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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

I hope there are no future wars.

The point of war is to kill people.

That's not necessarily true. The point of war is to force control. You can force control without killing people. Economically, psychologically, digitally, etc. Killing people is one of the ways but not the only way to wage war.

Indeed - anti-personnnel mines are intended to maim, not kill, because severely wounded soldiers or civilians are a greater drain on enemy resources and morale than a quick death.

The point of war is enforcing your will through violence. You can skip the violence, but then bullies would essentially be unrestricted.

Do you think there is a difference between killing people and violence ?

You can have violence without killing people, for example in torture the goal is generally not to kill the recipient.

And if a doctor has a surgery that goes bad and the patient died, they may have killed someone, but there was no violence.

But you can't have killing without violence.

I guess if you get extremely broad with the term but starvation isn't often classified as violence.

If the starvation is intentional it's a kind of violence ?

Smallpox, radiation leaks, freezing to death etc are all causes of death that can be engineered but not generally labeled as violence. What definition are you using?

"War" for the sake of "war" is pointless. It should be tied to a political objective for some kind of gain.

Ideally, it would be the last resort in limited capacity when diplomacy fails.

Otherwise you're unleashing horrors on humanity.

There's no single point to war. It can be anything from enjoying the destruction and killing and torture and lack of rules, to "retribution" (for people who are into thinking of other people in terms of arbitrarily and vaguely defined groups), though creating chaos to get political advantage, to distraction from political issues, or really whatever...

> The point of war is to kill people.

You could have a war that's entirely based around infrastructure damage, and you could warn people away from incoming attacks.

ah right, good point. Let's have more wars then.

Do you think that's what I was arguing?

Well I'll quote the sentence to make it clearer, I guess.

Never happened.

Even if it hasn't happened, it would still be a relatively normal war if it happened.

The point of wars usually isn't death.

Logic would indicate that if it didn't happen, it would not be normal if it did now.

Logic would not dictate that. It would be notable but still a pretty normal war. There have been major attacks that are only strikes on infrastructure, and some of them do warn ahead of time so people can evacuate. Deciding to only use that kind of attack is a valid option that makes sense as a "taking the high road" PR tactic.

the point of war is to get past bargaining frictions and make it clear what a mutually acceptable settlement looks like

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