14
War is like love; it always finds a way.1
—Bertolt Brecht
In the spring of 1990, two months before the beginning of “Operation Desert Storm,” I gave a presentation on war and warrior elites to a small group of sociologists. They were interested and supportive, but a bit pitying about my choice of a topic: War, they were eager to remind me, had run its course. The Cold War had ended; communism was over; there were no longer any “sides” to take. Too bad I had elected to work on a subject of only historical interest.
The conviction that war is passé, or soon to become so, has a venerable history of its own. The introduction of the gun, and after that, artillery, seemed to promise levels of destruction so costly that no state would want to risk them. After the gruesome bloodletting of the Napoleonic Wars, philosophers Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill prophesied that war would end as civilization turned, in relief, to the peaceful business of industrial production. World War I was, of course, the “war to end all wars”; a quarter-century later, the nuclear weapons developed and used in World War II seemed to doom war once and for all. Ghoulish wonks might play with scenarios for “limited nuclear war” and “flexible responses,” but anyone with sense could see that “war has been vanquished,” as Robert L. O’Connell has put it, defeated by its own weaponry.2
In the last few years, obituaries for war, or at least predictions of its imminent demise, have been coming thick and fast. In his 1989 book Retreat from Doomsday, John Mueller argued that “major war—war among developed countries—has gradually moved toward terminal disrepute because of its perceived repulsiveness and futility.”3 John Keegan, in his History of Warfare, expressed the hope that “at last, after five thousand years of recorded warmaking, cultural and material changes may be working to inhibit man’s proclivity to take up arms.”4 And in his most recent book, Ride of the Second Horseman, O’Connell finds the grim horseman thrown from his mount: Thanks to the growth of international trade and the emergence of international economic institutions, war has ceased to be “functional.”5
But no matter how futile, repulsive, or dysfunctional war may be, it persists. There have been 160 wars of various sizes since World War II,6 and by 1994 these had taken the lives of an estimated 22 million people.7 Many of these wars have been “conventional” in the sense of pitting one good-sized nation-state against another—Iran against Iraq, for example, or Iraq against the United States and its allies. Many others have been decidedly unconventional, featuring belligerents which are not nation-states but ethnic groups, factions, and religious movements. As Martin van Creveld argues, what we have been witnessing is not the death or atrophy of war but its “transformation”:
In a sense, war has found a way around the obstacles placed in its way by the scholars of militarism. Since armed conflict between the major nation-states is too costly and too likely to tip over into nuclear holocaust, war has taken other forms. Now it is likely to be “low-intensity” or, as German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger terms it, “molecular,” with the diminutives referring to the size of the warring units rather than to the cost in human life. The new kind of war is less disciplined and more spontaneous than the old, often fought by ill-clad bands more resembling gangs than armies. But it is, from a civilian point of view, more lethal than ever. Recall that in World War I, 15 percent of the fatalities were civilians, with that proportion rising to 65 percent in World War II. In the “low-intensity” wars of the late twentieth century—the wars of Ivory Coast, Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, East Timor, and the former Yugoslavia—civilians constitute 90 percent of the dead.9
Whatever the psychology of this new type of war—and there has been much vaporizing about a recrudescence of “evil” in the world—one particular innovation has made it possible, and that is the emergence of an international market in small arms.10 The modern nation-state came into being, as we have seen earlier, as a support system for the mass army. Today, however, anyone can purchase guns and almost anything else they might need—vehicles, canteens, boots, camouflage clothes—on the open market. Even military training and leadership is available, for a price, from mercenary groups and U.S. firms employing retired officers.11 Somalia, for example, had no arms industry and very little infrastructure of any kind during the years it was being torn in shreds by warring factions; the guns were provided by the superpowers of the Northern Hemisphere. With a thriving black market in weapons recycled by the former guerrillas of Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, the nation-state is no longer necessary as the unit of militarism. A warlord with cash and a coterie of followers will do.
