Good point, I hadn’t considered that. If I were to try to fit this to my model, I would say that there’s nobody really looking to produce the best military technology/tactics in between wars. But if you look at a period of sustained effort in staying on the military cutting edge, i.e. the Cold War, you won’t see as many of these mistakes and you’ll instead find fairly continuous progress with both sides continuously using the best available military technology. I’m not sure if this is actually a good interpretation, but it seems possible. (I’d be interested in where you think we’re failing today!)
But even if this is true, your original claim remains true: if it takes a Cold War-level of vigilance to stay on the cutting edge, then terrorists probably aren’t deploying the best available weaponry, just because they don’t know about it.
So maybe an exceptional effort can keep you on the cutting edge, but terrorist groups aren’t at that cutting edge?
Not entirely applicable to the discussion, but I just like talking about things like this and I finally found something tangentially related. Feel free to disregard.
if you look at a period of sustained effort in staying on the military cutting edge, i.e. the Cold War, you won’t see as many of these mistakes and you’ll instead find fairly continuous progress
The cold war wasn’t peacetime though… there was continuous fighting by both sides. The Americans and Chinese in Korea, the Americans in Vietnam, and the Russians in Afghanistan.
One can argue that these places don’t scale to the kind of military techniques and science that a World War 3 scenario would require. But this kind of war has never occurred with modern technology (specifically hydrogen bombs). How do we know that all of the ideas dreamed up by generals and military experts wouldn’t get tossed out the window the moment it was determined that they were inapplicable to a nuclear war?
Good point, I hadn’t considered that. If I were to try to fit this to my model, I would say that there’s nobody really looking to produce the best military technology/tactics in between wars. But if you look at a period of sustained effort in staying on the military cutting edge, i.e. the Cold War, you won’t see as many of these mistakes and you’ll instead find fairly continuous progress with both sides continuously using the best available military technology. I’m not sure if this is actually a good interpretation, but it seems possible. (I’d be interested in where you think we’re failing today!)
But even if this is true, your original claim remains true: if it takes a Cold War-level of vigilance to stay on the cutting edge, then terrorists probably aren’t deploying the best available weaponry, just because they don’t know about it.
So maybe an exceptional effort can keep you on the cutting edge, but terrorist groups aren’t at that cutting edge?
Not entirely applicable to the discussion, but I just like talking about things like this and I finally found something tangentially related. Feel free to disregard.
The cold war wasn’t peacetime though… there was continuous fighting by both sides. The Americans and Chinese in Korea, the Americans in Vietnam, and the Russians in Afghanistan.
One can argue that these places don’t scale to the kind of military techniques and science that a World War 3 scenario would require. But this kind of war has never occurred with modern technology (specifically hydrogen bombs). How do we know that all of the ideas dreamed up by generals and military experts wouldn’t get tossed out the window the moment it was determined that they were inapplicable to a nuclear war?