Is War On The Wane?

A U.S. Marine from Bravo Company of 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, gestures during a gun battle in the town of Marjah, in Nad Ali district of Helmand province, Afghanistan, in this 2010 file photo. Goran Tomasevic/Reuters/File

State Of The World: Is War On The Wane? -- Peter Grier, Christian Science Monitor

Part 2 of the surprisingly upbeat state of the world: Long-term statistics show war is on the wane.

Car bombs in Afghanistan, firefights in Libya, skirmishes in Sudan – look at today's international news, and it's just the same-old same-old, isn't it? Mankind has been at war since the dawn of anger. Won't war always be with us?

Maybe not – or maybe not as much, at least. War is on the downswing, argue some scholars. Its frequency has lessened considerably since the cataclysm of World War II.

"There really aren't very many wars anymore," says John Mueller of Ohio State University in Columbus.

Read more ....

My Comment: Being one who has studied and covered wars for the past 25 years .... I have certainly not see a let-down in conflicts and wars around the world. It is our human nature to conduct war and conflict .... and while advances in weapon systems now give us pause to conduct the truly "big" wars .... our human character has not (unfortunately) changed.