And it is not only the expertise and hardware of war that is available in the international marketplace. The very spirit of war—the glory and romance once associated with particular noble lineages and, later, nations—has become a commodity available in the global consumer culture. With Rambo and his ilk, Hollywood offers up a denationalized, generic warrior-hero, a man of few words and limited loyalties, suitable for universal emulation. An American journalist described Russian special-forces fighters in Chechnya this way:
It is in the postnational factions of today’s “molecular wars” that these images are probably most effective, complementing and even substituting for makeshift notions of tribal and ethnic identity. Serbian soldiers also affect Rambo-style headbands and bandoliers;13 a Liberian guerrilla fighter takes “General Rambo” as his nom de guerre.14 Within the United States, the “Rambo culture” helps inspire a grass-roots “militia” movement dedicated to preserving and expanding the individual’s right to bear arms, including assault weapons normally reserved for the police and the military.15
So the “democratization of glory,” begun in the mass armies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, may eventually outlive the mass army, with its oppressive discipline and its constitutionally ordained subordination to civilian government. “Every man a warrior-hero!” seems to be the great populist demand of the late twentieth century. And if every man is to have his experience of warrior-glory, every man must have his war: The right-wing rural American stockpiles weapons in preparation for eventual battle with immigrants, African Americans, or government forces, while his suburban counterpart pays to spend weekends in mock wars fought with paint balls instead of bullets.
De-gendering War
One feature of the “transformed” war of the nuclear age is that it is less likely to be the exclusive province of males or even of adults. This “de-gendering” of war reflects, above all, the continuing revolution wrought by guns. There has never been a weapon that some women could not wield, but the gun—easy to carry and dependent for its lethal force on chemical rather than muscular energy—is potentially within reach of all. The “democratizing” trend it set in motion, which began in the sixteenth century with the elevation of the foot soldier’s role, extends now increasingly to the human categories traditionally excluded from combat: women and even children.
Nationalism has been another force militating toward the greater inclusion of women. Unlike the elite-warrior ethos of another era, nationalism does not discriminate on the basis of gender or class. Women as well as men are expected to participate in the worship of their nations’ flags and other sacred symbols, to cheer at parades and rallies, to “sacrifice” for the war effort. World War I, as we saw at the beginning of this book, inspired the same transports of enthusiasm among women as it did among men. In wartime England, for example, suffrage leaders abandoned their cause for war-related efforts, such as attempts to publicly shame men they judged to be “shirkers.”
In the United States, the change has occurred more rapidly than anyone could have imagined just a couple of decades ago. At that time, the prospect of women dying in combat was sufficiently alarming that it helped mobilize votes against the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.16 But a few years later the deaths of eleven women, and the capture of two, in the U.S.-led Gulf War aroused no special indignation. The idea of a “weaker sex,” requiring male protection, had lost its grip. Though still largely barred from direct combat, women now serve in a variety of new roles: directing artillery, piloting helicopters, operating supply depots. Meanwhile, a few bold and sturdy women have gained admission to the service academies where the officer elite is trained, have become fighter pilots, and have even found berths on combat vessels. We no longer hail “our boys” as they go forth to war, but “our men and women.”17
And in some settings, children. The warring factions in Liberia routinely recruited young boys as “men”-at-arms. During the war between Iran and Iraq, both nations fielded troops consisting of boys in their teens or younger. There is nothing about the gun, after all, which says it cannot be wielded by a child. But when little boys, and occasionally also girls, can be enlisted, then clearly war can no longer serve its ancient function as a male ritual of initiation—if gender remains a meaningful category at all. In Liberia, fighters in one armed faction carried out some of their massacres while dressed, bizarrely, in blond wigs and tutus.
The de-gendering of war does not mean that “masculinity” will cease to be a desirable attribute; only that it will be an attribute that women as well as men can possess. Already, in popular usage, the dismissive term “wimp” is applied almost as readily to women as to men, implying that the appropriate stance for both sexes is tough and potentially battle-ready. The division of humanity into “masculine” and “feminine” may persist, but these categories may have less and less to do with the biological sexes. This is not an entirely negative development, from a woman’s perspective: With the admission of women to warrior status, we may be ready for the long overdue recognition that it was not only human males who made the transition from prey to predator, but the entire human race.
How far the de-gendering of war will go is still very much an open question. Van Creveld, for one, sees the “transformation of war” inevitably stopping short of the continued incorporation of women, if only because of entrenched and irrational male resistance.18 Indeed, at every step toward their incorporation into the military, women have been met with coarse, misogynist resistance—jeers, hazings, and, above all, sexual assaults and harassment aimed at reminding them that, in the most primitive calculus, women are still not predators, but prey.19 There is no reason to think that men, as a sex, will give up their starring role in war any more easily than mounted knights once gave up theirs.
