Quote Originally Posted by Bill Moore View Post
David,

Sometimes a little gloom drives innovation, nothing like necessity to drive change with a sense of purpose and urgency .

Innovative centers like Silicon Valley have spread around the world for better and worse. I'll take your point and raise you one. Non-state sectors are frequently the centers for military innovation, but frequently is military-industry teaming that leads to the big innovation wins. I suspect there are bureaucratic hurdles to expanding our ISR collection by leveraging existing private industry satellites, but those hurdles can be overcome during a crisis. Going back to my first point, a futuristic adversary may have a couple hundred $2 million armed/weaponized unmanned maritime vessels (surface and sub surface and hybrid). Assuming our ISR could detect these, now we have to destroy with million dollar missile. That is still an expensive proposition, so the economic asymmetry remains unless we apply a new paradigm. If it is a protracted conflict, then what opponent's industry can out produce the other? I assume it will be possible in the near future to produce small, unmanned vessels using 3D printing, and adding the software as the article I linked to above indicates is a pretty simple and inexpensive. This can play out in multiple ways over time, either in our favor or against us. I guess my point is after thinking about it a little more is we cannot assume technical superiority in future, as an example, even if we know our destroyers are superior to Chinese and Russian destroyers, innovation in other areas can neutralize that advantage. When I see net assessments that compare friendly to potential adversary forces, they are largely symmetric (plane to plane, tank to tank, ship to ship) and the assumption is the side with the mostest and bestest military toys has the decisive advantage. This process neglects comparing fighting strategies and how asymmetric technology and tactics and change the assessment finding.
Bill you are correct in that we cannot assume technological superiority.

Post WWII? Yes. Most R&D was primarily(90% ish) military in nature with some trickle down to commercial/consumer applications.

1989? Yes. But Military R&D and Commercial R&D spend hit parity.

2018? No. Commercial R&D makes up approx 90% of total global R&D spend. Everyone has access to COTS(Commercial Off The Shelf). That 10% dedicated military R&D will only get you so far.

At the nation state level, not much is needed to build and deploy experimental armed drone swarms.

Some cash

Small, skilled, motivated team with latitude

The national/organisational will to experiment with and deploy/employ it.