Technology, Warfare, and the Fleetingness of Technological Advantages

Technology can change balances of power in large and unpredictable ways. It may favor defense in one period, and attack in another. Machine guns and barbed wire seemed to favor mutual attrition in WWI, and minimize the effectiveness of strategy and calculated movement -- at least until toward the end, the first crude tanks were deployed.

Nuclear weapons led to decades of huge military build-ups and relatively small proxy wars, and a dangerous dependence on spreading sophisticated arms and military training among unstable, irrational and undemocratic allies, and especially towards the end of the Cold War, building up the capabilities, organizational ability, and confidence of extreme groups like the Wahabis and Muslim Brotherhood.

It is hard to remember the few short years when the atom bomb seemed to give America an unanswerable advantage.

The use of drone aircraft, esp. in Pakistan and Afghanistan may help accomplish the seemingly impossible task of flushing Al Queda out of wild mountainous areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but at the risk of outraging much public opinion in Pakistan and possibly helping destabilize Pakistan with its large nuclear arsenal. The advantage could also be short lived. With advancing technology, a new kind of cheap off-the-shelf drone may some day be widespread, wiping out this U.S. advantage.

Drones, "smart bombs", and all the high technology warfare that the U.S. alone has mastery of at the moment are dependent on some very fragile infrastructure and a peculiar state of international affairs. For a long while, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had a mutual reluctance to militarize space, with the exception of spying and the extreme case of ICBMs. I.e. we did not shoot down eachother's satellites. If one did, the other would, and the world was safer if we both had spy satellites than if neither did. For the last 2 decades inertia has ruled in this area, except that the U.S., with its new use of aerospace enhanced "conventional" weapons is "playing a dangerous game", giving other nations the motive to shoot down our satellites. China is probably the only nation likely to do this, having the technological strength (and wealth), and the possibilities for vast hidden military power (I think China must be the least monitored and monitorable great power having still great hinterlands that can be hidden from foreigners and from the vast majority of Chinese). This, combined with the sheer manpower of China, could facilitate enormous secret projects. These might involve the training of huge numbers of soldiers in foreign languages and whatever else it might take to quickly seize and hold an area, say, of the middle East. Or they might involve developing and assembling some new technology of warfare, such as a communication network consisting of a vast swarm of solar powered unmanned planes distributed high in the atmosphere, and simply too numerous to take down with any technology other than a very similar but superior swarm of robotic flying machines (while satellites remain extemely vulnerable -- I can only imagine such a system deployed after the U.S. satellite communication system was destroyed. It would be enormously hostile and provocative but an extremely effective shift in the balance of power). As long as China does not become an open democratic society, such things are at least remotely possible. On the other hand, a rich and comfortable ruling class will at most times prefer the status quo to the unpredictable consequences of such a move, which probably gives us time to try to resume making the world more open and democratic.