I’ve had conversations with people who think that Medieval warfare was more honorable and better because of the hand to hand nature of it, and that guns ruined how badass it was.
It also draws to mind the inventor of the machine gun Hiram Maxim’s idea that the machine gun would be so terrible that people would stop having wars.
The reality is that war has always been the worst thing that can happen, and most people die of disease and indiscriminate weapons like artillery.
It seems the strategy of making hell more hellish to stop the hell is a poor one.
On its face, making war more hellish to dissuade people from waging war sounds like a good idea. Where it falls apart is that the ones waging war typically aren’t the ones going through hell.
I do think warfare is more honorable and better the less technology you use, but that’s just because technology lets you increase the distance of warfare and the distance is what actually makes wars worse or less honorable.
I would not have said better without the prompt of your comment, but I value the deadliness of war negatively, so something like a club can kill fewer people than a gun, which can kill fewer people than a neutron bomb.
I think it’s more honorable to give all parties involved an honest chance in winning a fight and in harming the other side. Drone operators are functionally immune to harm, and their side only risks the value of a drone, whereas the other side is often unarmed and fully vulnerable to drone attacks, just by sleeping near a window or being outside [or going to a wedding, but that’s not my point]. It’s a lot harder to hit someone with a club without being vulnerable to their attacks yourself, and you cast an even wider net of damage with similarly low risk of the people actually impacted by your neutron bomb being able to attack you back.
A good historical example for how this is not dependent just on technology and for why medieval warfare was NOT more honorable is the Siege of Caffa. The Golden Horde flung plague-ridden corpses over the city walls, infecting the residents, causing them to flee, and likely causing the Black Death. That again, involves an increased distance of warfare. Any time you fight in a way that can’t be reversed, it’s less honorable and deadlier, thereby making it worse from my perspective.
Nukes are the ultimate Chekov’s Gun. It’s only a matter of time before one gets touched off somewhere for some reason. Especially as society continues to crumble from underlying ecological collapse.
I’ve had conversations with people who think that Medieval warfare was more honorable and better because of the hand to hand nature of it, and that guns ruined how badass it was.
It also draws to mind the inventor of the machine gun Hiram Maxim’s idea that the machine gun would be so terrible that people would stop having wars.
The reality is that war has always been the worst thing that can happen, and most people die of disease and indiscriminate weapons like artillery.
It seems the strategy of making hell more hellish to stop the hell is a poor one.
On its face, making war more hellish to dissuade people from waging war sounds like a good idea. Where it falls apart is that the ones waging war typically aren’t the ones going through hell.
I do think warfare is more honorable and better the less technology you use, but that’s just because technology lets you increase the distance of warfare and the distance is what actually makes wars worse or less honorable.
I would not have said better without the prompt of your comment, but I value the deadliness of war negatively, so something like a club can kill fewer people than a gun, which can kill fewer people than a neutron bomb.
I think it’s more honorable to give all parties involved an honest chance in winning a fight and in harming the other side. Drone operators are functionally immune to harm, and their side only risks the value of a drone, whereas the other side is often unarmed and fully vulnerable to drone attacks, just by sleeping near a window or being outside [or going to a wedding, but that’s not my point]. It’s a lot harder to hit someone with a club without being vulnerable to their attacks yourself, and you cast an even wider net of damage with similarly low risk of the people actually impacted by your neutron bomb being able to attack you back.
A good historical example for how this is not dependent just on technology and for why medieval warfare was NOT more honorable is the Siege of Caffa. The Golden Horde flung plague-ridden corpses over the city walls, infecting the residents, causing them to flee, and likely causing the Black Death. That again, involves an increased distance of warfare. Any time you fight in a way that can’t be reversed, it’s less honorable and deadlier, thereby making it worse from my perspective.
In fairness, nukes kinda are the ultimate making hell more hell and so Maxim’s idea worked to a degree.
Nukes are the ultimate Chekov’s Gun. It’s only a matter of time before one gets touched off somewhere for some reason. Especially as society continues to crumble from underlying ecological collapse.