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Pentagon personnel have been aiming to increase the lethality of troops for decades now, under the assumption that this will naturally result in military victory. The latest public figure to promote lethality is President Donald Trump’s recently confirmed secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth. The basic idea underlying Lethality First is that “the good guys” need to kill “the bad guys,” and the sooner and more efficiently this is done, the better. Lethality, it is believed, must be maximized in order to save the lives of allied soldiers and civilians. Commitment to this creed was not diminished by the highly lethal debacle in Vietnam, nor the disastrous Global War on Terror, because Lethality Firsters always insist that any and every defeat is caused by a failure to have maximized lethality.
Modern weapons of war, beginning with the machine gun, were developed with the intention of making the ugly job of killing swifter and more efficient, while preserving the lives of allied troops. But at some point lethality became a kind of telos for people in the defense sector, who consider it obvious that lethality is a good thing, in and of itself. Which is strange, because the very same people, when asked, will readily aver that murder is bad. The difference is that they regard the acts of homicide which they perpetrate—or aid and abet—as necessary, indeed, perhaps even noble. This is why it is not uncommon to hear not only military industry profiteers but also politicians and bureaucrats, who do not appear to be psychopaths, gushing about “lethality.”………….
A conflict is not “resolved” by annihilating the compatriots of bad actors, rather than attempting to understand that community’s perspective and coming to a reasoned agreement about how to achieve a peaceful cohabitation of the planet. Through highly lethal bombing campaigns, some of the wrongdoers may be punished, but so will be anyone who happens to live nearby and, eventually, the future people who will bear the brunt of blowback and quests for revenge such as happened on both September 11, 2001 and on October 7, 2023. Increasing lethality is bound to increase the amount of indiscriminate homicide committed, which radicalizes previously neutral persons, motivating them to seek retaliatory revenge. The fact that this lesson has yet to be learned by Secretary of Defense Hegsweth is concerning, to say the least.
Perhaps things in the world would go better if they gave up on the idea of using ‘the most lethal weapons and people available. Kill, kill, kill seems to be the only things these people know. However, killing is not always the best solution for any problem that comes up. Killing seems to beget more killing in revenge for the first killing until nobody knows who started it, while everyone wants to finish it. Does that sound good to you?