Slowing Military Change
Abstract
This monograph looks at the development of military technology in recent years. It examines three major platforms: fighter aircraft, tanks, and cruisers, examining the gaps between generations as well as the capability gains of each succeeding type. While it shows that development has slowed, at the same time capability increases have also slowed: it takes longer to get new equipment, and that new equipment is less of an improvement over its predecessor than its predecessor was over its predecessor. It is thus a period of declining gains. Only in electronics and computer technology was that thesis shown to be somewhat untrue, but even there military technology has lagged significantly behind commercial advances, and thus to call it innovative and rapidly developing is to draw a long bow. This relative military stasis, in technology, at least, has a range of causes: the end of the Cold War, bureaucratic changes, political cultures, scientific limits, cost inflation, a focus on new characteristics that cannot be so easily measured. The monograph also looks at the strategic environment to see whether that has evolved rapidly while technology has proven more dormant. While many of the issues that characterize the post-Cold War period were also present during the Cold War; they may be newly important, but they are not necessarily new. Indeed, the contemporary period may be seen as a return to military normalcy after the lengthy anomaly of the Cold War. It is a shift away from state-on-state conflict, away from large scale war, away from a view that sees armies as forces designed solely for decisive, Clausewitzian battles. Yes, there has been change since the end of the Cold War, but it should not be exaggerated; rather than innovation, it might be taken as reaction, and the Cold War should be examined from a new perspective as a period of radical innovation in strategic terms, which would further be reinforced by the rapid technological development that characterized it.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2008
- Accession Number
- ADA488859
Entities
People
- Zhivan J. Alach
Organizations
- United States Army War College