But the inclusion of women has gone far enough to cast serious doubts on any theory of war that derives exclusively from considerations of gender. War has been seen by many cultures as a male initiation rite and a defining male activity, but it need not remain so. When war ceases to serve one “function”—for example, the capture of prisoners for human sacrifice or the seizure of land for agricultural expansion—it generally finds another.
So war has come to depend less on the human social institutions that have sustained it for centuries, if not millennia. One of these is male supremacy, as embodied in the all-male warrior elite; another is that superb social instrument of war, the nation-state, in whose name all major wars have been fought for more than two hundred years. To anyone who had believed that war could be abolished by severing its links to male privilege, or by healing the artificial division of our species into nations, the end of the twentieth century can only bring gloom. War has little loyalty to even the most warlike of human institutions and may, ominously enough, have little use for humans themselves. Twentieth-century military technologists have already begun preparations for a version of war in which “autonomous weapons” will be “given the responsibility for killing human beings without human direction or supervision.”20
The Beast in Modern Form
Looking back on the developments of the twentieth century—and on the four centuries of gun-based warfare that preceded it—one is tempted to reformulate the ancient puzzle of what it is that gives war its iron grip on human cultures. Traditionally, the puzzle has been posed as a question about “human nature”: What is it in us that draws us, over and over, to an undertaking we know to be destructive and suspect, in most cases, to be thoroughly immoral? But when we reflect on war’s remarkable resilience in the face of changing circumstances, we cannot help wanting to turn the question around for a moment to ask instead: What is this thing that humans have been so fatally drawn to? If war is not firmly rooted in some human subgroup (adult males, for example, or any other relative elite), if it is not the product of some particular form of human social organization (feudalism, the nation-state, or capitalism)—then what exactly is it?
This is not, I should remind the reader, the question I set out to answer in this book. The aim of the book was not to explain the existence of war but, more modestly, to understand the uniquely “religious” feelings humans bring to it. These feelings are not indissolubly wedded to the project of war: As William James wisely observed, the kind of courage and altruism people bring to war could, conceivably, be redirected to some more worthy enterprise, or “moral equivalent of war.” Nor is war dependent, for its existence, on the special feelings we attach to it. War can be waged, and often has been, without any great and noble sentiments. It is routinely waged, in fact, by ants.
In trying to understand what war is, we have been misled, I would argue, by the apparent linkage between war and various other institutions—hierarchies of class, gender, and political leadership, for example. Analyze any war-making society and, sure enough, you will find the practice of war apparently embedded in and dependent upon that society’s economy, culture, system of gender relations, and so forth. But change that economy and culture—as in going from a hunting-gathering to an agricultural way of life, or from agriculture to industry—and war will, most likely, be found to persist. So it is the autonomy of war as an institution that we have to confront and explain. Is war something which really does have “a life of its own”?
As we observed in chapter 9, war can be analogized, in a mathematical sense, to a process caused by living things—in particular, to a disease brought about by microorganisms. War is “contagious,” as we have noted, spreading readily from one culture to the next. And once the famous “cycle of violence” has begun, there is, of course, no stopping it; each injury demands the counterinjury known as revenge. Thus war is, in some not yet entirely defined sense, a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a dynamism not unlike that of living things.
Social science provides us with no category for such an entity, but other fields are beginning to offer what look, at least for now, like promising frameworks. One of these is the biologist Richard Dawkins’s concept of a “meme.” Searching for a way to describe cultural evolution, he proposed the concept of self-replicating “units of culture” analogous to genes. Like genes, these “memes” seek to copy themselves as widely as possible and, also like genes, are subject to certain (so far unexamined) selective forces. The underlying idea—which gains a certain respectability from the new “dual inheritance model” of evolution21—is that culture, like biology, may be subject to evolutionary laws of its own, with the “fittest” memes winning out, in time, over the other cultural possibilities.
