People have conflicts among each other one-on-one. However, when people have significant power over others, they wage conflicts using their groups instead of as individuals.
Some of these conflicts are moralized issues, but most of them are simplified battles over power toward a future purpose, group control, or an ego battle over who has more power.
Individuals won’t normally see the benefits of attacking a different set of people. To keep everyone motivated, most groups portray the appearance of their “good” versus their opponents’ “evil” using elaborate, large-scale media. The strongest motivation to attack other groups comes from overstating fears of what may happen if the other group wins.
Each group can (and usually will) damage other groups to the degree that larger groups don’t have power over them. If they’re the highest government in the land, they can kill at will and do almost anything they want. If they’re a corporation or colony that a more powerful group (e.g., a government) could dismantle, they’ll only act within their privileges unless they’re making a strategic and significant decision.
These dramatic conflicts have many interconnected elements, and each element is its own sub-conflict driven by unique decisions separate from the large groups’ leadership. Alliances often shuffle around, but nothing quite solidifies the group’s loyalty like an outside threat.
Inevitable
The unscrupulous desire for power by a minority of individuals makes smaller-scale conflicts inevitable, and large-scale conflicts are even more unavoidable, especially when small-scale conflicts aren’t addressed. However, their tremendous scale and profound transformation of sometimes millions of people will terrify most leaders into avoiding large conflicts for as long as possible.
Groups can coexist for much longer with conflicting values than individuals alongside each other, but once a trend has turned toward crushing the competition, it’s difficult to stop humanity’s competitive or destructive nature.
Usually, the trigger for a large-scale conflict comes through an existing disagreement among groups where a leader develops at least one of a few specific desires:
- Gaining power from the other group becomes more important than peace from that group (often by getting money or resources).
- Losing patience with the unease that comes from a looming conflict.
- The leader harshly interprets a religious text or a previous leader’s desires.
- Irrational hatred of another people group.
- A leader has a self-interested reason, so they deceive the entire group to do one of the above.
Most groups tend to protect their most educated and intelligent members as much as possible from the group’s highest risks. Strategists, among others, are often working closely with (or are) the ruling class of the group, while less advantaged individuals (e.g., young, unintelligent) are far more exposed and disposable. To keep everyone in line, the lower class is implied to have access to those privileged positions if they work hard enough.
When outright physical conflict isn’t as advantageous to win, legal battles can become just as fierce. Low-agreeableness personalities can even make sports a constrained form of warfare.
The resource costs for war preparedness are high. Any slack in discipline, even for a week or two, is enough to make the group lazy and ineffective.
Defusing
There are a few ways to avoid or stall a large-scale conflict. Occasionally, these tactics can be used within a large-scale conflict as well.
Appeasement
By trying to satisfy another group’s desires, a group hopes the other group will stop wanting a conflict.
If both sides are willing to appease, they can settle it with a negotiation. However, leaders with evil intent will often lie to benefit more than their opponent from an agreement.
However, if one side doesn’t want to relent, the other side’s reconciliation only trades time until the inevitable conflict while giving their opponent more power.
Very often, people will behave as if they don’t understand the other side. Understanding sometimes resolves conflicts, but those people are often trying to distort how things look to take advantage of others’ grace.
As an appeased group gains more power, they’ll make increasingly more unreasonable demands over time. Often, because the appeasing leaders are fearful and have made a habit of compromising boundaries, they’ll keep conceding indefinitely, all the way until the demanding group gives an impossible request.
Converging
Creating an alliance, merger, union, or truce can prevent conflicts by making multiple smaller groups under threat into a larger group. However, because of the inner conflicts present in all of humanity, people need a shared opposition or they start fighting amongst themselves.
Subversion
Destroying key components of a larger group can delay or nullify that group’s purposes, typically by making them ineffective. This can create power vacuums the subverting group can then fill:
- Destroy that group’s image to make the people fight with each other or destroy their reputation outside the group. The easiest way is to draw extra attention to one of that group’s past decisions, which often includes starting a protest.
- Sabotage resources or the means to acquire resources, usually by attacking the weakest points (which is often their communications technology).
- Redirect and reroute resources toward the subverting group’s purposes. This can involve redirecting physical things (e.g., raw materials) or mental things (e.g., information).
