, and of about 190 countries in the world today, only about 9 are thought to be nuclear. Somehow, the rest don’t seem to count.  But such countries do count, as they always have, and their presence is now projected by alliances of all sorts, from the U.N. and NATO to NAFTA, SEATO and beyond.  These alliances in turn hasten the growth of international law and behavioral norms promoting peaceful resolution of issues.  And as sovereign authority is more and more exercised by unions and alliances, it is in the process transferring  from military to other sovereign issues.  A big part of the European debt controversy involves the tension between EU sovereignty and that of its constituent members over economic policy.

Second, the expense of war is more and more being used as a political weapon itself.  Ronald Reagan vowed to break the wallet of the Soviet Union through his Star Wars Program, and perhaps he did.  In the U.S., conservatives have sought to cut social program spending by not paying for war expenses though increased tax revenue, thereby creating politically explosive deficits.   Through history, political rhetoric to the contrary, most national deficits have been created by the expense of war, not the costs of the domestic economy, and have been paid for through tax revenue increases.

Third, the economic expense of war consists largely of huge transfer payments from the government to private corporations in the form of bewildering varieties of defense contracts.  This in turns enables these corporations, Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex”, to spend millions each year in lobbying for policies that further enhance their incomes, at the expense of national interests.  Results of this include such things as the cost of weaponry climbing a steady 6 percent annually, while the rest of the economy is in recession.

More importantly, our obsession with improving our skills at killing each other drains energy and resources from our abilities to work together to evolve the planet to a more peaceful place.  The costs of war have been a boon that has generated the growth of alliances among people, and has hastened the development of international norms of more peaceful behavior.  It is time to promote those, and not war itself.  We no longer can afford otherwise.