Unfortunately, it is not too easy to say what the evolutionarily significant “units of culture” may be. Sometimes Dawkins and his followers in what is optimistically called the “science of memetics” refer to the slenderest bits of cultural ephemera—tunes, phrases, images—as memes. But while tunes or phrases can be “infectious” in their own way, their reproduction—on compact discs or printed pages—seems largely a matter of human whim. At other times, Dawkins includes rather grander notions, such as the idea of a deity, as memes, though clearly the idea of a deity exists at a vastly higher level of complexity than, say, a particular image of a deity. The image—a particular painting of Jesus, for example—will be more or less the same for all who behold it and can be described, more or less adequately, by a simple code suitable for electronic transmission. Not so, however, with the idea of God: Not only does the idea vary from person to person (and within each person, depending on mood and the vicissitudes of faith), but it often contains within it a complex set of behavioral instructions—love thy neighbor, light candles on shabbos, avoid pork and alcohol, or whatever.
If war can be thought of as a meme, clearly it is a meme like religion rather than like, for example, a popular tune. It cannot be reduced, as a tune can, to any simple sequence of symbols. Rather, it would have to be conceived as a loose assemblage of algorithms or programs (in the computer sense) for action: When living in the vicinity of a tribe that possesses large numbers of spears, it is wise to make spears of one’s own. When approached by a group of men brandishing spears, it is a good idea to muster up a spear-bearing group of one’s own. When attacked, fight back, or run very fast. And so forth.
Considered as a self-reproducing cultural entity or meme, war appears to be far more robust than any particular religion, perhaps more robust than religion in general. Compare, for example, the “reproductive” efficacy of war to that of a superficially rather similar religious practice: human sacrifice. Both involve killing people, and both tend to invoke rather exalted explanations for why the killing must be done. But human sacrifice can spread only by imitation; war, on the other hand, requires far less by way of human acquiescence. You may admire the religious fervor that leads the neighboring tribe to immolate its children, but you are not required to follow suit. In the case of war, there is very little choice; if the neighboring band decides to capture and immolate your children (or steal your herds and grain stores), your group can fight back—or prepare to face extinction. Given its tenacity and near universality, war is surely one of the “fittest” of memes.
“Memetics” remains in its infancy, but for our purposes, the truly sobering aspect of Dawkins’s idea is that “fitness,” for a meme, may have little or nothing to do with the biological fitness or well-being of the people who act in conformity with it. If culture is governed by laws analogous to those of natural selection, these laws are not selecting for stronger or happier people, but for more successful memes. “What we have not previously considered,” Dawkins writes, apparently referring to a century of social science, “is that a cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has, simply because it is advantageous to itself.”22
Thus, if war is understood as a self-replicating entity, we should probably abandon the many attempts to explain it as an evolutionary adaptation which has been, in some ecological sense, useful or helpful to humans. Biology instructs us to raise large numbers of healthy children—the clearest possible measure of biological fitness—but culture can countermand this instruction with the idea that it is glorious to die young in war. Culture, in other words, cannot be counted on to be “on our side.” Insofar as it allows humans to escape the imperatives of biology, it may do so only to entrap us in what are often crueler imperatives of its own.
Another possible way of thinking about war as a self-replicating activity comes from computer science—though not from the part that seeks to provide models for the human mind. Perhaps surprisingly, this infant science has come up with a new notion of “life,” and one that goes well beyond the water-and-carbon-based chemical engines that we usually recognize as animals, plants, and microorganisms. Computer scientists are generating new “life forms” that have no material substance at all; they are programs—computer “viruses” would be the most familiar example—that have been designed to reproduce themselves and, in some cases, even to undergo spontaneous “mutations.” Such “creatures,” which can be represented on a computer screen as dots or fish or lions or anything else one fancies, can be programmed to evolve in response to selective forces imposed by the experimenter. If two or more species of them are present, they may quite spontaneously enter into such lifelike relationships as those of symbiosis and parasitism.
These self-reproducing computer programs demand a definition of a living being as “a pattern in space/time… rather than a specific material object.”23 Such a being must be able not only to reproduce itself, but to undergo mutations, and hence to evolve over the course of generations. If technological changes in weaponry, transportation, and so on are understood as the relevant “mutations,” then war, in some rough sense, may fit this kind of expanded definition. With the introduction of the horse as part of the technology of war some 4,000 years ago, war “mutated” into an occupation for mounted elites. With the introduction of the gun, it mutated again—this time into an activity potentially accessible to the common man and woman. And following each such mutation in the mechanism of war, human social institutions, with their ancient hierarchies of class and gender, can only scramble to keep up.
