Michael Hochberg
In the 1980s, the United States faced a profound challenge: winning a conventional war in Europe against a numerically superior Soviet army.
Technological innovation – most notably the development of smart, precision munitions – provided a solution. Instead of needing tens or even hundreds of unguided munitions to hit a target, one smart munition would often suffice.
This meant that a single plane could destroy a whole series of Russian tanks in a single mission, or strike a series of logistics and infrastructure targets, with the expectation of hitting nearly every one.
This produced a revolutionary asymmetry and made huge Soviet investments obsolete. Precision provided a way to defeat scale.
Today, the US faces a similar situation: its adversaries are mass-producing drones and missiles at enormous scale. A revolutionary new technology is desperately needed in order to make this investment obsolete.
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