War is not, and should not be, sporting

I’ve been thinking today about unmatched combatants and a combatant’s willingness to take hits in order to win a fight. I think about the former often because, when I do jujitsu, I am an unmatched combatant. I’m usually the only woman in the adult classes, which means that the people (i.e., men) with whom I’m rolling are 8 to 14 inches taller than I am, and outweigh me by 40 to 90 pounds.

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Problems arise when foolish people (by which I mean Lefties) try to apply the rules of sportsmanship to war. War is not about winning for fun, it’s just about winning. The fact that a war may be asymmetrical doesn’t mean that the larger power has to handicap itself to give the other side a fair chance. Certainly, the winning side shouldn’t engage in sadistic massacres, but that’s not because sadism and overkill are unsportsmanlike. It’s because they are (a) an unnecessary waste of resources and (b) morally bad for the bigger army.