Fugitive Caesar

Wars were highly popular during the Roman Empire, or British Empire, or first century of American Republic, because militaries were accustomed to winning; getting rich from plunder and annexing new land. Andrew Jackson and other generals became rich, powerful.

The military used to be the best career path available for rapid social advancement, especially during intense periods of violent upheaval. Men like Napoleon or Junger could come out of nowhere and make a name for themselves. Even after WW1, military conscription was popular.

It's a recent development that war is seen as unpopular and pessimistic.

After WW2, when the American Empire conquered the world, the managerial bureaucracy was scared of its own war machine, and went to work dismantling their own military competence to prevent the possibility of internal coups. Men like Patton and Douglas MacArthur were feared.

The State Department starts the wars, and the Pentagon fights the wars. This gives an illusion of unity. But the lesbians running the State Department (Victoria Nuland) are repulsed and horrified by the gorilla alpha male womanizers who do infantry combat. (Pete Hegseth)

Vietnam, the Korean War, Afghanistan, and Iraq were all based around this tension, where a masculine Pentagon tried to win a war while the lawyers and bureaucrats of State Department did everything they could to handcuff American military with Kafkaesque rules of engagement.

The CIA and State Department have gotten very good at Color Revolutions, and they repeated this same playbook at home in America with the George Floyd BLM protests. This tactic was used in the 2010-2012 Arab Spring, and the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine.

If an American incel could enlist for war with Iran with the expectation of a million dollars in plunder, 50 acres of conquered land, and a busty Persian baddie as his state-mandatory girlfriend, you would see millions of American young men jumping at the chance to invade Iran.

This concept is completely alien to the modern worldview, because America is a feminized, demilitarized longhouse police state ruled for geriatric Boomers, feminist women, and nonwhite ethnic groups.

The American military has been turned into a Soviet welfare jobs program for nonwhites and women, with a very small division of elite troops armed with the best vehicles and weapons in all of history.

The real question of war is whether it's going to be TSA security theatre designed by lawyers and bureaucrats to PREVENT masculine soldiers from winning, OR whether the dogs in the American military will be let off the leash.

If the American military was allowed to win, you would see a big change in social perception. Young ambitious men from Harvard would be joining Special Forces instead of going to Wall Street or Silicon Valley, because combat would be viewed as the fastest path to celebrity.

Again, this is completely alien, unimaginable to modern mind. But from Julius Caesar to George Washington to Andrew Jackson, war was viewed as best path to chase selfish ambition. Crassus was richest man in Rome, and he still started a dumb war with Parthia to gain power.

Imagine Elon Musk hiring a private army of one million American incels to colonize Rwanda without government approval, and you will start to understand the traditional perception of war.

War always sucks for the losing side. But I struggle to think of any premodern examples when war was unpopular among ordinary citizens. One rare example would be John Felton's assassination of the Duke of Buckingham in 1628, an incompetent general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Felton_(assassin)

But the specific complain here was the Duke of Buckingham kept getting his soldiers killed, he got rich by failing upwards, and the British king was rumored to have a sexual affair with the Duke of Buckingham. Nobody complained about war, so much as nepotistic incompetence

Maybe the difference here is that modern citizens take it for granted that our armies will be commanded by vast numbers of Dukes of Buckingham, incompetent sexual degenerates who build their reputations by failing upwards. 