Lately I was watching the current stream of war-related news and the Syrian migrant crisis, and I thought of what I would say on the blog about actual, continuous, and devastating warfare in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East and the stupidity of the literally inexplicable background of who is fighting whom in all those conflicts and what cause would justify the aftermaths in the form of devastated cities and long refugee corridors... Or even what words should I use to describe the foolishness of the new cold war between nuclear-powered "super countries" and what that will mean for our children and theirs in the future... Then I realized that reacting to meaningless affairs and worldwide political absurdity in a world so divided by racial, structural, governmental, and religious diversity is also meaningless. I also realized that I said enough in the past. There is nothing new to be added or said. There will always be people who will think that a rifle is not a rifle if it never fires a bullet.
And to use a rifle, you need war, right?
I have to admit that I have mixed feelings when it comes to military, soldiers, wars, battles, tactics, military gadgets, and stuff. On the 'interesting' side of the medal, warfare, if placed in history, good stories or movies are simply extraordinary tales, and I love them. Perhaps, in a way, it was also based on my experience as a soldier: I served the army more than two decades ago within the mandatory military service, and I was situated in the surface-to-surface missile unit and trained for operating small rockets designed for targeting tanks and other heavy machinery. I couldn't say I enjoyed all the time spent in the service, but I wouldn't be telling the truth if I'd say that it wasn't interesting and educational, at least from the technical point of view.
Speaking of history and tales, this summer, I mentioned one of the most famous last stands in the history of wars in the post "Fishermen and Pirates of Evia", when King Leonidas of Sparta confronted a large army of the Persian Empire and stood to the very end guarding a narrow pass in the battle of Thermopylae almost 2500 years ago. Anyhow, here, in Serbia, in our own history, we also have one of those suicide missions, conveniently called "last stands" by military vocabulary, and it happened only a couple of kilometers on the north from our house on the nearby hill called Čegar. Just like Leonidas, Serbian general Stevan Sindjelić, during the First Serbian Uprising against the Ottoman Empire in the year 1809, confronted a huge Ottoman offensive after the Serbian army failed to capture the main Turkish fortress in the city. Outnumbered by 1 to 10 Serbian trenches only managed to reject several attacks, and after almost all day long of fighting, the battle turned out to be one of the best-known last stands in the long history of Ottoman occupation of Serbian lands. Ultimately, when battle turned to be hand-to-hand combat in the trench, Stevan fired his flintlock pistol into a pile of gunpowder kegs in the moment when ottoman soldiers swarmed the trench from all sides and headed for him personally. The explosion was tremendous, and the fall of Stevan's trench created time for other Serbian troops in the remaining 5 trenches to retreat on time, and, in the aftermath, Turks took all the Serbian soldiers' heads off and used the skulls to build a tower along the road to Constantinople as a warning to anyone rising against the Ottoman Empire.
Yesterday, we decided to visit the hill where it all happened and took some photos with two remaining cannons from the battle and from the monumental tower standing in the middle of the field. It was one of a kind experience that leaves a distressed feeling, especially after the glimpse from the top of the narrow tower toward the planes and the city.
But there is another side of my mixed feelings regarding this topic. Simply put, if you place the warfare outside the history or fiction and experience it live, for me, all the magic from movies and books is evaporating into thin air almost immediately. While I wasn't participating in any warfare in the army, I have witnessed real air strikes performed by NATO aircraft, dropping cluster bombs just hundred's of meters away from my house. I saw them explode*. I saw real damage in neighboring houses and streets and saw people injured from the impacts. Real people. Not soldiers. Collateral victims. Civilians. It wasn't fun. It seems that warfare two centuries before was more dignified, to say the least. The battles before were "organized" outside settlements, and most of them took place in the fields where no civilian casualties could be possible. Today, if you look at the aftermath of any wars happening everywhere on the globe, the first thing you will notice are devastated cities, villages, houses, schools, hospitals, even... Murdered innocent people and children. Ruins in all directions. It is easy today to pull the trigger. From the distance. There are no real heroes or knights today like before.
Modern times and technological advances perhaps ruined the very essence of war, but deeply in it's core, the war was, is, and will always stay our darkest invention. Yes, it looks amazing with special effects in movies and written in our history books full of heroes and heroic events, but in a nutshell, it represents the worst genes we kept from our animal ancestors, evolutionary speaking.
