
Here’s how much of your life the United States has been at war - drawkbox
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/05/18/heres-how-much-of-your-life-the-united-states-has-been-at-war/
======
drawkbox
The terror wars are the most alarming because it has also militarized our
police, created a lower bar for our justice system or two justice systems,
created secret courts, attacked our Constitution with the Patriot Act,
abolished privacy, and the cost is more than all other wars combined.

In the end, every war since WWII, where the world was decimated and we got the
advantage of rebuilding, has left the country in a worse economic condition
than the last. Every single war creates a sideways market and has created more
imbalance.

We now have the possibility of losing the people internally and that is
typically how all empires fall, from within due to overextended wars and lack
of spending internally.

You could also throw in the War on Drugs as another war not recognized by this
but that is the war that has taken the most of our freedoms since the War on
Terror. Overriding the justice system to force moralistic laws, taking
freedoms from individuals on a grand scale, general warrants that we crossed
the ocean to get away from. There may be an end to the War on Drugs in some
ways soon, but the War on Terror seems to have no end or way to end it until
it has broken the US internally.

If 'terrorists hate our freedoms' then why are our lawmakers taking away our
rights?

~~~
collyw
Both wars are on abstract ideas, and are pretty unwinnable wars.

------
littletimmy
American wars will never stop precisely because the war has no great adverse
impact on American lives.

When other countries go to war, like Pakistan against India for example, their
citizens feel the pain. So sooner or later they realize war is not all that
good and they form an uneasy peace agreement. Americans have no such
compulsion towards peace, because the wars they finance always ruin some other
country and kill some other people. At the same time, it sustains a good war
economy and keeps the public occupied. These wars are win-win from the
perspective of the American establishment.

As a side note, this is why 9/11 was such a monumental event from an American
point of view: it was one of the very few times that Americans were in the
crosshairs. As Chomsky put it "This is stuff that we do to you, you don't do
it to us."

~~~
seesomesense
The cure for the American love of war is to have more of these wars fought on
the American mainland.

~~~
zanny
Thats the greatest ruse. There will never be another war on American soil. At
least anything other than opportunistic strikes - suicide bombers, untraceable
ICBM strikes, or attacks by non-governmental groups. You will never see
Chinese, Russian, Mexican... any foreign nationalities soliders walking down
the streets of New York or LA. A real war, in the modern world, without all
the bullshit proxyisms and toying with lives, is resolved with nuclear arms
first and foremost.

Don't think for a second this country would tolerate anything less than
nuclear retaliation to a ground invasion of the mainland USA by a foreign
government. Hell, an organized terrorist group would see themselves nuked out
of existence if they tried to do a land invasion. It is instant suicide to
_attack_ America directly. Why do you think the entire point of the Taliban
during the 80s against Russia, and of all the myriad terrorist groups
operating against the USA today, was to lead a band of nomads to commit
suicide raids and guerrilla attacks against them? They knew they could never
"win" a war. They could just make their enemy lose. They worked to help bleed
the USSR dry, and are winning by all their own metrics to this day by doing
the same to the USA. They hide in caves while we flush a trillion a year down
the toilet in the name of security against them. And people wonder how Rome
fell.

~~~
meira
This kind of thinking, the same of Fox News and the media uses, is what
support this "war on terror". All of great empires thought they would never
been invaded or destroyed. Until they were. It would not be that impossible to
invade USA if the country's foreign policy keep turning every country in the
world into an enemy. A full war against Americans (which is not impossible to
happen, as the US is doing bad even to european countries) would put US in a
very fragile situation.

~~~
zanny
All the great empires did not have weapons that could render the planet
uninhabitable a _hundred times over_. Don't act like nuclear arms did not
change war.

No, the USA would not survive a global war versus _every_ other power. The US
has enough missile subs, secret launch bases, and distributed silos to make it
impossible to do a joint strike to eliminate the entire American nuclear
arsenal. But very few would survive that war - most of the planet would be an
irradiated uninhabitable wasteland. I would expect you would have survivors of
a global nuclear war, but it would not be a pleasant world to live in.

There is no situation where you could do a ground invasion and takeover of
_any_ sufficiently nuclear armed first world country where that country would
not use nukes as a final measure. That is what they are for. I mean go ahead,
try taking over Pakistan and see if they don't nuke you for it, for example.

