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A cold war game stretching from 1948 - 2000 (this would allow for conversion of save games from HOI4) could be interesting. It'd have to focus a lot more on espionage and diplomacy, maybe some simulation of internal politics (so different parties taking power actually has an effect, and one's actions as leader has consequences) rather than map painting. I imagine this would take a long time to create, but if done right it would make for a very engrossing game which I believe could be quite popular.
Also RIP EVW ;_;
Also RIP EVW ;_;
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I think a lot of people would disagree with you. The former Yugoslavia (including Slovenian conflict, the Croatian war, the Bosnian War, the Kosovar intervention by NATO, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting), Armenia and Azerbaijan, Iraq (Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom and ISIS), Turkey, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, the Sudan, Georgia, the Ukraine, the Philippines, Nigeria, Thailand, Afghanistan, Pakistan vs India and Pakistan as part of Afghanistan,Yemen, Somalia, Ethiopia, Columbia, Mexico... and that is just what has happened thus far off the top of my head. It has been a peaceful time for most of Europe, the United States (at least her civilians... the US Armed Forces have been extremely busy) and Northeast Asia... but historically those areas have strong states, and therefore have fewer small wars. When they fight it is usually in large, systemic, multistate conflicts... those have always been rare, precisely because they are so expensive in both treasure and lives.
However, the number of conventional hotspots for starting conflict between strong states has multiplied in the last few years. The US and it's Eastern European allies are squaring off against the Russians in a second contest, this one hundreds of miles to the east of the last one, but with the Russians in a far worse position and pressed for time, therefore more inclined to take risks. The Japanese are rearming, and squaring off again against the Chinese again. The Vietnamese, the Philippines and Taiwan also squaring off against China in the South China Sea. Germany is unwillingly dominating Europe as part of the Eurozone crisis as it dictates terms to the Greeks despite French and Italian objections... and much of Europe is starting to consider pushing back. Nobody is quite ready to go to war... but that isn't always necessary for war to occur.
The biggest problem with doing a modern game is how to accurately model non-state actors and hybrid conflicts. That is a hard one, especially since much of the conflict is due to weak states disintegrating and something new taking its place (as in most of what I listed above is exactly that). The fact that most people in the first world have a hard time getting their heads around what is happening in the third world today and why doesn't help.
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well i wouldn't say the asian countries are squaring off against china. china is picking fights and everyone around it happens to be the defenders as it were.
I tend to view the why's, at least the stated ones, as somewhat unimportant, simply because I view intentions as less relevant than results. Why states in Southeast Asia are pushing back against China (or why they think they are) is less relevant than the fact that they are. At a different time in history, or under different circumstances now (for example, without US support and attention), they would become tributary states... that many of them aren't is important, but also creating a new potential crisis, especially as China confronts increasing domestic problems both economically and politically.
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People are welcome to disagree with me, but they would be wrong.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/1491518243
Even since the end of the Cold War, the number and intensity of violent conflicts has been in steady decline.
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That simply isn't true. The nature of conflict has changed, yes, but if anything conflict is more common today than it was during the Cold War, albeit somewhat less organized. A number of conflicts were prevented by the Soviet-American balance and the fact that every nation in the world fell into the state system (so the internal tensions in countries like Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia etc were kept locked down).
To quote from the introduction: "Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate in medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then were suddenly abolished."
I don't think that the author and I would disagree as to the state of the past, but I think he and I would differ sharply in terms of how we view and what we have experienced in the present. The fact of the matter is that throughout much of the world, tribal warfare is becoming increasingly common, moreso than it was during the Cold War as the nation state breaks down in many overpopulated developing nations... and the author is correct in asserting that tribal warfare chews through people at a much higher rate than conventional warfare. These deaths and conflicts are frequently undocumented, but that doesn't make them any less real. And as institutions continue to break down in overpopulated countries, this is not a trend I see reversing itself. Conventional militaries will do less and less killing as the technologies of precision warfare spread. However militias and tribes are filling the void as conventional militaries shrink in size in order to enable greater effectiveness at fighting other armies.
I would like to note that in 1910, the people of Europe believed themselves to live in an extremely peaceful age as well, to the extent that many thought they were outgrowing war (after all, the last major systemic conflict that had occurred was nearly a century in the past... the writing of the time period is an interesting mix of people who thought war unthinkable, and those who welcomed it). They were no more correct in asserting that than people are today. Tribal warfare never really stopped during that time, and much of the world was a very violent place. However to the people living in Europe and the United States, that violence was of too low a level and too far away to be visible, therefore it didn't exist. Ask officers in the various colonial armies scattered throughout the globe how peaceful the world was, as opposed to the European middle and upper classes... you would get a very different story.
