Long Face

As with any historical analysis, we have to witness from the present moment, and so we cast our gloomy gaze back into history to trace its many threads leading to our present perch on the precipice, projecting our plight back into the struggles of previous generations. There were certainly many well-intentioned peoples and powers moving through this history, attempting to do better, and to earnestly improve the world around them in accordance with their ideals. 

A failure focuses the attention on the point of failure, the elements that went wrong and the series of events leading up to that wrong and connecting to that failure. It is hard not to gaze over the absurdity and recklessness of the present moment and, anticipating the inevitable suffering, curse that long and desperate historical procession that lead us here, imagining that it could have been somehow different. 

But there is still plenty good to experience, and much of that good can be attributed to those imagining something different and attempting to live in accordance with it, and bringing about that good as a result. A dissatisfaction with the present state of things indicates as much: there must be something satisfactory to compare against. 

Moving towards what is satisfactory, and seeking out dignity and peace and warmth in a world in which those things are constantly sapped away seems to be a worthwhile pursuit in itself. What else is there to be done? What would be the point of all of this fuss, if we were to simply curl up and go to sleep for good and forget it all?  

Slow Burn

The transformations set in motion by the disasters of the World Wars would continue to ripple out through the cold war period, and though the intensity and speed of change began to dampen and spread out, the change itself was no less consequential. 

The US would emerge to find itself as hegemon of a world perfectly suited to its imperial instincts; not accidentally to be sure. The economic imperialism of the United States - being a slower and less readily perceptible form of violence - managed to elude for some time the trauma response of a terrorized industrial world that was rapidly accumulating wealth and urgently moving away from the horrors of mass industrialized violence and the threat of nuclear war. 

The economic imperialism was aided in part by layer upon layer of economic and technological complexity, making it easier to gaslight and camouflage one's aggression after all, and mighty and deft applications of PR which took advantage of that camouflage to manipulate opinion and perception. And many of those at the bitter end of receipt would be too poor and broken to properly fight back anyway, left with few alternatives, or else they would be pushed into mounting some sort of insurgency and the wealthier powers would deploy their counterinsurgency to mop up, a process that has its own insidious consequences which we'll have to touch on later. 

The policy of containment would pit the remaining great powers against each other without making that explosive direct contact, instrumentalizing the smaller poorer nations instead as proxies for the interests of empire, much like pawns on a chess board advancing the prestige of interested competitive players.  

The powers of the Middle Ages expressed their aims in vicious wars of religion, but this time it was a vicious struggle over the ideological blueprint for economic organization and the structuring of class and privilege, though of course religious questions also hid behind them economic questions and matters of class and privilege; these things are just expressed differently depending on the historical constellation of human affairs. 

The market vision of capital won out in the end, but the victorious United States had to have it all, and upon vanquishing its foe and destroying its last remaining threats, was unable to slow its perpetual slow economic warfare, intensifying its universal extraction and sucking the life out of whatever resided in its sphere of influence, antagonizing the resisting powers outside of its spheres of control, and reigniting a race for national survival, leading up to our present moment. 

Slow Down

We've spent plenty of time talking about the high octane stuff: great war and large scale rapid transformation in particular, and even the future potential for the breaking out of these things once again. However, there are a couple of important issues associated with this type of focus that we need to address. 

The upside to this analysis is that it really stretches out the bounds of what is possible. The breaking out of the World Wars for example was a shattering historical event that couldn't be fully anticipated or grasped when it mounted, and the speed, scope, and intensity of the transformations defied any one power's control or even comprehension. 

In this light, a humbleness and wariness is called for. What could happen next? We don't entirely know. A little uncertainty lends a certain flexibility: if one isn't entirely sure what could happen, one could better balance one's efforts towards avenues not necessarily constrained by a deathgrip on ideologies and perceptions that are in danger of becoming outmoded or outdated. 

The downside to this analysis however is that it presents a vivid image that can eclipse the many other slower and broader historical changes and affairs, and then of course daily living itself. A little uncertainty? Great, we can have a little flexibility. Too much uncertainty? This can be paralyzing, and introduce a powerful constraint in thought on its own. 