And the armies... They are a big part of it. Following words, said a couple of years before the battle of Čegar, on a different continent, are still fresh and valid, just like if they were said yesterday. Almost certainly, the famous James Madison's quote will stay accurate for many more centuries. After all, as a species, humans are not really capable of learning from their own mistakes:
I am sure proving his point is as easy as glimpsing the yearly statistics for the Global Firepower, aka GFP. Following numbers I acquired from "Business Insider" and "The Center for Arms Control & Non-Proliferation". They are collected for the latest year, and I summarized the data for only the top 5 armies in the world: US, Russia, China, India, and the UK (and you can freely double these numbers for accounts of all other countries).
Anyway, more or less, give or take, believe it or not, in the nutshell, GFP numbers are:
And don't forget to add uncountable, and I really mean devastating, a large number of missiles and rockets, all kinds of ballistics, regular weapons, drones, rifles, pistols, cold weapons, military-based factories, scientific research facilities, spy satellites and military space programs, state-of-the-art uniforms, etc. Indeed, we don't have a name for that big number in mathematics. Even the number of zeros in that count would be probably longer than the letters in this very sentence.
Now, only by comparing these numbers with James Madison's words, it seems that after 200+ years, perhaps armies are not children of war anymore. In the dawn of the third millennium, it seems now that they are perfectly capable of creating wars just to justify their own existence. If only war could stay in history and fairy tales... But we all know that's not going to happen. With all that weaponry in existence, there will always be people who will think that a rifle is not a rifle if it never fires a bullet.
Original post date: November 2014, Update: November 2015
Image ref:
**http://www.businessinsider.com/11-most-powerful-militaries-in-the-world-2014-4
Refs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Čegar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_Tower
http://armscontrolcenter.org/
http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons
http://armscontrolcenter.org/issues/nuclearweapons/articles/fact_sheet_2014
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Madison
http://www.businessinsider.com/35-most-powerful-militaries-in-the-world-2014-7
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_bombing_of_Niš
And to use a rifle, you need war, right?
I have to admit that I have mixed feelings when it comes to military, soldiers, wars, battles, tactics, military gadgets, and stuff. On the 'interesting' side of the medal, warfare, if placed in history, good stories or movies are simply extraordinary tales, and I love them. Perhaps, in a way, it was also based on my experience as a soldier: I served the army more than two decades ago within the mandatory military service, and I was situated in the surface-to-surface missile unit and trained for operating small rockets designed for targeting tanks and other heavy machinery. I couldn't say I enjoyed all the time spent in the service, but I wouldn't be telling the truth if I'd say that it wasn't interesting and educational, at least from the technical point of view.
The cannon from the Hill of Čegar
Speaking of history and tales, this summer, I mentioned one of the most famous last stands in the history of wars in the post "Fishermen and Pirates of Evia", when King Leonidas of Sparta confronted a large army of the Persian Empire and stood to the very end guarding a narrow pass in the battle of Thermopylae almost 2500 years ago. Anyhow, here, in Serbia, in our own history, we also have one of those suicide missions, conveniently called "last stands" by military vocabulary, and it happened only a couple of kilometers on the north from our house on the nearby hill called Čegar. Just like Leonidas, Serbian general Stevan Sindjelić, during the First Serbian Uprising against the Ottoman Empire in the year 1809, confronted a huge Ottoman offensive after the Serbian army failed to capture the main Turkish fortress in the city. Outnumbered by 1 to 10 Serbian trenches only managed to reject several attacks, and after almost all day long of fighting, the battle turned out to be one of the best-known last stands in the long history of Ottoman occupation of Serbian lands. Ultimately, when battle turned to be hand-to-hand combat in the trench, Stevan fired his flintlock pistol into a pile of gunpowder kegs in the moment when ottoman soldiers swarmed the trench from all sides and headed for him personally. The explosion was tremendous, and the fall of Stevan's trench created time for other Serbian troops in the remaining 5 trenches to retreat on time, and, in the aftermath, Turks took all the Serbian soldiers' heads off and used the skulls to build a tower along the road to Constantinople as a warning to anyone rising against the Ottoman Empire.
Yesterday, we decided to visit the hill where it all happened and took some photos with two remaining cannons from the battle and from the monumental tower standing in the middle of the field. It was one of a kind experience that leaves a distressed feeling, especially after the glimpse from the top of the narrow tower toward the planes and the city.
