Veterans Day Sparks Concern About Military Recruitment

Around Armistice Day, aka Veterans Day in the US, and Remembrance Day in the British Commonwealth, there is concern that the US military isn't recruiting enough volunteers. Americans Don't Want to Fight for Their Country Anymore, Newsweek reports. It could mainly be because unemployment is low and military salaries (not including all the benefits) are …

A Time For War? Studied Empathy? Or Both?

Here's a well-reasoned piece by Steve Schmidt arguing that this is a time for war. The bleating and whining for peace now, he writes, is no more appropriate than it was in WW2. Click. My Substack e-newsletter, "Israel-Palestine: Is Studied Empathy Still Possible?" is getting a lot of attention and has garnered several new paid …

Chinese General Sun Tzu – The Art of War Explained In 5 Minutes

The Life Guide: "The Art of War is the most influential treatise on war ever written, consisting of 13 chapters each of which is devoted to one aspect of warfare, it has shaped the way in which conflicts have been fought for thousands of years from the Japanese samurai to the Napoleonic war. Not only …

Origin of the Disdainful Term, ‘Pig War’, And It’s Importance to Diplomacy

"This will not be a pig war," meaning it won't be insignificant, there's a real danger of prolonged violent confrontation, and we had better take it seriously, we'd better think seriously about diplomacy. The Pig War of 1859 "was a confrontation in 1859 between the US and the British Empire over the British–U.S. border in the San Juan …

Why Do Nations Go to War?

PolicyEd, affiliated with Stanford University's Hoover Institution, explains that "war is politics by other means. In other words, when political leaders cannot get what they want through political means, they judge the cost of achieving their goal through military force. Preventing armed conflict requires raising the cost of using force. Until the cost of any …

10 Questions A Baby Boomer Never Thought Anyone Would Ask

I know fame is fleeting, but one doesn't understand how fleeting it is until one teaches social studies. Public memory is exceedingly short. Pop culture to one generation is entirely different from popular culture to another generation. People who are extraordinarily famous to one generation aren't even known to another generation.  Teenagers ask me questions …

Napoleon on War Strategy and the Importance of Military and Citizen Morale to Winning

"In war, morale forces are to physical (forces) as to three to one." -- Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon sought to dominate Europe, but famously got bogged down when he invaded Russia where his forces got stuck in the early spring melt of ice into mud. The same thing happened to Adolph Hitler when he invaded Russia, …

Paradigm Shift: Russian Invasion of Ukraine Causes Change in How We See the World

Americans, and other nationalities, have sought to create central organizing principles for understanding the world. The broad outlines of world history begin with civilization, exploration, colonization (evolving into colonialism), and development of empires, to competition for resources, wars, regional and world dominance, rise and fall of empires. In the mid-20th century, the Cold War between the U.S. and Russia provided the central …

Could the US Civil War Have Been Avoided?

In some respects, the American Civil War seems INEVITABLE. A nation founded on equality embedded the inequality of African Americans into the Constitution at its birth by permitting slavery and the 3/5s Compromise. There was no possible peaceful compromise on this issue. As Abraham Lincoln said, the nation could not continue to exist half-slave and …

3 Big Reasons War Went Away

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC45TRP4lq0 Vox, 2014: "The 21st century has actually been the most peaceful one in modern history."