War's sad meaning

Thomas Bruscino, author of A Nation Forged in War: How World War II Taught Americans to Get Along (University of Tennessee): "War, after all, is about competing purposes, competing causes, competing ideals—produced by polities, defined by policymakers, put into action by military professionals, and fought for by average soldiers. War itself does not care about the relative merits of those ideals, but the outcome of war, and therefore the outcome of combat, determines which ideal wins. The outcome of war determines which cause gets to survive, thrive, and guide the lives of people in peace, and just as importantly, which cause does not get to shape the peace. Most vitally, war decides which ideal gets to be fought for again. War is regrettably a part of the human condition, and it is many awful things, but it is never meaningless."