“War,” it has been asserted, “never changes.” The sentiment is old and worn, found in government report and video game and meme all around. Many of its iterations elaborate. “War never changes. It only becomes more bloody and brutal,” one US government report said in 1939; “War never changes in its essence; it only changes in its means,” offered Field Marshall Foch in 1920, with less moral and more technical concern. On the one hand, it is true that war’s means and shape and causes change immensely. The devastation wrought by artillery and bombings and modern infantry is different in character from that wrought by an early modern army of mercenaries or by an ancient tribe’s band of warriors. It has many common denominators, including human suffering, but it is different. On the other hand, war has certain basic costs, costs and effects we should consider before entering or lauding entrance to war.

The Scenario

The war looms. You, as a nation or a nation’s leader, have a choice, to enter into the war or to step back from it. Alternately, you have the choice of whether you heat the (cold) war up, whether you seek a truce, whether you open a new front, whether you begin an operation. But most crucially today we’ll look at those situations where a hot war is not ongoing, or where the war’s scale is as yet retrievable to near-cold.

What are the downsides that always attend war?

Rubric

War generally has a predicate with some moral pretense. Rarely will a nation declare, ‘That stuff be ours, God be damned, so gimme.’ The justification may be obviously evil, such as Communism or liberalism spreading its tentacles, heavily flawed, such as in self-defense or civilization-spreading justifications for European colonization (can’t let our rivals get ahead!), plainly covetous, as in resource-acquisition wars, or, very occasionally, possibly righteous, a plea of defense against a foe. Even such righteous pleas typically have an admixture of sin, other reasons and motivations. So we have to just the reason to go to war. But that reason to go to war does not exist in a vacuum.

The other side of the coin to the reason to go to war is the reason not to. Let’s say you have a righteous justification for war, insofar as it is considered in itself. The foe really has been harming your nation, killing its citizens, seizing its stuff, and more. But consider the harm done by going to war. How many of your citizens die as a result of that decision to war compared to how many would die without it? How likely are you to be successful (is this a situation where success is a righteous consideration?¹)? Are the harms done by the war likely to be greater than the harms allowed by peace?

This is not a plea for pacifism. This is a plea for carefully weighing the costs before self-defense (Prov. 10:19, 12:16). Sometimes the cure is worse than the curse. In cases of invasion, of course, self-defense is almost certainly justified, and these costs are generally smaller than that of surrender.²

Note also that, in these circumstances, we do not have right to point to the righteousness of our cause and say, ‘God will prevent all those nasty things from happening.’ Quite apart from His refusal to do so across much of history, including in wars as righteous as America’s war for independence, relying on Him to escape the natural consequences of our actions is presumption, a sin which 1 Samuel 15:23 makes like unto divination and idolatry. For a national leader, it behooves to remember that Saul lost his right to rule by presuming he knew better than God’s law, the pattern of the world, what would have a good result.

Dangers

The first universal rule of war, universal except in the oddest examples, is that your soldiers will die. Be it to an accident or to enemy action (including asymmetric tactics such as guerilla warfare and suicide attacks), somebody you send into war will die. He may or may not come back in a body bag. He will almost certainly have a family. That death is a result of the choice to go to war. How many are worth the end-goal?

The second universal rule is that collateral damage is (almost) unavoidable. By the grace of God and extreme care, it can be avoided; by care and God’s mercy, it can be minimized. American ground forces, to my knowledge, are typically decent about this. The same cannot be said for American air-power.  Regardless, in war, property is destroyed en masse, including much property belonging to those who had no hand in starting the war and no guilt for whatever justified it. This destruction is permitted to an extent, as per Exodus 20, but it is still undesirable.

Much worse is the sort of collateral damage which consists in dead civilians. Your own or the enemy’s, these are people whom all in involved have a responsibility to offer no harm against, to even protect. Those who have not done what the state is empowered to punish (Gen. 9:5-6) are innocents in the terms of war, and to harm them is wrong. To kill them is murder. Yet war will kill many of these, particularly if prosecuted with the slightest hint of sloppiness, especially in these days of high explosives. 150 dead children in the first days of the 2026 Iran war testify to that fact. When going to war, whether the evil to be remedied justifies the deaths of many. Then ask again, and again. Unless the nukes are in the air, you’ve got time to triple-check.

Remember, always, that “Napalm sticks to kids,” and that the damage will spill over, save the most stringent efforts and often despite that.

The third universal rule is that war raises the passions of those who fight it, and that raised passions, in sinful men, mean temptation. Men at war fear for their lives, desire vengeance, desire to act, desire to be seen, desire to win, desire to bring justice or vengeance. Men bear the power of kill and not to kill, the power of the sword, and they begin to feel a little like Pilate, losing sight of eternity (John 19:10). Passions flame higher and higher, by the nature of the beast, for intensity must rise when death is on the line. All people directly involved will be tempted to two types of sins.

On the one hand, they will be tempted to wield the power they have been given, the power of life and death, for ignoble ends. They will be tempted to step a smidge beyond what is justified. They will be tempted to be silent when they should speak, to be inactive when they should act. They will be tempted, in other words, to commit what is imperfectly codified in the modern day as war crimes.

