War is the application of violence to achieve a political outcome. It's important to differentiate between this type of war and simple conquest and commandeeri

War is the application of violence to achieve a political outcome. It's important to differentiate between this type of war and simple conquest and commandeering of resources (human, natural, etc.) In both cases, as the scale increases, the sophistication required to support the effort increases... One needs better social structures, better technology, supply chain management, etc. So these "civilized" aspects are in fact prerequisites for victory in war, though war may offer an incentive to focus on improving those systems and their coordination at the expense of other aspects of society. So just as eating food strengthens a person enough that he/she may grow, survive, and thus desire to eat larger meals in the future, eating is not the cause of hunger. What we must also realize (for history and for the present day) is that war utterly wipes out culture and the history of humans, and replaces it with some politicized narrative imagined by the victors. We know little about indigenous Americans, and the future will know little about the Afghanistan and Iraq of the early 21st century and earlier. There will be volumes of information, but it will be written by scholars beholden to the occupying hegemon.