100 years after world war 1.

cook99

Its hard to believe what it was like when WW1 ended. The refrain then was ‘never again.’
Yet we knew what happened, by 1940 europe was plunging into war again.
Is this a curse that humanity cannot escape? Can we ever stop killing and destroying our fellow human beings?

below is an excerpt from an artcicle by Eric S. Margolis

A FULL century after World War I we still cannot understand how generals sent so many soldiers to be slaughtered. Ten million soldiers died on all sides; millions more were left maimed or shell shocked. Seven million civilians died. Twenty million horses died.

The image we have of hapless soldiers being forced to climb out of their sodden trenches and attack across a hellish no-man's land pock-marked by water-filled shell holes, deep mud, thickets of barbed wire and rotten bodies is quite accurate for the Western Front. Waiting for them were quick-firing guns, heavy artillery, the greatest killer of all – machine guns – and, later, poison or burning gases, and flamethrowers.

How could the generals of that era have been stupid enough to send waves and waves of their soldiers to almost certain death? Trench warfare in the West quickly became siege warfare in which decisive victories became almost impossible.
Eric S. Margolis

cook99

Today, soldiers sit in front of a monitor and use drones to kill
their enemies. As other countries catches up will we see a new a war not unlike
computer games?

person

The cliché is that armies always prepare to fight the last war. I think you can see how I WWI they were still using tactics from preindustrial battles but had the massive firepower brought on by industrialization. You could maybe use that same framework to guess at some future conflict.

The hard part for me is to imagine what future tech the US will have by the time other countries catch up. Maybe we'll have nanobots or supersoldiers by then.

Cinorjer

@person said:
The cliché is that armies always prepare to fight the last war. I think you can see how I WWI they were still using tactics from preindustrial battles but had the massive firepower brought on by industrialization. You could maybe use that same framework to guess at some future conflict.

The hard part for me is to imagine what future tech the US will have by the time other countries catch up. Maybe we'll have nanobots or supersoldiers by then.

That is profoundly true, because the Armies are ran by old men who were trained in the previous war and refuse to innovate. Historically, our US war between the states had a huge body count because the two sides insisted on lining up and marching in ranks through open fields directly toward weapons that were now accurate and could be quickly reloaded. In our last "war" in Afghanistan, we acted like all we had to do was capture territory and the enemy would withdraw to some battlefront instead of just waiting until we'd left and popping back up to declare the town under their control again. In WWI, the machine gun had just been invented and the old farts sending waves of men out to die had never faced one on a battlefield. One man could now kill a hundred people so the size of the forces didn't count.

At least, that's the impression I got from working in the Pentagon for a couple of years during the Reagan administration.

silver

@cook99 said:
Today, soldiers sit in front of a monitor and use drones to kill
their enemies. As other countries catches up will we see a new a war not unlike
computer games?

It all sure makes you ponder, 'specially at this peaceful time of year.

When I was a girl, my folks always had magazines laying around, like Look and Life, and I will never forget the picture of soldiers in Cambodia, their bodies looked like they had melted -- full-page photograph of it, some of them melted over what looked like picket fences, with their helmets not on heads anymore. Definitely made an impression.

genkaku

For America, WWI coincided with the Spanish flu epidemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide. America sent its troops to Europe packed into troop ships whose cramped quarters (proximity to the infected was one of the ways the disease spread) guaranteed that many would-be soldiers landed in the grips of an often fatal disease.

Marine Corps Gen. Smedley Butler [1881-1940] was man who left the military after 34 years and became known in later life as being a strident critic of military adventures.

Tosh

@cook99 said:
Today, soldiers sit in front of a monitor and use drones to kill
their enemies. As other countries catches up will we see a new a war not unlike
computer games?

Not all of them:

http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/these-moving-photos-of-wounded-soldiers-were-taken-by-bryan-adams--ekVtINzZDx

Tosh

@Cinorjer said:
That is profoundly true, because the Armies are ran by old men who were trained in the previous war and refuse to innovate.

It's true that many of the armies entering WW1 were 'Napoleonic' in the sense that their dress and tactics were from that era. French troops, dressed in sky blue parade uniforms would form up, as if on a parade square and get mown down by German machine guns.

The armies that emerged from WW1 were more like modern day armies, and they did innovate; the tank was a WW1 innovation.

Frozen_Paratrooper

There was a certain inevitability to the way the war progressed once it had begun. A large portion of the total dead on the western front died in the opening months of the war. Hundreds of thousands in the summer alone. To the politicians who possessed the power to end the conflict, how many were really prepared to tell the families of loved ones, "Whoops! Sorry! Big mistake that was! We're calling it quite even though we haven't lost."

Tragic, but it's important to view it from the standpoint of the time.

cook99

Is WW3 coming?

genkaku

@cook said: "Is WW3 coming?"

What makes you think that it has not arrived?

cook99

bcos most of the world are not at war?

federica

That's what you think. Even those with an apparent lack of concern, have some vestige of interest. It's all tied up with the global economy, and point of power.
Trust me, you may not see it on the surface, but there is an internal struggle going on, and like the YellowStone park Volcano, nobody's entirely sure when the first 'bang' is going to happen......

vinlyn

@federica said:
That's what you think. Even those with an apparent lack of concern, have some vestige of interest. It's all tied up with the global economy, and point of power.
Trust me, you may not see it on the surface, but there is an internal struggle going on, and like the YellowStone park Volcano, nobody's entirely sure when the first 'bang' is going to happen......

But I don't see that as being any different than the world has ever been.

genkaku

It may make for bleak reading, but of the 162 countries covered by the Institute for Economics and Peace’s (IEP’s) latest study, just 11 were not involved in conflict of one kind or another.
Worse still, the world as a whole has been getting incrementally less peaceful every year since 2007 – sharply bucking a trend that had seen a global move away from conflict since the end of the Second World War.

Quote taken from The Independent article entitled, "World peace? These are the only 11 countries in the world that are actually free from conflict"

federica

@vinlyn said:But I don't see that as being any different than the world has ever been.

Exactly right. It isn't.

So really, @cook99‌ either isn't 'paying attention' or is unaware of global politics.... Simply because a country isn't coming out all guns blazing, doesn't mean they're not involved somehow....