Gold team rules!!!! Until valhalla

In the end it probably wouldn’t matter. I doubt it would effect warfare so much beyond separating the “honorable dead” from the dishonest living. In America we have a saying: “it looks like you brought a knife to a gun fight.” This refers to a person ill prepared for. Task or competition, or who’s opponent has brought better tools or otherwise outmatched them. The implication obviously, is that it is generally not good to be the guy without a gun in a fight with guys with guns. And what are you going to do if the other guys figure you’re packing sticks so they’ll bring guns and take the easy win? Declare war if they do?? You’re already at war. Bring bigger sticks? For better or worse, the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Where am advantage exists- someone will use it. That’s a major part of why nuclear proliferation is such an issue. Mutually assured destruction is only a deterrent to those nations states who would face serious losses or are vulnerable. And those who are...

... without nations states or feel they have all to gain and none to lose- do not have the same safeties staying their hand. But those countries who have nuclear weapons won’t, effectively can’t, give them up- in the face of a danger that a greater evil than themselves would still have them- and use them. There’s no going back.

... well... unless we so totally destroy ourselves as to effectively erase these technologies from existence. But even then- someone just figures them out again almost inevitably if that happens. As long as we as humans would seek to kill each other with fists and teeth and such- we will figure out rocks and sticks work better- and then from there we will always make “bigger” “better” tools for the job. It’s our nature. The same innovation that sees a river and figures out the bridge or boat to cross it easier, faster, safer; will see the problem of how to kill a man and devise more efficient means.

There's a significant point you're missing: collateral damage.

Self driving cars. There has been great debate and will likely be great legal proceedings of and when self driving cars come to the mainstream use. Most of us have probably seen articles and memes- you’re in a self driving car. There will be an accident. There is a brick wall, and there is a nice soft group of pedestrians. Should the car smash itself into the wall injuring or killing you but saving the pedestrians, or should the car sustain minimal damage and protect you by plowing into the people? We can change peoples answers and complicate the situation by specifying people. How many people are in the car? How many pedestrians? Who are the people? With their newborn child in the car. The person willing to die to save 4 pedestrians against their one life- they might now feel 4 pedestrians worth their child’s life.

But what if the pedestrians are 2 adults with 2 new born children? That changes some peoples answers, and some people will still chose their own child over 2 strangers children. We can make it more complex. If instead of a wall- it is between the pedestrians and another car, a car with people. Now add the questions of who is in which group and how many. It gets complex.

What isn’t compels is that most people tend to bias towards self preservation or preservation of those they know or care about over strangers. We don’t weight their lives the same. If a malicious Greek deity said to you- either the person you love most does today, or a bus with 100 people you don’t know, somewhere in the world, explodes and your person lives.... would you let 100 people die to save your most loved person?

Collateral damage is something we mainly pretend to care about. At the end of the day, most people are less concerned about how many other people walk out of a room as they are about themselves. That’s what survivors guilt is about. You lived, they died, and you know you’re supposed to feel bad about that, and you feel bad because at the time- you were relieved. You were happy that they died and not you. That’s how evolution has wired us. The creature that survives to reproduce continues the species. But we are social creatures and so our instinct for self often conflicts instincts and behaviors that support the social grouping that has been a large part of our species successful continuation.

So yes, sticks would theoretically have less collateral damage than many modern weapons. but there are two things to look at there:
1. What advantage does reducing collateral damage give you in defeating the enemy? If you and I duel in a crowded plaza- in a world without law, and you bring a knife so as to limit the chances of harming anyone but me; and I bring a riffle so I can hit you from across the plaza at a safe distance, and I don’t care if the bullets go through you and hit others or if I miss and hit others- who had the advantage? Who is likely to beat the other and also to survive? Me. Really. More so if I use a very big riffle or a cruise missile and am out of reach of you and the crowd so aren’t affected or in danger at all no?

Is that morally repugnant? I believe it is. I’m not advocating for collateral damage or justifying it morally. But.... collateral damage is largely the effect of using an advantages weapons system to achieve victory through efficient but imprecise means. Ideally, you’d develop weapons with precision and efficiency, designer viruses, nanites, murder drones, precision guided kinetic projectiles. Then you have minimum collateral damage and maximum lethality. Morally- we ideally just wouldn’t murder each other. At the very least not over simple disagreements.

Yet... here we are. So the person who cares about collateral damage is certainly got some morals. The person who isn’t hindered by those morals in their selection of the most effective weapons to achieve victory is most likely the winner, the survivor, though. If a man is forced to choose the moral high ground and likely death, or moral compromise and likely life- he can answer himself what matters more to him, his life or his principals. But the dead guy, unless he becomes a martyr- his high mindedness does with him. The noble and just side of an ideological battle, if they lose to an ideologically horrible enemy, the world loses their values. Thusly they must decide if it is justified to be as “bad” as the thing you are against to ensure that their particular “bad” doesn’t become the way of things. The living tend to change the world. The dead are largely removed beyond existing as symbols.

