Avoiding Piecemeal Use of Resources

Professional planners tend to resist fragmenting scarce strategic assets across many small uses because dilution reduces operational effect and complicates command. Under extreme scarcity this preference can force a choice: accept greater operational risk (deploying without full testing) or delay until capacity allows safer aggregation. — This heuristic explains why states and firms sometimes accept untested deployment of critical capabilities and has direct implications for nuclear policy, procurement of scarce tech (e.g., AI compute, vaccines), and crisis‑time decision rules.