- Building trust with that group to do one of the above a later time, but by hiding power or having a key decision-making ability.
If enough people already agreed with the minority group, the idea was already waiting to happen and simply needed brave enough people who were willing to take the risk against their authorities to start the trend.
Demonstrating
By using demonstrations of power, a group can imply they’re comparably stronger than their opponents. The message they’re trying to communicate is that they’re bigger than they may seem and not worth contending with.
This bluff only works if the other group doesn’t want to risk the resources to test that impression, for one of two reasons:
- The other group has a scarcity of resources.
- The bluffing group is relatively unimportant to the other group.
Often, these demonstrations of power can involving partnering with other groups to give a shared image that implies the separate groups are one group more than reality.
If multiple groups demonstrate at the same time to outperform each other, they’re engaged in a cold war. A cold war can persist as long as both sides have enough ego to persist demonstrating, but they’re both afraid to start an engagement.
Divestment
By separating all resource usage from another group (e.g., sanctions), that group may be severely weakened from the lack of something they may need.
This only works if that group is heavily reliant on something. If they don’t need any outside help, or can make it themselves, the strategy will only harm the defending group.
Of course, that group will always seek another source for it, and the entire endeavor can backfire spectacularly: the opponent has another source for what they need, and they’re not happy that they had the inconvenience of having to find it.
Engaging
When two or more groups attack each other, their relative size makes a profound difference in the fight’s events.
But, there are a few universal aspects irrespective of size or context:
- The lowest-ranking members, unrelated groups, and bystanders are always the most harmed. Most of the leadership are using others’ power, but tend to care more about the power they wield and who they’re destroying than any concern over their own members.
- If the leaders are unscrupulous, they’ll attack their opponents’ symbolic treasures. By damaging symbols, they damage their opponents’ cultural values. Depending on the culture, this will sometimes provoke their desire for vengeance, but the long-term consequence of this is that the culture is diluted or dismantled.
- If a group starts losing, the loyalty and desires of the individuals in the conflict determine how far and how long they’ll keep fighting. If people are driven strictly by money or opportunities, they won’t fight for nearly as long or as hard as those driven by an ideal. People will risk their life for any purpose they want (and are more easily dissuaded from their duties by conflicting opportunities), but will only sacrifice their lives for a perceived noble cause.
- The members’ loyalty determines how much the entire endeavor can advance forward purely to satisfy the ego of the attacking leadership. This can only persist, however, as long as those members can advance their own self-interest as well.
- The methods that any groups will even think of tie very closely to the group’s long-term interests:
- Nuclear warfare obliterates everything (land, possessions, human labor, human skills), so it’s only a last-ditch effort as a means to survive.
- Constraining power when the other group has a different type of power creates a “cold war” or “trade war”, which ends up dramatically hurting both sides.
The organization’s ability to educate means of attacking and defending (e.g., military training) is frequently the determining factor in a tightly contested battle. However, the ability of an organization to change their tactics relative to what the other side is doing can quickly determine whether a group can succeed.
When the organization is larger than ~50 people, the older leaders will send the younger members with something to prove into the highest-risk parts of the conflict. The youth will often risk dying for another person’s decision, meaning nearly all large-group conflicts that aren’t preventing a decidedly evil thing are in some capacity immoral.
Large vs. Small: Large
Larger and more powerful groups tend to assume they have an automatic victory before they start proportional to their perceived relative size, which is a major disadvantage.
The large group will act quickly, but always slower than the smaller group, since they have more to move and often less of a compulsion to survive.
The larger group’s effort will be focused on preserving resources as much as possible. The leadership will constantly calculate if the effort is worth the cost, since they’re usually free to back out any time.
Because of large groups’ size, they’re a bit more impersonal, and individuals must trust strangers they don’t know directly much more frequently. These two factors together mean distrust within a group is disastrous to the harmony of the group proportionally to its size.
Often, a sufficiently motivated smaller group can scare the larger group away.
Large vs. Small: Small
Smaller groups, if motivated by an influential leader, are usually far more determined and focused than their larger opponents. In lieu of those leaders, the group can consist of determined self-leaders. However, without any leadership, the group will focus strictly on surviving and won’t make any sensible long-term strategies.
