Angry Planet - Why War Never Changes

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

You may have noticed that we end our show with a snippet of the video game Fallout (my favorite). “War - war never changes.”What if that’s both true and not true? You have to love a dichotomy. Anyway, we are lucky today to have University of Chicago professor Paul Poast on the show. He looks at foreign policy—war—using statistics to make some sense of it all.This is a break down of why wars popular on the history channel (World War II, the Civil War) aren’t indicative of how wars are actually fought. The smaller proxy wars the U.S. and Russia have been fighting for the past 30 years are the status-quo, not some new kind of conflict.Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. you may have noticed that we end our show with a snippet from the video game Fallout, which is my favorite video game series. War. War never changes. Now, I'll never be able to do Ron Perlman justice, but still, that's the line.

So what if that's both true and not true? You have to love a dichotomy. Anyway, I like to use the word dichotomy. Anyway, we are lucky today to have University of Chicago professor. Paul Post on the show. He looks at foreign policy, war, using statistics to make sense of it all. So today we're going to talk about the state of modern war, and thank you so much for joining us. A flag on the field real quick.

Yeah, for what? A little bit of Angry Planet Deep lore. There was a version of that outro that we also used Middle Gear Solid 5, which has a line in the beginning that says war has changed and then he goes on to explain how it's changed. Well, I really wish we could have gotten both in there, but it just never quite worked. Okay, okay. Well, thank you for bringing up something from the ancient past. So I just want to say, first, Paul, you've put together these incredible Twitter threads,

which are a really cool educational tool. Tell people first what your Twitter handle is. Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me on the podcast. I'm really looking forward to the conversation today. And so, yes, folks can follow me on Twitter at Prof Paul Post, and it's P-O-A-S-T. It's like toast with a P. I've been saying that my whole life. And so that is where they can follow me and, of course, my Twitter threads, which I use to try to convey all sorts of insights regarding foreign affairs, international relations, and try to do so from the standpoint of how scholars of international politics understand it and the research that we use. And one of your threads pointed towards a foreign affairs article that you wrote in 2019 that I really would use the word prescient. And it analyzed the question of whether we are truly living in a period of unusual peace,

if war has actually died down or is becoming extinct. One thing you say, though, is that in reality, war is persistent but not prevalent. What does that mean? Well, first of all, thank you for bringing up this piece. It was a piece that I co-authored with Tanisha Fizal, who's a professor at the University of Minnesota, and has also done a lot of research on trends in war. And in particular, it has done a lot of research on battlefield medicine and kind of the advancements of battlefield medicine, which have direct implications for how we think about warfare.

especially if we spend a lot of our time analyzing war by thinking about, quite frankly, body counts. Well, if battlefield medicine has evolved over time, that's obviously going to directly impact how many people are killed, injured from warfare. And that's a big part of her research. And so Tunisia and I together wrote this piece for foreign affairs that laid out kind of this, the idea that, first of all, there's these claims that there's a decline in warfare. And these claims have been made probably most popular by Stephen Pinker.

And about a decade ago, he wrote a book titled The Better Angels of Our Nature, where he talked about not just warfare, but all forms of human violence and saying how these are on the decline. And he's just really the latest person to put forward this claim. But there's, of course, other people who say, well, that's not quite the case. they'll either say they're looking at the data wrong, the data actually do not show the client, or they say, look, we've been in time periods like this before, and unfortunately, they don't last, right? And so to be able to say that there is now a marked change in violence, where it's really too soon to be able to make that kind of argument.

So in terms of that claim that I put forward in the Twitter thread that you refer to, the idea that war is persistent but not prevalent, But this is actually a finding that I share with my graduate students when I teach them. I teach a course at the University of Chicago titled quantitative security. And what I show them is that one of the, if you will, laws, I mean, we can't really, does social science really have laws? But you could argue that one of the laws of international relations is that war is persistent but not prevalent. What I mean by that is for the time period over which we have data.

