Military Might (or Might Not)

I have a friend who occupied very high positions in the Pentagon, and I once asked him how long it would take for new technologies to begin to level the military playing field that has been dominated by the US for decades. He said, “Maybe 20 or 30 years.” That was about 20 years ago. Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker: Is the U.S. Ready for the Next War? “While the future of warfare is being invented in places like Ukraine, U.S. officials are looking on with a growing sense of urgency. For decades, the American armed forces have relied on highly sophisticated, super-expensive weapons, like nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and stealth fighters, which take years to design and cost billions of dollars to produce. (The country’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan were not for a lack of technical prowess.) Since the end of the Cold War, these munitions have given the U.S. near-total dominance on land, sea, and air. But now the technological shifts that have stymied the Russian invasion of Ukraine are threatening to undermine America’s global military preëminence.”