War is What We Do

Wars Are What We Do

They always say the next war is unthinkable. But they prepare for it anyway, as if their amnesia were strategic. War is what we do. History is carved by its timelines. Dates, generals, treaties, invasions. A century without one is an outlier. A decade without one is a lie.

30,000 B.C.: Clubs, sharpened bones, obsidian blades. Maybe for animals. But in what is now Kenya, scientists found a mass grave. Twenty-seven individuals with skull fractures, bladelets in ribs, shattered knees. A prehistoric massacre. Over water? Land? Women? The bones don’t say.

War followed agriculture like mold on bread. Someone always wanted more wheat, more cattle, more river. Jericho. Egypt. Sumer. Babylon. Fighting became policy. War became an institution.

Rome, naturally. Their wars had names. Their enemies were trophies. The empire was armed bureaucracy. Taxation was militarized.

Greece. Glorified it. Gave us Sparta. Gave us Achilles. Gave us the myth that there’s honor in killing with state approval.

The Mongols. The Crusades. The Ottomans. Napoleon. The American Civil War. Names we memorize in school but never question why they all end in graves.

World War I. The war to end all wars. Until World War II, the good war, they called it. Against evil. Against genocide. And it was. But we still firebombed cities. Nuked civilians. We told ourselves it was for peace. We always do. But it cured the Great Depression. That part we forget.

Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Ukraine. Gaza. Genocide, gas, drone strikes, collateral damage. We call it national interest. We call it defense. We call it democracy. But it’s just war.

Today, machines kill for us. Drones. Algorithms. Defense contractors. Inspired by movies like The Terminator, we taught the machines to do our dirty work. It's no longer fiction. It's budgeted.

War is no longer to gain resources. It's to expend them. To absorb surplus. A jobs program with body bags. A public works project for the defense industry. A way to keep the economy busy while Congress yells at TikTok.

We call it entertainment. Streaming war porn in real time. We cheer for our side, jeer at theirs. Wave flags. Post hashtags. Sell T-shirts.

Always the last one, we say. Always the one to end them all. But we leave the factories running.

APPENDIX I: The Supply Chain to the Grave

War doesn’t just destroy. It demands rebuilding. Construction, prosthetics, trauma therapy, new elections, security contracts. War makes things that war then un-makes. And the economy thrives on both.

APPENDIX II: Rebuilding for Profit

The same corporations that build missiles also win contracts to rebuild hospitals. The money flows either way. Bomb or bandage—the invoice looks the same.

APPENDIX III: Resource Inversion

In early human history, war was for resources: water, land, slaves. Today, we have resources to spare. So, we stage wars to use them up. Abundance is the enemy now. War is how we spend it. There have been over 3,000 wars in recorded history—so many we’ve lost track.

APPENDIX IV: Terminator Was a Documentary

We used to imagine killer robots. Now we mass-produce them. Drones with names. Algorithms with targets. Eyes in the sky that never blink. We don't even need soldiers anymore. Just programmers and remote screens. Killing is outsourced to code.

APPENDIX V: Wars, Small and Large

(Partial list. Dates approximate. Conflicts vary in scale.)

1. Jebel Sahaba Massacre (~13,000 B.C.)
2. Mesopotamian city-state wars (~3000 B.C.)
3. Egyptian-Nubian conflicts (~2500 B.C.)
4. Trojan War (mythical or ~1200 B.C.)
5. Assyrian campaigns (~900-600 B.C.)
6. Greco-Persian Wars (499-449 B.C.)
7. Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.)
8. Wars of Alexander the Great (336-323 B.C.)
9. Punic Wars (264-146 B.C.)
10. Roman civil wars (various)
11. Jewish-Roman wars (66-135 A.D.)
12. Germanic-Roman frontier wars (~100-400 A.D.)
13. Muslim conquests (632-750 A.D.)
14. Byzantine-Arab Wars (7th-11th centuries)
15. Viking raids and wars (8th-11th centuries)
16. Norman conquest of England (1066)
17. Crusades (1096-1291)
18. Mongol conquests (1206-1368)
19. Hundred Years' War (1337-1453)
20. Ottoman conquests (1299-1683)
21. Spanish conquests in the Americas (1492-1600s)
22. Thirty Years' War (1618-1648)
23. English Civil War (1642-1651)
24. American Revolution (1775-1783)
25. Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815)
26. Latin American wars of independence (1810s-1820s)
27. U.S. Civil War (1861-1865)
28. Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871)
29. Anglo-Zulu War (1879)
30. Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905)
31. World War I (1914-1918)
32. Russian Civil War (1917-1923)
33. Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)
34. World War II (1939-1945)
35. Chinese Civil War (1927-1949)
36. Korean War (1950-1953)
37. Vietnam War (1955-1975)
38. Six-Day War (1967)
39. Yom Kippur War (1973)
40. Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989)
41. Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988)
42. Falklands War (1982)
43. Gulf War (1990-1991)
44. Yugoslav Wars (1991-2001)
45. Rwandan Genocide and civil war (1994)
46. Second Congo War (1998-2003)
47. U.S. war in Afghanistan (2001-2021)
48. Iraq War (2003-2011, 2014-2017)
49. Syrian Civil War (2011-present)
50. Russian invasion of Ukraine (2014-present)
51. Gaza conflicts (various)

...and hundreds more.

This list was generated by AI.