Conflict arises when there is no longer a consensus regarding the real power situation, and the two parties, by acting on different subjective pictures of the objective situation, come into collision.
The purpose of such a conflict, arising from different pictures of the facts, is to demonstrate to both parties what the real power relationship is in order to reestablish a consensus on it.
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Unfortunately this kind of fighting between young boys now occurs much more rarely than it did before (say a century ago) with the result that boys of today grow up to manhood and go off to fight, or to run the State Department, without any conception of the real nature of power and its relationships. This lack is, at the same time, one of the causes of juvenile delinquency and of adults’ mistaken belief that the role of war is the total destruction, or the unconditional surrender, of one’s opponent, instead of being what war really is, a method of measuring relative power so that they can live together in peace.
The role of any conflict, including war, is to measure a power relationship so that a consensus, that is a legal relationship, may be established. War cannot be abolished either by renouncing it or by disarming, unless some other method of measuring power relationships in a fashion convincing to all concerned is set up. And this surely cannot be done by putting more than a hundred factually unequal states into a world assembly where they are legally equal. This kind of nonsense could be accepted only by people who have been personally so remote from real power situations all their pampered, well-protected lives that they do not even recognize the existence of the power structures in which they have lived and which, by protecting them, have prevented them from being exposed to conflict sufficiently to come to know the nature of real power.
“…adults’ mistaken belief that the role of war is the total destruction, or the unconditional surrender, of one’s opponent, instead of being what war really is…”
Correct 100% so. Most wars ended with some sort of negotiated settlement. War as ending in WW2 a rarity.
“adults’ mistaken belief that the role of war is the total destruction, or the unconditional surrender, of one’s opponent, instead of being what war really is, a method of measuring relative power so that they can live together in peace.”
Tell it to the Tutsis. Or the Bosnians. Or the Armenians.
The losers in a war become slaves to the victors, or are expelled/exterminated from the land fought over.
The objective of any sane war effort is final victory.
This may or may not entail utter destruction of the enemy, depending on the nature of the enemy. If may be enough simply to destroy their morale. Which is another way of saying: establish absolute dominance over them on a psychological level.
A war that has a sequel was a bad war. It failed to achieve finality. Nobody really won World War I. The Allies just lost less badly.
War is, at further remove, the process of ontological priority. It both asks and answers the question of what has what priority.
When an entity engages in warfare with another, it is asking the question: which of us has priority? And the asking of the question also occasions it’s answer. The entity that exists has higher priority than the entity that no longer exists.
War is this process of ontic priority. Those modes of being that exist and continue to exist and have more frequently or less contingently existed, then, have demonstrated higher priority than such modes of being that do not exist, have passed out of existence, have less frequently or more contingently existed, or could not exist.
For an entity to be described as virtuous at warfighting, for it to become more virtuous at warfighting, then, is for it to be something that participates in such higher priority modes of being; to anticipate them, even; to be something that can anticipate them.
Most working class kids learn this on the playground. At least I hope they still do…
More than ever salvation from the proles, only men left.
Unfortunately the current crop of leaders have never been in a fistfight or changed a tire, never mind war. They achieve dominance by being Alpha at meetings ala Rumsfeld [won every meeting, destroyed everything he touched] or now of course by being the biggest snivelling coward b_tch….my trauma is worse than yours over Jan 6, etc. One upsmanship on being histrionic drag queens in suits.
Trying to explain this is like me trying to explain calculus to my cat, I don’t know calculus myself for starters…
The cat of course doesn’t need to read Quigley to understand his point.