The Goal of War

War is not a competition in killing and destruction. Imagining that it is will seriously distort thinking about important topics - like nuclear weapons.

Soldiers sometimes say their job is to "kill people and break things." This is wrong.

At least, those activities do have to be done by soldiers sometimes, but that is not the goal of war. Consider: in war civilians are often left alone and buildings are sometimes left standing. True, some civilians do die in almost every war and some works of man (buildings, bridges, power plants, etc.) are destroyed. But if that is the only goal of war, then the people carrying out this task have been wildly inefficient throughout history. In war the killing of even 5% of the civilian population is a brutal slaughter rarely equalled in history. If the goal of war is to kill people, how can armies have killed so few, how can they have been so consistently ineffective in the past?

The goal of war is clearly not to kill civilians. The goal in war is defeat the soldiers of your enemy. To whip his army. Killing civilians is only incidental.

What does this say about a weapon whose most obviously use is to destroy cities?

Comments

[Greg Wilson]

Depending on how you define "war," its goal can be lots of things. But the point of this post gets confusing when it conflates the "goal" of war, with the "job" of a soldier. They are not the same thing. Arguably, the job of a soldier is to kill people. If it comes over that hill, shoot at it. Soldiers can have lots of "goals" too, and accomplish many admirable things that don't involve killing people, but job 1 is killing people and destroying equipment & infrastructure.