Throughout history, war seems to have had an iron grip on humanity. In this short book, internationally renowned philosopher of war, Christopher Coker, challenges the view that war is an idea that we can cash in for an even better one - peace. War, he argues, is central to the human condition; it is part of the evolutionary inheritance which has allowed us to survive and thrive. New technologies and new geopolitical battles may transform the face and purpose of war in the 21st century, but our capacity for war remains undiminished. The inconvenient truth is that we will not see the end of war until it exhausts its own evolutionary possibilities.
The manual describes the general strategy for the U.S. Marines but it is beneficial for not only every Marine to read but concepts on leadership can be gathered to lead a business to a family. If you want to see what make Marines so effective this book is a good place to start.
Excerpt from Will War Ever Cease? During the past twenty years great interest has been taken in the matter of war and peace, and thousands of good men and women have discussed the question of whether war can be abolished, and a reign of universal peace ushered in within a short time. For generations, yes for centuries, men have dreamed of peace on earth, but wars and rumors of wars have continued, and within the past six years we have witnessed perhaps the greatest and most costly war that the world has ever seen; a war that has involved nearly all the nations of the earth, and has cost the lives of millions of men, and billions of dollars, and has left in its train so much woe and evil that it seems to have cursed the nations of the earth for years, perhaps for generations to come. In the face of all this loss and destruction, certainly no sane man can deny the frightful evils of war, and no sincere well-wisher of the human race can avoid the hope that some way may be found to put an end to a system of settling disputes among nations that causes so much misery and loss to all the parties involved therein. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
"Dan Reiter explains how information about combat outcomes and other factors may persuade a warring nation to demand more or less in peace negotiations, and why a country might refuse to negotiate limited terms and instead tenaciously pursue absolute victory if it fears that its enemy might renege on a peace deal. He fully lays out the theory and then tests it on more than twenty cases of war-termination behavior, including decisions during the American Civil War, the two world wars, and the Korean War. Reiter helps solve some of the most enduring puzzles in military history, such as why Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, why Germany in 1918 renewed its attack in the West after securing peace with Russia in the East, and why Britain refused to seek peace terms with Germany after France fell in 1940.".
Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Politics - Topic: Peace and Conflict, Security, grade: 73, London School of Economics, course: Strategic Aspects of International Relations, language: English, abstract: In answer, this paper supports Christopher Coker‘s argument that humanity is more likely to remain in the war enterprise, contesting that war’s evolutionary process is open-ended and thus inevitable. While the paper argues that we cannot eliminate war, it acknowledges that we can do more to mitigate war. The study will methodically consider how war continues to evolve as part of human nature, culture, and technology to demonstrate that war is unstoppable, then considers the extent to which we can mitigate war and its devastating consequences via institutions and humane warfare. While Plato would argue that “only the dead have seen the end of war” (Bowden, 2001), philosophers and scholars including Immanuel Kant, John Horgan, and Stephen Pinker envisage the long-peace and the end of war. The enders’ momentum and optimism to eliminate war is what Gustave Flaubert (1954) would describe as a “thunder against” war. Scholars and philosophers on the enders’ platform infer that “humanity has become much wealthier, healthier and more free, and war-related casualties have plummeted since the end of World War Two” (Horgan, 2015), therefore the end of war is possible and imminent. In addition, Pinker, in his seminal work “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” posits that humanity is becoming more civilised and less violent since the European Enlightenment, hence there is a little incentive for war. The enders’ ‘thunder against war’ has ignited scholarly and philosophical debates in which John Gray, for instance, disputes that Pinker is wrong about violence and war, stating "peace and freedom alternate with war and tyranny, eras of increasing wealth with periods of economic collapse. Instead of becoming ever stronger and more widely spread, civilization remains inherently fragile and regularly succumbs to barbarism" (Horgan, 2015). In a similar perspective, Christopher Coker, world renowned philosopher of war, proposes that war is fundamental to our society, therefore to eliminate war is to alter humanity. Coker argues that “war is continuing to evolve and that until such time as it reaches an evolutionary dead-end we are more likely than not to remain in the war business” (Coker, 2014, p. 73). But the questions remain: can we do more, and even so, can war be eliminated?