The World Wars may have been experienced as an Armageddon for many people caught in them - both in terms of the end (and beginning) of an era and literally as a matter of life and death - but life has to continue on. The image of a nuclear winter or climate catastrophe punctuating our own historical moment is even more extreme, but until the lights actually go out, it is worth trying to live well regardless. 

We'll certainly continue to return to these existential questions as they beckon, but I also want to take time in between to slow things down a bit and dial down the intensity. Life still goes on between periods of upheaval, and the trajectory of that living may be set in motion by that upheaval but it has consequences and effects and lessons of its own, which may be more gradual and less perceptible, but no less consequential. To go back to our car metaphor, a crash may be coming, but the car and road had to be built, and there were reasons for the velocity and mass, and one had to be persuaded to get into the car and to be transported by it. 

Anyway, with things calmer and slower, one has more time to maneuver and more room to think. 

Make or Break

In the time leading up to a serious crisis, there are usually a set of voices emerging that are raising the alarm about the many interacting conditions that threaten to bring that crisis about, and then those voices are shouted down, the crisis mounts, the voices are proved fucking right, and then those in power are forced to make the proper adjustments anyway under far greater pressure and under sharply curtailed time constraints than was really necessary. 

The US and its allies have been flailing in foreign and global economic policy for decades now, just about smashing every last piece in the china shop really, and now the first glimmers of a new multipolar world are taking shape in response to that recklessness. The powers pushing to make that world come into fruition - namely Russia and China and their allies and observers - are already of that world and will be first movers in understanding how to move and survive in that world, whereas the US and its allies are wading deeper and deeper into a wilderness they have no real understanding of. 

Of course one can learn and change as one moves into an uncertain environment, but the learning has to be fast enough and a competence and confidence have to emerge before the stakes are really high. The Western powers are learning about a whole new state of affairs very quickly and in a crash course as they make their moves in the course of the Ukraine crisis and are provided with real feedback, but is it enough? The continuing flailing, and willfully impoverished understanding transmitted through the media as the ruling elite talks to itself and the ruled, and the continuing attempts to obfuscate through better PR as opposed to real and hard understanding of facts on the ground, does not inspire confidence. 

Living things can move towards all sorts of equilibria in many different conditions...until they can't. And you may have a set of legs that allows you to run when you start to hear the rumbling of an avalanche, but if it is big enough and close enough, it won't matter: no amount of running will allow for an escape. 

That's not to say that the Western world necessarily has to be buried in the coming cascade of crises, but that world has certainly skated by for some time on those long and irresistible fumes of global hegemony without having to adapt to surrounding conditions, and it now appears that the bill is coming due. Historically, sooner or later that state of affairs starts to bite. 

Violent Forms

We can trace in the historical developments leading up to the existing modern world a gradual shrinking back from the visceral aspects of warfare. It was only a couple of centuries ago within the much longer arc of human social and cultural development that people were doing to each other things - as a matter of regular violent relation - that most in the developed world would consider to be deranged and criminal, even in a context of warfare. 

Of course it is worth emphasizing that we have to be careful with language here. Much of this profound change can largely be attributed to the developments of the richer industrial core, and that outside that core - and even within the poorer less-developed industrial powers - still exists a multitude of differing pre-industrial relations, or else those relations are creeping back in to weakening powers. 

Nevertheless for even the great powers existing a few centuries ago, much of the violence in warfare and civil administration was done by hand and up close and personal. There is no getting around cutting at or stabbing at someone with a sword or lance; one has no choice but to survey much of that damage: the look of it and the sound of it and the smell of it especially. 

There were still the matter of missile weapons of course, and firearms themselves have been under development for a considerable amount of time, but the qualitative changes seemed to really start cropping up with the dawning of the industrial era as the range and destructive power of these weapons really started to open up distances and the meaning of violence itself, abstracting it away from the local act and extending its consequences to the aftermath in the form of the dead and wounded, after the fact. 

We can see too that the concurrent developments of communication technologies such as the printing press and then later telegraphs and radios and phones would further increase the distances and change the evolutionary movements of represented experiences, communications, and ideas coming out of warzones, and public relations would emerge as a fully developed industry turned towards shaping and managing those ideas and communications.     