~~~
seesomesense
"All the great empires did not have weapons that could render the planet
uninhabitable a hundred times over"

Like Ukraine's nuclear weapons protected it from Russia ?

Here is a clue. As the world situation changed, Ukraine lost its nuclear
weapons. Want to bet that will NEVER happen to the USA or the successor of the
USA ?

------
rescripting
I see the country's involvement in war as an inevitability born from the
continued evolution of the military industrial complex. Like any organization,
a primary goal of the military is for it to self sustain. To reduce its size
to a level suitable for peace time you'd need to fight back against so many
incentives to keep things the way they are. It's a Herculean task.

This pressure to scale it back was supposed to come from Congress but it's no
secret that the public's faith is in Congress's ability to do their job is at
an all time low.

So now you always have to have a conflict. Slowly the bar for what merits
involvement gets lower. Other comments here have echoed my fear that the bar
may get so low that the focus to find a suitable enemy turns inward.

~~~
adrice727
I spent almost six years working for the Department of Defense. From my
perspective, the entire organization is engaged in a giant game with two
objectives. One, funnel as much money as possible to defense contractors. Two,
keep the game going for as long as possible, by any means possible.

------
abalone
What's more interesting than the "definitions of 'at war'" are the definitions
of "young men and women [who have] died," "children [who] lost a parent or
sibling" and "life-altering injuries".

Apparently ABC's Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent thinks only U.S. men,
women and children are worth counting.

~~~
hudibras
Well, it _is_ Memorial Day, an American holiday to remember Americans who have
died in wars.

~~~
abalone
The speech was given on May 16. Moreover, the definition of what constitutes a
human doesn't change on Memorial Day.

------
lsc
I don't want to diminish the difficulty and danger the soldiers at the front
today face, or the danger that the civilians in those areas face, but I'm not
sure that the war on terror belongs to the same category of conflict as world
war two.

------
MWil
Actually, because Congress or the President have not yet acted, we have been
in a period of war since 1990.

[http://www.benefits.va.gov/pension/wartimeperiod.asp](http://www.benefits.va.gov/pension/wartimeperiod.asp)

source: am Veteran/Military lawyer

~~~
drawkbox
Good information, so essentially the Gulf War never ended, and war powers have
been active since 1990.

> Mexican Border Period (May 9, 1916 – April 5, 1917 for Veterans who served
> in Mexico, on its borders, or adjacent waters)

> World War I (April 6, 1917 – November 11, 1918)

> World War II (December 7, 1941 – December 31, 1946)

> Korean conflict (June 27, 1950 – January 31, 1955)

> Vietnam era (February 28, 1961 – May 7, 1975 for Veterans who served in the
> Republic of Vietnam during that period; otherwise August 5, 1964 – May 7,
> 1975)

> Gulf War (August 2, 1990 – through a future date to be set by law or
> Presidential Proclamation)

That makes the Gulf War the longest war combined with the terror wars from the
article (2001-present). We are only 15 years into this century and already
have seen as much war as last century which included the world wars. I guess
perpetual war has already started.

~~~
abecedarius
So the durations increased monotonically, except for WWII as kind-of-
surprisingly defined to last through 1946 making it edge out Korea. I didn't
expect such a simple pattern.

------
rbehrends
Odd that they don't seem to count the Cold War. I understand that their
measure of what they count as a war is subjective, but surely the Cold War
impacted the average person's life at least as much as the War on Terror and
had a significantly bigger economic impact.

------
hudibras
[http://www.visaliatimesdelta.com/story/news/local/2014/08/09...](http://www.visaliatimesdelta.com/story/news/local/2014/08/09/remembering-
pfc-williams/13841727/)

Killed last year in Afghanistan at age 19. He was six years old on 11
September 2001.

