War is simultaneously the best and worst thing humanity can do. Killing each other is a pointless activity, yet the imminent threat of death and the idea of destroying your enemy is the strongest motivator to work together and accomplish innovative and seemingly impossible tasks.
I would argue that it has little to do with war itself but the rather to environment where we can use collective effort to solve strategic goals.
There is a idea that collective action is always inferior to private action, but I would argue there is a subset of problems with outsized effects where solving the problem is far more important than solving the problem as efficient as possible. This is particular for problems where the effects are large and impossible for markets to price in all the effects.
One example is war fighting itself where winning is far more important than being cheap. Although efficiently matters, it only matters in the context of increasing your changes of winning. How would you price in the destruction of a city? How are you going to collect the money if you manage to save it?
