Years and centuries pass, and the materials, knowledge, and processes that started turning out plowshares now turn out automobiles, airplanes, bridges, skyscrapers. Each step in the process, each advance made, adds just a little more value to the output of the previous step, building vastly more complex systems from the interactions of numerous smaller ones. Politics is about the ownership and control of the value chain. Western democracies, founded on such contracts as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are based on principles that every individual owns themselves and the fruits of their labour, that they are each entitled to an equal opportunity to be responsible for themselves. Among such things is the provision of a common defense, in short, war.
War is a challenge to or from the value chain.
Just as the discovery of steel heralded a new wave of conquests against those less developed, war is the competition of value chains. Whether fought with Toledo steel swords, or composite-armour tanks, conventional and unconventional warfare are about attacks on various stages of the material value chain, by methods best suited to the attack on each link. This approach loses sight of the fact that the material value chain is not the only value chain, and I would venture to say, not the most important one. Value chains stretch back to the beginnings of civilization, by definition in fact. Behaviour is purposeful, directed, and a driving force is needed, a motivation.