When that group is significantly smaller, their only reliable tactics come through fear (e.g., terrorism and guerrilla warfare) and creatively using their environment (i.e., tactics). Both of these techniques can often give the means for a group to confront another group 10 times larger than they are.
Often, the smaller group will try to gain support from another group or increase their members. They’ll show stories of suffering, destruction, oppression, and devastation, from the larger group and will usually portray themselves as innocent victims. Sometimes, they’ll merely appeal to morality.
Their victory will appear decisive and usually is, though the smaller group has a slim chance of winning if they have at least a specific resources:
- A superior tactician to the larger group who can more efficiently use everything.
- Superior technology to the larger group that magnifies group members’ combat effectiveness.
- Time to spread out the engagement, which give more room to strategically think and wear down the larger group’s morale and resources.
- Enough of a social revolution to empower the smaller group where the larger group is afraid of them.
However, victory for the smaller group is far more complex than the opportunistic goals of their larger opponent:
- The “win conditions” for the smaller group are far more specific, and are sometimes simply survival.
- They’ve put up enough of a fight that the larger group doesn’t anticipate their victory is worth the cost. This can be either in lost resources or bad image.
- The larger group has lost so much to the conflict that they can’t continue it.
- The smaller group has lost everything the larger group would have wanted.
- Another group has distracted the large group. This often arises from that third group seizing the opportunity to take that large group’s power while they’re distracted.
Often, to become the larger group against a common enemy, several groups will ally together for that specific purpose alone. Their alliance is almost always temporary. It’s not uncommon for that alliance to become its own conflict after the other group is eliminated. Often, one group will betray the other group’s trust from that previous alliance to gain power in the exchange.
However, the smaller group will often surrender. If they do, they’re either absorbed into the larger group as slaves or permitted to persist as subsidiary groups. In modern society, the slavery is often much more nuanced and goes by other names.
Evenly Matched
Groups hate to be evenly matched both from how much destruction it can cause and how uncertain the results will be. Thus, they work very hard to overwhelm their opposition as much as possible, and typically do it at the same time.
A close battle between two large groups quickly becomes extremely dramatic and intense. Since both sides have similar resources, both of them will do anything to get an edge on the other:
- Military and communications technology developments.
- Recruiting any other groups. This can include pretty much anyone who sympathizes with the battling group, and can be public or private.
- Manipulating their image to imply their opponents are less capable. This is especially useful when the groups are contending for the decision of a third group, but works when there’s anyone undecided over where they want to place their allegiance.
- Most war strategies involve cutting off resources from their opponent. This can include core needs (e.g., food, water), military supplies (e.g., guns, ammunition), or communications technology. At the farthest, a group can destroy its own supplies so the enemy doesn’t receive it (scorched earth policy).
- Each unit, squadron, battalion, and legion must be as self-reliant as possible to ensure they’re safe from any disruptions.
- Diplomatically ending any further conflict is the greatest net win for everyone, but it’s not always in the interests of a group that’s significantly more powerful.
For the sake of drama, history tends to portray battles as evenly matched when they were decisive and overwhelming victories.
3+ Groups
Often, when a match persists evenly among two groups, a third group may gain enough power to destroy either of the original two. If that happens to where both groups see that third group as a threat, the two groups will often stop their conflict and attack the third group. The teamwork from the joint effort often provokes a shared desire for peace after they defeat that third enemy, though it can create a new, smaller conflict among those two if resources are scarce.
Sometimes, the smaller group has more power than the larger group (e.g., governments give individuals more rights than a corporation). When this happens, the larger group will see themselves as evenly matched or outclassed, and they adopt the attitude and perspective of a more mobile and fast-acting small group.
Inner Conflicts
Each large group will typically act as one unified force until a trend reaches maturity to question the leadership’s decisions. At that point, the group becomes unstable. This is most clearly onset when people aren’t getting what they need or want, and the violence of war guarantees at least some of the people will oppose their leadership.
The best way to placate members is with a rewards system, typically with decorated medals. By using incentives that create a sense of meaning, people can keep fighting long after it makes any rational sense.
One of the easiest ways to influence the group toward a continued effort against the opponent is to generate a disaster or emergency. If there’s a crisis, people are more likely to act in overt fear and rally behind their leadership. This disaster can either be a relatively smaller legitimate problem enhanced into a larger one, or can be a complete fabrication.
