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28 June 2024

Grand Strategy, Innovation and Technology-Power

Michael Hochberg & Leonard Hochberg

The pace of technological innovation has accelerated dramatically over the past couple of hundred years, and there is no end in sight. Technical innovations generally take one of three forms: Cost reductions for existing products and services, functionality improvements (including fundamentally new kinds of functionality), and changes in the form in which a given kind of functionality can be delivered - for instance, making the same functionality available in a smaller or lighter form.

Dramatic technological innovations, when followed through with implementation at scale, have the power to make prior technologies obsolete very rapidly. As the world has become more networked, the potential has grown for new technologies to disrupt the balance of military power rapidly and comprehensively. It is frequently the case that highly innovative new technology can, at very low cost, make enormous investments in prior technologies both obsolete and irrelevant. If we look at the race toward ever more effective technologies as a component of warfare, then these opportunities to spend modest sums to develop highly disruptive technologies are a form of asymmetric warfare.

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