~~~
whoisthemachine
Wow that's very sad.

~~~
krick
What I'm going to say seems like extremely unpopular opinion, but _why exactly
is it sad_? Because somebody died? Yeah, sure, this part could be sad, except
people die all the time.

Because "Young Brave American Soldier" was killed by "the enemies"? Oh hell
no. He didn't die on someone's behalf: he was the one who invaded somebody's
home country and was killed by people protecting that place from people like
him. I'm more grieving for people he killed, than for himself.

Maybe it's sad because he died because of USA government, who is so fond of
making war? For me, it doesn't seem to work either: as far as I know USA has a
volunteer military, nobody forced him into it. He has consciously chosen
killing others (and, possibly, being killed himself) as his professional
activity. For me, the fact he voluntarily made such choice is more sad than
the fact he suffered from it.

So why exactly is it sad?

~~~
chii
it's sad because the fact that he thought that his choice was the best for his
country - a sort of misplaced, misguided loyalty. And it's being taken
advantage of by those in power to propagate an agenda that doesn't benefit
many americans at all.

~~~
littletimmy
Would you extend the same courtesy to fighters on the other side?

~~~
prawn
Yes.

------
ghostunit
"More than 6,500 young men and women died in these wars"

I love how the hundreds of thousands of people _WE_ killed somehow don't make
it into this count.

~~~
seesomesense
MILLIONS that we killed, not hundreds of thousands.

The body count in just Iraq is over 200,000.

[https://www.iraqbodycount.org/](https://www.iraqbodycount.org/)

This is the way the American world looks. Bleak and littered with corpses.

~~~
adventured
Actually the way the American world looks, is one in which no major world
powers have gone to war since WW2 ended, with America maintaining the peace
and protecting Western Europe from the Soviet Union.

Global poverty and global violence - in fact, nearly every major negative
measurement has plunged in the last 70 years during which America has reigned.
The global median income and standard of living keeps rising. The world has
never had it so good, as it has during the time in which America has been the
leading superpower.

Endless war among major nations for centuries. America becomes _the_ global
superpower, not a single major war between major nations in 70 years.

Two world wars in 25 years. Zero world wars - despite vast global military
armament, including two aggressive communist powers that murdered a hundred
million of their own people combined - in 70 years. America has been the sole
thing holding it all in check.

Global wealth - at an all time high. Global charity - at an all time high.
Global median income - at an all time high. Global median standard of living -
at an all time high. Child death rates, at all time lows. Science, space,
manufacturing, global trade, innovation, opportunity, education, pick a topic
- the world has never been better off than it has been the last 70 years on
average, and especially since the collapse of the USSR and old-line Communist
China, both of which occurred on America's watch.

~~~
gonvaled
That is one way of seeing it.

Here is another way: global period of prosperity in which a world superpower
has (momentarily?) solved the problem of maintaining its supremacy (mainly
economic, but also military and political) by leeching the rest of the world
using various mechanisms: dollar as reserve country, military occupation of
resource rich countries - sometimes by tacit alliances with repressive regimes
- international intellectual property agreements skewed to favor the home
economy, rigged international financial markets ...

Which is fine, but here is the problem: it is not that America has chosen the
"peace-americana", it is that the "peace-americana" is working in its favor.
As soon as it does not work anymore, the US will very willingly fight other
major powers, in a race to the bottom.

All this, of course, discounting the fact that during the "peace-americana"
the US has killed millions of people (most of whom are innocent bystanders),
while at the same time suffering the loss of a couple of thousand people.
Every person killed is a big loss, and that means the millions of people
killed are a very big loss, even if you do not care.

So, what is the grudge we in the rest of the world have with the US? Speaking
for myself, just the fact that you are not using the chance that this period
of prosperity is giving the world to engage in a permanent and objective
international state of affairs, which is not just a way for you to control us
and maintain your supremacy.

You are just a bully, which is to be expected: everybody would do exactly the
same thing in your situation. Just don't try to sell it as something that it
is not.

And let me tell you one more thing: even if it is in your short-term interest
to act as you are doing, long-term it is just stupid. Instead of fostering
collaboration you are creating enemies (Russia, China, some parts of south
america, now even Europe); in the long run, your supremacy will be eroded and
you will fall, like all empires fall. The question is if another empire will
come, or an international cosmopolitan establishment will be created to
regulate the relations among people on Earth (hopefully not country-based
anymore). You could have lead this path, but my impression (based on the
status of the world and particularly the US economy, as related to the
upcoming powers) is that that chance has already passed.

------
walterbell
_> Young Americans have lived in a country at war for almost their whole
lives, but they have to be reminded of it._

This statement would benefit from a historical chart of journalism practices
in war reporting.