Sifting through the historical record and cataloguing and making sense of these changes is a lifetime of work all in itself, but for now we could say there has been a discernable change in the way warfare and violence and cruelty in general are perceived and understood and carried out. One need only look back to the Bronze Age and Classical antiquity and into the Middle Ages and see that violent conflict was carried out very differently. 

The Assyrians for example would find the PR efforts of modern nations tidying up their atrocities and war crimes quite strange, what with their fanciful murals depicting the king and state carrying out terrible acts upon their enemies, so as to remind their foes the consequences of resistance. And great powers like the ancient Greeks and Romans would regularly announce themselves outside of the city walls, either offering a deal and mercy or not, depending on the siege, and then when the siege actually began, everyone within the walls of that city would understand the implications of the fall of those walls. 

Similar circumstances could be found throughout the Middle Ages. The Mongols for example were feared throughout Asia for their willingness to raze whole towns, butchering whole populations by hand in single days and leaving fields of bone in their wake, and even violently disciplining their own ranks, and it was right up to the birth of modern nations and the industrial era that city states were still violently and publicly executing perceived criminals and enemies of state and putting their horrific tortures and remains on full public display to detract dissenters.  

These conditions were by no means evenly distributed, with a whole spectrum of harshness and severity among the powers. For example, the Achaemenid Persians were known for being much more lenient and exercising softer power, though they would go hard when they needed to as well. Further, there is also the matter of class and privilege and the location of those various classes in the division of labor, which implied their respective distances from hard labor and violent conflict. Though there were even exceptions here, as there were upper level classes that regularly fought such as in Rome. 

Nevertheless, we see definite changes in the application of violence and state power, as well as the perception and understanding of that violence, leading up to and then transitioning into the modern era, some of which we have sketched out in previous posts. The mass sensibility toward violent conflict has changed so broadly that we now see a broad and concerted effort among major and minor powers at minimizing the violent intentions of a conflict, and then attempts at managing circulating reports of atrocity and war crime as those things inevitably crop up when a conflict drags on. 

A far cry from emphasizing these things for applications of terror and intimidation, though of course we see this tendency more pronounced in the weaker and poorer powers, who can't afford the more precise implements, PR armies, and total control of the battlefield, such as an insurgency force. 

Even on the individual level, military psychologists have reported that soldiers in developed modern states are more reluctant to use implements of hand to hand combat, and we have that well-known phenomenon of "shooting over the enemy's head," which is a little tougher to do when one is hacking away with a sword. 

Much could be said about these changes, and the resolution could constantly be increased and all sorts of exceptions picked out, with violence waxing and waning and concentrating in some powers and cultures and not others, but tracing the general trajectory of human conflict, we begin to see a relationship in which the exploding material power of the industrial nations engenders a wariness and caution around violent and kinetic combat as we surveyed in the course of the World Wars, in which there is an arms race for developing new technologies and doctrines for enabling the powers to get at each other and gain leverage over each other while truncating the duration and the destruction of the conflict. We see surgical strikes and special ops, and the push and pull of insurgency and counter insurgency capabilities, evolving in new ways. 

As nations rapidly industrialized and globalized and wealth spread, greater swathes of world populations would begin to experience greater subjective distances to the application of violence. To be sure, a less violent world is desirable, but this is not a sanguine regurgitation of the Pinker-esque contention that we are becoming less violent in general. 

As we observed, our increasingly abstract and distant relation to violence is partially a function of relative wealth and privilege, and even among the modern rich nations, protracted and tortured conflicts tend to churn out more and more atrocities as human nature under chronic strain gets nastier. 

Further, the logic of empires has not gone away, and empires still want what they want, regardless of ideal or abstract codes of conduct. Soft and economic power is still violence in a different form, and there is no consolation in slowly getting suffocated to death as opposed to instantly crushed.  

More generally and in the longer term, that distance and abstraction of violent conflict can be attributable to economic expansion and prosperity. Contraction and the ensuing conflict tends to close those distances and reduce those abstractions once again, and as the conflict grinds on and heats up, those intentions and PR efforts begin to buckle as the atrocities crop up. 

In this era of contraction, it is apparent that we still have a lot more contracting to do, and things will get much worse, surveying the line of crises coming down the pipe. It is very difficult to say for certain what will happen or what is even possible. 