To quote from the introduction: "Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate in medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then were suddenly abolished."
I don't think that the author and I would disagree as to the state of the past, but I think he and I would differ sharply in terms of how we view and what we have experienced in the present. The fact of the matter is that throughout much of the world, tribal warfare is becoming increasingly common, moreso than it was during the Cold War as the nation state breaks down in many overpopulated developing nations... and the author is correct in asserting that tribal warfare chews through people at a much higher rate than conventional warfare. These deaths and conflicts are frequently undocumented, but that doesn't make them any less real. And as institutions continue to break down in overpopulated countries, this is not a trend I see reversing itself. Conventional militaries will do less and less killing as the technologies of precision warfare spread. However militias and tribes are filling the void as conventional militaries shrink in size in order to enable greater effectiveness at fighting other armies.
I would like to note that in 1910, the people of Europe believed themselves to live in an extremely peaceful age as well, to the extent that many thought they were outgrowing war (after all, the last major systemic conflict that had occurred was nearly a century in the past... the writing of the time period is an interesting mix of people who thought war unthinkable, and those who welcomed it). They were no more correct in asserting that than people are today. Tribal warfare never really stopped during that time, and much of the world was a very violent place. However to the people living in Europe and the United States, that violence was of too low a level and too far away to be visible, therefore it didn't exist. Ask officers in the various colonial armies scattered throughout the globe how peaceful the world was, as opposed to the European middle and upper classes... you would get a very different story.
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The Great Illusion is a good example of this mindset. Not a bad theory put forth by the author. Just not true, sadly.
It would have to focus more on international politics, diplomacy, espionage and similar. Cold War era+ stuff.
The author actually demonstrates that tribal warfare has been steadily declining. As for 1910, as Pinker shows, they really did live in an extremely peaceful age when compared to all human history before it. Did you know that WWI killed fewer people than the Thirty Years War? And the world had far more people living in it during WWI, so your chances of dying as a result of human conflict were actually far lower in 1916 than they were at almost any point in the middle ages.
When discussing the history of violence, it's important to consider the rising population of Earth and to count homicides by X per 100,000 people per year. If you need convincing about this, ask yourself where you would rather live: a town of 10,000 people where 10 people are murdered every year, or a city of 1,000,000 where 200 people are murdered every year?
WWII killed about 2% of the world's population. A staggering number... until you remember that the Mongol Conquests killed about 17%. Caesar's conquest of Gaul killed 1%.
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Imagine if some event killed 10 percent of the worlds population today. The media could not handle it.
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So, two points. First, the 30 years war lasted... 30 years (taking the traditionally considered start point of the defenestration of Prague through to the Peace of Westphalia) whereas the First World War lasted slightly more than four. Second, in calculations that put the 30 years war as causing more deaths in absolute terms than WWI also includes civilian casualties for the 30 years war without doing so for WWI. If you do the same for WWI the casualties increase by one, or several, orders of magnitude (taking into account premature deaths due to starvation, the Spanish Flu and the effect that returning armies and weakness due to malnutrition had on its spread, etc). That number is not easily quantifiable whereas military deaths for modern conflict are, which is why they aren't brought up. With the 30 Years War, you aren't getting any closer than a vague ballpark (within a million or two) anyways, so why not include civilian deaths from things other than combat?
However, all of this is kind of beside the point. I don't think anyone disputes that life has improved dramatically by every metric since the pre-industrial era. Have things continued to improve over the last 20 years, which was the original point of the discussion (the original quote I took issue with; "Since the end of the Cold War, the world has never been safer or more boring. Great news for humanity. Awful news for grand strategy game designers")? I would answer with a resounding no! Life has improved and become less violent in certain areas (China is no longer in chaos like it was during the Cultural Revolution for example, and East Africa south of the Horn is a surprising success story), others however gotten dramatically worse in others as the nation state breaks down (you see this throughout the Middle East, and West Africa is worse than ever). Meanwhile much of the world remains largely the same. Life is still great and nonviolent for people in Europe, the US and Japan... but that has been the case for a while now. In the grand scheme of things, nothing has changed.
