Conversation

Pictures of bombed out cities make you realize the extent to which the bones of the built environment are reinforced concrete. It’s like stripped skeletons. Under the skin it’s all brutalist.
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I know the term comes from the French brut for concrete rather than the English brutal for oppressive, but does the etymology link up in Latin or something? Or is it just a really uncanny coincidence that brutalist architecture looks brutal?
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Mechanized militarism is closer to industrial demolition or earthquakes than to pre-modern combat. Being blown up by a hypersonic missile or asphyxiated/burned by a thermobaric weapon seems more like being trapped by a building collapse in an earthquake than being shot/stabbed
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To get back to whatever my original point was… soldiering is now a profession closer to general contracting in construction. It’s skilled and dangerous but in a different way than in history. Even the equipment is similar. Trucks, tracked vehicles, explosives.
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We don’t really think about how artillery, from the humble mortar up, is really the foundational weapon in conventional war. Not the rifle or the fighter aircraft. Just pound, pound, pound away till only broken bones on built environment remain. Ugly, unglamorous, unsexy.
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Most modern war now seems to be asymmetric and unconventional. We are now seeing asymmetric conventional and it looks weirdly dated. Symmetric wars are now primarily economic and memetic.
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American warmaking is also like this in a much smaller core. The air supremacy in recent wars has been so absolute, the job of artillery can be done from the air. But same pound-to-rubble principle backstops the work if “smart” methods fail to achieve decapitation/regime change.
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Russian and Chinese war making will likely remain this way since they lack the air/sea dominance to make it look cleaner.
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Something depressing about this visible reduction of military prowess to a lesser industrial construction/destruction prowess, which is as it should be. Humans never really abandoned anachronistic Don Quixote romanticism about war.
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If you read about military history right up to around 1700 or so, when battleships first took warfare beyond human form factors, it’s ugly and brutal but clearly a distinct activity from construction and demolition. Fire was the only larger force available and it was messy.
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But once shipborne heavy artillery could pound away at coastal cities, war became a sort of extension of the construction industry. KnightLu culture turned into general contractor services without permits.
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Also - the military is used for construction in extreme environments (building roads in mountains, bridging rivers, etc). Soldiers as builders during peace time is a common theme in a lot of military fiction as well (malazan books come to mind).