[teiferer]

It's not the only way.

An alternative is to organize the world in a way that makes it not just unnecessary but even more so detrimental to said soldier's interests to launch a missle towards your house in the first place.

The sentence you wrote wouldn't be something you write about (present day) German or French soldiers. Why? Because there are cultural and economic ties to those countries, their people. Shared values. Mutual understanding. You wouldn't claim that the only way to prevent a Frenchmen to kill you is to kill them first.

It's hard to achieve. It's much easier to just mark the strong man, fantasize about a strong military with killing machines that defend the good against the evil. And those Hollywood-esque views are pushed by populists and military industries alike. But they ultimately make all our societies poorer, less safe and arguably less moral.

[yakshaving_jgt]

I'm in Ukraine now.

Tell me how your ideals apply to russia, today.

[teiferer]

In the short run, today, you of course have to shoot back. What else can you do..

In the long run, just piling up more military is not the solution.

[yakshaving_jgt]

> In the long run, just piling up more military is not the solution.

Except it would have prevented the invasion in the first place.

[teiferer]

Again, in the short run and if only Ukraine did that, sure. But that's too simplistic thinking.

If every country doubled its military, then the relative stengths wouldn't change and nobody would be more or less safe. But we'd all be poorer. If instead we work towards a world with more cooperation and less conflict, then the world can get safer without a single dollar more spent on military budgets. There is plenty of research into this. But sadly there is also plenty of lobbying from the military industrial complex. And simplistic fear mongering (with which I'm not attacking you personally, just stating it in general) doesn't help either. Especially tech folks tend to look for technical solutions, which is a category that "more tanks/bombs/drones/..." falls into. But building peace is not necessarily about more tanks. It's not a technical problem, so can't be solved with technical means. In the long run.

Again, in the short run, of course you gotta defend yourself, and your country has my full support.