They Don't Wage Them Like They Used To

We love science. We love statistics. Without them, we would not know what the chances are that the sun would rise in the east. So very many useful things have come our way via studies of the natural and social sciences that the sheer volume of discovery becomes overwhelming at times. Take for example this recent report that informs us that war is less deadly than it used to be. One of the main reasons that body counts are down is the lack of global participation. It's hard to get the whole world involved in any one particular conflict these days. Nowadays we have to rely on territorial skirmishes that take place on a much smaller scale than they used to.
Better health care has something to do with it. The Human Security Report Project at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University says that since 2000, the average conflict has killed ninety percent fewer people each year than in the 1950s. Wars fought with huge armies, heavy weapons and major-power involvement have largely given way to low-level insurgencies fought mostly by small, lightly armed rebel groups. The title of the report? "The Shrinking Costs of War."
That's when I start thinking about a hillside in Lafayette, California. There is a cross on that hill for every U.S. service person who has died in Iraq. More than four thousand crosses cover obscure the grass and crowd the trees. Then I think about the seven hundred billion dollars that we have spent on the war in Iraq, and I wonder about shrinking costs of war.