Military Power and the Advance of Technology: General Purpose Military Forces for the 1980s and Beyond

This new, fully revised edition of Dr. Deitchman’s New Technology and Military Power (Westview, 1979) reflects the changes of the past five years, some of them major, in the world situation, in U.S. perceptions of national security needs, in U.S. assessments of the balance between strategic and general purpose weapons systems, and in the evolution of high technology weapons. Addressing our urgent need for multipurpose rapid deployment forces that can be sustained for fairly long periods, the book answers many important questions that have been discussed in Congress, at the Pentagon, in the White House, and, of course, in public debate: How has modern technology influenced the basic components of national security? Why must we now spend so much of our national budget to build credible general purpose forces? Is high technology running away with our military establishments and is it compatible with a large carrier force and a fleet of nuclear submarines? Why must we create an enormous arsenal of sophisticated nonnuclear weapons designed to assure victory in a battle where nuclear weapons will not be used by any of the combatants? Why do we need the potential of a preemptive presence in faraway theaters? Dr. Deitchman also deals with the basic facts of the military-industrial complex, examining its institutional dynamics and constitutional barriers to change, its technological drive, and its societal inertia. He shows how simplistic journalistic prescriptions and trivial observations fail to do justice to the enormous complexity of an industrial economy with strong survival instincts and scientific energies.