The meaning of this series Fighting Future War is dual:

1. Fighting Against War for the Future

— how war can be ended in the future for the sake of the future, but also, if wars must be fought in the meantime,

2. Fighting in Future Wars

— how wars might be fought according to less detrimental methods and motivations, and how evolution in that direction might also contribute to ending war.

How will war be fought in the future? Will revolutionary, advanced technologies or still more profound influences define its character? What will be the end effects of future war, and for what ends?

In order to fight against future war, we must understand the fighting of future war. This requires contemplating the real history of warfare in order to predict its possible futures. Factoring the interaction of current or hitherto unapplied invention and ingenuity must figure in our analysis. But also necessary is an appreciation for how war relates to seemingly tangential social and cultural ideas, not only as these ideas have been influential, but as they might be in the future. The reasons people fight, and how they fight, are closely linked in the domain of ideas — beliefs and assumptions.

"The written history of the world is largely a history of warfare, because the states within which we live came into existence largely through conquest, civil strife or struggles for independence. The great statesmen of history, moreover, have generally been men of violence for, if not warriors themselves, though many were, they understood the use of violence and did not shrink to use it for their ends."

— John Keegan, A History of Warfare

An understanding of war and the pursuit of military studies is not encouraged for those outside of the centralized military establishment and its supporters within political, media, and academic institutions, for predictable reasons. War has become the business of the state, of politicians, of university historians and political scientists, and a business of some magnitude for select industries. For the opponents of war, war itself has chiefly been an object of shallow excoriation but not penetrating examination, as though effectively engaging the subject would imply approval. And though depictions of war may be popularly celebrated in media and find cultural expression, by most people war is studied little and understood less.

But the price for a failure to understand every aspect of war as it has actually happened, to learn from plain history, and to predict the possible futures of war must be considered catastrophic. If those in the war establishment do not in fact hold the keys to understanding war fully and objectively without bias (or rather with the subjective 'bias' of a life-advancing perspective), nor even have the motivation to scrutinize warfare deeply (and why would they?), then it becomes patently unlikely that war will chance to be improved in terms of the interests of life exclusively from within the war establishment, and even more unlikely that war should ever be rendered obsolete. The bias inherent is very much against the use (or dissolution) of warfare for beneficial, life-interested ends, and in favor of the use of life for the ends of war; thus are shortsighted interests served by war, to the disservice of life itself.

Thus, it becomes incumbent upon the outsiders to that war-system and those war-interests to take up the gauntlet, to become educated concerning warfare in the past, present, and future according to a new criterion. It falls to everyone with an interest in living and an interest in survival — not merely to those who study war because warfare appeals to them on some level, nor to opponents of war who believe their hatred for fearsome war means they need not study it, but to everyone who is born on earth and wishes to live there — to become familiar with war at least from afar, to acquire some useful knowledge of warfare, to face war in all its many facets frankly and honestly without illusion or romanticism, and thereby to decentralize the effective cartel of knowledge in the hands of those who employ war for political, factional, and manipulative goals. There can be no reward for ignorance and apathy, only terrible penalties.

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> next, Part Two: The Effects of War