Stevan Sindjelić & Remains of the Skull Tower in Niš
But there is another side of my mixed feelings regarding this topic. Simply put, if you place the warfare outside the history or fiction and experience it live, for me, all the magic from movies and books is evaporating into thin air almost immediately. While I wasn't participating in any warfare in the army, I have witnessed real air strikes performed by NATO aircraft, dropping cluster bombs just hundred's of meters away from my house. I saw them explode*. I saw real damage in neighboring houses and streets and saw people injured from the impacts. Real people. Not soldiers. Collateral victims. Civilians. It wasn't fun. It seems that warfare two centuries before was more dignified, to say the least. The battles before were "organized" outside settlements, and most of them took place in the fields where no civilian casualties could be possible. Today, if you look at the aftermath of any wars happening everywhere on the globe, the first thing you will notice are devastated cities, villages, houses, schools, hospitals, even... Murdered innocent people and children. Ruins in all directions. It is easy today to pull the trigger. From the distance. There are no real heroes or knights today like before.
Modern times and technological advances perhaps ruined the very essence of war, but deeply in it's core, the war was, is, and will always stay our darkest invention. Yes, it looks amazing with special effects in movies and written in our history books full of heroes and heroic events, but in a nutshell, it represents the worst genes we kept from our animal ancestors, evolutionary speaking.
View from Čegar's monumental tower with Viktor's plastic AK-47 toy gun
And the armies... They are a big part of it. Following words, said a couple of years before the battle of Čegar, on a different continent, are still fresh and valid, just like if they were said yesterday. Almost certainly, the famous James Madison's quote will stay accurate for many more centuries. After all, as a species, humans are not really capable of learning from their own mistakes:
"Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." - James Madison, Political Observations, 1795
I am sure proving his point is as easy as glimpsing the yearly statistics for the Global Firepower, aka GFP. Following numbers I acquired from "Business Insider" and "The Center for Arms Control & Non-Proliferation". They are collected for the latest year, and I summarized the data for only the top 5 armies in the world: US, Russia, China, India, and the UK (and you can freely double these numbers for accounts of all other countries).
Anyway, more or less, give or take, believe it or not, in the nutshell, GFP numbers are:
6.000.000+ soldiers (human beings, men in the uniform)
35.000+ tanks (the iron amfibia combat vehicles with heavy guns on the top)
22.000+ aircraft (fighters, bombers, logistic planes, all kinds of military flying machines)
16.000+ nuclear warheads (only couple of them needed to cease all life on earth)
1000+ warships (cruisers, destroyers, frigates, corvettes, etc.)
15+ aircraft carriers (monster nuclear-powered ships)
230+ combat submarines (with large nuclear engines under the sea)
900.000.000.000+ dollars spent for military budgets (per year)
35.000+ tanks (the iron amfibia combat vehicles with heavy guns on the top)
22.000+ aircraft (fighters, bombers, logistic planes, all kinds of military flying machines)
16.000+ nuclear warheads (only couple of them needed to cease all life on earth)
1000+ warships (cruisers, destroyers, frigates, corvettes, etc.)
15+ aircraft carriers (monster nuclear-powered ships)
230+ combat submarines (with large nuclear engines under the sea)
900.000.000.000+ dollars spent for military budgets (per year)
And don't forget to add uncountable, and I really mean devastating, a large number of missiles and rockets, all kinds of ballistics, regular weapons, drones, rifles, pistols, cold weapons, military-based factories, scientific research facilities, spy satellites and military space programs, state-of-the-art uniforms, etc. Indeed, we don't have a name for that big number in mathematics. Even the number of zeros in that count would be probably longer than the letters in this very sentence.
The 11 Most Powerful Militaries In The World**
Now, only by comparing these numbers with James Madison's words, it seems that after 200+ years, perhaps armies are not children of war anymore. In the dawn of the third millennium, it seems now that they are perfectly capable of creating wars just to justify their own existence. If only war could stay in history and fairy tales... But we all know that's not going to happen. With all that weaponry in existence, there will always be people who will think that a rifle is not a rifle if it never fires a bullet.
Original post date: November 2014, Update: November 2015
Image ref:
**http://www.businessinsider.com/11-most-powerful-militaries-in-the-world-2014-4
Refs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Čegar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_Tower
http://armscontrolcenter.org/
http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons
http://armscontrolcenter.org/issues/nuclearweapons/articles/fact_sheet_2014
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Madison
http://www.businessinsider.com/35-most-powerful-militaries-in-the-world-2014-7
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_bombing_of_Niš