~~~
angersock
There's something more to it, though.

America has such a massive commercial and industrial apparatus (regardless of
what anybody trying to puff up the Chinese or Russians might say) that we have
effectively made it entirely possible to maintain a relatively high state of
war without the general economy really ever feeling it.

In concert with this, the clever manipulation of the populace by both
mainstream media, government agencies, and also by internet news outlets has
allowed the populace to at once constantly fear for their safety while never
actually building to the point of questioning why, exactly, the same officials
and policies are held day in and day out. This isn't the matter of
conspiracies, mind you, it's simply business.

The utterly _terrifying_ thing is that, in the meanwhile, all of us nice
techies have been training people to accept ubiquitous surveillance and even
outright writing the tools ourselves.

And so, the credible foreign enemies gone, we see all this apparatus beginning
to turn inwards.

~~~
walterbell
Can us nice techies put our minds towards a non-violent economic migration
plan for the entire military-industrial complex :) Other industries are
regularly lectured on the merits of adapting to a changing economy.

~~~
meatysnapper
The best way to think of the military industrial complex is a giant social and
corporate welfare program. Just like there are prison towns, where the entire
non-imprisoned population depends on the prisoners for jobs, there are entire
swaths of our country dependent on military bases, contractors, etc.

~~~
llamataboot
There is also a disturbing ratchet effect. It is almost always easier to argue
for more (weapons/surveillance/police/prisons) in the name of safety. Far more
difficult to argue against them. So we only seem to be moving in one
direction.

The seemingly-now-inevitable decriminalization of marijuana and lessening on
the Drug War in the US notwithstanding (which is a welcome development, but
I'm not sure it is because of a general discontent with the militarized state
of daily life)

~~~
harryh
When it comes to military conflict we're certainly only moving in one
direction: smaller.

------
harryh
This is dumb. Being "at war" is not binary and it's silly to think of it as
such. Call the US's involvement whatever you want, but saying it's the same
thing as WWI or WWII is insane.

~~~
angersock
It's not at all, at least from a financial standpoint:

[http://cironline.org/sites/default/files/legacy/files/June20...](http://cironline.org/sites/default/files/legacy/files/June2010CRScostofuswars.pdf)

We've spent more on the Middle East than WW1 and Vietnam _combined_.

~~~
harryh
Not in terms of % of GDP which is the only measure that actually matters.

~~~
angersock
It doesn't strike you as, I don't know, a little _odd_ , that we have paid for
a Vietnam and a WW1 without noticing it?

Yes, the sheer performance of the rest of the economy has enabled the % GDP to
be smaller than previously, but that doesn't make the scale of the thing any
less impressive.

~~~
harryh
It doesn't strike me as odd at all. We are vastly richer now than we were in
the 1970s. When I was 12 years old $10 was a huge amount of money for me. Now
it's lunch. You've gotta look at things relatively, not on an absolute scale.

------
tedunangst
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Janus_%28Roman_Forum%...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Janus_%28Roman_Forum%29)

------
barsonme
> But that state of war, we are told (I am too young to know better) feels
> different than America during World War II...

