⬅️ Back to Home · Cross: History MOC · Politics MOC · Database: Wars base (file not included in this release) · Canvas: Drone Warfare (file not included in this release)
War across history — the two world wars, the modern conflicts, the ethics of fighting them, and the data on what they cost.
Thucydides, the first war analyst
“It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” → The Peloponnesian War - Thucydides · Thucydides Trap
Ancient & Framing
- The Peloponnesian War - Thucydides — the founding text of war analysis
- Thucydides Trap — rising power vs. ruling power (Athens/Sparta → US/China)
- The End Is Always Near - Dan Carlin — collapse, plagues, and hard men
- Cross-vault → The New Concise History of the Crusades · Islam Caliphates, Conquering, Colonizing · 60.14 Colonialism
World War I → 60.13.1 World War I
- Dan Carlin - Blueprint for Armageddon — the six-part epic
- Road To The Great War - The Rest Is History · The Murder Of Franz Ferdinand - The Rest Is History
- Study path: WWI Curriculum Board · WWI_Curriculum_Syllabus
World War II → 60.13.2 World War II
- The revisionism debate: Why They Are Re-Writing World War 2 — Sir Richard Evans · Lying About Hitler - Richard Evans (the Irving trial) · Churchill should of made peace with Nazi Germany · Peace Offers · The Truth About Winston Churchill - Andrew Roberts
- Conduct & context: Civilian & Carpet Bombing · Propaganda in WWII · Molotov Ribbentrop (LonerBox) · Hitler's Anti-Semitism · Pacific War
- James Holland- World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles - Lex Fridman Podcast 470 - YouTube
- Study path: WWII_Curriculum_Syllabus · Books: Aftermath by Donovan Webster
- Cross-vault → Vejas Liulevicius - Communism Marxism Nazism Stalin Mao Hitler
Modern Conflicts
- September 11 Attacks - Origins, Plot, and Aftermath — four flights, al-Qaeda’s origins, the planes operation, missed warnings, the aftermath, and a claim-check of Richard Miniter’s interview; connect its response to Iraq War
- Iraq War — the hub: WMD, the “Clean Break” myth → Exposing the “Clean Break” Myth Israel Was Not Behind the Iraq War - With Dr. David Wurmser
- Islamic State (ISIS) — origins, ideology, organizational genealogy, causal responsibility, atrocities, territorial defeat, and the surviving global network; primary-text companion: The ISIS Reader - Ingram, Whiteside and Winter
- Ukraine — the Russian invasion
- Sudan Civil War 2023- · Sudan, Wars & Genocide · African wars · Country hub: Sudan
- Sanctions — the economic weapon
- Canvas: Drone Warfare (file not included in this release)
- Cross-vault → Elective War in Democracies · 60.1 Israel-Palestine · Terrorism, Violence & War
Philosophy of War → Just War Theory
- Just War — traditionalists vs. revisionists, the libertarian critique (Rothbard, Dave Smith), and the reading path
- Just War Blog Post — the write-up
- Cross-vault → Laws of War (IHL) (proportionality, distinction, human shields) · Violence in Politics (MOC)
📖 Just War PDF library (Philosophy of War/Books)
Walzer Just and Unjust Wars · McMahan Killing in War · Frowe The Ethics of War and Peace · Orend The Morality of War · Rodin War and Self-Defense · Benbaji & Statman War By Agreement · May Aggression and Crimes Against Peace · Nathanson Terrorism and the Ethics of War · Fabre Cosmopolitan Peace · Routledge handbooks (Ethics & War · Military Ethics) · Augustine City of God · Aquinas Summa I-II · Rothbard Ethics of Liberty + For a New Liberty + War, Peace, and the State · Bazargan The Ethics of War
The Data
Pinker’s Chapter 5 supplement — war is heavy-tailed, so the rare giants dominate
Richardson’s 315 “deadly quarrels” and a later Correlates of War sample both place conflict magnitudes close to a straight line on log-log plots: small wars are common, immense wars rare, but the tail is far thicker than a bell curve would lead us to expect. That means there is no stable “typical war” from which the largest wars can safely be extrapolated. Attrition, proportional escalation, and sunk-cost reasoning are Pinker’s proposed mechanism for how a conflict can keep moving outward along that tail.
