War has more benefit than harm

First and foremost, I'd like to define the parameters of this debate. What we'll be discussing, at least chiefly, is the incidence of actual declarations of war. These will mostly be formal, and will chiefly include conflicts initiated by governmental bodies. As such, wars include those conflicts that involve substantial troop movements on both sides of a given conflict. We can discuss small-scale troop movements, though those will not be the focus of this debate. Second, I think it's important to state what the burdens are in this debate. Since the topic is "War has more benefit than harm," we are discussing both wars going forward and past wars within this context. Both of us should endeavor to use examples in support of our side in this debate, i. e. it is my burden to present evidence that war has been harmful, and his to present evidence that war has been beneficial. We will assess this not strictly based on preponderance of evidence, but also based on its quality. A larger benefit can counter many smaller harms, and visa versa. Also, a more likely harm can counter many less likely benefits. We can weigh these within the debate, but it is mainly up to voters to assess these arguments. I would say that the burden of proof is chiefly on Pro. As war is generally viewed as harmful by the wider population (as I will explain throughout this post), it is up to Pro to dissuade voters of that view. He effectively has the highest mountain to climb in this debate, and therefore a failure on his part to turn opinion for war should presume a Con ballot. With that, I'm going to launch into my arguments. 1) Loss of life This is probably the biggest concern with regards to war, and with good reason. We can reasonably quantify resources lost or gained. These are easily amenable to utilizing numbers because we have assigned them value. The value of human life (or, for that matter, of any life) is more difficult to assess because it does not come with a set cost. And this is with good reason. The prospect of merely quantifying life lost is one that dehumanizes people, relegating them to the state of being a statistic without a name, family, friends, history, or any characteristics. This is what war does " it homogenizes people, turning them into faceless, soulless numbers signifying death, displacement, famine, injury, and disease, and this is fundamentally its biggest harm. Loss of life persists in any world, but only in one in which war remains a tremendous concern to societies across the planet does this reach its apex. The number of lives ended as a result of wars across history remains somewhat uncertain, and estimates range. However, given reasonable estimates and just taking into account the top 10 deadly wars and conflicts of which we are aware, some 290 million lives have been lost. [1] And each of those lives is now relegated to a statistic, many forgotten and buried in unmarked graves. The effect of their loss is felt specifically by their families and friends who suffer the deep emotional pains, while more broadly, the effect of their loss is impossible to determine. We can say that they would have likely contributed demonstrably to their various economies, and that those attached to them would have also contributed further than actually occurred. As I suggested, however, the loss of life isn't determined solely by those killed in military actions. During the expansion of the Mongol Empire, Genghis Khan and his descendants burned cities to the ground, returned vast tracts of land and all that sat upon it to grass fields, and forced countless peoples out of their homes. They caused the collapse of societies, incited terror that was felt deeply by nations ahead of them and, most importantly, spread the Black Plague to China and Europe, indirectly resulting in the deaths of countless millions. [2, 3] This is just one example of extensive harms that resulted from warfare and wouldn't have occurred to nearly the same extent if not for its presence. The First World War made the spread of the 1918 pandemic of influenza all the simpler and more deadly. [4] Wars are a tremendous part of the reason for malaria's worldwide spread and continued persistence. [5] That's not to mention that wars don't just increase the presence of disease, but rather have been known to cause such disturbances in the availability of food, housing, and medical services as to make the disease burden more strongly felt. This is the case in El Salvador, where, during their civil war in the 80's and 90's, managed to dramatically increase the burden of tuberculosis on the general population. [6] 2) General costs These are more easily quantifiable, though they will normally be viewed as costs of a given war for the country at large rather than for its citizens directly, and often misses the individual costs. However, we can say something, at least, just looking at these numbers. The costs of WWI for the U. S. alone, adjusted for inflation, were $334 billion. WWII comes in at a whopping $4.1 trillion, and these are for wars we entered late. Vietnam cost us $738 billion, Iraq $784 billion (at least through 2010). [7] Each of these came at the price of essential services at home, which led to people wallowing in poverty and hunger, often with limited access to education, medical services and housing. And these are for the country that fielded few attacks on their own soil. Whole cities were leveled in the European conflict during WWII. London was reduced to rubble, and 250,000 were left homeless by the end of 1940 alone. [8] Discounting the tremendous human cost, these people suddenly became liabilities for the general economy, requiring tremendous amounts of housing, food and water in order to stay alive. We could talk about all of the cities destroyed in Russia, where tens of millions died during Hitler's invasion, or we could talk about the Holocaust and the impact of those lost lives (on top of other genocides in Rwanda and Sudan, and their efforts to erase whole groups of people and what that means, though I'll likely be focusing on that in the next round), or the long-term effects of irradiated lands as a result of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but all of these things directly link to lost life in terms of lost labor and therefore lost economic potential. 3) Cycle of violence This is normally discussed in the context of domestic abuse, but it applies here as well. The goal during war is normally to seek benefits for the attacking country, otherwise the costs of war simply outweigh the benefits. And the country being attacked is most certainly experiencing high levels of distress and a desire to return the harms visited upon them, at least in the vast majority of instances. This means that war is an endless cycle. This distress and desire for revenge magnifies all of the harms I've discussed here by making the process of going to war one that endlessly visits upon the general population of the world. As such, while Pro may be able to prove that there are benefits to certain wars, the reality that they engender more wars means that he has to prove that a very significant majority of warfare is beneficial, otherwise the harms of these additional wars would simply outweigh the individual benefits. With that, I'll hand the debate back to Pro to provide his case. 1, . http://necrometrics.com... 2. . https://suite.io... 3. . http://en.wikipedia.org... 4. . http://virus.stanford.edu... 5. . http://wwwnc.cdc.gov... 6. . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... 7. . http://www.fas.org... 8. . http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk...