War vs life: A cost/benefit approach

A wise culture learns to deliberate decisions by creating cost/benefit analyses that are as complex as they need to be so that the biggest decisions are the most completely informed.

Why don't we do that with war?

What costs are considered when we are considering whether to wage war?

Historically and rhetorically, only two costs are examined in the run up to war and indeed in the historical analysis of past wars. The common reference is "blood and treasure." 

Those costs are, of course, vital and glaringly important. 

But if we run our decision-making based on incomplete cost/benefit information we fail to make wise decisions and, with war, we fail in multiple ways. Not considered: 

• environmental impacts
• infrastructure destruction
• lasting trauma
• opportunity costs
• potential alternatives

Each of these factors in any more complete cost/benefit analysis would almost always, if not permanently and categorically, point to a wise decision to avoid war, even with an almost certain chance of purely military victory. Why?

Environmental impacts

Using the US as a prime example, the environmental costs of war and war preparedness should be front and center, since the US military is the most developed in human history. Just one eco-cost is the carbon footprint, the largest in the world, bigger than many entire developed nations. 

Infrastructure destruction

The most militarized country in the world in 1939 was Germany, with a great deal of ambition and aggression on the minds of the Nazi leadership alongside supreme confidence in its power. Indeed, they destroyed some 1700 towns in the duration of World War II, but in the end Germany itself was the most damaged, rivaled only by Japan, which had similar war preparedness, ambitions, and great confidence in its future victories. 

Lasting trauma

Whether its referred to as shell shock, battle fatigue, post traumatic stress disorder, or by any other name, the emotional toll on both warriors and civilians as a result of war is not only for the lifetime of those individuals but can become intergenerational, even epigenetic. 

Opportunity costs

When a $billion is spent on a new war plane, that is a $billion that isn't available for daycare. When a $trillion is spent on the annual Pentagon budget, that is a direct theft from healthcare, education, national infrastructure, and everything else. Economists refer to this as opportunity costs.

Potential alternatives

This is the most studiously ignored factor--that there is a rich history of maximal goal success using nonviolent people power instead of arms and violence. Indeed, as a game-changing empirical study showed, nonviolence wins in those struggles slightly more than half the time and violence wins slightly more than one-quarter of the time.

Prepping for nonviolent conflict is far less costly in literally every respect.