Figures 5-7 to 5-11 — Conflict-size power laws, a normal-distribution contrast, a city-size analogy, and deaths summed by quarrel magnitude. In Richardson’s 1820–1952 sample, the two world wars produced about 77 percent of war deaths: roughly an 80:2 rule, not merely an 80:20 rule. The practical implication is to prioritize preventing great-power escalation, because a few tail events can outweigh many smaller wars. The evidentiary limit is just as important: conflict definitions are unstable, older records are incomplete, Figure 5-11 includes interpolated bars for unobserved small quarrels, and a power-law fit neither identifies a single cause nor predicts when the next extreme event will occur. Chapter 5 synthesis · Power-law conflict magnitudes, PDF pp. 304–307 (file not included in this release) · Normal and power-law distributions, PDF pp. 308–310 (file not included in this release) · Attrition and escalating commitment, PDF pp. 315–316 (file not included in this release) · Figure 5-11 and the 80:2 result, PDF pp. 317–319 (file not included in this release)
Pinker’s Chapter 6 supplement — count wars, classify wars, and measure their lethality separately
Pinker’s post-1946 reconstruction uses PRIO/UCDP categories rather than treating every episode of organized violence as one interchangeable object. State-based conflict has a government on at least one side and is divided into interstate, colonial or extrastate, internal civil, and internationalized civil conflict; nonstate conflict and one-sided killing are separate datasets. That taxonomy matters because a decline in battle deaths can coexist with many continuing civil conflicts, and a decline in the number of wars can be driven by different mechanisms from a decline in their average deadliness.
Figures 6-1 to 6-4 — Battle-death rates, conflict counts, and average deadliness by conflict type. In the series Pinker assembled, the world wars are exceptional spikes; postwar battle-death rates fall sharply, internal civil-war counts rise and peak later, and average lethality also falls. More than half of the 9.4 million recorded battle deaths in 260 state-based conflicts from 1946–2008 came from only five wars, so fewer extreme wars account for much of the improvement. These are historical series ending in 2005–2009, not a current peace index. Their deliberately conservative battle-death rules omit uncertain, indirect, and one-sided deaths; the figures therefore support comparison under a fixed yardstick, not a complete accounting of every harm. Chapter 6 synthesis · Conflict categories and counting rules, PDF pp. 420–423 (file not included in this release) · Figures 6-1 and 6-2, PDF p. 424 (file not included in this release) · Figure 6-3, PDF p. 427 (file not included in this release) · Figure 6-4 and the heavy tail, PDF pp. 428–429 (file not included in this release)
- Continents by Death Toll — where the bodies are
- Genocide percentages
- Cross-vault → Politics quotes (§ War: Franklin, Göring, McGovern)
Books — the shelf
🏜️ Iraq & the War on Terror
Cobra II - The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq · The Assassins' Gate - America in Iraq · Imperial Life in the Emerald City - Inside Iraq's Green Zone · Muqtada - Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq · Black Flags - Joby Warrick (rise of ISIS) · The ISIS Reader - Ingram, Whiteside and Winter (dated primary texts and source audit) · Against All Enemies- Inside America's War on Terror · Ghost - Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent · Targeted Beirut - Jack Carr James M Scott · 13 Hours
🎖️ Special ops & soldiers
Lions of Kandahar · Shooter - The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper · Trigger Men
🕵️ Espionage & information war
Filed captures and working notes — October 2026
Conflict histories and comparative war notes
- Countries and Their Death Counts in the Last 20 Years — preserved working note or source capture
- India Pakistan 2025 Conflict — preserved working note or source capture
- Nuclear Weapons — preserved working note or source capture
- The Second Sudanese Civil War - Casual Historian — preserved working note or source capture
- Yazidi Genocide — preserved working note or source capture
Auto-index
Base index
Wars.base (file not included in this release)
-
Books
- 13 Hours
- A Secret Life- The Polish Colonel, His Covert Mission, And The Price He Paid To Save His Country
- Against All Enemies- Inside America's War on Terror
- Black Flags - Joby Warrick PDF Extracted
- Black Flags - Joby Warrick
- Cobra II - The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
- Counterspy - Memoirs of a Counterintelligence Officer in World War II and the Cold War
- Ghost - Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent
- Imperial Life in the Emerald City - Inside Iraq's Green Zone
- Information Operations Planning
- Lions of Kandahar
- Muqtada - Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq
- Shooter - The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper
- SOE in France
- Targeted Beirut - Jack Carr James M Scott
- The Assassins' Gate - America in Iraq
- The End Is Always Near - Dan Carlin
- The ISIS Reader - Ingram, Whiteside and Winter
- Trigger Men
-
Philosophy of War
-
Books
-
-
Wars (file not included in this release)