Sometimes this group will express as protesting or rioting, with the people who incite the protest starting a trend of opposition. This taps into a base urge to rebel and directs it against the leadership.
However, since the protesters are leaders of an opposition force that may run the system soon, the current leadership can often backfire spectacularly in how they handle the unruly dissenters. The leaders who oppose the rioters are typically laggards of the rioting trend, and it’s not uncommon for them to be ejected or die from it.
Sometimes, a lower tier/subdivision of a group with a different culture can oppose the large group. In that case, it quickly becomes a small vs. large group conflict (“civil war”) as soon as the small group’s leadership make a public decision that the small group majority approves. Otherwise, the small group will quietly subvert the larger group and wait for an opportunity.
If there’s enough opposition, that protesting group can split off into its own group altogether. If the original group disagrees (which is common because it’s a tremendous loss of power) this will incite a large-scale civil war, and the former leader will almost always fight the split with everything they can employ.
On occasion, if there’s any chance of compassion or love, there will be a bitter departure without a conflict between the smaller and larger groups. After enough time, they’ll often ally later on future purposes.
However, the more frequent reality is that the large group will commission a “secret police” to track the dissidents (e.g., Gestapo, FBI). High-ranking and vocal opponents will disappear in their sleep, civil disobedience will somehow become violent, and attempts to overtake the larger system will fail.
The only way for any smaller group to fight the larger group comes through a unique type of group social risk:
- Get together to discuss what everyone understands.
- Give enough time together to cross-pollinate new ideas on how to solve the problems.
- Agree on a good decision, then take action on it.
Complicated
Modern warfare has tried to create some form of civility to war, especially as technology has made warfare absolutely horrific. Dozens of organizations have responded afterward to the gruesome war stories by banning certain forms of combat (e.g., chemical/biological warfare).
The reasoning that drives the rules around forbidden weapons is absurd. Beyond torture, killing a person is the worst thing you can do to them, and war is built around the threats and means of killing people. Some implements of war create devastating results that don’t kill people (e.g., landmines), but the purpose of others is to make killing more efficient (e.g., hollow-point bullets).
Further, the “rules of engagement” imply that only combatants should be harmed, and not civilians. While this may make sense in a war where the attacking and defending force are in relatively new territory, this is practically unenforceable when the defender is in their homeland and the culture of the defender’s family advocates for revenge. At that point, every civilian is a possible combatant.
There are other rules that often become war crimes if not followed, most of them coming from the four Geneva Conventions:
- If an aircraft has been disabled, the soldiers parachuting down are helpless and can’t be fired on.
- If a soldier wishes to surrender, they should wave something large and white (or sometimes black) and raise their hands. They’re forbidden to “fake surrender”. The other side may search and restrain them, and confiscate their items. The soldier only has to state their name, rank, and number, though it can sometimes include religious preference and other small details that wouldn’t run the risk of a court martial.
- Prisoners of war (POWs) can be taken to a camp and treated well. They can only be forced to work, but in non-military capacities that isn’t dangerous or unhealthy, and they must be allowed to perform medical/ministerial duties. Prisoners are allowed to escape or impersonate the opposing force’s officers, and executing them is a war crime.
- Torture and medical experiments that aren’t benefiting the health of the prisoners are also war crimes.
- Further, any soldier who performs a war crime can’t say they were “just following orders”.
- If there’s ever a cease-fire or an armistice (i.e., when the war is finishing), nobody is allowed to attack each other anymore.
This gets more complicated, but the idea is to create a fair and equal opportunity for combatants to fight for themselves. However, this entire idea is ridiculous when you consider that any combatant who has the means to kill their opponent will.
The simple reality of humanity is that they’re capable of unending evil that is most prevalent in war, and only way to stop a war crime is to stop the war criminal, which usually means killing them.
One of the benefits of a well-trained military is that it builds habits into its members that empower more success in other endeavors. For that reason, even when there are zero risks from opposing forces, a military can still serve a useful purpose in times of peace by drawing out people from the lower class into the middle and upper class.