On the other hand, they will be tempted to indulge their passions. ‘Eat, drink, and be merry,’ they may say, ‘for who knows when we die? Or when we will kill?’ For killing is a difficult thing to most men, requiring a screwing up and making release or numbing to be desired. Drugs, pornography, obscenity, fornication, all of these become desirable. The presence of force adds to these the possibility of theft, coercion amounting to theft, rape, and the like, as the army’s morals decay. There was reason for the strictness of the New Model Army’s code of conduct.

Retreating from the moral for a second, we should also consider the practical. What are the results of this war on your own country? What will be the effect of it, politically? In the United States, whoever is in charge when the war starts, even if he also ends the war, takes a political drubbing. America hates going to war, at least without very good reason, and we haven’t liked the reasons since 1945. We didn’t like them from 1900-1939 either. To put it bluntly, the Republicans are going to be shellacked for their warmongering. As much as I loath the Republican institution, the Democrats are more unrestrainedly evil, and smarter on average. I’m not looking forward to 2026 or, at this point, 2028.

Another practical consideration, though one that slips towards morality a bit more, is how likely the war effort is to achieve the purpose which justifies the war, and at what cost, at what effort. If you come to a war like the current Iran conflict, I’m of the opinion (as seems to be born out) that the war is unlikely to accomplish its stated goals (i.e. nuclear de-escalation, regime change, lessening Iran’s local influence). The moral part of this is: the less likely rectification is, the less moral weight lies in the reason.

Now, let’s look at three rules of how war affects the home front.

First of all, war degrades a nation’s morals, particularly a home front war. Men observed this in a war as justified as the American War for Independence (I cannot find the quote, which I saw about a decade ago). War’s pressures and opportunities foster sin and promote temptation; the result is a general downslide of the society’s moral state. Men who remember their sins on the campaign become less resistant to those same sins, such as prostitution, at home, or their resistance is compromised by guilt. The sins which seemed justified by expedience or pressure during the war, well, they have a funny habit of keeping going, even when their excuses are gone.

Second and related to the above, a component of it, war in every single case I am aware of increases the power of the war-waging government. War convinced America to adopt the Constitution instead of the Articles of Confederation (1776-1787). War ended state rights and the idea of a confederated government, rather than a nation (1860-1865). War created an institutional state, a powerful bureaucracy, in the 1860s and the 1910s and then, for this time it stuck, in the 1940s. War justified mass censorship (1860s, 1910s, and 1940s forward) and mass surveillance, whether in WWI or the establishment of the intelligence agencies in the 40s and 50s or the USA PATRIOT Act or FISA. Danger, as Spencer Roane said way back in 1821, “is always the tyrant’s plea….”³

Third, war shapes the people and the government both. It shapes them towards war. They are built into structures which profit from, prefer, and thrive by war; these institutions exist because of war, but they are not easily dislodged when their immediate necessity, real or perceived (see Roane’s quote), elapses at the war’s end. These institutions, like NATO or military manufacturers, find that they must justify their existence and give themselves a reason to continue. Being designed for war, the natural answer is to find a new war.

The war also shapes the people in a way often unrecognized but most pronounced in military men. An essential part of military discipline is obedience. Even if independent thought is desired, ultimately a soldier is trained to trust, rely on, and work within the bounds of the institution he belongs to (though if he’s an intel operator, he is like to be taught that those bounds encompass much illegality). Men trained by the military tend to trust the institution—unless (like too many) they’ve been burned too much. But the tendency holds, and if you find a politician who came from the military, double-check that he’s not the sort that trusts and relies on institutions, on established authority which knows not God. Make sure he’s willing to be William Wallace in principle, not just bravery.

The war also shapes the populace to obey. War produces exigencies which justify power seizure and motivate extraordinary compliance. More, it justifies vilifying those who except from tyranny’s excesses; too easily the hated other starts to include principled patriots on our own side. And that hatred of the other, so easy and so desirable for an unscrupulous government (i.e. 99.999% of them historically), that’s a part of the moral degradation too. But the effect is a populace trained and habituated to obeying the government without making sure first that God gave the government that job, without making sure that the government was given that authority by the people.

Conclusion

You, in all likelihood, do not have the choice of whether your nation goes to war. You can weigh all these factors, but you don’t sign the declaration of war or send off the men to die. You don’t order the bombs to drop. But, particularly in a system built on citizen-votes, every rightful inhabitant of the nation is in a sense a civil magistrate. He has perhaps a small voice, but he can and should raise it nonetheless to help guide the ship of state, to help establish righteous government, even if only by demonstrating where lies the self-interest of those holding the tiller. So we must weigh these facts, must evaluate the war without reverence for the government (because it usually lies; because no matter how truthful we are responsible to doublecheck its work (Acts 17:11)), and we must act as civil magistrates in our small sphere, to endorse a righteous war or oppose an unjustified one.

God bless.

---

Footnotes

1. Israel did not have a right to leave God’s promise out of their calculus when the Rabshakeh of Assyria came against them. ↩︎
2. I can posit an edge case in which an invader was of such close character and desirable virtue to the people that surrender to his demands is proper. In other words, a case in which the invader is regarded by the people as preferrable to their own government. Such, for example, seems to be the case in the Donetsk region of Ukraine vis a vis Russia. ↩︎
3. Algernon Sidney essay no. 2, 29 May 1821. I highly recommend. ↩︎