Comment by belorn
1 day ago
If you want society to be more vulnerable to military action, then the biggest innovation is health care. Improved health care is what allowed nations to create and maintain larger military forces. Through out history, disease and malnourished caused more death by a large margin than actually violence in combat, and many war campaign stopped suddenly because one or both sides became unable to continue.
> Improved health care is what allowed nations to create and maintain larger military forces
Isn’t it the other way? With a lot of medicine’s modern advances being rooted in combat medicine?
I think they mean communicable diseases, not combat injuries. For example, around 2/3rds of the military deaths in the American civil war were from disease, not combat. I don’t think much of the medical advances that prevent that came from combat medicine.
> don’t think much of the medical advances that prevent that came from combat medicine
Triage and ambulances come from battle medicine [1]. (Not sure about communicable-disease prevention.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Jean_Larrey
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America's school lunch program was created so that it would have healthier soldiers. We better stop feeding children.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_School_Lunch_Prog...