And that can vary by what data set you're using, but basically over the past 200 years, say 250 years. Every single year, there is a war happening somewhere. Now, these wars, some of these wars might be international wars, one state invading a, another state. It might be civil wars. They might be what we call extra state wars, which if you think back to the 19th century, that would be a colonial war, for example, would be an example of that. But every single year, war is happening somewhere on Earth. That's what we mean by it being persistent. What we mean by it not being prevalent, though, is that though there is war happening somewhere, war is not happening everywhere. Most relations between most people and most states,

most of the time, quite peaceful. And so that's the idea is that while war is always happening somewhere, it's not happening everywhere. Most of the time, nations are cooperating. They're getting along or they're at least kind of thinking about it negatively. They're maybe deterring each other, but they're not actively fighting one another. And so that's what we mean by this finding. that war is persistent but not prevalent. And you talk also in the article about just what aberrations World War I and two are. I mean, where I would guess both the, I mean, the prevalence was much broader than normal. And also you talk about the rates of those who were killed and wounded being much

higher as well. Can you talk a little bit about what it means for those two wars to be outliers and what's normal compared to World War I and two? Absolutely. So the reason why we say that World War I and World War II are outliers is because they are exceptional in almost any metric that you want to use to measure warfare, whether you're talking about the number of deaths, the intensity, the number of nations involved, the stakes. These were enormous wars. And most wars do not look like them at all. However, they are also the wars that tend to get the most attention because they are such large wars.

I mean, you know, we think about, would there be a history channel if there wasn't World War II? Right? I mean, that's kind of one way to think about it. It gets our attention. It draws us in. but what it can do then is it can lead us to think that that is what war is, right? It can lead us to say, okay, we see what World War I looks like, we see what World War II, that is what war looks like.

And the reality is that wars do not frequently look like that at all. If you go back to the data that we draw upon, and I should say that what are these data sources? So one of them is called the correlates of war project. That's been a project that's been around since the 1960s. Another one is the Uppsala conflict data project that's been around since the 1980s out of Uppsala University in Sweden. You also have more recently a data set called the Mars dataset that was put together by Jason Lyle at Dartmouth College. And so these are some of the data that we use.

We have other sources for them. But if you look at these data, the trends that come out are the following. So first of all, most wars are actually quite short. So whereas World War I and World War II lasted four to five years, the norm is more four to five months. That is more the norm. That is like the median number, the median war lasts about four to five months. And this is talking about international wars, wars between states. Also, if you look at the death toll from the wars, and in particular, if you look at it from a daily standpoint, most wars kill approximately 50,000.

50, if you will, troops a day. We call these battlefield deaths, right? About 50 per day. And there's big variation on that. There can be days where it's quite quiet. There's not any killing going on. Then there can be, of course, days with massive levels of violence. But on average, about 50 per day.

And those are numbers that I think when most people hear them, it's like most wars are short. And most wars, I mean, 50 is still quite a few. but it's not at the thousands that we think of like when people hear about the Battle of the Sone, right? 20,000 soldiers killed it a day or something of that nature. It's like it's not at that level of intensity. And yet most interstate wars are actually quite short and at a much lower level of intensity than what we typically think of when we're thinking of war. And that's because we're typically thinking of World War I in World War II.

And so that's what we mean by those wars being such outliers. And as a result, it can very much skew what we think of as war, as well as what we think of the trends regarding war. So it's almost like we don't start paying attention to a war until it has gone on for a certain amount of months and starts to look a certain way. You think of the war in Ukraine, right, which there's trenches are being built, essentially started in 2014. and looks very much like an old war, even though there's a lot of new aspects to it, right? Absolutely. So I think the war in Ukraine teaches us a lot about war in many ways, both in terms of what's new about the war, but also, as you indicated, what's old about the war. And then first of all, this is a war, the nature of this war we have not seen in Europe since World War II,

a massive war of invasion. You could even say a war of colonialism. We have not seen a war like this in 80 years. So that's one thing that makes it very different. Of course, there's been war in Europe, the war of Bosnia and the various wars throughout the 1990s there, but those were very different. They had some aspects that were similar, but not at the scale of what we're witnessing now. And so that is one thing that makes this like kind of a throwback, if you will, with respect to war. But the other part of it is how it's bought. You pointed out, we've seen trench warfare. We're seeing large conventional forces being used. Everybody was talking about all the future. It's cyber warfare. It's unmanned vehicles and so on and and so, and yes, those are being used, but so are tanks, right? And if anything, that was a big debate early on in this war was, does the war show the obsolescence of tanks, or does it actually show where tanks are pretty useful? And I would come down on the side of tanks are actually useful if used properly. And that was really the issue early on was Russia wasn't necessarily using them properly. So in many ways, I think that's why this war has gotten our attention. The other reason it got

