[pdonis]

> Certainly we are more capable of destruction than in the past

That is what the article is referring to when it talks about war being a lot more destructive--that if we choose to wage a total war, like we did in WW II, we can potentially destroy a lot more than at any time in human history. But the article is arguing that that very fact has prevented countries from trying to wage total war, because the costs now greatly outweigh the benefits. So the actual destructiveness of actual wars has gone down.

> If anything, it seems like war is much less destructive than it used to be, because weaponry and tactics are much more precise than they used to be.

I think this is true, but it's also true that more precise weaponry and tactics also change the goals of war. You can't conquer a country, or reclaim a country that someone else conquered, with low-level targeted munitions. But you can do things like eliminate terrorist leaders or take out particular dangerous capabilities (like the Israelis bombing Iraq's Osirak nuclear weapons plants) without having a major impact on the rest of the population. This kind of change is exactly what the article is describing when it says that democracies now have an incentive to build a military not for fighting a conventional war but for "the kinds of actions which mitigate the harm caused by failed states" (of which terrorism is one).