[nerdponx]

I'm surprised to hear the author state that war is more destructive than in the past. Is that actually true? Certainly we are more capable of destruction than in the past, but modern millitaries have put a lot of effort into being less broadly destructive, unless they specifically intend to broadly destroy things. Photos of bombed-out cities in Syria are jarring, but even the worst devastation there doesn't look as bad as what we saw in WWII, WWI, or even the American Civil War. When is the last time a city was "sacked" or a countryside "pillaged"? When is the last time an entire city population was executed? If anything, it seems like war is much less destructive than it used to be, because weaponry and tactics are much more precise than they used to be.

[pdonis]

> Certainly we are more capable of destruction than in the past

That is what the article is referring to when it talks about war being a lot more destructive--that if we choose to wage a total war, like we did in WW II, we can potentially destroy a lot more than at any time in human history. But the article is arguing that that very fact has prevented countries from trying to wage total war, because the costs now greatly outweigh the benefits. So the actual destructiveness of actual wars has gone down.

> If anything, it seems like war is much less destructive than it used to be, because weaponry and tactics are much more precise than they used to be.

I think this is true, but it's also true that more precise weaponry and tactics also change the goals of war. You can't conquer a country, or reclaim a country that someone else conquered, with low-level targeted munitions. But you can do things like eliminate terrorist leaders or take out particular dangerous capabilities (like the Israelis bombing Iraq's Osirak nuclear weapons plants) without having a major impact on the rest of the population. This kind of change is exactly what the article is describing when it says that democracies now have an incentive to build a military not for fighting a conventional war but for "the kinds of actions which mitigate the harm caused by failed states" (of which terrorism is one).

[mcguire]

"It is really quite hard for ancient or medieval armies to do meaningful long-term damage to an agricultural economy; farmers flee, crops are hard to destroy and in any case armies can’t do anything to the land itself. [...] Even a sustained collapse might mean something like only a 25% reduction in total production; by contrast Liberia lost 90% of its GDP in just six years of internal warfare from 1989 to 1995."

Now, I could pick some nits with that: crops are not that hard to destroy. But that just results in a few years of famine. On the other hand, a proper counterexample would be the Thirty Years War, but I don't know what the actual long term consequences for the northern German economy were.

[cjblomqvist]

Have you seen Bachmut, or what used to be Bachmut? That's a city of 80k (?) - which is quite a large city historically (just go back 200 years, then most cities are a lot smaller than they are today).

Russia has had a similar strategy with other places since they started doing military campaigns 2008.