our attention, and this was something that I was saying to folks early on the war was the weight of death, if you will, was exceptional compared to most wars. So I told you about how most wars are around 50 battlefield deaths a day, most interstate wars talk about them. And that's what we're talking about. In this case, we were looking at least 40 to numbers that we had at the time. The first few weeks of the war, it looked like it was in the neighborhood of 500 to 1,000 battlefield deaths a day. It was just a huge rate of, you know, a huge rate of destruction and death experience on both sides, Russia and Ukraine forces. That rate has slowed down, but definitely it is still, at least, again, this is based on the numbers we have. We don't, we're not completely sure how many people

are being killed on a given day. But we're still looking at rates that are in the hundreds per day. And so that is something else that I think makes this war, to your point, Matt, really makes this war kind of get our attention, right? Is the fact that it is just such a devastating war, both in terms of the overall scale, but even on a daily basis. Can we talk about, can we focus in on the tanks thing? Because I think it's a really interesting kind of case study for how we probably

process conflict now. The brief summation is that in the early days of the war, Russia was losing a lot of tanks and a lot of people said, well, tanks are no good, no more. Tanks are over. And then, you know, the last few months, there's a big push from Ukraine to get tanks. There was a big political fight in the West about who was going to give tanks and how many. Now they're getting a lot of tanks. And it turns out that tanks are pretty important for support.

supporting infantry and holding position. Why do you think that we have to, why do you think that like we relitigate old battles? Because like this is like this conversation about tanks kind of happened, has happened over and over again, right? We've done this over and over again. Why do you think it always takes this another big war like this for us to relitigate all these old,

all these old talking points? Why is this always kind of part of it? that's a really fascinating question because I think it hits a lot of levels. I mean, we could, the first level is we could talk about tanks themselves, right? Because you're exactly right that ever since the tank first was introduced on the battlefield in World War I, we've had these conversations. So that's it. Tanks are done. That's it. Tanks are done. Part of the reason, though, is because tanks have evolved, just like anything technologically.

You know, they went from just simply something that could allow you to be able to go across trenches to then. the idea that, well, if they're combined with aerial support, you can actually achieve maneuverability with it. And then they went from that to then, well, it's really just about holding territory and having a presence. And that's kind of the idea of the Cold War and having these tanks, you know, kind of lined up on the battlefield. They're not being used, but they're there to hold territory. And we keep, so the tanks keep evolving the way they're being used, how they're being used, the technology that's infused with them. And what that's led to is sometimes it leads you to then and have to catch up because you're saying, well, this is how tanks used to be used and that's not appropriate anymore. That's not how warfare is going to be fought anymore.

Therefore, we need to think of something else. And so it kind of goes back to my comment earlier regarding looking at things like drones, cyber warfare, saying, well, we're moving beyond these old ways of fighting warfare. and we're moving to these new ways of fighting warfare. And then what happens is you realize that, oh, wait, first of all, these old ways of fighting were probably used for a reason. And secondly, you realize that, oh, no, these things are still, and I should back up here. When I say you realize, I mean, I'm talking about the analysts who are looking at this. I'm not talking about the military personnel who are on the ground.

I think they fully recognize how and when these can be useful, but it's more when we're observing this or we're thinking about the nature of warfare. We say, oh, well, no, this is what's going on. This is where the future is taking us in a new direction. And then we realize, oh, wait, first of all, the technology has changed. And these things are now quite advanced. And secondly, at the end of the day, warfare itself hasn't really changed. We may have changed the way that we fight works. though again, this current war has raised some questions about that.

