NOTES to CHAPTER TWO

1. We include the elements of the budget which are justified as being a part of our national security effort, but which are not controlled by the commanders of the Technological War and are generally wasted in projects uncoordinated with defense requirements.

2. The phases of technological development are discussed in Chapter 3.

3. As an example, the center of gravity of the Soviet space effort -- both military and civilian -- was the large booster. To the extent that we had a center of gravity, it was divided between nuclear technology for our military effort and sophisticated guidance and electronics for our support equipment.

4. We are not arguing here in favor of constructing nuclear-propulsion aircraft, although a very good case can be made for them. The example of nuclear propulsion was chosen because we spent enormous sums and invested hundreds of thousands of hours of precious technical talent but made very little permanent gain from the program, despite the fact that for a fraction of the resources expended an extremely valuable flying test-bed could have been constructed. The nuclear aircraft program suffered from most of the faults of the U.S. decision-making process and is therefore highly illustrative. Among its problems were: unreasonable expectations, endless review without decision, conflicting goals, inability to determine a single positive approach, and making national security dependent upon the skill of the players of a political game.

5. We are not recommending that we solve our decision problems by turning the final decision over to random military officers, any more than we would recommend that it be given to businessmen, politicians or scientists.

6. Arguments and divisions are inevitable due to the very nature of scientific training and resource allocation. This is discussed more thoroughly in a later chapter.

7. There have been a number of changes in the situation since we wrote this section. Many of them have been beneficial, and some have even been due to the influence of the first edition of the book. Unfortunately, there is still insufficient appreciation of the relevance of technology to national strategy.

(7a) Advances in guidance technology have made the entire land based missile force vulnerable to a first strike; meanwhile, the oceans are becoming more transparent through such means as cosmic ray backscatter, synthetic aperture radars in space, and other means.

A Full First Strike capability does not imply the total disarmament of the enemy. It does imply reducing the enemy's retaliatory capability to the point at which he cannot do unacceptable damage to the aggressor. "Unacceptable" means different things to different nations.

8. We do not imply that any large number do hinder national defense; the point is that no steps have been taken to ensure that they will help.

9. Current examples are space, ABM, MIRV, and the use of deep underwater technology for military purposes.

10. For an early discussion of this subject, see Colonel Francis X. Kane, U.S.A.F., "Security Is Too Important To Be Left To Computers," Fortune, April 1964. Reprinted in Barnen, Mott, and Neff, Peace and War in the Modern Age (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1965).

11. Pournelle's Law of Costs and Schedules states that "Everything takes longer and costs more." It was independently discovered by J. E. Pournelle and Poul Anderson in the early 1950s.

12. Such simulated tests will never be effective in competition with real tests, of course. The point is that no agreement or inspection can halt research. Agreements can slow it down -- but at the risk of the enemy making discoveries through his use of ingenuity.

13. The Secretary of Defense's heavy emphasis on numerical data from Viet Nam often dictated inappropriate military tactics and strategies. As one operations officer explained, the goal wasn't to kill targets, it was to fly sorties.

14. We did deploy the GPS navigation system, which we discuss elsewhere.

15. Meanwhile, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty requires the U.S. to use "national technical means" for verification of Soviet compliance with the treaty. According to the London International Institute for Strategic Studies, this means observation satellites, particularly the large "Keyhole" systems. The special needs of these systems are also imposed onto the design of space systems, and apparently influenced the shuttle design. The result is one more conflicting set of requirements, and leaves the design of purely military systems up in the air, or to agencies not responsive to military planners.

16. The "overkill" argument goes in and out of fashion. In 1969 it was very much "in". In 1988 it appears to be less so, but it will probably rise again.

17. We analyse the role of surprise in the Technological War in a later chapter. The present section is intended as a brief introduction.

18. Needless to say, GPS proved invaluable in the Iraq war. The concept of GPS was first introduced to strategic thinking by F. X. Kane.

19. Part of this strategic review was PROJECT FORECAST conducted by Col. Francis X. Kane, and PROJECT 75 done by Aerospace Corporation, with Bill Dorrance as the Principal and Jerry Pournelle as the editor. These two highly classified studies reviewed everything then known about air and missile systems and made forecasts of the strategic environment of 1975.