The Fatal Accounting of War
When Land Is Priced Above Lives
From the essay
In risk assessment, assigning a monetary value to human life is always uncomfortable, but it is also unavoidable. The purpose is not to declare what a person is “worth” in any moral, spiritual, or human sense. The purpose is to prevent decision-makers from treating death as an unpriced externality. That logic becomes especially important when applied to war. It asks a brutal but necessary question: what is the claimed value of the objective, and how many human lives is that objective consuming? Territory is treated as priceless; people are treated as spendable. But land without people is not a nation.