But the nature of warfare hasn't really changed. Now, what do I mean by that? What I mean is at the end of the day, war is about territory. War is about land. And in order to have land, you have to have a way to hold that land. And there's no better way to hold land than to have something that you are heavily armored, that protects you, that is heavily armored, that has the ability to move quickly, that can offer support to your troops. We used to call these things knights on horseback, and we have gradually evolved

to where now we call these things tanks. But they're all the same idea, which is that if warfare is about territory, then fundamentally things like tanks, and that's really what I would say, is the tank, you know, an Abrams tank, a leopard tank, these things will evolve. It goes back to my point about the technology evolving, but something like a tank, something that is armored, that protects personnel, that allows you to hold territory that can fire a large amount of artillery in a short amount of time, that will continue to be useful because the nature of warfare is fundamentally about territory. It's fascinating. I guess it, I mean, it has to be true because the Russians are bringing out tanks from the 50s. I mean,

even those are still useful, apparently. So, I mean, the tank, clearly, regardless of what tanks you have, yeah, they've lost the real one. They've lost what more than 10,000, I think, is what the open source investigation numbers are. Yeah, according to the information that I've

seen most recently is kind of your point about, Jason, your point about the 1950s tanks, but that they haven't been able, Russia is not bringing out new technology, but they're just pulling out things from storage. But that also, that can take us to a more fundamental point about the nature of this war, this particular war, which is that, and this is something I've been saying to a number of folks for a while now, but this particular

war, I don't see it ending anytime soon. And the reason why is, because it's basically become a war of attrition. It's become a war of just holding territory. This is perhaps best exemplified by the current Battle of Bachmute, where you are seen, I mean, in many ways it looks a lot like the battlefields of World War I in the Western Front, where you have just massive movements of soldiers fighting and for what? maybe gaining a few inches, maybe gaining a few yards, perhaps a half mile at that. And you're seeing Russia do this.

You're seeing Ukraine exhausting massive amounts of military personnel and resources to the point to where, according to the leaked documents that we recently saw, the U.S. military is even saying, why are you doing this? We don't think you should be holding Bakhmut. We think there's other things that you could be doing strategically. But to me, Bakhmut really captures kind of the nature of the current war. which is it's this war a stasis. It is a war of where it's a battle of attrition, the sides are willing to exert massive amounts of effort for very little gain.

Well, so I have a question about the nature of this war then built on that. Are we approaching a world war because, just not because Americans and Chinese soldiers are fighting at this point, but because most of the world is in some way involved. I mean, we have drawn weaponry and financial might, if you're not talking about anything more material than that. Everybody's sort of chosen sides, even if you're not doing it in any other way than deciding where you buy your oil. I guess I'm just sort of wondering, what kind of scale do you see this war having and do you see it evolving from this point? This is a question that's been quite controversial because there is obviously people who have already come out. And by people, even people who are policymakers who come out.

Oh, we're already in a war of war. We are definitely in a war that has global implications, has global involvement. Whether that meets someone's preferred definition of world war, I think requires a little bit of unpacking. So first of all, this goes back to what we were just talking about regarding World War I and World War II. and about how World War I and World War II have very much skewed our understanding of warfare. And in particular, what does it mean to be in a global scale war? Because when we think about World War I and World War II, we're thinking about direct involvement of soldiers on the sides,

directly fighting each other in a sustained manner. And that's what we think of when we think of World War. We also think about it as a war taking place on multiple continents. and of course post-World War II, and as we've entered into the nuclear age, we think about it as the use of nukes, right? We think about that. Whenever people have used the phrase World War III, they're always referring to a nuclear exchange, right? And so those have become what we view as the criteria for world war. But I think if one takes an even broader historical perspective of warfare, what you'll start to notice is that those, it is true that the war in Ukraine does not have those features, it does share a lot of features with those wars as well as other global scale conflicts. So first of all, and what are examples

of other global scale conflicts? We can be talking about things such as the seven years war. We go back to the 1700s. We could even talk about components of the Napoleonic wars. We can talk about that. But the first thing that we can say is that it is true that the fighting is largely with just a few exceptions, maybe with like mercenary soldiers and so forth, but the fighting is between Russians, Russian troops and Ukrainian troops. So that is the direct fighting. And again, if that's your criteria of who is directly fighting whom, then yes, it is a bilateral war, and that's it. It's not a war war. But if you start to take what I would call a political, political economy approach, which means you're taking seriously the idea that warfare is an

economic endeavor, as much as a military endeavor. That indeed, in order to be able to fight militarily, you have to have the economic basis to do so. You have to have the supply. You have to have the weaponry. Well, if you take it in that perspective, then it is not a bilateral conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The only way Ukraine is able to fight this war is because of the armaments that they're receiving from NATO countries, notably the United States, because of the very tanks that we were referring to earlier. The other thing is that the Ukrainians have benefited a lot from actual training by Western forces.

