The Killing Machine: Ten Thousand Years and We Still Haven’t Figured This Out
Abstract
Ten millennia of organized warfare have produced extraordinary technical advancement alongside a consistent failure to reduce civilian casualties, which now represent 60%–90% of total conflict fatalities in modern urban combat. This essay traces the evolution of organized violence from paleolithic evidence through contemporary precision-strike doctrine. It argues that a significant accountability gap exists between Congress and the military it authorizes, and that this gap is the central governance failure of the current era. The essay then proposes a framework for closing the distance between the capacity for lethal force and the institutional wisdom to govern it.
The Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Has humanity, after ten thousand years of organized killing, actually gotten better at war—or have we simply built more sophisticated excuses for engaging in it? The question sounds rhetorical. The data suggests it isn’t. We’ve graduated from obsidian arrowheads to hypersonic missiles, from phalanxes to drone swarms, from the musket to the AI-guided loitering munition, yet in 2025 the Action on Armed Violence project recorded 45,362 civilians killed or injured by explosive weapons—with 97% of those casualties occurring in populated areas. Ancient armies, for all their brutality, operated under logistical and tactical constraints that mechanically limited civilian exposure. Today, depending on the theater, we achieve 60%–90% civilian casualties. Progress, it seems, is relative.
Before anyone reaches for the standard disclaimer, let me supply my own. I’m not writing an anti-military screed. My son graduated from West Point and wears Army wings. My brother spent more than twenty years as a Green Beret and retired as a First Sergeant. I went through Marine Corps Officer Candidates School. I have considerable skin in this game, literally. The men and women in uniform are not the problem. They are, historically speaking, the most rigorously trained and ethically constrained practitioners of organized violence we’ve ever produced. The problem is the nature of war itself: a beast that has never been tamed, only occasionally fitted with a cleaner uniform. What follows is an honest accounting of where we’ve been, where we are, and—with appropriate humility before the fog of history—where we still need to go.
A Brief and Unhappy History of People Killing Each Other
Warfare didn’t originate with nation-states or standing armies. It began, as most human miseries do, with scarcity and tribalism. The Nataruk site thirty kilometers west of Lake Turkana, Kenya—excavated beginning in 2012 by Dr. Marta Mirazón Lahr’s team at the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies and carbon-dated to between 9,500 and 10,500 years ago—contains the skeletal remains of twenty-seven individuals bearing unmistakable evidence of organized intergroup violence. Obsidian arrowheads are embedded in bone. Blunt trauma wounds. A pregnant woman whose hands and feet appear to have been bound at the time of her death. This was not a domestic dispute or a duel. It was a premeditated raid. Homo sapiens arrived at organized warfare well before the wheel, writing, or agriculture. Dr. Mirazón Lahr’s summary was spare and exact: “The deaths at Nataruk are testimony to the antiquity of inter-group violence and war.”
The philosophical roots aren’t particularly mysterious. Charles Darwin would have recognized them immediately: competition for limited resources in a zero-sum environment selects for aggression. Thomas Hobbes, writing in Leviathan in 1651, characterized the natural state of mankind as a “war of all against all,” in which life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Nataruk study co-author Professor Robert Foley expressed the evolutionary dimension with scientific restraint: “I’ve no doubt it is in our biology to be aggressive and lethal, just as it is to be deeply caring and loving. A lot of what we understand about human evolutionary biology suggests these are two sides of the same coin.” He was not being pessimistic. He was being precise.
The technological arc runs predictably. Hand-thrown stones gave way to atlatl spear-throwers around 40,000 BCE, providing ranged killing at distances approaching forty meters. Bow-and-arrow technology, now dated to approximately 64,000 years ago, democratized lethality. The Bronze Age introduced the chariot-mounted composite bow. The Iron Age gave the Assyrians hardened steel and the systematic destruction of city walls. The Romans refined the formula with the gladius, the pilum, and a combat engineering corps that would not look entirely out of place on a modern brigade staff.
Into this martial tradition stepped Sun Tzu, writing in China’s Spring and Autumn period roughly five centuries BCE. His Art of War, composed on bamboo slips across thirteen chapters, accomplished something genuinely remarkable: it divorced warfare from brute force and relocated it in the domain of intelligence, deception, and psychological dominance. “All warfare is based on deception” is a maxim that required no revision when Operation Fortitude fooled Hitler into holding Panzer divisions away from Normandy in 1944. The text remains required reading at all American service academies, which is either reassuring or alarming depending on your level of confidence in the people assigning it.