Build a Fire

For a while I was content just sketching out any sort of interesting idea that would pop into my head, that I could retain enough interest for to work through it in this space. That was fine and well. But things are changing, and I'm changing. 

I'm less interested now in haphazard sketching - though there is a time and place to work out an obsessive random thought which may prove useful later, taking into account concepts of nonlinear problem solving and such - and more interested in putting everything together in a way that enriches better navigation and living. 

Part of the reason for this is situational and environmental, I've fallen through the cracks and am now engaged in a weird multi-faceted hustle to make a living. And the social and political landscape, along with standards of living, are rapidly deteriorating in the US, not to mention the industrial world. It is a time to focus. 

I could admit to overusing the fire metaphor at this point, but accordingly we have a well developed image on our hands that could prove useful for illustrating a greater point about this project. When you're awash in materials and conveniences, starting a fire to get warm is easy. There isn't a whole lot of consciousness involved, or better put, much of that consciousness is dispersed out to other people putting the appropriate materials in place, based on histories of knowledge and experience. 

The wood say is ready-made perfectly cured and you might even get a little densely packed kindling to get things going with, or perhaps some accelerant or some dry papers, and you flick your lighter and away you go. You can get a fire going without knowing too much or making too much of a fuss. 

But then say you are caught out in the cold ill-prepared and have less to work with and you have to light a mixture of dry and wet material, and it gets tougher really quick. You have to know how to progressively cultivate the fire and feed it and nurture it, and you have to understand how the air is traveling and what the heat is doing and where it is going, and how to keep the heat in with the surrounding earth and rock and housing as it is getting colder and more urgent. What if you can't get it lit and the cold presses in and you start to panic? 

The question is not just what to think, but what are we doing with it? How are we living better as things get worse? 

A good cultivated fire does little to overturn that old principle that "no one gets out alive," but it does make things a little warmer and easier. 

Mythmaking

Part of what a myth does is foster a spiritual and emotional connection to its subject matter, often by compressing and simplifying the subject matter itself and then exaggerating that simplification for good effect, so that myth is often associated with falsity, which can be a problem, though that is not what good myth is meant to do. 

Good myths attempt to capture the deep tectonic movements of archetypes, which describe patterns that oscillate cyclically, possibly for centuries during the course of a civilization's lifespan, in the hopes that audiences can harmonize with those patterns and live better. 

One may get a warm fuzzy feeling for a certain myth, or a bad foreboding feeling for another, and then perhaps those feelings will accord with energetically similar real world movements. More complicated problems arise when one has to judge those myths: as collectively constructed for certain purposes, whether benign and constructive or malignant and exploitative, as having a certain age and relevance, and competence in construction, and so on. 

Easy Does It

Before moving on, I thought I'd throw up a handful of those obligatory meta posts. First, there is the sensitive matter of telling a story, especially through a long historical arc. Given modern conceptions of cause and effect, it is always tempting to to point at a given chain of relations, such as a historical progression of ideas and events, and say, "aha the cause!" And so we get a crystallization and a hardening of ideology around a provincial point of perception. 

As language has a tendency to "pin" things down in the image of what they present to the perception - even subtle language does this, multiplying the pins but nevertheless pinning - then the storytelling necessarily focuses in the perception to a delimited sphere of relations, marked off by the language itself. 

This sphere can remain flexible and constantly shift, both through feedback internal to it and through feedback coming from its relation to the real: one moves, and acts with image in mind, and tests that relation. It can remain living. 

Beyond that sphere however, life is still happening. This is partially an apology: I'll never really get it. One can trace military histories and changing relations of violence and say quite a bit of useful things about our present moment, but then there are many other changes going on beyond those things: in culture and in spirit and materially and economically, biologically, chemically, in the individual, and so on. One puts in one's work to capture what one can and then the day is done and the time is up. 

This work is still quite useful, and crucial even. Telling the story of the poisonous berry may not capture the true nature of the berry, but it keeps the storytellers and the audiences alive. But forgetting this humility tends to facilitate the hardening of the sphere, or the story and it stops moving and communicating. It becomes dead, and then it begins to cut into the world of the living. 

