But where the contradiction lies comes from the fact that the fundamental objective of any military is ultimately in increasing its ability to wage war and defeat other existing militaries. Such an objective is necessarily orthogonal to “saving civilian lives” unless you define only a subset of humanity to be the civilian lives you wish to save treating those outside as expendable. Disregarding how illogical and frankly inhumane in my opinion it is in arbitrarily choosing to delineate people like this, even in purely pragmatic and economic terms, it makes no sense. War is a zero sum game no matter how much you can optimize it such that the least amount of lives are taken in doing so.
The result of a use in military force is always ultimately the destruction of something which if not treated through other diplomatic means will escalate to larger and larger conflicts until at some point, nothing is left. Be very wary of those who tell you that the work you are doing is only to decrease casualty rates and save lives because that same reduction can and will be used to justify an increased usage of military force because of that very newly lowered rate.
Instead of working to increase the effectiveness and lethality of militaries, why not choose to spend your energy on trying to find ways to make it easier and more effective to resolving conflict by other diplomatic means? If such a belief is idealistic in today’s world, perhaps it is. But I believe there exists a future where such a world is possible if we only choose to not immediately give in to the cynicism of that other belief.
