Imagine if we took the commandment "Thou shall not kill" to heart. Imagine if instead of killing those men on the roadside, it was the job to the soldiers to incapacitate them but take them alive. Is it possible? Of course it is possible. Perhaps harder, but possible.
Here's the funny thing about killing. Somehow we continually find excuses for doing it. And the easiest excuse of all is that the other guy did it first. And so it goes round and round and never stops, forever escalating. And it won't stop, until we stop making excuses.
Well, when it comes to firearms, incapacitation doesn't work quite like the movies show. You can't just hit someone in the arm/leg every time (aiming is harder than that), and even if you do it will fairly likely kill them anyway. If you really want to priorize incapacitating enemy soldiers, you're going to have to use different weapons than firearms, weapons that are probably shorter range and slower. That isn't a practical option when the enemy soldiers have guns themselves.
I'm all for peace but telling your own soldiers not to kill could be a very good way to get many of your own soldiers killed.
We could use some serious development in non-lethal weapons, but I'm afraid it might not solve anything - non-lethal weaponry is by definition more complicated by lethal, and thus any technology designed to stun could be repurposed to kill with more effectiveness than the bloodless variant. We'd probably need to reach the level when there would be no practical difference of effectiveness between the two types.
One of the fascinating things to come out of the widespread distribution of non-lethal weapons to police has been two effects:
1 - police are more likely to use non-lethal weapons, even in cases where no weapon at all would work fine, because the long-term consequences of using a non-lethal are minimal
2 - in cases where people do die due to being attacked by a non-lethal weapon, there's generally quite a bit of moral outrage that the weapon was used at all, even if it was well warranted
I suspect if soldiers were issued stun weapons tomorrow, we'd see both of these come true and people would still cry foul when some percentage of targets inevitably died as the result of the use of the non-lethal weapon, and rules of engagement would be vastly changed to virtually eliminate the idea of escalation of force, just go in shooting and sort it out later.
There's a difference between an army and a police force. Police are there to enforce the law and neutralize criminals.
Generally speaking, the police don't want to kill anyone. They want to capture the suspect and move on. Back in the day, non-lethal force meant beating the guy with a big stick, but liability became an issue. So now we pull guns on dumb kids, and a jumpy cop results in a dead dum kid instead of a broken arm.
Armies are different. Since the US Civil War, total annihilation of the enemy's ability to make war has been the rule of the day. You err on the side of killing, becuase a stunned enemy lives to fight another day.
So, on your last point, you're sort of missing an important part of absolute war:
Against a fair enemy, the "ability to make war" becomes the problem of destroying capital of the enemy (factories, railroads, etc.). Against an enemy that doesn't have any sort of indigenous weapons production or roads to speak of, the "ability to make war" consists of the problem of destroying the manpower of the enemy.
So, we notice that while we bombed Germany and Japan, less than three decades later they were banging along--and we notice that when we spend a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, we end up just playing whack-a-mole with hapless militia.
Well yeah, but there's a powerful argument that militaries have been increasingly acting as over-amped global police forces. Part of this is a growing queasiness with war, like the OP, who don't understand what it is. It's why we use precision munitions and snipers instead of just firebombing cities. It's why we go door to door to "detain" people instead of just shelling the house.
The next logical step, and the one the military is very actively pursuing, is nonlethals.
That would be uber cool. Unfortunately, we don't have any that rival the effectiveness of lethal ones, thus if one were to use stun weaponry, one would lose to an enemy that decided not to.
To add on to that the complexity of developing such weapons grows considerably when you take into account the uniqueness of each target - various resistances, adrenaline, different body composition, hit area and so on. If you fail to incapacitate the target they might retaliate lethally.
Which is actually possible with lethal weapons too - people don't always die from a shot or two and not always instantly. So to ensure the threat is defused the weapons must be very effective and the best way to ensure that is by making them as lethal as possible.
Indeed. And on the other side of the equation, if you overdo your non-lethal weapons, they can easily become lethal. Tasers have already claimed many lives. That ball of fast-setting cementy thing you shoot at your target may solidify in a way that chokes your enemy to death. And this is all discounting the possibility of a disabled enemy falling to his death by accident.
Effective non-lethal weapon is a very narrow target to aim for.
