War & Peace Quote by Joe Bob Briggs

“Everything changed” is the kind of sweeping claim that dares you to forget the bodies while admiring the technique. Joe Bob Briggs, a critic with a taste for provocation, frames Bosnia as a hinge moment not because of diplomacy or atrocity, but because it supposedly validated a new, cleaner way to wage war: high-altitude, “high-level precision” violence with “a bare minimum of ground action.” The diction is doing the moral laundering. “Precision” sounds clinical, managerial; “bare minimum” reads like efficiency, not abandonment.

The intent is less to eulogize Wesley Clark than to spotlight a seductive American fantasy: war without risk, and therefore without political cost. Bosnia becomes a proof-of-concept for what would later be sold as humanitarian intervention with low American casualties, a conflict you can run like a software update. That’s the subtext: if you can fight from the air, you can keep the home front quiet. You also keep accountability diffuse. A bomb dropped from 15,000 feet has fewer witnesses, fewer uncomfortable stories, fewer veterans coming home with complicated narratives.

Context matters because the Bosnia reference compresses a messy reality into a technological parable. NATO air power did play a decisive role in pushing toward Dayton, but the “everything changed” framing nudges readers toward a doctrinal takeaway: air strikes as a moral shortcut. It’s an argument that flatters modernity while sidestepping the oldest question in war - not can you do it, but what you’re actually willing to see up close.