But whether we base our analogies on genes or computer programs, we are looking for a way to understand how human societies may, in a sense, fall prey to “living” entities that were, originally, of our own creation. This tragic possibility is implicit, it seems to me, in Marx’s description of capitalism. In Capital, as in that other nineteenth-century classic, Frankenstein, human creativity brings forth something—market system or monster—which humans can no longer control. Humans invented market systems and bring strong feelings to them—greed, most notably, but also the desire for adventure and sometimes even altruistic concerns for the general welfare. But once under way, market systems (and perhaps especially those of the industrial-capitalist variety) have a dynamism of their own, which no socialist enclave has yet found a way to resist for any length of time. The market comes to act like a force of nature, dictating—or at least severely circumscribing—the choices of anyone who hopes to remain a “player.” This outcome would seem to fit Andrew Bard Schmookler’s observation that “with the rise of civilization human creativity ceased to drive the mill of cultural evolution but rather became its grist.”24
War is not the only self-replicating social institution. The familiar hierarchies of race, gender, and class are also endowed with a certain ability to reproduce themselves. Insofar as the members of a supposedly inferior group are denied adequate nutrition or education or access to important resources, they will indeed remain “inferior.” Girls who are barred from education on the basis of their sex’s presumed intellectual deficits may well end up as examples of why women can’t be educated, and will often pass this implicit judgment on to their own daughters. Black children who are underfed and consigned to underfunded schools will, very often, be handicapped for life. This does not mean that social hierarchies cannot be overthrown; only that those who would overthrow them should be aware of their almost lifelike power to persist. As reformers have had to learn again and again, simply declaring a group equal does not end the dreary dynamic that has condemned it to inequality thus far.
Someday, perhaps, social theory will be in a position to understand human culture as a medium—a primeval soup, as it were—within which abstract entities like war, and possibly also capitalism, religion, and science, not only “live” and reproduce but also interact. For now, let us content ourselves with observing that they do indeed interact, and in complex, evolving ways. War, for example, has for millennia existed in a symbiotic relationship with male domination, both drawing strength from and giving nourishment to it. But this mutual dependence only goes so far. There have been cultures, like that of the Inuit, which are both peaceable and male dominated, just as there is now a culture—that of the United States—which is both militaristic and (at least officially) egalitarian with respect to gender. War has thrived through its symbiosis with male domination, but it can also do quite nicely on its own.
Market systems have an even more complex history of interaction with the self-replicating pattern that is war. During the feudal era, for example, the European warrior elite disdained the nascent market and the men who made it work. But, as William H. McNeill argues in The Pursuit of Power, it was the eventual synergy of markets and militarism that helped pave the way for the burst of European imperial expansionism from the sixteenth century on. Something like that synergy persists in the United States, where the market economy has become thoroughly addicted to the manufacture of weapons and the government expenditures that underwrite it. But on a global scale, the interaction between war and the market system (or, if you will, the memes for war and markets) has grown more complex and sometimes hostile: The now global marketplace tends to homogenize cultures and produce a single “community” of, say, Coca-Cola drinkers or Marlboro smokers; at the same time, the far older war system exerts a centripetal force, fractionating the human population into warring subgroups.25
I should emphasize that the notion of a cultural entity as a quasi-“living” being does not impute to that entity any intentions or objectives of its own. In fact, I was being overly colorful at the beginning of this discussion in saying that such entities “seek” to reproduce. They “seek” nothing; as with strands of viral DNA, it is just that those that have managed to reproduce successfully are still around. For anything like intentionality, or passion, or ambition or hope, these self-replicating cultural entities are dependent entirely on us.
And in this sense we have more than served their “purpose.” This book has been about the passions of war, and they are, as we have seen, among the “highest” and finest passions humans can know: courage, altruism, and the mystical sense of belonging to “something larger than ourselves.” But if we concede to war at least some measure of the autonomy enjoyed by living things, then we must acknowledge that we have invested these lofty passions in a peculiar kind of god indeed—an entity that is ultimately alien to us and supremely indifferent to our fate. We have sacrificed our loved ones for what is worse than nothing: we have sacrificed them for something that has no use for us.