It's true that as society progresses it off loads the killing work onto fewer people - executioners, soldiers, drones, etc. These killings are presumably justified by the will of the larger society otherwise these men wouldn't be paid to do this. So a smaller part of the population does an increasing porportion of the killing, but does the overall number of people killed decrease?
When was the last time there was a battle with thousands of causalities anywhere on earth? War hasn't gone away, but it has definitely declined. Surely it would be better if it were gone completely, but things are moving in the right direction.
Which occurred over roughly two months. Literally millions of soldiers died over the same time span in the world wars, nevermind civilians. That's just in the last century, and it's not even in the same ballpark.
But I think you are underestimating the violence that still exists. Others have mentioned the thousands killed in single battles in the Iraq war, but only slightly less recent is the Second Congo War[1], with over 350,000 direct deaths, and 5.4 million dead from disease and starvation directly caused by the war.
That war officially finished in 2003, but there are still spill-over conflicts (battles started this week to disarm one of the still-active militia).
In terms of proportion of the world population this is (of course) much lower than WW1 or WW2. But it's still a huge number of deaths, and we are mostly unaware of how large it is.
The difference between 1915 and 2015 is that we've improved the industrial scale machinery of killing to a point that it is too powerful. No two top 10 states can really fight each other, because nuclear exchange will ensue and the consequences of that are too unpredictable and high risk to engage in.
So we engage in proxy conflicts in the periphery and kill the hapless inhabitants there. There's no "battles", but lots of death... Mostly of people that are inconsequential to whomever is writing the history.
> We are certainly living in the most peaceful period since the start of the 20th century.
Well, no. We're living in a period with less frequent very-high-casualty battles than WWI, WWII, and the Chinese Civil War, to be sure, but that's true of all the parts of the 20th century before, between, and after those wars, as well.
Some research shows that we live in an unusually non-violent time period.
"Violence has been in decline over long stretches of time", says Harvard professor Steven Pinker, "and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence"
There are a bunch of nice graphs showing this here:
If that's true, I'd mark the start date for such a period at the end of the Cultural Revolution.
List of conflicts with over 1 million deaths:
1850-1864 Taiping Rebellion: 20 million deaths.
1914-1918 World War 1: 37 million deaths.
1917-1922 Russian Civil war: 9 million deaths.
1928-1936 Chinese Civil War: 2 million deaths
1937-1945 Second Sino-Japanese War: ~25 million deaths.
1939-1945 World War 2: 60 million deaths.
1945-1949 Chinese Civil War: 6 million deaths.
1950-1953 Korean War: 4 million deaths.
1966-1971 Chinese Cultural Revolution: 30 million deaths.
1955-1975 Vietnam War: 3 million deaths.
1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War: 1 million deaths.
1998-2003 Second Congo War 1-5 million deaths.
Defining a non-violent period as "a period in which there are no conflicts with more than 1 million deaths",
The previous violent period lasted from 1914 to 1971.
The current non-violent period has lasted 54 years since 1971.
The previous non-violent period close to this long lasted from 1864 to 1914, which is 50 years.
Sure, as the world population grew, the size of conflicts haven't been growing to match, but in absolute terms I think there is good chance there will be at least several million+ deaths conflicts upcoming in the current century.
Looking at those numbers, I hadn't realised that from the Chinese civil war [1928] to the Korean War [1953], which is nearly a historical continuum, adds up to nearly 100 million deaths.
Resource deprivation. Competition. For a number of major nations, foreign wars.
For those in any of the member states of the "Coalition of the Willing", the illegal and unjustified war of aggression against Iraq has resulted in as many as 600,000 deaths (Lancet). That's one for every 512 Americans.
And that's merely human deaths. If you include animals slaughtered or killed in the name of humans (for food or as a consequence of human activity) it's tremendous.
If we are going to discard the contextual meaning from above (people killing people) we should include the billions of yeast I baked alive the other day. And all the microorganisms I'm digesting incidentally.
The Bible very unambiguously does not prohibit killing, it prohibits unjustified or unlawful killing. If we took it to heart, we'd continue doing exactly what we're doing, which is killing people when we feel justified in doing so.
Here's the funny thing about killing. Somehow we continually find excuses for doing it. And the easiest excuse of all is that the other guy did it first. And so it goes round and round and never stops, forever escalating. And it won't stop, until we stop making excuses.