Whenever my dad or grandparents would talk about war, they'd always mention
how less involved our current wars are.

During those wars, it was an all-out effort on the homefront and you were
constantly reminded that you were under attack.

It's crazy how shut-off we are from current conflicts because of 1) the scale,
and 2) the distance. Even though the news _constantly_ reported on the Iraq
War and the conflicts over in the Middle East, it wasn't something I thought
about while I was growing up.

I wonder how much more respect our soldiers would see, and how less willing
we'd be to go to war if we actually felt impacts day-to-day. (E.g., rationing,
everybody knowing somebody overseas, women taking over factories, etc.)

~~~
harryh
The fact that the conflicts of today are much much smaller (by any measure you
choose to use) than those of last century is a WONDERFUL THING. It's not
crazy. It's AWESOME. Fewer people are dying or being injured. It's costing
less money. Fewer people's lived are impacted. It's one of the biggest areas
of progress for mankind. Celebrate it!

~~~
reitzensteinm
This is true only if the effects are symmetrical. If we're barely feeling the
effects and our opponents are in agony, that's not a step forward, as we have
no motivation to end the conflict and the total suffering may actually
increase.

~~~
harryh
The effects are symmetrical:

[http://d35brb9zkkbdsd.cloudfront.net/wp-
content/uploads/2013...](http://d35brb9zkkbdsd.cloudfront.net/wp-
content/uploads/2013/12/Pinker.jpg)

------
cyphunk
Appalling (from the speech):

 _" More than 6,500 young men and women died in those wars"_

Strangely typical that people forget that "human" is a definition that applies
to more than just "American". Just take one of the wars, the Iraq war, and
include in your definition of "young men and women" at least the Iraqi
civilians that also died and you should have a number above 112,000+ that
died.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War)

This slip of the tongue speaks volumes.

------
bryanlarsen
What really drove it home for me was how much my Mom freaked out when the war
in Kuwait broke. I was seventeen at the time, and she was worried that I would
get drafted.

~~~
harryh
It drove home what for you exactly? The fact that your mom was irrationally
worried about something that was never going to happen?

No one in the US has been drafted in over 40 years.

~~~
bryanlarsen
The last time it happened, people my mother's age were the ones being drafted.
It really looked like a flashback experience.

And if you want to insult my mother, please do it to my face. Thanks.

------
spydum
what about the "war on drugs", which If I recall was 1990? Or the Cold war?
How are these not the same as the war on terrorism (which gets some sort of
recognition specially here, maybe just to make things look more dramatic)?
Wars against ideals or ambiguous targets make this binary thing very difficult
to pin down.

~~~
DoctorBit
1971 by Richard Nixon:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs)

------
jccalhoun
There have been very few years when the USA military wasn't engaged in a
military conflict:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_milit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations)

------
phyalow
"We've always been at war with Eastasia".

------
erdojo
This is not true. The US hasn't been at war since WWII. Everything since has
been a conflict. Even Vietnam.

~~~
staunch
Vietnam meets anyone's definition of war.

~~~
kazazes
Except United States' technical definition of war, which must be authroized by
Congress.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_United_States)

~~~
staunch
> _However, that passage provides no specific format for what form legislation
> must have in order to be considered a "declaration of war" nor does the
> Constitution itself use this term._

~~~
hudibras
Furthermore, there's no doubt that the U.S. can be at war without an official
declaration by Congress: those instances when another country formally
declares war on the U.S. first.

For example, the U.S. was officially at war with Japan from 7-8 December 1941,
for a few hours with Germany and Italy on 11 December following their
declaration of war against the U.S., and from 13 December 1941 to 6 June 1942
against Bulgaria.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_declaration_of_w...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_declaration_of_war_upon_Japan)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_declaration_of_wa...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_declaration_of_war_upon_Germany_\(1941\))

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_declaration_of_wa...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_declaration_of_war_upon_Bulgaria)

------
pla3rhat3r
This is depressing.

