Old and New Wars

The evolution of war over the last century has been profound. The changes affect everything from the subject and scale of war to the weapons and the warriors using them.

This is the image that would have come to mind at the mention of war sixty years ago: The clouds bearing down on the men who picked death over slavery and ostracization. The gloomy atmosphere amplified by the ballads of death and loss courtesy the grenadier who was a bard before the war. The blind fire coming from the defendants doesn't help. The first wave of recon; the men who picked the short straw and a few brave idiots, brought down in seconds by the machine gun controlled by the opponent who also doesn't care about the fight and wants to go home to his five-year-old but is shot down in that moment of weakness by a sniper just doing the job assigned to him by a hierarchy of captains, colonels, generals and majors all of whom are more keen on advancing through the ranks than keeping their men alive. The fighter jets cloaked  by the moist atmosphere come out to massacre the helpless attackers. The unprepared AA-guns fire pointlessly, all of the ammo missing, bursting into black clouds. The attackers retreat to the uninhabitable trenches. The capture of the next 200 yards of blood pools will have to wait for reinforcements.

In modern warfare, such a scene seems impossible. The battle for land through organized violence has ceased, armies are more of a tool for stopping riots. A single casualty is a devastating blow. The weapons are more lethal, diverse, strategic and precise. The budgets are phenomenal.
However, most of the wars today are not fought with guns and bombs on open grounds but with paper bombs, threats, deception, superior strategy and leverage in closed rooms. The warriors are lawyers, witnesses and politicians. Men wearing a poker face and a sharp suit. It is not even the countries that are competing as much as it is representatives, multinationals and ginormous corporations. They're not fighting for land anymore. That would be uncivilized. They fight for resources, the reason behind the wars for land acquisition. And they're fighting for intellectual property, the right to own the motion of swiping three fingers downward on a touchscreen.

War has transformed. The fact that it does not involve the shedding of pints of blood everyday is the only comforting thing about its present face.