First, I never claimed that "it never matters who wins and who loses". I made a much more circumscribed observation: that this would not be the sole or uttermost consideration from a perspective of eternity.
Second, you argue as if against a pacifist. I am not a pacifist, not even a nuclear pacifist --- a position I consider defective --- and am assuming that war can be waged in deadly earnest, inflicting hundreds of thousand of fatalities (I'm thinking here of WWII) and be right and just; yes, even if atomic bombs are used --- after all, the different kinds of bombs and armaments per seare a technical, not a moral, distinction.
So you've spent your efforts to rebut points I did not espouse.
I did espouse a longer perspective, since this is a perspective we will be obliged to acknowledge at the point of Judgment. And this is a perspective we get, not from hubris, but from a certain ---to use Zelazny's word --- chastity, since it comes of not succumbing to lust, nor wrath, nor fear, but from a fidelity to the code of the just person, even the just warrior.
Not to get too lengthy about it, war must be conducted by focusing overwhelming destructive force on enemy combatants and their military (not social) targets, since we wish to annihilate the enemies' ability to project military aggression, not their ability to exist as a society. Just force destroys what needs to be destroyed; and it discriminates so that the infrastructure of civilization, and of biological life itself, is not selected as "target".
Discrimination is the key. A person who flicks off morality and is willing to engage in indiscriminate killing, is not engaged in war, but in murder; he is not defending his nation, but turning it into a nation of murderers; to the extent that this advances to completion, in the end he and his enemies are indistinguishable. They are the same, and he has destroyed his society in order to save it.
This is the Judgment of which I speak.
“...I never claimed that “it never matters who wins and who loses”. I made a much more circumscribed observation: that this would not be the sole or uttermost consideration from a perspective of eternity.”
This is an attempt to play it both ways.
Situations can be assessed differently, depending on perspective (time interval is only one example). As the time interval between “then” (for example, August 1945) and “now” increases without limit, it can be argued that it is moving in the direction of “eternity” (objectively defined as “limitless” but in subjective human terms, it’s only an interval sufficiently large that people have trouble imagining it).
Moral absolutists dislike a change of perspective if it chances to nudge results away from their preferences. How can they remain in control?
They declare that “eternity” is the more important concept; conventional wisdom reinforces their ploy, as nearly everyone is impressed by large numbers. Any moral concepts associated with an ever-unwinding time-stream get a free ride, gaining equivalent force quite independent of merit.
To tie it back to the disagreement, any immediate concerns (like, who wins or loses) cannot help but shrink, set against “eternity.” A mathematical quirk becomes a convenient excuse to hold the participants of “then” in moral disdain - a way to get one-up that few could resist. That includes moral absolutists.
Many who do not subscribe to such a view still deem it worthy, but it strikes me as odious. That’s on top of lazy.
I find protestations of “I’m not really a pacifist” a little difficult to swallow, when in the next breath the speaker condemns the employment of atomic bombs in August 1945 (extended verbalizings about “indiscriminate destruction” sure to follow). No better example can exist, of dire times and equally dire demands for the most serious of armaments. If not then, when? If not against the Axis, against whom?
Moral absolutists prefer being moral over being effective; everybody would prefer to be both, but some of us lesser mortals figured out that in this world (the one we do inhabit) tradeoffs must be made. In their pursuit of the moral (whatever that might entail), absolutists cannot help but diminish in effectiveness. In any war, they become dead weight that others must carry.
There is no way out of this dilemma.