Interestingly, none of those big wars happened right after the key technologies were introduced. There was always a substantial lag. Most of the bow and stirrup technologies that made the Mongols so fearsome were invented a millennium earlier by the Xiongnu (the predecessor of the Huns). Cannon and muskets were invented a century before the cataclysms of the 1600s.

The World Wars saw rapid innovation, but the machine gun, the howitzer, the ironclad battleship, and other key technologies were pioneered earlier. There were constant incremental improvements in all of these technologies, of course, but it's unlikely that they reached some special threshold of lethality that caused wars to suddenly get much much bigger and deadlier.

Instead, what changed were the societies that made use of the weapons.

There were plenty of steppe empires before the Mongols, but they usually weren't able to overcome densely populated, settled civilizations like China. Only once Genghis Khan implemented reforms like meritocracy, writing, and so on were the steppe warlords able to break through and conquer the world.

Mongol tactics - especially the ability of mounted units to remain separate for days and then all converge on the same place at the same time - required sociocultural innovations to prevent defection/betrayal and ensure cooperation among highly mobile subcommanders.

Similarly, firearms and artillery saw wide adoption by the 1400s, but it wasn't until the 1600s that gunpowder armies grew to truly massive size - hundreds of thousands of men instead of tens of thousands. That increase in size drove much of the higher death toll of the wars of the 1600s, since those giant armies had to live off the land, which caused famines and massacres (the battlefield death toll was higher too, obviously).

Those big armies required lots of money, which required lots of financing - better tax collection and more bank loans. Paul Kennedy notes that the countries that won wars in the gunpowder era tended to be the ones that were the best at tax collection. Charles Tilly argues that gunpowder-era wars made the modern state, because the regimes that survived were the ones that developed complex bureaucracies in order to collect more taxes to fund their wars.

The World Wars were also made possible by innovations in social organization - modern corporations, even larger bureaucracies, modern supply and logistics, and continuous research and development. Those social innovations emerged partly as a way to make countries more effective in war - if you didn't develop those things, you were liable to be conquered.

It's likely that all three eras of warfare required innovations in persuasion, ideology and communication as well. Genghis Khan had to convince a plethora of fractious steppe warlords to all stick together and cooperate. The great powers of the 1600s used a combination of religion and local loyalties - often communicated using the printing press - to help motivate their large armies to fight.

In the 20th-century wars, ideologies like communism, fascism, and democracy were key, and radio was an important new tool. All of those ideological changes changed society as well.

It was these social changes that allowed wars to get so big and cataclysmic in each era. So it might seem like the changes I'm describing are a bad thing - and in fact, I do think it's a distinct possibility that we'll see a cataclysmic global drone war sometime in the future. But from any one country's point of view, those social changes were absolutely necessary, since the only thing worse than winning a war is losing a war.

And historically, warfare acted as a vector for the beneficial spread of both physical and social technologies. Countries in the early modern period had to adopt modern fiscal systems in order to be able to resist conquerors who already had those systems in place. Industrial production spread not just because it made citizens wealthier, but because you needed it to make guns, ammunition, railroads and so on.

In other words, it's very difficult for countries to resist the changes that new dominant packages of military technologies necessitate. In the 1700s and 1800s, you either learned to be a gunpowder empire or you got conquered and enslaved. In the 20th century, you had to become a modernized industrial state, or you got plowed under. If there is a single driving, irresistible force of history, I think it must be the innovations that we use to kill each other.

Right now, we're in the middle of a revolution in military affairs that will be just as profound as the Industrial Revolution, the introduction of gunpowder, or the rise of steppe warfare. The two great inventions of our time - AI and the electric tech stack - are rapidly eclipsing industrial warfare.

That will probably make war more capital-intensive, as human labor is increasingly removed from the equation (and because AI is very capital-intensive). It will almost certainly make it more knowledge-intensive, as understanding of how to apply AI effectively becomes decisive.

These changes are going to force our society to change and adapt. The America that won World War 2 didn't look like the America of Thomas Jefferson's time. And if we want to remain powerful and secure, the America of the 21st century won't look like Roosevelt's America, either. It can't.

Right now, China looks like it's outpacing other societies in terms of adapting itself to the new requirements of war. Possibly alone among all countries, it has mastered every part of the drone supply chain.

China's emphasis on manufacturing, while perhaps not economically efficient, has also probably prepared it better for prolonged capital-intensive war. Right now, they would be able to out-produce the rest of the world in terms of drones.

If we are to match them, we're going to need to make better use of industrial policy to patch the holes in our supply chains, stop wrecking those supply chains with tariffs on our allies, and form closer partnerships with those allies so that we can achieve the scale to match China.

China also seems to be adapting the new communications technologies of social media more effectively than many of its rivals - or at least, more effectively in terms of warfighting ability. We scoff at China's massive system of internet thought control, but it's possible that this is the only way to keep a modern nation from fracturing and spiraling into chaos in the age of social media.

I hope there are ways to hold together a modern nation-state without resorting to centralized thought control. But we really need to start looking for those techniques, instead of just assuming that stability will somehow naturally reemerge from the chaos of X and TikTok.

Most of all, America - and Europe, and other developed countries - must prepare for dramatic, wrenching change. These days, we often find ourselves looking backward - resisting the adoption of new technologies, blocking development and wallowing in nostalgia for the glory days of the 20th century.

But the kind of society we had then will not serve us as well in an age when flying robots rule the battlefield. Just as Thomas Jefferson's America gave way to Franklin D. Roosevelt's, we must find a way to preserve the core benefits and advantages of our liberal democracy while transitioning to the next thing.

Right now, I don't think either Americans or Europeans are mentally prepared for that change. I hope it doesn't take a catastrophic defeat in a major war in order to wake them up.

1 The cost of a human soldier goes up with both lifetime earnings and with the subjective value that society places on each human life. Both of those things go up as economies grow.

2 Technically, I also had to know that explosives carried by drones would win the battle against new kinds of armor. But that's just obvious from basic physics. It takes a huge amount of energy.

This article was first published on Noah Smith's Noahpinion Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion subscriber here.

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