by tim » Sun Jun 22, 2025 9:44 am
DaKardii wrote: Sat Jun 21, 2025 10:40 pmNow what?
https://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg ... tmodel.htm
Criteria indicating crisis war
A crisis war is like a ball rolling downhill, usually over a period 5-10 years long. It may (or may not) need a push to start, and it may be temporary stopped by obstacles on the way down. But eventually it starts gathering an enormous amount of energy, and at some point its momentum becomes so great that it's unstoppable, until it reaches the bottom of the hill in an explosive climax that forever changes the landscape.
The rolling ball analogy can be used only so far, but it represents something real: A steadily increasing anxiety on the part of the people fighting the war, an increasing hatred of the enemy, an increasing desire for genocidal vengeance, and a willingness to risk everything for total victory.
To understand the emotion behind a crisis war, you have to think about wars where this kind of energy was displayed: Think of the early 1990s Balkans, where the Serbs pursued massive ethnic cleansing (mass murdering the men, mass raping the women) of the Croats and the Bosnians; think of the 1994 Rwanda war, where Hutus murdered and dismembered a million Tutsis in a three month period; think of President Truman's vengeful statement after a nuclear weapon had destroyed a Japanese city; think of the mass murder and mass destruction of an entire region when General Sherman marched his troops through Georgia near the end of the Civil War.
A crisis war may start out small, but it builds in strength and energy until it becomes as unstoppable a force of nature as a raging typhoon.
In another chapter (where?) we quoted at length Leo Tolstoy's discussion, in War and Peace of the Battle of Borodino, and in particular the fact that Napoleon could not have stopped the battle: "Had Napoleon then forbidden them to fight the Russians, they would have killed him and have proceeded to fight the Russians because it was inevitable."
This is the essence of a crisis war. A huge mass of people who are willing to kill or be killed. An unstoppable "ball of invasion," in Tolstoy's words.
So to understand a crisis war, we really need to understand people's feelings and intentions. This is something that the TFT authors were able to measure by reading contemporary diaries and histories.
We required a set of criteria that can evaluate a war based on commonly available facts about the war in ordinary history books, and the criteria should be as free of subjectivity as possible.
Unfortunately, there are no simple numeric measures that can be applied. In particular, the number of battle deaths does not seem to be an appropriate measure. World War I (in Western Europe) showed that it's possible to have a static non-crisis war and still have quite a few war deaths. The American Civil War, the worst war in United States history, killed 0.8% of the population. On the other hand, China's Taiping Rebellion civil war killed almost 15% of the population.
So we need to be able to measure the feelings and intentions of large masses of people, but without using simple numeric measures.
Since we can't measure public attitudes during historical wars, we look for "clues" in the historical descriptions of the wars to see if the criteria for a crisis war are met. If the clues are ambiguous, then it's necessary to refer to additional sources to get more information. In my experience, it's rare that an ambiguous situation remains ambiguous for long. Whether a war is a crisis war becomes abundantly clear very quickly.
[quote=DaKardii post_id=91319 time=1750560001 user_id=2550]Now what?[/quote]
[url]https://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ww2010.book2.tftmodel.htm[/url]
[quote]Criteria indicating crisis war
A crisis war is like a ball rolling downhill, usually over a period 5-10 years long. It may (or may not) need a push to start, and it may be temporary stopped by obstacles on the way down. But eventually it starts gathering an enormous amount of energy, and at some point its momentum becomes so great that it's unstoppable, until it reaches the bottom of the hill in an explosive climax that forever changes the landscape.
The rolling ball analogy can be used only so far, but it represents something real: A steadily increasing anxiety on the part of the people fighting the war, an increasing hatred of the enemy, an increasing desire for genocidal vengeance, and a willingness to risk everything for total victory.
To understand the emotion behind a crisis war, you have to think about wars where this kind of energy was displayed: Think of the early 1990s Balkans, where the Serbs pursued massive ethnic cleansing (mass murdering the men, mass raping the women) of the Croats and the Bosnians; think of the 1994 Rwanda war, where Hutus murdered and dismembered a million Tutsis in a three month period; think of President Truman's vengeful statement after a nuclear weapon had destroyed a Japanese city; think of the mass murder and mass destruction of an entire region when General Sherman marched his troops through Georgia near the end of the Civil War.
A crisis war may start out small, but it builds in strength and energy until it becomes as unstoppable a force of nature as a raging typhoon.
In another chapter (where?) we quoted at length Leo Tolstoy's discussion, in War and Peace of the Battle of Borodino, and in particular the fact that Napoleon could not have stopped the battle: "Had Napoleon then forbidden them to fight the Russians, they would have killed him and have proceeded to fight the Russians because it was inevitable."
This is the essence of a crisis war. A huge mass of people who are willing to kill or be killed. An unstoppable "ball of invasion," in Tolstoy's words.
So to understand a crisis war, we really need to understand people's feelings and intentions. This is something that the TFT authors were able to measure by reading contemporary diaries and histories.
We required a set of criteria that can evaluate a war based on commonly available facts about the war in ordinary history books, and the criteria should be as free of subjectivity as possible.
Unfortunately, there are no simple numeric measures that can be applied. In particular, the number of battle deaths does not seem to be an appropriate measure. World War I (in Western Europe) showed that it's possible to have a static non-crisis war and still have quite a few war deaths. The American Civil War, the worst war in United States history, killed 0.8% of the population. On the other hand, China's Taiping Rebellion civil war killed almost 15% of the population.
So we need to be able to measure the feelings and intentions of large masses of people, but without using simple numeric measures.
Since we can't measure public attitudes during historical wars, we look for "clues" in the historical descriptions of the wars to see if the criteria for a crisis war are met. If the clues are ambiguous, then it's necessary to refer to additional sources to get more information. In my experience, it's rare that an ambiguous situation remains ambiguous for long. Whether a war is a crisis war becomes abundantly clear very quickly.[/quote]