Richard Koenigsberg: Warfare is about killing and dying. This much we know. Ordinarily  we emphasize the role of killing. Soldiers of one nation kill soldiers (and civilians) of another nation. This is the conventional view; how textbooks write about warfare.

 I suggest, rather, that the essence of war is the death of human beings: the production of death. This is why killing occurs: to produce massive numbers of dead bodies.

Warfare is an institution that produces corpses.

Dead human beings testify to the existence of nation-states.