What is even the point of having a war once you are fighting with robot armies? Why not just throw a coin and hand the country over to the side that picked the correct outcome? Use an unfair coin to correct for military strength. Or each side sends its best players for a game of Risk or Rock, Paper, Scissors or Command and Conquer.
You get a winer and a loser, it does not take years and costs a fortune and you avoid all the unnecessary loss of life and the damage you have to fix after the war. That seems like a win for everyone involved. Well, that could actually also work right now, no need to wait for robot armies.
In this episode, the crew of the USS Enterprise visits a planet whose people
fight a computer-simulated war against a neighboring planet. Although the
war is fought via computer simulation, the citizens of each planet have to
submit to real executions inside "disintegration booths" to meet the casualty
counts of the simulated attacks.
You get rid of destroying assets but keep killing people. It is kind of an improvement if you just compare the losses incurred in this kind of war as compared to normal war, after all you are not losing your assets. But morally it seems actually worse to me. You decide to lessen the consequences of a war but you decide to keep your assets but keep killing people.
It won't work because actually enforcing a meaningful loss requires a real war.
Otherwise, no matter if you believe if you have got a 50% or 10% chance of victory (or even no chance, but a certainty of painful losses for the opponent) then it makes all kinds of practical sense for the loser to say "screw the coin/game" and simply ignore the result and escalate it further.
If a reasonable settlement acceptable to both sides can be negotiated, then it doesn't need the coin or game in the first place; and if someone can enforce the conditions on the loser without a horrible cost, then there's no need for a game or a war since it can be done as a simple ultimatum.
For lack of a better word, that was meant more cynical than something that has actually any chance of working. It just seems to be a somewhat logical continuation of the idea of a war where everyone just sends robots to the front lines to fight things out. But you are of course right, the correct conclusion is probably that there can not be a war just fought by robots.
After one robot army has defeated the other one it has to go after human soldiers, assets or even civilians to achieve a victory or must at least be willing to do so unless the opposing country surrendes at this prospect. Just defeating the robot army and then doing nothing will not be effective beyond the inflicted loss of resources.
If the simulation is reasonably predictive and the spoils of war not too severe then the loser won't start the war because they would npt expect to gain enough.
This is what democracy is, a coarse estimate of who has the most soldiers. A 90% majority can do what they want, a 51% majority needs to compromise a little.
Just as the purpose of a war isn't to determine who's stronger but an extension of diplomacy with violence as a tool, a simulation isn't needed to determine who's weaker, countries already have a good idea on that. If the results are reasonably predictable and the request is not too severe, then you don't need a simulation, game or coin toss, ordinary diplomacy does that well; this is how events like Sudatenland takeover in last century or Crimea takeover in this century happened without a fight.
However, in an actual war many things matter more than the numbers or fighting power. For example, it is clear that ISIS is much weaker than the full USA military, however, because defeating ISIS in an actual land war would cause significant casualties to USA, they can go on - a clear simulation result showing that they would lose won't ever be enough for them to concede defeat since they can (and will) simply call it as a bluff and claim that USA is not willing to pay the blood price. So you can't settle a conflict like this with a simulation; the loser always has the backup plan of telling "make me, if you dare" instead of accepting the loss.
Agreeing to a result of simulations that both sides believe isn't settling undecided disputes nonviolently, it's just old fashioned diplomacy or ultimatum/surrender.
If one side has the robot army, they'll target the human soldiers on the other side. If both sides have robot armies, they'll probably target one anothers' civilians.
Nations are never going to rid themselves of the desire for war, or the need for war to involve bloodshed, because we're just another species of simian bludgeoning the out-group to death with extremely abstract and over-engineered rocks. We already have non-violent ways to resolve conflicts between nations, we fight wars explicitly to kill people.
[...] they'll probably target one anothers' civilians.
Which would be a first class war crime.
Nations are never going to rid themselves of the desire for war, or the need for war to involve bloodshed, because we're just another species of simian bludgeoning the out-group to death with extremely abstract and over-engineered rocks.
While that is not an uncommon point of view empirical evidence suggests otherwise, war seems to be in decline and seems to have shifted from wars between nations to civil wars and asymmetric wars.
Some argue that advances in human behavior heavily lag behind technological advances and I tend to agree at least somewhat, but concluding that we will never manage to overcome this stupidity seems not really obvious to me. And I certainly hope that it is not true.
We already have non-violent ways to resolve conflicts between nations, we fight wars explicitly to kill people.
Force is the ultimate and only way to »resolve« conflicts if all other means fail. But I do not think we are killing people for the sake of it in wars, it is just a means to an end.
You get a winer and a loser, it does not take years and costs a fortune and you avoid all the unnecessary loss of life and the damage you have to fix after the war. That seems like a win for everyone involved. Well, that could actually also work right now, no need to wait for robot armies.