And this goes back to 2014. So if we want to just review a little bit, maybe for your listeners, is that, of course, in 2014, what happened was Russia took control the Crimean Peninsula. And that was something that was part of Ukrainian territories had a bit of a contentious history between Russia and Ukraine, but Russia took control of it. And they did so in a way that was accomplished through a fate accompli. What that means is they were able to basically take it without shooting, without a shot being fired, right? They were able to just simply send in their troops, take control of it. And there was really nothing Ukrainians could do about it.

what that then led to was an effort by Ukraine's national army to start improving and training, and that was through assistance by NATO countries. And so since 2014, we've been training, by we, I mean, the United States as well as other NATO allies, have been training Ukrainian forces. This is part of what has led to, I think, or I think this is part of what led to the miscalculation by Russia. I think that when Russia launched their invasion, they were expecting to still face the Ukrainian military that they saw in 2014, not the Ukrainian military that has been improved through training since that time.

So that's something else that points to kind of the broader participations for. Another thing that points to it is kind of the details of how Ukraine has been able to carry out what they've been doing, their operations. the Biden administration has been very open, almost to the point to where people have said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, maybe you should share so much. They've been very open about providing targeting information, right? And it's like, is that as valuable? Is that more valuable than the person who's actually pulling the trigger?

Right. So again, it goes back to this idea that, yes, it is a Ukrainian who is pulling the trigger or pushing the button, but they're doing it with information in training provided by, say, an American. And so in that sense, it definitely, this war absolutely shares a lot of features of a broader understanding of what it means to be in a world of war. You're listening to Angry Planet. We'll be back in a minute. And we're back with more Angry Planet, the best show on the internet. You point out in that same article that the United States has in fact fought against Russia, has fought against China directly in previous encounters, and no nuclear exchange took place. And recently, too. And recently.

Yeah. Yeah, I think this is something else that leads us to misunderstand warfare. And again, and the reason why is. because we have as the model in our minds, World War I and World War II. And as a result, we say, well, if it doesn't look like that, then it's not war. And instead, it's maybe a skirmish, a conflict, but we don't label it a war. A police action, a special operation. Special operation, exactly.

But the reality is that since World War II, the U.S. has fought against China, has fought against Russia. just not in a sustained manner and not always through direct means. Now, this leads into the whole idea of like proxy warfare, right? This is a whole other concept that's been quite contentious. And even people saying we're involved in a proxy war with Russia now through Ukraine. And there's a lot that we could unpack about that. What I would just say, though, is the whole idea of major powers fighting each other through the efforts of other countries is not new.

And that was actually going back to that foreign affairs piece that you mentioned. One of the examples we bring up is indeed going back to Napoleon. And when people talk about Napoleon's grand army and about how it was invading Russia, the key thing to keep in mind is that his massive army only had 30% Frenchmen in it. Most of it was made up of individuals from other nations, allies of Napoleon. And so, and that's also part of why the army dispersed so quickly, too. It's because a lot of them are like, why are we doing this? Why are we marching here?

This is, this is terrible. And, you know, they'll point out, like, if you even look at the attrition numbers, a lot of, a lot of the attrition happens even before they get to, get even get close to Moscow. They're like, we're just, you know, we're leaving, right? This is this kind of terrible. Even before winter hit, they were like, no, we're not part of this. But what it depends to is just this more general trend that is not unusual at all.

Major powers are fighting each other. to not do so directly or at least try as much as possible to not actually use their own direct forces to engage in the fighting. I mean, that's kind of, I think there's two things that are post-9-11 that I would say are, and I'm probably wrong, and I'm excited for you to tell me how I'm wrong, but feel like two major features of America's conflicts post-9-11. One is the other confiscating use of language to say that, you know, we're authorizing the use of military force. We're not necessarily going to war.

We're doing police actions. This is not a war. And the other one is kind of like these special operation soldier driven things where you go into places in North Africa. And we are at war. I think if other people, if you were to go look at it objectively on the ground, It looks a lot like fighting and war. We don't talk about it. The press doesn't really cover it.