MAD Men

It is difficult to judge the human interest in the mutually assured destruction doctrine. The doctrine does seem to hold: despite many close calls we managed to avoid nuclear war in the course of the first cold war. A number of miracles given the pressure and circumstances certainly. Some semblance of self preservation does matter. 

But that was, relatively speaking, a more economically prosperous time, as well as climatically more stable. With the motivated reasoning growing behind tactical nukes and more limited nuclear strikes, it is easy to see how things could once again spiral out of control, with the chaotic realities of a hot war blowing apart the theory and the special pleading altogether. 

On a longer time scale, the recklessness of the industrial nations is no longer an open question. And I'm not talking about the breaking out of the World Wars, which was bad enough. In a manner of speaking, we've been living through another kind of MAD doctrine, one that plays out over a greater amount of time but which is no less consequential. 

For at least half a century now we've known about the consequences of greenhouse gas emission for the climate, and now that we know much more about it, and the climate has become visibly unstable, and the voices of alarm have risen concurrently with it, we still manage to do very little about it collectively. Growth is still prized above all whatever the cost, and development and fossil fuel usage is only intensified. 

We've seen how we prioritize such a problem as a given crisis surfaces and mounts: attention shifts almost entirely to the provincial aspects of the crisis, efforts are displaced, and the coordinates temporarily shift to a new locus of bitter division. How will this dynamic fare as the crises deepen and intensify and their frequency increases ever more? We are transported further away from effective collective action with each shock, ensuring future shocks; the conclusion is foregone. 

We are capable of welcoming with open arms a longer term mutually assured destruction. How about a shorter term one? Slow cook or flash fry? 

Appendage

As with domestic politics, there is definitely an overarching element of class and privilege that pervades our geopolitics. And in a world in which the "good guy" professes universal human rights and universal freedom and democracy, this inconvenient fact has to be carefully and methodically erased with good PR. One can spot the discrepancies by holding the carefully brushed ideals up to the light of fact. Or else the ideal itself breaks apart all on its own under the strain of external pressure.  

For one thing, it was no accident that Hannah Arendt, living through the World Wars, produced some of the more incisive critiques of that airy ideal of universal human rights, depicting them as a polite fiction which could be aspired to, and that it took the application of state power to move in that direction. This contradiction would become more visible as the gaps opened up between ideal and reality, when refugees fleeing failing states came to realize that their rights were only as good as the nation that backed them, and were treated as nonhuman by those host states which saw them as alien. 

The principle nestled in this dismal state of affairs can be scaled out and applied in a number of ways on the world stage, and the Ukraine invasion in particular, due to its geopolitical dimensions and the actors involved, illustrates a number of these ways. 

To witness the heads exploding in the Western establishment political and media classes over the invasion, one would be forgiven for wondering if the last two decades of US foreign policy actually happened. If the United States invades Iraq, it is to stop a madman from threatening the world with nuclear annihilation and then to pacify the state, spreading peace and democracy. If Russia does something similar then its leader is the next Hitler who is bringing about the end of the civilized world. 

The subtext in these reactions is that only the rich and powerful - and by extension the richest and most powerful - can do whatever they want, and their closest subjects within their cultural and political spheres of affinity get to partake in some of that power, which is what we actually call "freedom" and "right." 

When you extend this logic in the real world, it becomes the case that whoever is to challenge that position of concentrated privilege and prestige must necessarily -by virtue of their own concentrated location - accumulate and concentrate their own portion of loyal subjects to match the aggressive power of their rivals, so that a majority of the worlds nations - held in tension between competing powers - become appendages (or more politely, vassals) of the most powerful, where they are not becoming punching bags of course, and then the given suites of privileges and abilities are graduated along those contours of power. 

So it is then that both the Ukrainians and Iraqis are shat upon, and the precision strikes and the surgical maneuvers meant to win the PR wars start smashing bystanders, and the short jaunts in to establish stability become prolonged occupations that increase instability. We'll get to some of the reasons for the decorum later; after all, it was not long ago that the great powers still beat their chests and brayed that they too had a right to conquest. We still do it now, but the formalities have changed. 

Setting aside the Western hierarchical ranking of the conflicts, with the Ukraine invasion being a worse thing, the hierarchical rankings continue on down into the mechanics of the invasion itself, with detailed coverage and interest in Ukrainian refugees and their differing treatment compared to the many black and brown refugees of the past decades. 

