With wars becoming less lethal should there perhaps be more of them?

The alternative of arms industries going out of business in Sweden (largest arms industry per capita) is too horrible to imagine.

Pete

There's only a decline because they've NOT counted so many varieties, it's just another statistical Furphy.
Lies, Damn lies, and Statistics.

For sheer insensitivity Pat Byrne's Online Opinion "Locking up the dogs of war: huge decline in war-related deaths" takes the prize for sheer insensitivity. Pat, the Vice President of the National Civic Council may be correct about the total number of deaths but this is not the time for celebrating with the Middle East aflame and Boko Haram and other radical Islamists wreaking havoc in Africa. Has Pat not noticed the shootings and beheadings of surrendered Iraqi Shias by the Islamic State? Or the decapitations of children? Or the executions of his fellow Christians? Front page news today is the decapitation of a US journalist - one of thousands of deaths in the Iraq-Syria region controlled by ISIS.
The real motivation behind Pat Byrne's article appears to be to protect the reputation of Islam, as in his equally insensitive article following the Boston Marathon Massacre in which he lauded the fact that there were so few US deaths caused by Islamic terrorism. In that article he overlooked the decapitation of US journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, just as he has ignored all the beheadings and executions by bullets being conducted by ISIS right now

Another motivation behind Pat Byrne's extraordinary article on the decline of war deaths (when his fellow Christians are suffering genocide in Iraq) is his determination to challenge the theme of the "Clash of Civilizations" as in Samuel Huntington's famous thesis. The public beheadings, enslavement of women and girls, and the shooting of defeated Shias as practised by ISIS certainly demonstrate a Clash of Civilizations compared to democracies, especially those with a Christian heritage. Even in the two world wars, the Geneva Convention was in the main observed: enemy troops who surrendered were not murdered in cold blood. IS murders even civilians belonging to the "wrong" Muslim sect.
However, the real question is why Pat Byrne is expending so much of his energy in defending Islam? After all the extremists are not the only problem. Closer to home the Sultan of Brunei is imposing brutal Sharia law on his country: that includes death for apostates, adulterers and homosexuals, amputations for theives and all the other excesses of the "religion of peace".
But one has to admit Pat Byrne's timing is impeccable - as with his Boston Massacre Bombing article, this one will inflict maximum grief on the family of Jim Foley, the murdered US journalist and all those who have lost loved ones to the brutalities of ISIS and Boko Haram. Does Pat not count the missing 200 Nigerian school girls among the "war deaths"?

i enjoyed reading this article. It reminds me of the lack of objective reporting in our mass media. We get the horror transmitted via smartphones to wow and terrorise us. Rightfully, we are disgusted by what we see.

However, hardly anyone seems to offer perspective and connects the dots to see the bigger picture.

Definitely one of the better articles to appear on this site. And it does offer some facts to help those who despair, which includes several of my family members!!