"Frankly, the largest problem with trying murder as a means of information control is that one mistake will lead to the entire trail of corpses being essentially worthless, thus nulling all your previous effort.
This is a medieval society with medieval means of information transfer. Even if some lucky civilian manages to acquire the real secrets of a clan
and blab about it to everyone in his civilian village, murdering everyone in the village is still an option to keep precious secrets safe.
Even without making a single mistake on the tactical level and assassinating everybody who could possibly know about your secret leads to a giant trail of bodies that bumps your threat rating up a level or reveals to your opponents some other critical information.
Ninjas (if I were a rational ninja) are masters of murder and more importantly misdirection. Finding ways to make murders look like the actions of another group of ninjas, chakra beasts, natural disasters, or any other more plausible explanation than "he learned the secrets of the X clan and they killed him" should be well within a competent clan's capabilities.
As a means of information control, loads and loads of misinformation is far better, because revealing your secret into an environment where a grand total of everything is complete and utter horseshit means that your mistake costs you essentially nothing.
Murder is only one tool to be used; I agree that using more than one tool is superior than relying only on one. However if my enemies are savvy enough to verify whether or not such misinformation is an attempt of my clan to hide their true abilities and we do not take steps to make sure none of our secrets get leaked we take an otherwise avoidable risk. To play one level higher we should also go out of our way to give some people false clan secrets and murder them anyway so that if they were compromised before the leak was sealed our enemies will still hesitate to use any such information.
For a masterful example of this, look no farther than the Uchiha clan, who have so many rumors said about their Sharingan that nobody believes any of it except the part where they're more dangerous ninja for it.
And how do you know for certain that they
haven't killed innocents to protect their clan secrets anyway?
The second problem with killing civilians left and right to preserve your secrets is that the amount of murder you'll end up committing will make you more likely to default towards violence, rather than more peaceful solutions.
Civilians constitute the majority of a ninja's clients. Killing them is not something to be done lightly since it can harm business, but our business is still murder, espionage, and everything else associated with those activities. We protect our own first and foremost, but we also protect those who serve us and hire us as a secondary concern. Civilians take care of infrastructure and ninjas take care of security but each will prioritize its own other the well being of their partners, just as a family will feed its own starving children before feeding their neighbor's starving children.
Rational ninja are practical people. If peaceful options exist, great; if not, oh well, life goes on for some of us.
For extreme edge cases, look at missing-nin who have survived a long time. They're practically a walking disaster area, because decades of reflexes towards violence makes them attack first, ask questions never.
How many and which missing-nin in particular are you referring to? They are traitors to their own families and deserve to be hunted down. Not only do they deprive their clan of able-bodied fighters, but they also endanger the rest of the clan by taking the clan's secrets with them. The missing-nin know this as they choose to defect, so they choose to end any peaceful negotiations. Extermination is the only recourse for the safety of the clan.
All ninja suffer from this to an extent, which is why peace is usually so fragile and war always inevitable.
Which is why we have to protect ourselves in any way we can; the world and its inhabitants are too dangerous to allow ourselves to lower our guard or be lax in our duties.
Leaf's economy is better for precisely this reason, because peace and thought out solutions are considered before maximum exploitation, which usually results in crashed economies.
Leaf leaks information like a sieve and there is no amount of misinformation they can distribute to hide it. With such large amounts of trade and free movement of civilians every rival Leaf has can track just how productive Leaf's economy is and how safe those civilians feel in the city. If Leaf should ever lose its military strength and this information was made known to the masses, there would be a mass exodus of civilians from Leaf since said civilians would not want to die once Leaf's enemies started to mobilize against their weakened rival.
As for military dictators deciding unilaterally on economic policy, yes the system isn't perfect and can lead to sub-optimal economies. However, it is a balancing act between security and prosperity. Without security your enemies can destroy you; without prosperity you will eventually stagnate or regress until you are no longer strong enough to protect yourself. Competent Kages and/or clan heads will realize how interconnected their economies and militaries are and will plan accordingly.
Sure. Before we start, I'd like to note that just because sometimes killing an innocent might be the right choice, it shouldn't ever be okay. It should be thought of as a major issue and alternatives should be considered.
I agree with this in principle, but in practice I (as a ninja) really don't care about some random civilian getting eaten by a chakra beast on the other side of the Elemental Nations.
Would they agree that the world is not a very nice place? Peace would be nice, if not a complete and eternal one then at least more peace than there is right now. Ninja having time to do other stuff than compete with each other, maybe invent better seals and techniques for non-combat use, or beat back chakra beasts to help civilians thrive, increase the population and thus the amount of ninja. Unlikely, sure, but wouldn't it be better if things were this way?
Every sword you beat into a plowshare is one less you have to defend yourself with. Eliminating chakra beasts keeps the troops active and learning how to fight, but humanitarian missions deplete your military manpower for long term gains at best (barring sealing revolutions which should not be considered easy to do; Hazou is special in that regard).
If you can afford to use some of your soldiers in non-combat missions, then you already are ahead of your rivals in terms of military strength.
