ABSTRACT
History is filled with examples of highly impactful and disruptive events. Revolutionary wars, civil wars, and world wars have impacted the world for millennia. For the vast majority of history, military conflict has been fought between two large government states in a formalized approach where each side amasses the most resources possible in an attempt to overwhelm the other side. In each case, war has leveraged an astronomical amount of resources and typically has represented a significant percentage of the capabilities of the nation-state. For example, the US government has traditionally spent 1%–4% of the gross domestic product (GDP) on military defense and preparedness during peacetime, but this figure jumped to 41% during World War II [2]. In all cases, the results of war were large scale and tragic to areas beyond the location of simply fighting or military skirmishes. These high-impact events were always the result of resource-intensive or high-input events. In many ways this balance of input and output was predictable and understood as a natural balance.