2. We can’t say that sticks would be less collateral damage. Collateral damage was par for the course through warfare in history. Everyone is looking for the advantage. There are practical limits to how strong or sharp or big or long your sticks can be, and there isn’t a huge margin of advantage between the best stick and an “average” stick. So how do you get advantage with sticks, if you can only use sticks? More people to hold more sticks. An army of 10,000 is unlikely to beat an army of 100,000 on open ground with just sticks, even if the 100,000 strong have worse stocks and worse soldiers. You need more stock fighters. Overwhelming superiority of numbers.

That creates challenges. The more men you have, the less choosey you can be about the caliber and qualities of whom you accept. More men require more officers to supervise them. More officers means lower average quality of officer. It also means that officers at higher levels like those overseeing regiments, have less detailed interaction and observation of individual sub groups under their command. It’s of low caliber soldiers, with less supervision, increases the odds that soldiers will behave in ways that violate conduct, rape, thrill killing, massacres, looting, etc.

Battlefields become more chaotic and less confined since you need space for men to fit and to fight with sticks. In the chaos of melee it is just as easy, easier perhaps, to kill civilians. In armed conflict it is hard to quickly identify threats, but when the weapons are sticks- its a lot easier to assume everyone is a combatant until proven otherwise. In such combat, you aren’t really even assessing targets. It’s melee. You’re looking for guys wearing your colors, and everyone else gets the stick. Don’t want the stick- don’t be there. Melee in urban environments is not such a pretty thing. Buildings are more likely to be left intact, but that’s about it. The danger to people remains the same or even increases.

There is also a psychological component. Many people struggle with taking a life. Taking many lives often has a toll on men. BUT- the less “real” it is- the less that toll tends to be. A pilot dropping bombs often is insulated from their kills. You don’t even see the people most of the time. If you see anything- it’s ants. You push a button, there’s a sound, you’re mikes away before the ordinance hits. You get a briefing or see a sheet of paper with some numbers. That’s it. Beating a man to death with a stick... that is very real. You feel him, hear him, smell him, you may even taste him. He may be all over you the rest of the day. That’s VERY real. It isn’t just- he’s there, then he isn’t. You literally best ever bit of life from him a blow at a time.

I'm just gonna say that the alternatives to nuking Japan and killing hundreds of thousands were a joint invasion expected to kill millions on every side, or literally just sitting off the coast until all of them starved to death.
Nevermind sackings were way more common when we had more spears and horses than rifles and tanks.

Men can snap when they’ve had enough killing. Go “all in.” Or they can just learn to not care. It’s just another day at the office. The first time for most things tends to be the hardest, but do it enough and it’s just... how things are. Unless and until you have that moment of realization down the road. The first stolen drink from dads liquor stash or the first time a bum buys you booze- that’s heavy. Should you? Shouldn’t you? It gets easier. And if you aren’t careful you become an alcoholic. And then one day... something happens and you see things straight. See where you are and see it’s wrong. And well... if you’ve spent a decade beating men to death with sticks.... that’s likely going to be pretty darn harsh of a recovery. You might just turn the stick on yourself and end the whole thing.

So yeah, personally I’m not a fan of collateral damage- and when your goal isn’t subjugation but liberation or integration- it doesn’t help. You can’t just smash through an enemy without concern for damage done to others, that’s how you create the next generations of enemies who want revenge, who have reason to hate you. If you’re gonna do that- you’ve gotta wipe them all out, and make sure you get every single one, every sympathizer and every person who could feel resentment. But then you risk that list becoming... basically everyone who’s offended by your inhumanity. And then you have a lot of enemies. So pragmatically- you have to balance it out.

We’ve come a long way from “carpet bombing” when you needed to drop thousands of bombs and hope a few hit where you wanted, and just regret that most will hit non targets. And we continue to improve, to build more precise means of delivering death. Hell- they modified a cruise missile with f-ing blades so that instead of blowing up a room, it just minces up anyone in its radius like Tuna in a blender. As drones and facial recognition and other technologies improve- in another 40 years... we might just have warms of drones with tiny sticks killing anyone that is labeled a threat. So maybe sticks will be the future and it just won’t be men holding them. Is that better? Swarms of murder robots severing the arteries of anyone who’s picture is found in a database or who is armed in a designated area? Well.... I don’t know. There will still be collateral damage though. The “no fly list” doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that the murder drones will kill the “right” person every time.

And that's why we're negotiating with the Taliban. Only took us 20 fucking years to figure that we either kill them all, stay there for 10 generations, or take our ball and go home since we killed the guy wanted to kill 10 fucking years ago. In a different country.

Sorry to interrupt. Was typing back to back and just saw your replies. But yeah. Well said. Sometimes... it be like that sometimes. Put morals in one bucket and spit in the other, and well... only one bucket will have anything in it you can touch at the end of the day.