The Imagination and War

      Ever since I was a little boy, warfare fascinated me. I spent hours out in my backyard or roaming around my hometown on my bike fighting aliens in my mind and coming up with cool new weapons based on things I saw in movies or video games. 

        It is a common thing for boys to be interested in action and violence. Something wired into human nature I believe, as being interested in combat and war has a survival advantage in a species notorious for waging it quite often. 

       America seems to enter one once a generation or two, and having youth and children have some exposure to warfare to relative degrees of intensity in media and entertainment depending on the age is quite useful to a nation that is as engrossed in world affairs and police actions as the United States is.

     When it comes to war, creativity and igenuity are what gives the advantage and the cutting edge to competitors in the conflict.

      Your chances of winning a battle or war is significantly higher the more creative and ingenuitive you are in your planning and on the battlefield. This is why imagination is so important. Imagination is the first step in developing new weapons and new technology and creatively implementing new strategies and tactics that come with these advances.

      They start in the imagination first. Which is why the culture and society with the most creative imaginations tend to be the strongest and most successful, both in war and in other areas of life.

        In terms of situations like terrorism or attacking an enemy, the more imaginative your method and procedure of attack, the less likely your enemy has the ability of defending against it or thwarting it.

       What kills a culture or nation faster than almost anything aside from natural disasters is crippled and reduced imagination. This kills the innovative capacity of that culture, and as a result cripples the ingenuity necessary to fend off enemies, survive natural disasters and economic hardships, and win wars. 

      Cultures where imagination is restricted and limited in order to protect a dominant ideology or system from ideas that can threaten that dominance often seal their fate and eventual collapse.

       If a culture cannot innovate and has a severely limited imagination and inhibited creativity, it cannot survive long term and will eventually be outpaced by its competitors. 

      This is often the unspoken value of creative entertainment. It exposes people to creative ideas and thinking that can increase the survival probability of both the individual and the society as a whole.

        As far as warfare goes, the most imaginative and innovative soldier on the battlefield, and the most imaginative and innovative nation in the war, generally is the victor. Creativity and imagination are crucial in war. They are both the source of the ideas that cause the war and the source of the methods utilized to wage it. 

They are also crucial in the policymaking of peacetime. 

    To conclude my post, I would state that any culture that restricts creativity and imagination to a certain level in order to protect a rigid system or ideology runs the risk of being overtaken by competitors and having the system become obsolete or indefensible.

     Inhibiting imagination always undercuts your cutting edge, either on the battlefield or in your society as a whole.