The public doesn't really care that much. But soldiers are coming home dead. We have military objectives in the region and we are attempting to achieve them. Often in concert with another political and military force that's there. Do you think that that this kind of obsession with World War I and two also kind of stops us from seeing and the obscuring use of language also stops us from seeing this stuff as war when it is? Or do you think that this is war? Does this count? There's a lot we could say about your point right there. There's so much that we could unpack because I think you're

touching on something that is, in many ways, might be the most important consequence of our skewed understanding of warfare. And that is that we do view, we tend to view things that that maybe in the distance past, in the distant past would have been seen as war. And we see this as, well, that's not war. That's a, yeah, police action. It's a skirmish. It's involvement. It's just the price of primacy, if you will, right?

What it means to be involved to be a global power and have range everywhere, have reach everywhere, right? This is just what you do. The military is involved everywhere at all times. A good example of this is Syria. I actually had a piece last year in world politics review where I talked about how this is the forgotten war because of all the attention that has gone to Ukraine because of our withdrawal from Afghanistan back in 2021. There's a lot of focus on that. And people forgot, wait a minute, wait, we're still, we still, U.S. soldiers like troops in Syria.

They're still engaging in operations there. And prior to Ukraine, Syria was actually the big. area of conflict that did receive attention, but it was so complicated that people didn't really know how to process it. And in many ways, Syria is more representative, I would argue, Syria is more representative of what warfare looks like historically than World War I or World War II are in terms of representations of what warfare looks like historically. The reason why is because, of first of all, the number of actors involved, the switching of sides, there were times where U.S. and Russian forces were fighting together, say, against ISIS, and then there were times where

they were supporting opposing sides. They have their own soldiers involved, involved in military operations. They come in, they come out. That's why myself and a number of other commentators have referred to this as like the new 30 years war, right? Because it has a lot of similarities to the 30 years war back in the 1600s. In terms of this, in terms of major powers coming in, coming out, switching sides, and just prolonging the conflict

in that way, but doing so in a way that it's very hard to process because it doesn't have these defined battlefields and define battle lines that we see currently with the war in Ukraine. And so in many ways the war in Ukraine is an easier war to process because it fits

better this model of World War I and World War II that people tend to draw on, whereas the war in Syria, as well as other conflicts that you were referring to, don't fit that model as well. And so they're harder to comprehend. They're harder to put into a category. And so we tend not to categorize them as war. We tend to say that, okay, there's something going on here. It's a military conflict. Our military is involved there, but it was shorter or I don't understand, so I'm not going to necessarily be able to categorize it. And as a result, it then is something that can leave our attention quite easily. So I think that's kind of what this points to is that the U.S. has been involved in this for quite a

long time, has been involved in these kind of operations. And in many ways, these things fit closer to, I would say, what historically war has looked like. But again, because we have this World War I, World War II, bias in our mind, or it skews our perception, we don't label it as such. Okay, okay, that leads me to my question that I've been wanting to ask the whole time, which is how do you get from here to a World War I, World War II? And do we have to worry about World War III nuke or not from these beginnings? This is a big concern is up until now in our conversation, we've been talking about the current war. we've been talking about whether you can define this war as a world war, according to some sort of historical criteria. But what if, I think this is the way I would look at your question is, is what if this war actually does? How does it actually become a war that does look like World War II, where you do have direct fighting between American and Russian forces, where you do have maybe China becoming directly involved with military assistance and support? How do you get to that? point. And first of all, there's a key, let me say it like this. When it comes to understanding war,

one of the first things to know about war is it's very unpredictable. And this is a point that a colleague of mine, Bear Brown Miller, who's at the Ohio State University, he wrote a book a couple years ago titled Only the Dead. And this is a book about this persistence of war. And hence it's it's referring to the idea that only the dead have seen the end of war. What he points out in this book, one of his key points in this book is that a war can grow in size very quickly and very unexpectedly. And it's not always clear exactly what is the trigger that leads to it to grow in size so quickly and so unexpectedly.