The gunpowder revolution—which Chinese alchemists discovered accidentally in the ninth century, and European armies adopted with enthusiasm by the fourteenth—permanently altered the calculus of infantry combat. By 1914, armies trained for Napoleonic maneuver warfare were drowning in mud and machine gun fire along the Western Front. The logical endpoint arrived on August 6, 1945, when a single B-29 released a uranium device over Hiroshima. Immediate deaths reached between 70,000 and 80,000; total casualties by year’s end reached an estimated 90,000 to 140,000. J. Robert Oppenheimer, watching the Trinity test three weeks earlier, recalled the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” His contemplation may yet prove not merely poetic, but precise.
The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan each exposed the widening gap between the maps on the wall and the ground beneath the boots. The lesson, consistently delivered and consistently ignored, is that tactical innovation outpaces strategic wisdom, and the capacity to destroy has always grown faster than the wisdom to restrain it.
Precision Weapons and the Paradox of Humane Killing
The contemporary defense establishment has invested enormous intellectual and financial capital in the concept of precision, the idea that smart weapons, surgical strikes, and reduced collateral damage represent a moral evolution in the conduct of war. The results are mixed. AOAV’s full 2025 annual report recorded 45,362 civilians killed or injured by explosive weapons globally, a 9% decline from 2024, but still dramatically elevated above pre-2022 baselines. Russia’s attacks in Ukraine accounted for 32% of that total. Israel’s strikes in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria accounted for 35%, with effectively all casualties occurring in populated areas. These aren’t rounding errors. The precision revolution hasn’t reversed the trend. It has provided a more sophisticated vocabulary for discussing it—an entirely different development.
The Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the global standard for conflict mortality research, reported that armed conflicts reached a historic high in 2024—a record 61 active state-based conflicts, the most since UCDP began tracking in 1946. In Gaza specifically, UCDP was able to classify only 2% of deaths as confirmed combatants and 48% as confirmed civilian, with the remainder of unknown identity. The precision revolution has produced better-targeted ordnance and worse aggregate outcomes, because the targets have moved inside apartment buildings.
What the UCDP data cannot fully capture is the degree to which civilian casualty figures in Gaza were a predictable consequence of deliberate Hamas military doctrine. Hamas positioned its command infrastructure, weapons caches, and rocket batteries in residential neighborhoods, hospitals, mosques, and schools not because of a shortage of undeveloped land in the Gaza Strip, but because the calculus was coldly rational: attacking those sites would either kill civilians and generate international condemnation of Israel or not attacking them would preserve the military infrastructure intact. The civilian population was the strategy. Precision weapons cannot discriminate between a hospital treating patients and a hospital treating patients while storing munitions in its basement. That distinction matters enormously when assigning moral accountability—and collapsing it, deliberately or carelessly, produces analysis that is worse than useless.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s On Killing (1995), drawing on S.L.A. Marshall’s World War II research, documented that only 15%–20% of combat infantry was willing to fire their weapons in actual contact. Marshall’s underlying methodology, however, has been disputed by subsequent historians, most notably Roger Spiller, whose 1989 analysis in American Heritage found that Marshall may have fabricated or substantially embellished his postwar interview data. The broader psychological finding—that military conditioning significantly raises firing rates at real psychological cost—is supported by independent evidence from trauma research and medical records, even if the precise figures remain contested. Soldiers conditioned to fire more readily, operating in urban environments where combatants and civilians are indistinguishable, produce predictable results. This isn’t criticism of the soldiers. It’s an observation about the environments commanders keep sending them into.
The Special Forces model offers an instructive counterpoint. The evolution from massed infantry to small Special Operations teams—SEALs, Delta Force, Special Forces—represents a compounding of capability through selection, training, and technology that reduces the required footprint while increasing effectiveness—my brother’s world. The sniper team, operating as a one- or two-person element, represents perhaps the most economical application of lethal force in military history: maximum effect, minimum exposure, near-zero collateral damage when employed correctly. It is Sun Tzu’s philosophy manifest . The greatest warriors, as a category, tend to be the most reluctant to employ their skills. I learned this at OCS. Anyone who has genuinely studied violence—who has trained to administer it and observed its consequences at close range—understands the cost in ways that armchair generals and foreign policy analysts typically don’t.
