Wars and War Games

Albert Einstein once said about wars:

“To my mind to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.”

Few would go that far. In war, it is kill or be killed. If that’s not an existential choice, what is? Besides, some wars are truly dharma yudh’s.

The loss of life apart, wars usually have a huge economic cost, for both the victor and the loser. And as former US President James Madison wrote in “Political Observations”, war is the enemy “most to be dreaded” when it comes to civil liberties:

“In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied…(all that inevitably leads to) opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both.”

And so Madison concludes:

“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Then there’s the issue that wars create the “merchants of death”, what Jawaharlal Nehru described thus:

“What a terrible thing is this armament industry which lives by the death of others, and which does not hesitate to encourage and bring about the horrors of war so that it may profit from it!”

To that, I guess this line by the main character in the Nicholas Cage starrer, Lord of War, would capture the weapons industry’s response:

“You call me evil, but unfortunately for you, I'm a necessary evil.”

Remember those shoot-them-all-up video games we grew up with? With the advent of the Internet, such games moved from the simple player-v/s-player option to become massively multiplayer. Games like Age of Empires even required strategic choices on what to spend resources on: defense, offense or more advanced technologies; trading or outright conquest.

With these trends, you wouldn’t be surprised that there are even smartphone games like War Agent that take it to the next level of reality: instead of being a side in the war, you are the weapons seller…to both sides. The aim is not get either side to win; rather, like real life, the aim is to ensure both sides keep buying from you to keep the balance; to ensure that neither side gets so powerful that the other side loses thereby ending your business opportunity. As you might have guessed, the game even involves lobbying both sides to ensure decision makers are war-mongers, and you even fund the media to get positive coverage!

Sound very cynical? Then again, the game is just reflecting reality. Don’t shoot the messenger (pun intended).