War remains really, really escalatory and really very dangerous.

You know, certainly these really big wars are not likely, but they're a lot more likely than people think.

And we don't really know why they get big.

We don't really understand the process of a war's escalation.

We have not thought about an optimal design for international order for the next 50 or so years.

We've continued forward with the liberal international order, which was

essentially optimized for the Cold War. Hey, welcome back to the Modern War Institute podcast.

I'm John Amble, editorial director at MWI. and for this episode, MWI's major Jake Morre

Marley sat down for a really fascinating conversation with Dr. Baer Browmuller, a political

science professor at the Ohio State University.

He is the author of a book called Only the Dead, The Persistence of War in the Modern

Age.

In writing it, he set out to answer a basic but really important question.

Are wars occurring less frequently

than they have throughout history? Now, it seems like maybe this should be a pretty simple question

to answer, but it's not as straightforward as it might seem. So Dr. Brown-Muller took a very

particular data-driven approach, and what he discovered is that war is not only not on the decline,

it is also not becoming

less deadly, as some scholars have argued.

Listen as he explains how he drew those conclusions and what some of the implications

are.

Before we get to the conversation, though, just a couple quick notes.

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