An army — all armies, not just yours — selects for robust men because in conflict, robust men are generally more successful. Bear in mind throughout this that "men provide muscle mass and DNA; women create civilization". That last is, however, only part of the equation. While women create civilization, only men can create men, and only robust men can create robust men.
Along comes a war, where — as George Carlin used to say — rich old men send poor young men to fight and die. And, of course, it's robust poor young men who do the fighting and dying.
The inevitable result is that succeeding generations are increasingly the product of those who weren't robust enough to be selected to fight and die (the un-robust) or who were able to game the system to avoid selection (the young rich). If this pattern is sustained long enough, the result is what we see now on American and British college campuses: the snowflake culture. Our future leaders will come from a population so un-robust that they feel threatened by opinions. This is unsustainable. It is a strategy that will lead inevitably to a failure of the species to thrive, and if continued long enough, will lead to extinction. Its cause is 'too much war'.
Europeans (and we’re part of that, culturally) have a long history of imperial expansion justified under the assumption that 'bigger is better’. Such expansion almost surely requires wars of conquest that, like any war, requires robust young soldiers and that, like every other war, results in dead robust young soldiers. Britain lost the bulk of two generations of robust, adventurous young men for being at the center of two world wars, and is now at the point of being conquered by unarmed third-world barbarians because there are too few offspring of robust, adventurous, risk-taking men who take after their fathers.
Luckily, here at the start of the 21st century, we’re beginning to understand that bigger is not better, and the justification for another war is being questioned by those who pay the bill either in taxes or with their lives. China, Russia, and the United States, the three largest modern nations, are all showing signs of weakness at their seams. China’s totalitarian government is each year forced to clamp down ever harder on dissident voices; Russia, which should have a booming economy given its phenomenal natural resources, is struggling to keep its own people fed; the United States is watching its politics devolve toward looming civil war.
In the case of the U.S., our Congress seems intent on provoking another war with Russia or China, as if another war is just what the doctor ordered. The solution to all these problems is two-pronged:
One: It is a fact that in all of human history, no nation has ever gone to war with a major trading partner. The best way to prevent war is to engage in commerce. When all your probable enemies are busily making money from the interactions between your economy and theirs, war becomes an unnecessary complication.
Two: Recognizing that bigger is not, in fact, better, we need to seriously reconsider the notion embedded in our brains that our union is indivisible. (This is also a valuable lesson for other countries similarly constructed.) The greatest failures in our history are marked by those times when we 'made a federal project out of it’, when we concluded (almost always incorrectly) that one size could fit all. It’s often hard in retrospect to see that such actions were errors because we have no contravening examples to show us that we picked a sub-optimal solution. All we have are the long-term consequences (of the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, to cite but a few examples) to tug on our sleeves and ask 'was that what you intended?’. If we are honest with ourselves, if we put away rabid partisanship, we can readily admit that most of these 'one size fits all’ solutions do not, in fact, fit very well anywhere, much less 'everywhere'.
For the case of the (increasingly dis-)United States, it's time to give up the demonstrably incorrect idea that Uncle Sam knows best. In the education department, for instance, we have spent trillions to improve student performance and we have no statistically significant change to show for it. Although we have a cabinet-level Department of Energy, we have not built a single new nuclear reactor in thirty years, relying instead on becoming the world's leading producer of petroleum. Climate alarmists are even now working to undo that success and intend to leave us shivering in the cold and grubbing for insects. That is: a proto-hominid, paleolithic existence. Talk about your 'existential threat'!
If we're to survive into the 22nd century, we have to adopt the attitude called 'isolationist' by some, 'non-interventionist' by others: we care that you're having problems, but we have problems of our own to solve, and those problems come first in our list of priorities. When we have our own house in order, we may be able to help you out, OR you may profit by our example and solve your own problems.
We've had far too many wars of liberation, and far too many dead children that might one day have grown to be fathers of a generation we could have been proud of. Instead, we have college seniors that are triggered by ideas that offend them.
"A republic, if you can keep it." —— Benjamin Franklin
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