Those enrolled in any advanced study of war must face up to the philosophical considerations and questions born out of history. The first is that  war is inevitable, and in a most perverse way, we are forced to ask, are wars necessary even just to change the gears of geopolitics?

A difficult fact to accept is that a war is much more than massed, armed conflict. Wars suck the humanity out of the members of the military and transform humans into genocidal maniacs and rapists. Plus, those terrible traits generate the behaviours needed for the execution of future wars.

In the Vietnam war in 1968, agitated US troops, under the command of Lt William Calley, entered the village of My Lai poised for engagement with their elusive enemy.