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The Time Factor is on our side, or at worst, neutral.
The Soviets also wish to halt the Technological War.
Technological War can be (or already has been) halted by
Agreements and Treaties.
The "Technological Explosion" relieves us of the necessity for making
decisions in the Technological War.
A Defensive Strategy is synonymous with Not Taking The
Initiative; rather it implies Avoiding The Initiative in most aspects of
national power. Defense means reacting to Soviet Initiatives.
Defense is incompatible with Deterrence.
All technological decisions should be made by civilian scientists, and
technological research vital to military power should be carried out under
civilian supervision, and preferably by civilian agencies such as NASA.
The military should fight battles, but not prepare for or prevent them.
The military principles of Surprise and Pursuit are not applicable to the
Technological War.
Other postulates, derived from the assumptions on
Chart 3
, include the proposition that since we are not at war, we do not need an
overall technological strategy and should not seek technological surprise even
if it is possible to obtain it; that since the U.S.S.R. is also interested in
stabilizing the "arms race," we should not exploit our advantage by engaging
in technological pursuit even if we could so exploit them; and that since we
can do anything we imagine and the technological explosion will inevitably
produce anything we need, there is no necessity for an orderly accumulation of
the building blocks to expand our military technological base.
If these propositions were put to the managers of our military technology in
the explicit form given here, it is likely that many of them would disagree.
Yet, an examination of the history of
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our technological management indicates that each of these factors is at work.
For example, the exploration of space, probably the most important military
medium of the future, has been given to civilian agencies that are often
unresponsive to military requirements.
Worse is the artificial distinction imposed on development of space technology
in the National
Space Act of 1959. This Act creates a civil space agency, NASA, exclusively
for "peaceful
purposes" in space. The effect was to constrain the use of space for military
missions.
NASA by law is not supposed to respond to military requirements for space
systems.
Admittedly, various pragmatic expedients have been followed to coordinate the
separate civil and military program requirements, such as the Aeronautics and
Astronautics Coordinating
Board, and the Space Task Group of 1969, but those efforts could never produce
an integrated national space program to execute a national technological
strategy for space applications
(Footnote 15)
. We have yet to establish environmental laboratories in space to develop the
basic building blocks for making the use of space the routine operation that a
military mission must be.
Similarly, the National Defense Education Act doles out money for
technological training with no regard to whether those who have received it
will participate in or will hinder national defense
(Footnote 8)
.
Many decisions on military technology have been centered in the office of the
Director of
Defense Research and Engineering, who is sometimes a scientist with no
military training. When
we have achieved advances or breakthroughs in military technology, we often
halted short of exploiting them and attempted to negotiate with the Soviet
Union to put them back in the bottle
(Footnote 9)
. In general there has been little planning for technological surprise, no
integrated strategy of technology, and no understanding of the meaning of
technological pursuit.
The above analysis was written in 1970. By 1989 the situation had changed,
although not as
much as it should. Our educational establishments have so deteriorated that
normative scores
on both the Scholastic Aptitude Test and the Stanford-Binet IQ Test have been
lowered; our space program was cut back to a single Shuttle system which was
then mismanaged, delayed, and stretched out; and our manned space program was
non-existent through the last part of the
70's. Then, when the Shuttle Challenger was lost, instead of rethinking the
situation and
generating new means for routine access to space, we spent more than two years
redesigning new launch vehicles.
By late 1989 the consequences of the 1983 SDI decision, coupled with the sheer
weight of US
economic power and the total incompetence of the Soviet economic system,
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brought about heavy pressures for change within the Soviet system. This has
not changed the fundamentals
of technological warfare. It has bought the West a respite. [1989]
The respite was followed by the collapse of the USSR, giving the US a chance
to rethink our strategy of technology. We are not making good use of this
opportunity. The US is at present the only superpower but this situation
need not be permanent. TECHNOLOGY HAS A
WAY OF EQUALIZING vast disparities. The Dreadnought made obsolete much of the
naval establishment of 1900. Space weapons can do the same in the year 2000.
[1997]
The Abandonment of the Initiative
[Table of Contents]
Of the present assumptions, probably the most dangerous is that it is
sufficient simply to react to
Soviet initiatives in the Technological War. By failing to seize the
initiative, we place ourselves
in a clearly impossible situation: either we must maintain such decisive
superiority over the
Soviets at any possible point of breakthrough so that we can concede to them a
long lead time and still be able to counter their new weapons; or we must
abandon superiority to them whenever we fail to do so.
Wealthy as we are, with enormous reserve power in the form of our industries
and laboratories, we cannot keep this posture forever. The abandonment of the
initiative is probably the most
expensive mistake we have made in the Technological War.
Until SDI there was little conscious effort to use the initiative to drive the
U.S.S.R. to decisions which add to our security. For example, we have
announced that we will develop penetration
aids for our missiles, and deploy those as needed to overcome the Soviet
missile defense system.
This strategy presupposes high confidence in our estimates of the
characteristics and limits of their system, which is a dangerous assumption
because the U.S.S.R. is a secretive society about which it is difficult to
obtain reliable technological information; but that is not the only hazard.
Since the Soviets proceed to exploit defense technology while we merely study
endlessly whether or not to pursue what needs to be done, the chances are that
they will understand defense far better than we; and understanding defense
technology is at least as important to the designers of our penetration
systems as it is to our defense systems designers. For lack of a sophisticated
understanding of the nature of defense technology, we may fail to understand
Soviet defense capabilities and limits.
By contrast, we could have deployed a series of penetration aids, some of
which are quite inexpensive, forcing the Soviet Union to adapt their defenses
to our offense. As they made such
an adaptation, we could change the nature of our offensive weapons, engaging
in technological pursuit and forcing them to waste their resources reacting to
our initiative. Admittedly this kind
of strategy is not simple, but the point is that it was not seriously
considered.
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In fact, though, we did nothing of the kind, but once again relied on
negotiations and treaties.
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