In the mid 1960s, I worked for the United States Navy’s Bureau of Ships, managing radar procurement and distribution to vessels operating in Vietnamese waters. Later in the decade I was a research assistant for the Navy Logistics Research Project. I wore a suit to work. I had a salary that my classmates envied. I was, by any conventional measure, on the right side of the desk.
I also went to Walter Reed Army Hospital on my own time and interviewed eight wounded veterans at the Army’s principal rehabilitation center for Vietnam amputees — men who had lost legs, feet, eyes, and jawbones in a war I was helping to supply. One had fifteen months of hospitalization behind him and permanent damage to his lungs, ears, and abdomen. His family had been living on $145 a month. Another, whose lower jaw had been shot off by a sniper, told me that Ho Chi Minh was the George Washington of Vietnam. A third said: “If I was in the same position as the demonstrators, I’d be doing the same thing. I don’t blame them a damn bit for not wanting to go.”
A few days later I was on Constitution Avenue covering a major demonstration for the George Washington University student newspaper. My press credentials put me there in an official capacity. My spirit was with the crowd. Riot police stormed out of a federal building and lobbed pepper gas canisters over our heads, behind us, so that the only way out was through it. I was nearly blinded. Mucus covered the front of my coat. For five minutes I could barely breathe.
I kept working for the Defense Department for several more years — later in IT roles for the Department of the Army, the Defense Communications Agency, and others. In 1974, my wife Jeanne and I both quit. It was not precisely a political act. But it was not unrelated to one, either. We never worked for the Defense Department again.
I don’t tell this story to position myself as a hero of any kind. I was a young man with a government paycheck and an olive drab coat, trying to make sense of contradictions I was living inside. I tell it because the contradictions have never been resolved. They have only multiplied.
In the decades since, I have watched the same logic play out so many times that the repetition has acquired a kind of terrible rhythm. Nations start wars. Nations do not get what they started wars to get. The arithmetic is almost invariably catastrophic for the aggressor, and the lesson is almost invariably ignored until it is too late.
Consider the roll call since 1900. Germany launched the First World War and was dismembered at Versailles. Japan and Germany together started the Second World War seeking dominance and living space — and got the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Argentina seized the Falkland Islands and was ejected within ten weeks. Iraq invaded Kuwait and was driven out by a coalition of thirty-five nations. The Soviet Union marched into Afghanistan and limped home a decade later, its empire not long to follow. The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 to destroy weapons that did not exist, and spent the next two decades picking up the pieces.
More recently, Russia has been advancing into Ukraine at a rate that, by simple arithmetic, would fail to complete its conquest any time this century. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, launched specifically to prevent NATO expansion, has produced hundreds of additional miles of NATO border with Finland and Sweden, which joined the alliance as a direct result of the war. The aggressor made its strategic situation dramatically worse, precisely by going to war to improve it.
Like many aggressors before them, America and Israel entered their war against Iran with high hopes. But their decapitation campaign has produced a harder-line successor with deep ties to his country’s most extreme factions, a regional explosion, an oil shock felt in every economy on earth, and retaliatory strikes on allied bases. The strategy — kill the leader, collapse the regime — did not collapse the regime. It confirmed for the population everything they had been told about their enemy’s intentions. History was, as usual, arriving on schedule and being ignored.
The deepest irony in this long record belongs to the twentieth century’s most catastrophic aggressors: Germany and Japan. Both nations entered that century consumed by ambitions of regional dominance and economic preeminence. Both launched catastrophic wars to achieve those ambitions. Both had their cities reduced to rubble.
And yet, by the century’s end, Germany was the undisputed economic engine of Europe, its influence over the continent far exceeding anything Adolf Hitler’s armies ever achieved. Japan had become an industrial and technological superpower, its products and culture penetrating every corner of the globe. Both nations got, through peaceful means and over decades, more of what they had murderously sought than their wars ever delivered — and got it more securely, more lastingly, and at a fraction of the cost.
This suggests a principle that ought to be obvious but apparently is not: any nation powerful enough to mount a serious military campaign is, almost by definition, powerful enough to pursue its interests through diplomacy, economic leverage, and strategic patience. The return on investment of war — measured in lives, treasure, and actual lasting gains — is almost always catastrophically negative compared to the alternatives. Even when you win.
Why, then, do leaders keep starting wars? The honest answer is not strategic miscalculation alone, though that is always present. All too often, it is ego. It is the intoxication of nationalism. It is the hunger to be seen as strong, decisive, historic. Many leaders march their nations into conflict not because of a cool cost-benefit analysis, but because of their catastrophic conviction that violence is a shortcut to power.
History’s verdict on this point is unambiguous. The shortcut is a dead end. The wars that aggressors start tend to destroy not only their enemies but themselves. The goals that seemed to justify the bloodshed have a way of being achieved, in the end, by the patient and the peaceful.
I was twenty-six years old on Constitution Avenue, barely able to breathe, the front of my coat soaked with pepper gas. Since then, I have been watching the same war start and restart ever since, under different names, in different places, for the same reasons.
Nobody wins. The arithmetic makes this clear. But the arithmetic is always ignored.