Technology is about reducing costs. Some costs are best not reduced.<p>Data, information, and control capabilities are force multipliers. If the goal is to deliver (or threaten to deliver) deadly force, the greater the acuracy with which this can be done, the more effective it is.<p>I was reviewing the German assault on France in World War II recently. What is interesting is that the forces were fairly evenly matched, and French armour in particular was superior to German in all but one category: German tanks had radios.<p>France distributed its forces against possibly military attack, Germany concentrated its forces <i>and dynamically adapted to changing battle conditions to seek maximum advantage</i>. In both specific engagements and at the scale of the entire front, German forces could adapt far faster than the French. Tactical advantage: Germany.<p>The rise of guerilla tactics, and their evolution over the second half of the 20th century, and into the 21st, has been telling.<p>Ambush attacks, soft-target attacks, suicide and car bombs, roadside "IED" explosives -- lying in wait for some target of opportunity. Over the past few years, forces in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East have used drones to drop grenades and shells from modest heights onto targets, almost completely unobserved. The prospect of far more mobile killing (or cripling) weapons, guided to specific individual targets, or simply selecting members of a crowd arbitrarily, could prove, as they say, game-changing.<p>And the winning move, not playing, is striking me as increasingly unlikely.<p><i>Of the fundamental and deep principles of economics I find useful, few strike me as powerful as the Jevons Paradox:</i> increased efficiencies at some task <i>do not</i> reduce the total amount of resources or other factors of production utilised, or the amount of that activity conducted. <i>By reducing costs, increased efficiency increases activity.</i> Jevons saw this with coal and steam power. Electricity, railroads, lighting, telephony, printing, radio, automobiles, air travel, the Internet: these didn't simply make the previously-experienced level of corresponding activities easier, <i>they raised the total amount of the activity, tremendously.</i><p>Wading through the product of an 1860s - 1880s boom in publishing on petroleum and fossil fuel activity, I ran across a statement that the coal deposits of the United States would suffice for a million years' supply, <i>at then present rates of consumption</i>. I can recall a time when advertisements in <i>National Geographic</i>, in the 1970s, claimed a thousand year supply. The current estimates in BP's annual statistical review of energy are for a century or three.<p>The amount of coal hasn't changed appreciably. The use of it has.<p>And falling costs of accessing that coal, and increased use-value from applying it, has increased rates of consumption roughly 10,000-fold.<p>Consider the prospects of waging war where offensive casualties, targeting power, time-to-execute, and single-shot-kill effectiveness see a similar increase.<p>The corrolary of the Jevons paradox is counterintuitive: <i>if you want to see less of a thing, make it very, very, very expensive.</i><p>How does one do that here?