Abstract. The article reveals the essence of the concept of military-economic cycles: they should be understood as such a form of socio-economic cyclicity, which, both in historical retrospective and in modern conditions of the formation of an information-network society, is generated by the struggle for resources that provide social units or complex social organisms - the winners in the struggle for economic and military-political leadership - the opportunity to dominate in the long term and successfully develop for some time, while maintaining stability. The cyclical nature of wars is clearly seen in the deployment of such global cycles of capitalism as the Kondratieff cycles, long cycles of world politics, and cycles of hegemony. Innovative military technologies are able to accelerate the deployment and make the militaristic component of those phases of long-term socio-economic cycles characterized by the outbreak of wars and increased instability, in particular, the upward waves of Kondratieff cycles, the “macro-resolution” phases of long cycles of world politics, the periods of thirty years of world wars in deployment cycles of hegemony. Wars are a way to resolve geopolitical contradictions, but they have a destructive effect on the natural environment, human development processes, and institutional environment, which hinders the advancement of mankind toward sustainable development, therefore, in modern conditions, it is necessary to develop and put into practice a global institutional consensus that obliges participants in geopolitical competition to interact in accordance with the law of techno-humanitarian balance, which will provide peaceful forms of resolving the contradictions of world development.