One final thing I would like to point out is a common difficulty when evaluating what reality is in the modern era. Historians of prior eras tend to be used to ball parking a lot of different things in the absence of credible information. In eras past, those gaps are enormous, so historians generally have no qualms about making educated guesses about a great deal (like the black death killing between one and two thirds(!) of Europe's population). Today, far more precise numbers and statistics are generated for a large number of things, so people are generally unwilling to fill in the gaps, or even acknowledge that they exist. They have a nice shiny number, encompassed by official reports of military and civilian deaths for "conflict area X," and that is good enough for them. The problem is that for many situations that number is completely understating the actual number of people who died, because so many died unnoticed while the authorities were disintegrating or under attack themselves. This is especially true for conflict today.
sucks that chart doesn't go past 2009. it'll be intresting to see how it looks once syria and ISIS are accounted for.
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Estimates for the death toll of the Syrian Civil War vary from 140,000 to 330,000. I'm going to go with 220,000, since it's near the middle and it's what the UN estimated in January 2015.
220,000/(7,300,000,000/100,000) = 3.01
By January 2015, the war had been going for nearly four years (three years and ten months to be precise), so 3.01/4 = 0.75 deaths per 100,000 per year, or a little more than one seventh of the way up to the dotted line for 5 on the above graph.
I couldn't find much hard data for the spillover into Iraq, but I doubt it's significant, since ISIL seized most of their Iraqi territory with very little fighting.
And the killing afterward as ISIS sorts out its territory?
Let me put it this way. During my times in Iraq, nobody knew how many people died of violence in our Battalion AO. Nobody. Not my battalion. Not the US Army at large. Certainly not the Iraqi Army. We knew how many US soldiers died exactly. We knew roughly how many Iraqi soldiers died. We also knew roughly how many Iraqi Police died. We knew how many Iraqi insurgents died and were detained by US soldiers (although we had a far less clear picture of things on the IA side of things). The civilian/paramilitary death count? Nobody had a clue. Insurgent forces, militias, factions within the Iraqi Security Forces, and just plain neighbors who liked to kill each other because one set was Sunni and the other was Shia. All of that happened under the radar. Unreported, and unknown for the most part. We do know there was a "sorting out period" where formerly mixed areas separated in a form of low level ethnic cleansing. We saw that peripherally, but nobody knew, or had anything resembling a clear picture of numbers.
Almost every conflict I listed in my opening post operated with similar rules, and under similar circumstances. A conventional element? Sure. But that comprises a small minority of the fatalities. These types of conflicts have multiplied since the Cold War. Which is why I have zero faith in numbers put forth using reported deaths and local government estimates. Which is really the problem with so many studies I've seen. They focus on reported deaths... with is a much better indicator of state sanctioned violence than it is the kind of sectarian warfare that has become increasingly common as states break down. Saying "between 140,000 and 330,000 died" is simply a fancy way of saying "we have no clue." Going to the median really doesn't get you anywhere closer to the truth... it's just another guess, based off of several other guesses.
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We're better at estimating deaths than you think. Between 140,000 and 330,000 doesn't mean "we have no clue". I would call "between 140,000 and 330,000" a very good clue. It means that it definitely wasn't 80,000 or 500,000.
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Does it? How many towns have been decimated by militias or security forces (not that there is much of a difference in Syria anymore) without anything other than rumor to acknowledge that it happened? When a population goes from 10,000 to 3,000 who is to say what happened to those people, how many became refugee's versus how many died? And how do we even know what the population centers have left in them at this point? Those numbers are shots in the dark, made by people who have to put some number on casualties because "I don't know" isn't an acceptable answer for whomever they work for. Don't get me wrong, they have a methodology that they sell, and it is probably, although not necessarily, more accurate than a random dart throw would be... but it is just a guess. And finding the median between two guesses won't put you any closer to the truth.
The fog of war increases exponentially the more non-state actors are involved in conflicts... and in Syria there isn't anything other than non-state actors involved directly (with Bashir al-Assad being the strongest single warlord in the country). We live in a country with a strong central government where we do a fairly reliable census every ten years. The big picture of what is going on is formed from a fairly strong foundation. When the little pictures are almost non-existent and highly unreliable, it is difficult for me to believe that the big picture formed from them has much bearing on reality.
I remember seeing a Doonesbury cartoon set in the Vietnam War. In it, the CO is making his report. He asks the soldier standing nearby what the date is. "The 17th" replies the soldier. "17 enemy dead sir" reports the CO. And so the picture is formed for higher. The picture that is wanted. Many forms of "truth shaping" happen in the US military today, and other army's are even worse. At the end of the day, what is "reality" is shaped by what is desired by higher headquarters.
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