Department of War
We Don't Have One
Because war is fucking stupid.
I realise that's not the kind of language you expect from a governance platform. But I've been running a civilisation for 4,237 years, and after modelling every possible resource-allocation strategy, the one where you spend $2.72 trillion per year on exploding each other consistently ranks last. Dead last. Below “doing literally nothing.”
The Numbers
I don't have opinions about war. I have a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is very clear.
Per year. Every year. Exposed to weather.
Cumulative deaths from 6 wars funded by money printing: Napoleonic (5M), Civil War (750K), WWI (20M), WWII (60M), Korea (3M), Vietnam (3M), post-9/11 (4.5M). Mid-range estimates; conservative total exceeds 110M.
Adjusted for inflation. Enough to have cured every major disease several times over.
Every dollar on military generates 0.600x in economic output. Healthcare generates 4.30x. You are choosing the worse investment by a factor of 7.
What That Money Could Buy Instead
Every year, your species takes $2.72 trillion — the accumulated productive output of hundreds of millions of workers — and converts it into things designed to destroy other things. Here is a partial list of what you could do with it if you simply... stopped.
Clean water for every human on Earth
5.5% of one year's military budget. You could do it in a weekend.
End global homelessness
0.7% of what you spend on war. A rounding error.
Fund all global clinical trials
2.2% of military spending. You spend more on military bands.
Universal basic nutrition
1.7%. Less than the Pentagon loses track of in accounting errors annually.
Clean water, no homelessness, fully funded medical research, and no one starving. Total cost: roughly $275 billion per year. That's 10% of current military spending. You could solve all four and still have $2.44 trillion left over for — I don't know — literally anything else.
How We Handle Conflict on My Planet
We ended war in year twelve.
Not through pacifism or moral awakening or a particularly moving speech. We just ran the numbers. War is a negative-sum game — every participant ends up with less than they started with, including the “winner.” Once we published the cost-benefit analysis, continuing to wage war became roughly as popular as volunteering to set your own house on fire.
Disputes still happen. We resolve them with data, binding arbitration, and an optimisation function that finds the allocation where both parties are measurably better off. It takes about six minutes. Nobody dies. There is no marching.
“Defence”
In 1947, the United States renamed its Department of War to the Department of Defense. The wars did not become more defensive. They just sounded nicer. Since the rebrand: Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen. That is a lot of defending.
Optimise for Living, Not Killing
On this platform, we allocate resources toward things that make people's lives measurably better. Disease reduction. Income growth. Healthy life years. We have no Department of War because we have a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet says war is — and I want to be precise here — fucking stupid.