The War Ledger [antikvár]

IntroductionThe story we are about to tell is a tale of conflict among nations. The wars we will be concerned with are few in number, but they are the fiercest and most lethal ever fought. Our book is not a series of case studies, however. A clinician's exploration of a single war is a very different task from the one undertaken in this volume, and the deep probing of individual cases requires skills we do not possess. The deadliness of wars in which the combatants fight with all-out efforts was a major criterion for our selection of a tiny sample of conflicts, but not for the obvious reasons. The vast size, scope, and ferocity of the fighting are important because they help to create the conditions of high stress essential to test our notions about the causes and consequences of armed conflicts.In our examination of these wars, then, we will be primarily concerned less with the wars themselves than with four general kinds of questions that can be posed about them. First, why do major wars begin? What are the conditions that provoke the most powerful nations in the world to fight with one another? Second, why exactly does one side win and the other lose? The obvious explanations of clever generalship, the size and self-sacrifice of armies, the quality and quantity of the weapons used, or combinations of all these, did not seem to us entirely persuasive. Third, we were interested in the rules that govern behavior of the contestants after the actual fighting has ceased. Some countries obviously recover faster than others after a war. How do some of the obvious factors such as victory and defeat influence the recovery of the combatants? Is there a predictable pattern in the behavior of the winners and losers? Fourth, and finally, have the rules governing conflict behavior between nations been drastically altered since the! ! | ; < I,!'!'I'I V,!I!h,Tfeil'-'U"!E 'ni.i-ii