For at McCay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast.

We often suppose that wars are fought over things like resources, border disputes, and ideologies.

My guest calls this the spreadsheet approach to work, and argues that, in reality, such factors

only come in as justifications for the much deeper drives of play.

Mike Martin is a senior visiting fellow in the Department of War Studies, King's College London,

and the author of Why We Fight.

Tana Shoe, he draws on his background in biology and experience serving in the British Army

to offer an explanation as to why individuals in nation-states go to war.

Mike argues that there are two fundamental impulses behind the drive to war, the driver's status and the drive for belonging.

We discuss these motivations and how leaders in ideologies corral and amplify them.

We inter-conversation with how those view of war could prevent conflicts and allow them to be fought more successfully,

and also be in lens on how to help men flourish in a healthy way.

After the show is over, check out our show notes at awm.is slash Why We Fight.

Alright, Mike Martin, welcome to the show.

Hey, good to be here. Thank you for having me.

So you wrote a book called Why We Fight, where you take a deep dive in exploring why humans engage in warfare.

I'm curious, what led you down that path through this book?

Primarily it was to explain my own experience of fighting in a war.

I spent a couple of years in Afghanistan as a British Army officer, and previously to that I studied biology at university.

And it seemed to me as I was fighting this war that it didn't really make sense.

It wasn't logical. There was no wars just don't make sense in the sense of people die, everything gets destroyed.

And so I set out to try and explore why it is that humans fight war.

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