Well then, problem solving mindset. What else of worth is there to do with one's life than to attempt to make the world a better place than it was when you were born into it?
Counterpoint: making sure that there is still a world for your family and preventing the world from becoming a worse place, aka, maintain the status quo because change is not always a good thing.
There are many reasons why the world is how it is, and we likely don't even know all of them though Jiraya might have a rather good idea. But a clear path forward would be to provide incentives for ninja villages to not fight each other, as if they cease doing that then their obvious path is to spend resources on improving their own situation and thus becoming relatively stronger than their opponents rather than weakening their rivals directly and thus also weakening themselves. What form could these incentives take?
If these incentives are to work, they have to be judged on their results rather than their intentions. Ninjas are predisposed towards distrusting each other and they all know that they don't trust each other so they will try to find ways to subvert any incentives you impose if it means improving the lives of their clan to a greater degree or in such a way that is reliable, aka, a 'sure bet'.
First off, there's the obvious solution. Get a large enough stick, threaten everyone into line. There's numerous practical problems with this, not the least of which being who to give the stick to and how to prevent them from doing whatever they might want with it. Regardless, we've taken some steps in that direction by massively empowering Leaf, simply because slotting into an existing power structure is way easier, faster and less risky than trying to build our own.
Every village and clan wants the largest stick, but they also want to prevent anyone else from getting the stick before them. The more Leaf gets empowered and boasts about it the more the other villages will be willing to team up against them for mutual protection.
Doable in theory, but in practice no ninja has done this in recent memory.
Then there's the fact that cooperation is generally much better for everyone than competition - that's why villages exist - but requires a measure of trust that is currently lacking. With a rather smaller stick than in the previous case, one could conceive of a diplomatic solution where all villages would be forced to the negotiation table with each other, without empowering anyone specific so far above the rest that they could take everyone on at once.
Wouldn't a better solution be interconnected trade networks? For example let's say Country A has Steel, B has Coal, and C has Helium. None of the countries by themselves have the materials necessary for airships, but by establishing fair trade agreements they can maximize the number of airships they could have rather than imposing large tariffs on each other. If any one country tries to leave the agreement, all of them lose access to cheap airships and the military and commercial benefits they provide. They will also be able to know the general strength of each other's militaries since the records of materials being traded would be closely monitored.
Something to consider besides force (see merchant empire in sig for more details about getting started if you haven't already).
If one could hammer out an organization where the first one to defect risks being annihilated by the combined might of everyone else, everyone would have an incentive not to defect first.
However, sneaky ninjas would realize that they could sabotage a rival if they can frame one country into appearing to defect. Monitoring a coalition of ninjas would be a daunting task to ensure fair play.
From this sort of organization other joint treaties might organically emerge, especially if pushed to do so - trade, security, expansion.
Or we could end up with two separate alliances just like 1914 in our universe.
And if different ninja villages have contact with each other, then over generations cultures should shift to no longer viewing each other as inhuman monsters that cannot possibly be trusted.
People will need to move for this to happen and more importantly people will need to accept visitors into their countries on a large scale. I don't think we have the means to transport that many people easily, especially with chakra monsters constantly curtailing efforts to connect settlements to one another without ninja bodyguards.
I mean, we as missing-nin already know that all people are people, flawed yet precious as they might be.
We as in Hazou, correct? Our teammates seem to be a bit more morally flexible in those regards.
The more trust, the more agreements, and those who don't cooperate are obviously left behind by those who do which provides a cascading effect of more and more incentive to not fight.
There is also the build up of potential destruction the longer a war gets postponed, like a forest not having regular controlled burns (as depressing as that sounds).
Going to war cuts off all that trade that you're reliant on to keep up with everyone else, after all.
Not necessarily. If Country X lies to the west of Country Y and Country Y is at war to the east with Country Z, then Country Y can still get trade from Country X relatively easily.
If we force everyone to talk out their conflicts before resorting to force, maybe one day the default reaction to problems will become talking rather than force, and war will be a last resort kind of thing instead?
Emphasis mine. We still have the problem of other villages banding together to protect themselves from the new threat and/or engaging in covert operations against the new threat to stop its rapid ascension to power.
Regardless, we will need that stick - enough strength and influence to push our vision on the world. We've got a fair start, but since we know sealing we think of things from that perspective. I'm sure Keiko has much greater insight into the specifics of economics and politics, for instance. We really should bring our ultimate goals and our thoughts on the path there to the attention of our allies, and ask for their input. In the worst case, we don't want our ideals to die with us.
We could also try establishing a new settlement in an inaccessible place for ordinary ninjas (LEO sounds good) and then experiment with different forms of government there. Then once we have a system that can out produce the current political quagmire we can use it as justification for switching to our new form of government. On the other hand, if our new government is so effective at out producing the other villages we should be able to solve the large stick problem faster than they can
and not have our research curtailed by their covert ops.
Basically, the 'Become Whirlpool 2.0' option.
Something to consider.