To get really technical about it, wars tend to follow what we call a power law in terms of their distribution and their size and their involvement. Lots of phenomena in the world follow power laws. Basically, a power law is the idea that a large amount of something, whatever that thing is, is caused by very few events. So this is used a lot like a meteorology to talk about damage caused by storms. Most storms do very little damage, but a few storms do most of the damage in terms of billions of dollars and so forth. Well, wars are like that. Most wars, as we've already talked about, quite small. And then suddenly you'll have a few huge wars that just go off the scale. And it's hard to predict because they follow that type of distribution, very hard to predict how it can

happen. But there are conditions where it could happen. What are those conditions in the context of the current war? So this has become something that has led people to be very concerned about Putin's threats to use nuclear weapons. One idea has been that it's not that Putin would use a nuke to say attack Warsaw or Paris or even strategically bomb Kiev, but he would instead use a tactical nuclear weapon, right? These are, quote, smaller nuclear weapons using one on the battlefield. But could that be the kind of red line? that would lead NATO to become directly involved because of the danger that that could pose to Europe as a whole due to fall out and so forth.

We have to end this war quickly. So that is one scenario where this could happen. Another scenario that could happen is that Putin becomes, can kind of go one of two ways. He could either become emboldened or become desperate. This is why people have talked a lot about offering offerings, right? one thing they've been concerned about is if Putin becomes desperate, could he potentially gamble for resurrection? This is a concept I've used before when I've talked to other folks about this for, but this is an idea that Hein Goemans at Rochester, University of Rochester

has written about where a lot of times leaders in a bit of desperation during war will gamble for resurrection, which is that I have nothing to lose. But if I go, go for this, maybe I can stay in power. And so what would this be? Maybe he invades the, maybe he invades one of the Baltic states. Maybe he goes ahead and uses a nuclear weapon, a strategic nuke. Knowing that this has the potential to escalate the war, but thinking this might be enough to actually get the West to back off.

That would be another nightmare scenario. The other one, though, related would be instead of an act of desperation, he could be emboldened. Now, I don't think this scenario is as likely as it was early in the war. I had laid this out as like one possible scenario early in the war. But this idea would be that if the war in Ukraine had gone well, he would have said, well, now I can go for something else. And this is what you saw with Hitler with World War II, right? It was that, okay, Poland was easy.

Well, first of all, Austria was easy. Czechoslovakia was easy. Poland seemed relatively easy. And then France was, of course, easy. So he just kept going and going because it was easy. eventually he went too far. But that was the idea is that could you become emboldened by success? Now, that's part of the reason why the fact that he did become bogged down in Ukraine.

I think that scenario was less likely. And I think at this point, the concern, the way that this could escalate quickly would be if Putin was in kind of this act of desperation and hence went for one of these gambling for resurrection type scenarios. I think that's the kind of grim note we like to strike at the end of an episode, right? No argument there. The only other the point I thought was interesting. I was jumping around in this to get this is a little piece of anecdotal evidence. We've got so many movies about World War II. Not a lot of movies about World War I.

There are some. They're starting to come out more. They're starting to come out more. thinking about medieval history there's a lot of movies about the 100 years war there's a couple movies about the War of the Roses

what is the great movie about the 30 years war there's not one because it's big it's complicated it's weird it's one of the most consequential moments

in European history and there's not like if you get a story about it it's usually as a backdrop and it's about the plague and it's about people just tried to survive and get through that moment, right? It's not about the war itself.

It's absolutely right. A Wallenstein movie from the 1920s from Germany, and that's kind of it. Yeah, and it would make sense it's from Germany, too. But that's, yeah, no, I think this is, that's a very good illustration of just this idea that that is a complex war. I don't understand that war. So therefore, it's hard to process. It's hard to distill it in a movie.

But the reality is that I think that war, or it does capture more the reality of war. So that is why it's important that we, again, not allow wars like World War I, World War II to skew our understanding of what warfare is. I think we also, we can't do it today, but it be great to have you, your co-author back to talk about casualties and how things have changed the ratio between people killed and people wounded and what that means. I'm not going to start that 45 minutes into the episode. That deserves its own separate. Really does. But casualties in the American Civil War and casualties now mean two completely different things, right?

Well, Paul Post, Paul Post, thank you so much for coming on the show. And really great insights, and we appreciate it. I appreciate being on the show. you so much for having me. Thanks for listening to another episode of Angry Planet. The show is produced with love by Matthew Galt and Jason Fields with the assistants of Kevin Medell. This is the place where we ask you for money.

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