Resolving
When two groups fight, there are too many unknown factors to know exactly what’s going on at any given moment (“fog of war”). However, leaders still must make decisions with their limited information and often try to increase the fog of war for their opponent whenever possible.
In practice, strategic decisions are essentially game theory, with the entire engagement built around at least two actors. Even seemingly harmless activities that simply change how things look can be highly effective in deterring purposes (e.g., “false flag operation”).
Large-scale conflicts resolve when everyone involved is sick of fighting. This can often take a long time, especially if more than two groups were involved.
The outcome of a large-scale conflict is never straightforward. Between the trauma on both sides that can provoke irrational behavior, the reasons why people fight, and the inter-group conflicts that often play out at the same time, it’s very hard to predict who will be left standing and in what position by the end.
If a leader who won’t end a conflict (mostly from a lack of compassion for their own group’s losses), the group must be utterly devastated until the leadership is stripped of their power. In those situations, their immediate lower-ranking leadership will depose that leader to save the group, and their “betrayal” will typically be exonerated by history.
On occasion, depending on the situation, the new opposition’s leadership will have enough skills influencing others that they’ll negotiate a compromise. That new compromise won’t necessarily please anyone, and will often create further bureaucracy (e.g., trade unions, national coalitions). This will sometimes happen without any violence or loss, but can create larger-scale conflicts later.
Wars can sometimes persist for a very long time, and it only comes through two possible reasons. Either the goals keep changing (which often comes through the leaders lying about what they really want) or the attacker severely underestimated the defender.
Sometimes, the allies drawn into the conflict will fight among each other longer than the original antagonists.
Whoever wins gets to claim all the resources. The members’ continued loyalty comes from how fair they feel their portion is.
After the event, the winners get to write the story, and it becomes part of their culture. In it, their group is always the protagonist, barring certain cases of leftism and Christianity.
Typically, the youth will hear the stories and take them at face value, and will often become the most powerful advocates for future conflicts about the subject. Some people, such as the Nazis and leftists, adapt those stories to re-educate young people and empower future conflicts with them.
Application
There is very little justice to any large-scale conflict. With the exception of preventing genocidal evil (e.g., Nazis), there are very few good reasons for war. However, every attacker will work to appear virtuous to gain support for their side. Even the lessons everyone learns could have just as easily (and less violently) been gained without the social revolution.
Legal battles operate under the authority of that government (e.g., intellectual property), but reach much farther than the two groups or their conflict. The laws their conflict establishes create philosophical boundaries for every pair of groups with a similar conflict in the future, and often across regional boundaries.
Large-scale conflicts still involve individuals with uniquely separate purposes, and people shift their loyalties as they gain understanding. It’s not uncommon for low-ranking soldiers who saw the horrors of combat to hate a sustained conflict more than their comparatively well-protected commanders. Only highly influential people can draw everyone together.
To guarantee a war, oppress a large group (e.g, a nation) for at least a decade, then give them economic power for a couple years. They will try to get revenge and seize power as soon as they interpret an opportunity (which often comes from other weak leaders who leave openings for it).
Great leaders are either always engaged in a conflict or have a plan for one. They’ll avoid it when possible, but aren’t afraid of it.
When making concessions, closely observe the attitude of the requesting party. If they don’t concede in kind for your group, prepare for a direct conflict.
Nuclear weapons will never be as popular as the threat of nuclear weaponry, simply because the winner inherits a crater that’s uninhabitable for a long time.
A third attacker in a large conflict may be advantageous by either side, but they can’t be trusted. They may attack either group at any time or change sides.
Often, the only grace a large group will give is to maintain image. Don’t ever expect virtue from a conqueror.
The losing side isn’t always innocent or a victim. Often, they’re only distorting their image to gain favor from you.
The losing side of a battle will have the same story as the winning side. But, they’ll have completely opposite values and the roles reversed. The truth is somewhere between both of them, but their traditional beliefs will diverge wildly from the same event.
Controlling and directing a riot is very difficult. While some people, especially the Left, are somewhat skilled at it, an anti-leadership movement will eventually take out its own leaders unless someone can skillfully influence the anger and fear toward a moral-looking cause.
Any issues with war crimes is a misplaced morality. War itself is horrible, and to make rules for warfare without outright killing everyone who tries to kill anyone is technically a double standard.