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DanArmak comments on A brief history of ethically concerned scientists - Less Wrong
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Do (incremental) advances in military technology actually change the number of people who die in wars? They might change which people die, or how rapidly, but it seems to me that groups of people who are determined to fight each other are going to do it regardless of what the "best" weapons currently available happen to be. The Mongols wreaked havoc on a scale surpassing World War I with only 13th century technology, and the Rwandan genocide was mostly carried out with machetes. World War I brought about a horror of poison gas, but bullets and explosions don't make people any less dead than poison gas does.
(Although the World War 1 era gases did have one thing that set them apart from other weapons: nonlethal levels of exposure often left survivors with permanent debilitating injuries. Dead is dead, but different types of weapons can be more or less cruel to those who survive the fighting.)
Some actual or hypothetical advances in military technology allow very widespread, imprecise destruction. Such destruction could kill big segments of the enemy state's civilian population, or of a population in which a guerrila army is embedded, as a side effect of killing soldiers.
For instance sufficiently powerful or numerous bombs can destroy large cities. Pathogens can kill or sicken an entire population (with the attacker distributing a vaccine or cure among their own population only). Damage to infrastructure can kill those who depend on it.
Notably, the two World Wars introduced the mass use of mechanized units and heavy weapons leading to a huge amount of infrastructure damage.
On the other hand, a century or two previously little infrastructure existed outside cities. Railways, electricity lines and power plants, car-quality roads, oil and gas pipelines, even most roads or trans-city water and sewage systems are modern inventions.