TOS: A Taste of Armageddon

[Madner Kami]

The purpose of war? There is no single purpose. There are as many possible purposes as those engaging in warfare can have in mind.

This is the actual point that is missing from the deliberations on this situation. The assessment that

The goal of a military at war is to break the enemy's ability to make war on your nation, not to merely kill people*.

is just plain wrong. That is how you fight a war, but that isn't (normally) why you go to war.

[clearspira]

Since the city of Jericho was destroyed long before the Israelites got there, the question is one of literature and myth.

True - but its hardly something that has never happened elsewhere.

[Riedquat]

Since the city of Jericho was destroyed long before the Israelites got there, the question is one of literature and myth.

The purpose of war? There is no single purpose. There are as many possible purposes as those engaging in warfare can have in mind.

There are an endless number of motivations and causes but the purpose is inevitably to get what you want (whatever that happens to be), whenever that ends up involving significant force.

[CharlesPhipps]

One could see this game as an extrapolation of the UNs continued desire to interfere with modern war. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict should have been ended 3/4s of a century ago, but Israel is always prevented from consolidating is victories because of political pressure to not finish its enemies off. The result is that the conflict drags on and the body count has grown beyond what it could have been had this been decided back in the late 40s through right of conquest.

What you're describing hasn't existed since The Peloponnesian War when the rest of the Greek City states realized that Persians wouldn't stop with just their next conquest. Worrying about how your neighbors are going to react to your invasion is something that has almost always been a thing.

But yes, I basically think this episode is a pretty good satire of the Cold War and actually could have gone further. The whole "proxy wars" of the period between the USA, USSR, and China are all things that never actually touch the infrastructure of the nations involved but are fought in places where it can be kept out of the streets but only on the television.

I honestly was half-expecting a revelation that the government is not at war and it was just a way to keep the public under control ala 1984.

[TGLS]

What you're describing hasn't existed since The Peloponnesian War when the rest of the Greek City states realized that Persians wouldn't stop with just their next conquest.

I think you're actually thinking of the Greco-Persian Wars not the Peloponnesian Wars.

[CharlesPhipps]

What you're describing hasn't existed since The Peloponnesian War when the rest of the Greek City states realized that Persians wouldn't stop with just their next conquest.

I think you're actually thinking of the Greco-Persian Wars not the Peloponnesian Wars.

So I am. My bad. I fail history forever.

*enters disintegration booth*

[BlackoutCreature2]

I always found a lot of aspects of the premise of this episode to be kinda stupid. What's the goal of the war? What needs to happen for one side to declare victory? If it's just to destroy the enemy, then why would you care if their culture can thrive? It all makes no sense.

The biggest question though is why you would allow your simulation to drag a third party that would have no respect for your little game into your mess? Ok, maybe Kirk was bluffing when he threatened to destroy the planet, but he obviously had the firepower to do it and there was nothing these yokels could've done to stop it. What if this happened a couple years earlier and instead of Kirk you were dealing with Garth of Izar? Or Mirror-universe Lorca? Or what if the Klingons had come along instead? So much for your precious culture.

Somebody pitched an idea of the aliens willing to let the Enterprise and its crew go, but they'd need to throw a couple hundred innocent locals into the disintegration booth instead, and the Enterprise crew need to debate the morality of allowing all these people to be sacrificed in their place. I think that would have worked much better.

[Mickey_Rat15]

The premise of this episode irritates a bit. Now perhaps that's unfair because there's always an element of "given such-and-such a sitution - just run with it - let's explore it and see where it takes us" about this type of story, but the idea of a simulated war like this - as soon as one side is losing they'll stop following the rules. If you can come to an agreement to stick to them you're probably capable of coming to enough of an agreement to not fight in the first place.

It treats war as a game, attacks being made to score points whereas in reality they're only done to achieve something materially; the goal isn't to kill the enemy but to defeat them (although history shows us plenty of commanders who can't tell the difference, and you've defeated them if you kill them all so they just leave it at that).

The goal of a military at war is to break the enemy's ability to make war on your nation, not to merely kill people*. The situation Eminiar and Vendikar have created means they are no longer trying to win the war, they are just killing people for no purpose other than the leadership of both world's have grown comfortable with the situation and see no reason to end the conflict. Which, oddly, they must have had to cooperate closely to even create the networks for these computer simulated attacks.

*The Allied island hopping campaign in the Pacific during WWII is a good example of rendering an enemy force ineffective without killing them. The Japanese expected a large land battle over their naval/airbase at Rabaul, and the reinforced the place with over 100,000 troops, who were trapped there when it was decided that could be bypassed, leaving that army stuck with the Allied naval supremacy preventing the Japanese from redeploying those forces.

Doesn't that kind of depend on how bloodthirsty the leader? Joshua famously put every man, woman and animal to the sword after the fall of Jericho even though merely destroying the walls and (as cruel as this may sound) killing the able-bodied men would have sufficed.

To what extent a military acts is determined by the war aims set by the nation's political leadership, that gets somewhat complicated when the political and military leadership are the same people. It is also something to take with a grain of salt an ancient example taken from what is primarily a religious text, but the Israelites purpose was to conquer and replace the people already living in Canaan, so their soldiers acted accordingly. Making a war existential is a grave mistake if you do not have the capacity to annihilate the enemy's military. Which was a strategic blunder of the Axis in making war with Soviet Union.

[Mickey_Rat15]

The purpose of war? There is no single purpose. There are as many possible purposes as those engaging in warfare can have in mind.

This is the actual point that is missing from the deliberations on this situation. The assessment that

The goal of a military at war is to break the enemy's ability to make war on your nation, not to merely kill people*.

is just plain wrong. That is how you fight a war, but that isn't (normally) why you go to war.

Except what I was speaking of was how they were fighting the war by computer simulation. They were not trying to win, they were killing people* simply because they were at war. The war had become its own justification, no longer a means to achieve a political goal.

*Actually worse than that, that were telling people to commit suicide.

[CrypticMirror]

I always found a lot of aspects of the premise of this episode to be kinda stupid. What's the goal of the war? What needs to happen for one side to declare victory? If it's just to destroy the enemy, then why would you care if their culture can thrive? It all makes no sense.

The Goal: To avoid loss of face, having waded into a forever war, by being able to declare victory.
Victory Condition: To ensure the other side loses face by admitting defeat.
The Why: Both sides are near enough matched in pride and weaponry to not be forced into admitting defeat.

It isn't about having a war; it is about not having to admit to having lost a war, but fearing if they actually seriously go to war they might very actually lose. The only way to ensure that their own culture thrives is to allow the otherside to also do so. Hence the compromise. It is very Cold War, especially with no proxies to do the dying for them. Don't you remember the slogan of "Better dead than Red", a real and actual Cold War era political slogan.