Strength as Doctrine: Two Cases and a Verdict
The proposition that clarity of purpose functions as deterrence is not new. President Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup in the 1980s, and the Soviet calculation that followed, demonstrated what concentrated will and communicated resolve can accomplish without firing a shot. Richard Nixon’s “madman theory,” whatever its ethical complications, rested on the same principle: an adversary that believes you will act decisively and at severe cost to them recalculates. The 2025–2026 period has now provided two major empirical tests of this doctrine in its contemporary form, with instructive and divergent results.
Operation Absolute Resolve, executed in the predawn hours of January 3, 2026, achieved the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife from his compound in Caracas using Delta Force and 160th SOAR assets, with no US military fatalities in the extraction element. An estimated 80 Venezuelan military and civilian personnel were killed in the broader suppression campaign. The operation drew comparisons to Panama’s Operation Just Cause, without the prolonged occupation that followed. Maduro appeared in Manhattan federal court on January 5 and pled not guilty to narcoterrorism charges. The strategic question—who actually governs Venezuela—remains unanswered.
Operation Epic Fury, launched February 28, 2026, in coordination with Israeli forces under Operation Roaring Lion, is the harder case. The opening strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of senior officials. Iran retaliated with hundreds of missile and thousands of drone strikes across the Middle East, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and the conflict was declared concluded on May 5 by US and Israeli authorities. The tactical objectives—destroying visible nuclear infrastructure, degrading Iran’s missile capacity, eliminating IRGC naval assets—were largely achieved. The strategic objectives were not. Iran’s successor leadership, centered on Mojtaba Khamenei and drawn heavily from the IRGC, proved more hard-liner than its predecessor. The Arms Control Association assessed that the strikes may have strengthened the domestic political case within Iran for nuclear weaponization rather than weakened it—a strategic irony of the first order. A post-war assessment published in this journal rendered the verdict plainly: “A Strategic Blunder in Five Dimensions.”
This outcome is not unfamiliar. The distance between tactical precision and strategic wisdom has been the defining theme of American military experience for fifty years. Destroying a target is a technical problem. Knowing which targets to destroy, in what sequence, to produce which political outcome—and then actually achieving it—is a different category of problem entirely. Eisenhower observed that “plans are nothing; planning is everything.” Sun Tzu’s aphorism that “victorious warriors win first and then go to war” is not merely strategic advice. It’s a statement about the psychological orientation of professionals who understand that battle is the last resort of the competent, not the first instinct of the brave.
From the WWF to the Octagon: The Civilian Proxy
There’s a sociological footnote to the evolution of warfare that illuminates the civilian-military gap more honestly than most policy papers: the American public’s complicated relationship with organized violence as spectacle. A generation of men who would never serve in uniform developed a vigorous appetite for combat through professional wrestling—staged brawls, scripted and theatrical, that filled arenas throughout the 1980s. The country wanted the experience of warfare without any of its costs. That is, historically speaking, an unusual arrangement.
Hollywood obliged. Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo franchise, beginning with First Blood in 1982, offered the armchair warrior a one-man army who could single-handedly reverse the outcome of Vietnam. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) offered something closer to the truth: the disintegration of unit cohesion under sustained institutional failure. Stone, a combat infantry veteran, gave audiences the moral environment of the jungle, not just its scenery. Both the gung-ho fantasy and the unflinching reckoning found large audiences—which tells you everything you need to know about the market’s reliable preference for resolution over accountability.
Bruce Lee, who created Jeet Kune Do in 1967, was operating in a different register. His synthesis of Wing Chun, boxing, fencing, and wrestling—governed by simplicity, directness, and adaptability—was applied Sun Tzu. In The Tao of Jeet Kune Do (1975), Lee articulated the philosophy as “using no way as way; having no limitation as limitation.” His insight—that the moment a system becomes its own purpose it has begun to fail—applies with equal force to combined-arms military doctrine and to the civic education deficit that has produced a legislature increasingly unqualified to authorize the force it’s constitutionally empowered to declare.
The UFC, which began in 1993 as a tournament designed to determine which fighting discipline was most effective in actual combat, now dominates sports media. Far from one discipline versus another, its modern champions are cross-trained in wrestling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, boxing, and submissions. Specialization, absent integration, is a liability. This lesson applies with equal force to the congressional authorization of military force—an institution that increasingly specializes in the authorization of violence without any integrated understanding of its costs.
A Framework for Reducing the Distance Between Capability and Wisdom
The evolution of warfare presents a structural challenge that technology alone cannot resolve: the capacity to project lethal force has consistently outpaced the institutional wisdom governing its application. Sun Tzu identified this problem twenty-five centuries ago. Correcting the imbalance requires attention at several levels simultaneously, and the most durable changes begin with education.
