alt Hacker News>There were more wars before any type of mechanisation of warfare
yes but they weren't comparable. With the exception of ancient Chinese wars which are a bit of an odd case given the population sizes and that they kept sending farmers to the front until everyone starved, European pre-modern wars consisted of small armies and relatively low civilian casualty ratios.
It's this and the late 20th century that saw civilian death ratios climb up to 80-90% in mass bombing campaigns and urban warfare environments. People like to use 'medieval' as an insult but the medieval age was quite constrained compared to Gaza. And if you take the pilots out of the equation and fully automate this, that's probably only a taste of what people will do to civilian populations.
Because a picture says more than words, this is the kind of thing you can probably look forward to:
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And this is a bait and switch: you were talking about the propensity of countries or people to go to war, now you are talking about the scale of destruction.
Cities were routinely razed and famines and disease killed scores of people in historical warfare as well - we have the accounts, we know it happened. The "difficulty" of implementing any of this was enormous given the lack of modern logistics or simple things like refrigeration to keep armies resupplied.
How does this support your argument though? World War 1 increased the level of danger and destruction of warfare and...then we had World War 2. If the hypothesis was that making war easy leads to more wars, then no example presented shows that because WW1 was at the time the most destructive war in history and simply set the stage for an even more destructive war.
"European pre-modern wars consisted of small armies and relatively low civilian casualty ratios." I don't think the Napoleonic wars of early 17th century can be considered small armies. French Empire had around 1.2 million regulars in 1813.