“War is brewing.” – The Lord of the Rings
Pa Wilder survived mustard gas and pepper spray. He was a seasoned veteran.
War. What is it good for?
Absolutely nothin’.
I have a different answer:
Saving hundreds of millions of lives.
Whaaaaat?
Yeah, war, it turns out, is an amazing catalyst for providing lots of life saving technology that has saved far more people than it has killed. I need to jump in here with this because everyone has their sphincters clenched because it appears we’re on the edge of the Third World War. Maybe that won’t be so bad.
Hang on, this will all make sense in a moment.
I’m a trained professional. Or I would be if I were trained. And if I were getting paid for this.
Give a thief a gun and he’ll rob a bank. Give a thief a bank and he’ll rob everyone.
But I made a pretty bold statement, and I have the receipts to back it up. First let’s start with what I’m counting. I’m not counting as “war” when governments kill their own citizens. In the 20th century alone (no Fox® required) governments killed an estimated 262 million of their own citizens.
Yeah, that’s an ugly number, and it’s certainly the largest man-made source of involuntary death. This is also the biggest argument EVER that the Second Amendment is the very best life-saving technology ever conceived by mortal man.
Ever.
War is a different kettle of fish, and it depends on the counting. One source says the total number of combat deaths since 1800 is around 35 million. Sure, that’s a lot, and I’d love to have them all over for a nice dinner, but it’s small compared to those killed by their own government. A broader definition of “war” would put it at 131 million in the twentieth century, but I’d guess that also includes a big overlap of citizens killed by their own government.
I hear that Stalin collected political jokes. When asked how many he had, “Four GULAGs worth.”
Tomato, tomah-to. Let’s split the difference and say it’s probably 80 million in the twentieth century, or roughly as many people as Joe Biden has allowed to come streaming over the border in the last three years.
But how, John Wilder, you amazing stud, you said you had receipts on how war brought about benefits that exceeded the costs?
War provides an acceleration of humanity, it provides the necessary push and investment into things that help troops do unexpected things on the battlefield. Like living. That leads us to penicillin. It was spurred into development (it had been discovered earlier) in World War II. Would antibiotics have been lost in a research paper without World War II? Don’t know – but World War II allowed them to be tested on Allied soldiers.
While we’re on medical, what about smallpox? Oh, sure, it doesn’t sound bad, but I’ve been told it is far worse than bigpox. What spurred that innovation? War. The Revolutionary War, in fact.
Well, there’s a joke coming back from 2012. I guess humor ended then.
I know I try to avoid drinking water since mankind developed beer and wine, but water chlorination has saved lots of people who aren’t drinking booze. Who developed the process to make chlorine gas cheaply so he could gas a bunch of French? A German guy in World War One.
There are more, but there are hundreds of millions of lives saved in just those three developments.
What else did war provide?
- Nuclear power – sure, just like OJ’s obituary, someone will say . . . “Oh, and there’s that one other thing” but nuclear power has produced clean power over the globe with, well, a few exceptions.
- Jet engines – without World War Two, would Steve Miller have ever had someone to take him home?
- Radar – I’ve never used it, but I’ve heard that it’s pretty good at keeping planes from hitting each other.
- The Internet – how else would we get pictures of cats?
- GPS – it can guide bombs, or it can take us to a liquor store in an unfamiliar town. Guess which is used more often?
I found a $20 outside of a liquor store. I decided to do what Jesus would do, so I turned it into wine.
- Satellites – without World War Two, would we have these? Probably not. And satellites have made weather prediction a pretty trivial thing. Doesn’t mean the prediction will be any good, but, you know, we can do it faster.
- Computers – created to calculate firing tables for artillery and to decode German stuff. Again, now we use for pictures of cats. And porn.
- Medical imaging, including x-rays and ultrasound – all started with military tech.
- Medical prosthetics – this is grimmer, but the more things got shot off, the better the tech.
- Telecommunications technology, including wireless networks – the very first time I used WIFI in a house, the host noted that it was based on tech used in Gulf War I. WIFI? Yeah, thank a war.
- Aircraft technology – when you make tens of thousands of aircraft that are used to the maximum extent of their capability, you learn what makes them fall out of the sky. Which is useful.
- Rocket technology – no bucks, no Buck Rodgers. From Werner von Braun to Elon Musk, I’m raising my glass to the foreigners who get us into space. Oh, von Braun’s first rockets weren’t aimed at the Moon.
- Sonar – I don’t fish, so, I guess this is okay. Meh tier.
- Chemical engineering – this is a really important one – in making all the gases to kill people in World War One and in all the bits and pieces required to make tires without rubber and how to make ammonia to kill yet more people in World War One, our modern world wouldn’t exist.
- Trauma care – how is it that 35 people are shot in an average Chicago weekend and only eight die? Trauma care. This stuff was built on lots of combat experience, and thankfully keeps lots of innocent people breathing.
- Cryptography – the entire field of cryptography is due to war. It’s the backbone of current connections and internet transactions, but started when people wanted to figure out where the Germans were going to be next week.
But when the Vikings used dots and dashes to communicate, it was Norse code.
I’m no longer scared of war. Sure, it sucks if you or your friends got exploded, but the numbers don’t lie: war has killed probably between 35 million (low) and 131 million (way high) in the twentieth century. The advancements from war have probably saved (one estimate I read) five billion people.
War seems to have saved more people than it has killed. By a huge margin.
So, in the immortal words of P.J. O’Rourke (peace be upon him): “Give war a chance.”
Maybe, but maybe we’re on the eve of creation?