Dave Rutherford Show: The Morality of War - Would You Send Your Neighbor's Kid?

David Rutherford (0:00)

With the world on the brink of a major war, isn't it time we take a step back and look at the morality of warfare today on The David Rutherford Show?

We spent over 20 years fighting in the global war on terror. I spent 15 years carrying a gun for a living, much of that in the first half of the GWOT. I saw a lot of different things. I saw a lot of different arguments for why we justified going to war. I heard a lot of stories about great deeds that were done on the battlefield. Well, in the 15 years after I left service, I've also spent a tremendous amount of time trying to help those who have suffered profoundly with operator system, who have suffered profoundly with operator syndrome as a result of going to war for that entire time.

And now with the president of the United States, the supreme leader of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Ukraine, Russia, the EU, many leaders from countries in the EU, South America, Central America, the posturing for the next evolution of warfare is already at hand.

So what I'm going to attempt to do today as a result of the loud thunder from the drums of war that seem to be growing substantially, I'm going to try and bring to you a deeper understanding of how long we as human beings have been contemplating the morality of warfare.

Now, this is probably one of the most, other than religion itself or basic human survival or procreation, I would say, the most significant thing human beings have engaged in since that miraculous moment of relevatory consciousness, we have been engaging in some type of warfare, which has led us, you know, to the 20th century, which if you're not familiar, or you haven't done the numbers, or you're not sure, when you combined all of the people that died as a result of large scale war, or the catastrophe of totalitarianism, as low as 200 million to as high as 350 million human beings died during that century. And the most pivotal moment of that century in my mind was when we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan.

I lay all that predicate out as I begin the historical framework for which I would hope you would begin to take a step back as you really begin your introspection on this topic. Because the real question is, in warfare, is there a right or a wrong? Is there the good guys versus the bad guys? Is there justification for violence versus non-justification for violence? Right? And the laundry list of how we evaluate is deep and long. And so, one of the things that you have to begin to contemplate are a few basic questions. And first and foremost, is this pattern of warfare that we can literally look back and witness based on the historical record itself, right? And every generation inherits, right? What? The closest, most recent sequence of warfare to evaluate in real time. Because technically, we've been at war since as far back as we can remember, right? I mean, hell, there was one time the Hundred Years War. So, you can talk about Genghis Khan and all the Khan warfare and the magnitude of that, right? There's a reason why you go over to Asia and the Mongolian steppe, and Afghanistan, India, the whole region, and one in 16 people have Genghis Khan's DNA in their bodies, because of the magnitude of warfare that they waged. So, as we inherit these ever evolving frameworks, right, around the existing social consciousness, political ideologies, the weapons that we engage in warfare with, and all these, you know, what we, what the times consider new emerging enemies. And for us, you know, the enemies could be radical Islam, it could be Russia or China or the cartels or whatever we want to adapt as some framework of moral or political policy as a threat to our general security, right? Or in the grand terms, national security. You know, but on the flip side, there's a lot of people out there that believe we're the enemy as well too. And there have been some really brilliant people that we'll get to. Walzer, a guy who wrote a great book around Vietnam, this guy, McMahan, M-C-M-A-H-A-N, McMahan, who wrote a book really about during the G-Watt times about asymmetric warfare and that cost. But now, as we begin to see autonomous weapons emerge, right, the drone warfare fighting both in Ukraine and Iran, we're even seeing cartels using drones. We certainly know that the Israelis are using drones in the war against Hamas and Hezbollah. You know, that escalation of cognitive dissonance within the war fighting apparatus really brings into question this sense of morality. But the more grander sense of morality, which leads me to want to force this introspection upon all of us or all of you listening, is this concept of strategic nuclear strikes, right? We just saw Netanyahu on a post he had just the other day. He had an AI image of Tel Aviv with a nuclear explosion in the middle, basically suggesting if you don't vote him into office, this is the inevitability of Israel, right? That they will be targeted with a nuclear explosion. We've also heard that from the EU, that Russia is going to launch nuclear weapons into the EU, and we've heard Trump talk about nuclear annihilation, even reference nuking tactical strikes in Iran. So, you know, what was before, you know, in the post-Nagasaki Hiroshima attacks, had become kind of this holier-than-now place that we didn't want to touch because we understood the significance of the ramifications of nuclear war, which led up to what? The really amazing moment between Khrushchev and Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis, where they luckily had back channels and said, hey, you know, let's stop. And there's also an interesting story about a Russian commander of a submarine that had lost comms and they thought it had started and their buttons were turned on, their keys were turned on and they were going to do it. But he stopped it. Luckily, they surfaced and then they got radio comms and realized, thank God, they hadn't launched, because at that time it was, you know, there was the idea that if one launches, everyone launches, right, mutually assured destruction, which had kept us in check, I think, as nations, as peoples in the morality of warfare for a long time. But now, we see nuclear warfare or nuclear war rhetoric growing at, in my opinion, at an incredibly alarming rate, right? And with the advent of autonomous weaponry, the thing that really hits me have the most, in the most heavy way is that, yeah, that precludes from, you know, our young men and women really enduring the on-the-battlefield consequence of whatever justification that we put forward to go to war in these massive scale wars, puts them in a little bit safer position. However, I think what it does because of that distance from actually seeing the carnage and the savagery of what warfare brings, the civilian populations are the ones that are going to pay the biggest price for everyone on the world, not just our enemies, but including, you know, whether you're in an airport in Riyadh or maybe you're in the airport in Tel Aviv, or maybe you're just driving along, you know, some route in Kiev or in Moscow or on a beach in Moscow, and all of a sudden, out of the sky, a drone swarm of a thousand drones just land and carpet bomb the entire area.