RE: What are your thoughts on the wars that continue to persist in this revolutionary era?

Good question !

Purely my own opinion, but I think conflict is hard-wired into all forms of life on earth, and humans are no exception. When our predecessors were hunter-gatherers, conflict could be mitigated by the weaker tribe simply moving to a new hunting ground. But once we settled down and started farming, communities inevitably came into conflict over resources and land. The oldest defensive structure known to archaeology is a tower at Jericho, built around 8300 years ago, even before pottery came into use there.

As human populations grew, and as technology slowly needed more specialised materials, conflict only intensified. Almost all human conflicts, even up to the present day, are either an effort to secure control over more resources and land, or a pre-emptive effort for fear that someone is going to try to take your resources and land away from you.

So sadly, I think wars will not only persist, I think they will increase in frequency and intensity until (or unless) we learn to control our own population growth (or wars do it for us) or we learn to use and distribute resources effectively enough that no-one has reason to want to hoard them.

But although it is terrible to say, wars are not all bad. They can be a huge spur to technological improvement. Almost every invention came about as a result of war, being either directly derived from a military technology (e.g. anything made of bronze, iron or plastic), or developed to indirectly support or mitigate the effects of warfare (e.g. penicillin, most forms of surgery, writing instruments from pencils to biro's, etc). Additionally even without the developments in medicine due to warfare, wars are a method of natural selection and population control. All the people who died as a result of war would almost certainly have died of famine or plague due to over population instead. In most cases, that would be a far slower and worse way to die !

War is also a spur to social and governmental development; without war, Athens wouldn't have developed democracy and Rome wouldn't have developed the Republic. Societies wouldn't have needed to develop organisational structures at a higher level than the extended family.

So, awful as it might be, I believe war is a natural human behaviour that has both positive and negative aspects to it.