Military education must be expanded and deepened. West Point’s curriculum requires twenty-four core courses spanning STEM, humanities, and military science, supplemented by summer field training that applies historical and ethical frameworks to command decisions under pressure. Officers who understand Hannibal’s double envelopment at Cannae, Montgomery’s deception campaign at El Alamein, and the civilian casualty implications of urban drone operations make better proportionality decisions than those who receive only technical training. As someone who went through Marine Corps OCS and whose son graduated from West Point, I can say with confidence that the ethical infrastructure of American military education is exceptional—and consistently undervalued in public discourse. The problem isn’t the people we’re producing. It’s the people who are authorizing them.
The Rules of Engagement framework governing precision weapons must be subjected to the same rigorous after-action review process applied to tactical failures. When a strike kills civilians despite technically accurate execution, the appropriate institutional response is not a public affairs statement. It’s an honest assessment of whether the intelligence, targeting criteria, and legal authorization were adequate to the complexity of the operating environment. The law of armed conflict principles of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity aren’t bureaucratic obstacles. They are the institutional memory of every war crime tribunal ever convened, from Nuremberg to The Hague.
The accountability gap is the hardest problem, and the one most people in this conversation refuse to name directly. According to the Congressional Research Service’s profile of the 119th Congress, only 98 members, 18.1% of total membership, had any military background as of January 2025. Pew Research puts the peak of congressional military service between 1965 and 1975, when at least 70% of lawmakers in each chamber had served, reaching 75% in the House by 1967 and 81% in the Senate by 1975. These were men who genuinely understood what a casualty report meant, because they had likely written or received one.
We now have a legislature in which more than four of every five members have never worn a uniform, never written a condolence letter to a next of kin, and never been responsible for the life of another person in a combat environment—yet vote routinely to authorize rules of engagement and the deployment of weapons against populations they’ll never see. The career trajectory of the typical modern congressman runs from law school to campaign fundraising to committee assignments, with no detour through anything that involves personal physical risk or institutional accountability for the consequences of failure. Nassim Taleb wrote an entire book about this. The military has been living inside it for fifty years.
This isn’t an argument for conscription. It’s an argument for civic education about the actual costs and consequences of warfare—the kind of visceral education that the Nataruk site, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial provide for those willing to look. A legislature that cannot read a casualty report with personal reference cannot be expected to authorize force with appropriate restraint. The accountability gap and the civilian casualty statistics aren’t separate problems. They are the same problem viewed from different altitudes.
Sun Tzu’s counsel has survived twenty-five centuries not because it is philosophical abstraction but because it describes the actual requirements of effective decision-making under uncertainty. Whether you’re a company commander in Fallujah, a portfolio manager working through a volatile credit cycle, or a father teaching children how to handle a complicated world, the operational principles are identical: preparation precedes confidence, intelligence precedes action, and the ability to remain calm while adapting to changing circumstances is the most durable competitive advantage in any domain.
The Monster in the Mirror
Has humanity gotten better at war, or merely more sophisticated in its rationalizations? The honest answer is both, and neither. We’ve developed extraordinary technical capabilities—weapons of precision, communications of speed, logistics of scale—that would have been incomprehensible to any general before the twentieth century. We’ve simultaneously demonstrated a remarkable consistency in applying those capabilities in ways that produce civilian suffering at proportions that would have appalled many ancient commanders who, at minimum, had the logistical limitation of fighting where they could physically stand.
The capacity for organized violence isn’t a bug in the human operating system. It is, as evolutionary biology and ten thousand years of archaeological evidence confirm, a feature—one that served essential survival functions in environments characterized by genuine scarcity and constant threat. The challenge of civilization has always been to contain, channel, and appropriately govern that capacity. The samurai understood this. Sun Tzu understood this. The Marines who raised the flag at Iwo Jima, of whom Admiral Chester Nimitz observed that “uncommon valor was a common virtue,” understood it at a level that transcends intellectual analysis.
From flint to algorithm, from Nataruk to Tehran, the fundamental dynamic hasn’t changed: human beings organize, equip, and deploy to kill other human beings, usually in pursuit of objectives that subsequent generations struggle to justify. The question for the generations inheriting this capacity is not whether to possess it—that decision was made at Nataruk, ten thousand years ago—but whether to govern it with the wisdom, restraint, and moral seriousness that its consequences demand. Eisenhower observed that “planning is everything.” The alternative is to keep making the same mistakes with better equipment, which is a reasonable description of the last ten millennia.