The rich nations that can afford to develop nukes get the cold war and the growling behind the fence, while the poor nations get to beat each other up or get beat up by the wealthy nations in the still existing hot wars, which are oftentimes followed with great enthusiasm by those bored with all of their milk and honey. 

How Hot Do You Prefer?

Intentions and grand strategy are one thing, but as a conflict heats up and becomes more desperate, those things begin to disappear. Time and time again we see powers enter into a conflict with their chosen battery of doctrines and tactics, only to have those blueprints go up in flames as the powers bog down and the fighting becomes prolonged and tortured. The heat makes malleable what was assumed to be rigid and immutable; the chaos sets in, and the unforeseen consequences begin to crop up, or else seeds are sown whose fruit may not be known for another century or more, after which the lessons are forgotten anyway. 

What is required for things to get really hot? The conditions can be quite variable, and thus unpredictable. Different geographies and environments alter the terrain for what constitutes sound tactics and technologies. What is at stake? What does a given power want? And generally the more powers entering, the more materials and abilities involved, the more prolonged the conflict becomes, and the greater the scope of the conflict, threatening to subsume more concerns and interests for further removed powers. 

As with revolution and civil war, we see profound changes happen in a society too: power may be centralized and consolidated somewhere where it is dispersed and scattered elsewhere, such as in the nationalization of industry, and social and cultural roles and mores may be stretched or even transformed. Weak empires may be broken, ascendant empires may be made, and international relations may shift. In desperate times, the changes needed for national survival may be instituted as a matter of necessity, where the dithering with gaslighting and PR and interest group veto may no longer be afforded. 

Coloring It In

We've reached a point in the analysis where we have a general historical outline, sketching out a rough trajectory from the premodern world to the point at which we stand now. There are plenty of details to fill in, but I'd like to do that with a series of more dispersed pieces that have a variety of different points to make. In time. 

Shock and Surprise

It is the shock and surprise that should really perk one's ears up: indications of the first real breaches in the old cracked and fissured order. I recall the shock and surprise of Trump's election, which would reverberate both domestically and around the world, and which would reorganize ideas of what is possible in the domestic politics of a hegemon and so on down the pecking order. 

And now we have the fresh shock and surprise of the global community (well maybe not the damned neocons, but that is a different story), looking on at an embittered and gangsterish Putin, striking fear in the hearts of his allies and enemies alike, breaking away and marching forward, muttering something like: "we're not going to take this anymore, you just gotta grab it and take it." 

How many broken and humiliated - or even strengthening and ascendant - empires are looking on at this fiasco and thinking silently to themselves, "yes yes very much so," quietly gaming out their next moves? I can think of a few. 

Violence as Destruction and Creation

Mirroring Marx's observations on productive consumption, that consumption stimulates production and production is also an act of consumption, it is also true that violence is both a destructive and creative phenomenon. Accelerated wartime production and the transformation of industrial nations' infrastructures and technologies are a good example of the productive capacities of violent conflict. But setting aside the obvious, violence is also very different from production. 

For one, prolonged warfare is quite famous for draining monarchical and national coffers. That dreaded war debt (or deficit) is there for a reason: one may be pouring finances and resources into arms and implements, but all of that is being smashed up in battle, when it is not being used to smash up the enemy's resources of course, so that accumulated productivity tends to burn up and then prolonged warfare begins to act as a steady nonrenewable draw on resources, whereas with times of productive expansion, rapid developments in technologies and infrastructure are used to build upon each other and accelerate accumulation and available resources multiply, fueling the developments in turn. Though this pattern is by no means indefinitely sustainable. One can mount a war on the earth in a manner of speaking. 

But in shorter timescales, warfare often follows overdevelopment and expansion, and then after the surplus has been burned up, it peters out, as flat out looting can itself only be sustained so far as there is loot to snatch. But then that scorched earth has cleared the way for new spurts of development, and those revolutionized wartime technologies and capacities are put to use to fuel a voracious hunger for new growth and indulgence after a long period of deprivation and struggle.  

