War Sucks

In spite of my silly tendencies as an adolescent to build model tanks and airplanes just for the fun of blowing them up with small commercially available explosives, I did manage to grow up being fairly well convinced of the need to place a greater value on building things up as opposed to burning them down.

So - good on you for that one, Mike.

There is something more that a bit unfortunate though about feeling a residual need to retain the ability to blow shit up, because "the other guy" seems always to be building things specifically to blow up my shit, so I'll have to blow up the shit he's building to blow up the things I'm building to blow up his shit and on and on and on.

And weirdly or not so weirdly, we took the blowing-things-up thing to what we considered the logical extreme by stockpiling nuclear weapons, which made the risks of war so horrendous that the great powers have avoided getting into direct conflict for quite a while now.

But, as a consequence of raising the risk of a world-ending nuclear exchange, we've been working overtime to come up with ways to blow shit up that carry a lower risk of escalating to Armageddon levels - or at least lengthen the time it takes to vaporize the whole fucking world.

(I was taught there were something like 44 steps to all-out nuclear war, and everybody more or less agreed to observe these rules so there were ways to interrupt what had always been a very slippery slope into total war - of course, now I can't find any good reference to that doctrine - but anyway...)

We seem to be celebrating an impending breakthrough in both mechanized warfare (ie: literally blowing up the other guy's shit), combined with all-out economic warfare (ie: blowing up the other guy's ability to buy new shit) to create the next great iteration of hybrid warfare.

And isn't this just too much fuckin' fun.

BBC - Investigation