CLASSIFIED: PRODUCE LEVEL CLEARANCE REQUIRED
WHITE PAPER
Prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Produce
Office of Absurd but Arguably Better Alternatives
Gray I. Rony
Senior Fellow, Institute for the Obvious
Adjunct Chair, Department of Why Are We Still Doing This
March 2026
First Edition — Peer Reviewed by No One Who Matters
CLASSIFIED: PRODUCE LEVEL CLEARANCE REQUIRED
Preamble
In the last 3,400 years of recorded human history, the species Homo sapiens has been entirely free of armed conflict for a cumulative total of 268 years. This is not an estimate. Historians have counted. Two hundred and sixty-eight years of not killing each other, spread across thirty-four centuries like raisins in a fruitcake nobody asked for.
During that same period, humanity invented the wheel, the printing press, antibiotics, space travel, the internet, and a phone that can identify a song from three seconds of audio but cannot hold a charge past 2 p.m. We split the atom. We mapped the genome. We put a car in orbit around the sun because one man thought it would be funny.
And yet, when two nations disagree about where a line on a map should go, the best solution we have produced—after five thousand years of institutional knowledge, philosophical inquiry, and the entire Enlightenment—is to send teenagers with rifles to stand on the line until enough of them are dead that someone agrees to move it.
This paper proposes that we can do better. Not because the author is an optimist. The author is not an optimist. The author has read the news. The author proposes these alternatives because they are absurd, and absurdity is the only honest response to a species that spends $2.4 trillion annually on defense budgets and still cannot figure out how to share a river.
The premise of this paper is simple: any method of resolving conflict that does not involve killing people is, by definition, a better method than the one currently in use. The bar is on the ground. We need only step over it.
1. A Brief Assessment of the Current Methodology
War, as currently practiced, suffers from several well-documented inefficiencies that would be unacceptable in any other field of human endeavor:
Cost: The global military expenditure in 2025 exceeded $2.4 trillion. For context, the estimated cost to end world hunger is approximately $45 billion per year. Humanity could feed every living person on earth and still have $2.355 trillion left over for, presumably, more creative ways to threaten each other.
Duration: Wars consistently exceed their projected timelines. Every war in modern history has been described by at least one participating leader as something that would be “over by Christmas.” None of them were over by Christmas. Several of them are not over yet.
Collateral Damage: The current methodology has a persistent quality-control problem in which the people who start wars are almost never the people who die in them. This is an unusual organizational structure. In no other industry does the CEO approve a project and then send the interns to absorb the consequences.
Resolution Quality: The Treaty of Versailles ended World War I so effectively that it produced World War II. The Korean War ended in an armistice that has technically not produced peace in over seventy years. The war-to-resolution pipeline has a defect rate that would shut down any manufacturing operation on earth.
Environmental Impact: Modern warfare is, by any metric, the least sustainable human activity ever devised. A single aircraft carrier produces more carbon emissions than several small nations. The environmental impact statement for the average military engagement would be rejected by any regulatory body that reviewed it.
If war were a product, it would be recalled.