Developing Warfare

So then, where am I going with all of this great war talk? We have this horrible story about a whole global order getting sucked into a total war, and now we have these worrisome conditions building up once again, and then there is the sudden thunderclap of this Russia-Ukraine conflict. Oh boy, it is all happening again. Well, maybe or maybe not, but also, not so fast. We still have some more details to fill in: much has changed in the last century, and that changes the shape of what happens next.

The shock and horror coming out of the meat grinder theaters of WWI, and the accompanying changes in perceptions of and relation to violent conflict in general, would have a profound effect on future war planning and deliberation in the industrialized nations. That "never again" resolution that follows collective catastrophe and tragedy would soon find expression in various rapidly developing technologies and their associated combat doctrines. These developments were numerous, but for our purposes we'll focus on aerial capabilities and aerial bombardment in particular, which contain in their evolution hidden traces of the changing relations of violence in the modern world. 

We did see early forms of aerial combat develop in WWI: the smaller biplanes would be used for strafing runs, dogfighting, and reconnaissance, and these aircraft would drop smaller explosives like grenades on ground targets as well. Balloons and zeppelins were also developed to drop bombs and cut through the fog of war through surveillance. Strategic bombers and the first aircraft carriers were even developed at this point. But the form would not yet become dominant and would serve as ancillary force to the massive trench-based ground war, at least on the Western front. 

The aerial technologies would continue to develop rapidly, advancing the potential of new forms of warfare, but there was something else also driving the ascendance of that tendency, something a little less tangible. There was a tantalizing promise held in advanced aircraft: within that technological suite, there was the possibility of both the increasing distance from violent combat itself, and a theoretically more precise method of striking at the enemy. 

With the WWI meat grinder still fresh in their minds, a whole generation of war planners and generals would be looking at strategic bombing as a way to cauterize the open wounds of total war and shorten the conflict through shock and awe, therefore cutting down on the casualties of war. This unfortunately didn't work out in practice, but for some time it served as an irresistible theoretical carrot to dangle. 

There was also another prong to that argument. Anyone paying attention to contemporary US foreign policy could see that the tortured arguments for the precision strike have been alive and well for over half a century at the least, despite those strikes being less precise than hoped in practice. The idea then - as it is now - was that with superior aircraft, reconnaissance, and targeting technologies, military leaders could suss out crucial military targets and wipe them out surgically, harming the capabilities of the enemy afar with minimal military or civilian casualties.

With the fires of WWII breaking out, it was time to test out these doctrines. The coming of WWII certainly did not see the disappearance of ground combat; its nature only changed with the rapid advancement of a number of technologies for engagement on land, sea, and air. Indeed, modern war would grow more complicated in many ways, challenging the theoretical underpinnings of aerial bombardment in new ways.

For one thing, precision strikes certainly did happen. Pure military targets were being taken out all of the time, but with that new threat came a host of new countermeasures in the form of of new offensive aircraft and ground to air defensive measures, among many. Troops still needed to be sent in to take out air defenses, sea power needed to be employed, all with their own unique abilities and vulnerabilities. One way around some of these new dangers was to conduct night raids, but one of the problems with that method is apparent: how do you know what you're even bombing? 

Needless to say, with the rapidly advancing arms race, and the full expression of industrial power, WWII would become just as prolonged as the first, and as time dragged on, the desperation grew once again. Arguments for precision strikes would shift in emphasis over to arguments for truncated a tortured, destructive, and drawn out conflict with full city bombing of civilians to strike terror and subdue the enemy. If you've been developed those tools, after all, that is where the logic went. This doctrine would find its full and absurd expression in the nuclear bomb. 

 

Again, we had a conflict completely spiral out of control, smashing through various theoretical attempts to influence the course of the conflict, until the great powers ended by mutually beating the stuffing out of each other, culminating with the dropping of the bomb, which would set the tone of the decades of cold war to come. After the dust finally settled, WWII claimed the dubious honor as the deadliest conflict in human history. 

Of course the US was willing to drop a nuke or two as long as it was the only one possessing the bomb. It wasn't until nuclear proliferation, the development of nuclear weapons by multiple powers, and the emergence of MAD that the hot war-suppressing aspects of the bomb would come into play, a lingering threat which still hangs over us today. In a century, so much has changed so rapidly. 

There is still plenty of ground to cover, but we're getting there.