单选题
War has escaped the battlefield and now can, with modern guidance systems on missiles, touch virtually every square yard of the earth"s surface. It no longer involves only the military profession, but also entire civilian populations. Nuclear weapons have made major war unthinkable. We are forced, however, to think about the unthinkable because a nuclear war could come by accident or miscalculation. We must accept the paradox of maintaining a capacity to fight such a war so that we will never have to do so.
War has also lost most of its utility in achieving the traditional goals of conflict. Control of territory carries with it the obligation to provide subject peoples certain administrative, health, education, and other social services; such obligations far outweigh the benefits of control. If the ruled population is ethnically or racially different from the rulers, tensions and chronic unrest often exist which further reduce the benefits and increase the costs of domination. Large populations no longer necessarily enhance state power and, in the absence of high levels of economic development, can impose severe burdens on food supply, jobs, and the broad range of services expected of modern governments. The benefits of forcing another nation to surrender its wealth are vastly outweighed by the benefits of persuading that nation to produce and exchange goods and services.
Making war has been one of the most persistent of human activities in the 8 centuries since men and women settled in cities and became thereby "civilized", but the modernization of the past 80 years has fundamentally changed the role and function of war. In pre-modernized societies, successful warfare brought significant material rewards, the most obvious of which were the stored wealth of the defeated. Equally important was human labor—control over people as slaves—and the productive capacity of agricultural lands and mines.
Warfare was also the most complex, broad-scale and demanding activity of premodernized people. The challenges of leading men into battle, organizing, moving and supporting armies, attracted the talents of the most vigorous, enterprising, intelligent and imaginative men in the society. "Warrior" and "statesman" were usually synonymous, and the military was one of the few professions in which an able, ambitious boy of humble origin could rise to the top. In the broader cultural context, war was accepted in the premodernized society as a part of the human condition, a mechanism of change, and an unavoidable, even noble, aspect of life. The excitement and drama of war made it a vital part of literature and legends.
单选题
According to the passage, leaders of pre-modernized society considered war to be ______