Comment by lazide
14 hours ago
Looks at history….
There certainly weren’t a lot fewer wars back when people had to physically stab each other with swords. Quite the opposite?
14 hours ago
Looks at history….
There certainly weren’t a lot fewer wars back when people had to physically stab each other with swords. Quite the opposite?
Much more frequent conflicts, yes.
Much less total death and dying as well, though. Battles were short and small scale until the Civil War (maybe the Napoleonic Wars prior? Debatable). The largest battles of history prior to the industrial revolution were in the thousands, 10s of thousands of people. Forces were usually broken and defeated or fled after brief engagements. Brutal in experience, but smaller in scale.
It was that perception of war as personal, intimate, chivalric, by old men that let to the peak atrocity period (PAP? Did I coin a term?) of ~1850-1950. WWI was really the first modern reckoning of industrialized, globalized war, that led to the staggering scale of suffering. Incomprehensible to the men that commanded it, as they were born and acculturated in pre-modern war era culture.
But then the epoch-defining tool of the atom came along, and war has gone back to smaller scale, focused, targeted, "precision".
So here we sit, straddling two eras again. Pre-drone and post drone. We have not fully reckoned with what the new era means. But it will come quickly, like most modern tool-culture cycles.
Ghenghis khan?
A different model of war and Empire.
Yes brutal, for the defenders of the castles and fortified cities they conquered.
But again, very targeted at key sites so as to assert an Imperial-vassal relationship. Not to really to metamorph the populace, and run the day to day, which was left to local leadership.
Their point was to demonstratively subjugate for the purposes of control and tribute, not to kill, replace, or even miscegenate. They were the mob-bosses of Eurasia, not the crusaders or jihadis.
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Far fewer deaths. In those pitched battles it would mostly be about breaking the organization structure of the opposing line and having the soldiers disperse. Very few battles in history actually saw slaughter of tens of thousands and they remain notable as such.
Wars of the gunpowder age have been far more bloody. Far more destructive to civilian life. Far more lasting damage to the environment.