To return to the question I posed at the beginning of this section: What is war that it exerts such cruel demands on us? It is first, in an economic sense, a parasite on human cultures—draining them of the funds and resources, talent and personnel, that could be used to advance the cause of human life and culture. But “parasitism” is too mild a term for a relationship predicated on the periodic killing of large numbers of human beings. If war is a “living” thing, it is a kind of creature that, by its very nature, devours us. To look at war, carefully and long enough, is to see the face of the predator over which we thought we had triumphed long ago.
Fighting War
War, at the end of the twentieth century, is a more formidable adversary than it has ever been. It can no longer be localized within a particular elite and hence overthrown in a brilliant act of revolution. Revolution, in fact, was redefined by Lenin and others as little more than a species of war, fought by disciplined “cadres” organized along the same hierarchical lines as the mass armies of the modern era. Meanwhile, war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions, rather than to just a handful of craftsmen and professional soldiers. It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.
In addition, our incestuous fixation on combat with our own kind has left us ill prepared to face many of the larger perils of the situation in which we find ourselves: the possibility of drastic climatic changes, the depletion of natural resources, the relentless predations of the microbial world. The wealth that flows ceaselessly to the project of war is wealth lost, for the most part, to the battle against these threats. In the United States, military spending no longer requires a credible enemy to justify it, while funding for sanitation, nutrition, medical care, and environmental reclamation declines even as the need mounts. In the third world and much of the postcommunist world, the preparedness for war far surpasses the readiness to combat disease—witness Zaire’s fumbling efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak of 1995, or the swiftly declining life expectancy of the former Soviets.
But in at least one way, we have gotten tougher and better prepared to face the enemy that is war. If the twentieth century brought the steady advance of war and war-related enterprises, it also brought the beginnings of organized human resistance to war. Anti-war movements, arising in massive force in the latter half of the century, are themselves products of the logic of modern war, with its requirements of mass participation and assent. When the practice and passions of war were largely confined to a warrior elite, popular opposition to war usually took the form of opposition to that elite. But in the situation where everyone is expected to participate in one way or another, and where anyone can become a victim whether they participate or not, opposition could at last develop to the institution of war itself.
This represents an enormous human achievement. Any anti-war movement that targets only the human agents of war—a warrior elite or, in our own time, the chieftains of the “military-industrial complex”—risks mimicking those it seeks to overcome. Anti-war activists can become macho and belligerent warriors in their own right, just as revolutionaries all too often evolve into fatigue-clad replacements for the oppressors they overthrow. So it is a giant step from hating the warriors to hating the war, and an even greater step to deciding that the “enemy” is the abstract institution of war, which maintains its grip on us even in the interludes we know as peace.
The anti-war movements of the late twentieth century are admittedly feeble undertakings compared to that which they oppose. They are reactive and ad hoc, emerging, usually tardily, in response to particular wars, then ebbing to nothing in times of peace. They are fuzzy-minded, moralistic, and often committed to cartoonish theories of the sources of war—that it is a product of capitalism, for example, or testosterone or some similar flaw.
But for all their failings, anti-war movements should already have taught us one crucial lesson: that the passions we bring to war can be brought just as well to the struggle against war. There is a place for courage and solidarity and self-sacrifice other than in the service of this peculiarly bloody institution, this inhuman “meme”—a place for them in the struggle to shake ourselves free of it. I myself would be unable to imagine the passions of war if I had not, at various times in my life, linked arms with the men and women around me and marched up, singing or chanting, to the waiting line of armed and uniformed men.
And we will need all the courage we can muster. What we are called to is, in fact, a kind of war. We will need “armies,” or at least networks of committed activists willing to act in concert when necessary, to oppose force with numbers, and passion with forbearance and reason. We will need leaders—not a handful of generals but huge numbers of individuals able to take the initiative to educate, inspire, and rally others. We will need strategies and cunning, ways of assessing the “enemy’s” strength and sketching out the way ahead. And even with all that, the struggle will be enormously costly. Those who fight war on this war-ridden planet must prepare themselves to lose battle after battle and still fight on, to lose security, comfort, position, even life.
But what have all the millennia of warfare prepared us for, if not this Armageddon fought, once more, against a predator beast?
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