Defence Acquisition: A New Beast or a Dinosaur?

Background

As long as man has needed to deal with conflict situations he has sought solutions that adversaries could not match to ensure victory and/or survival. In more recent times this has been reflected in guns with greater range such that they could be fired without the threat of incoming shells. Aircraft that could fly higher and faster than the enemy, submarines that could not be detected. In most cases a nation was looking for victory within the context of state-on-state war and to that end in pursuit of survival very large sums (or % of GDP) were spent on defence. This can also be viewed from the perspective of providing an insurance policy aimed at deterring a potential adversary from attacking. In very recent times the likes of the USA and UK (amongst others) have found themselves deploying military capability in support of one cause or another and in the most recent cases it has been to maintain security in the home nation from fundamentalist terrorist groups or in support of ‘democracy’ in other countries such as in the case of the Arab Spring uprisings.

It can be argued that during the period of the Cold War, the US applied an imposition strategy on the USSR by virtue of significant R&D investment in military and space technology. The resultant arms race was one that the USSR was never going to win for the simple reason that it did not have a strong enough economy to continue to bank roll the military and space investments in a sustainable way. However, the long term downside of this is that it established business models and mind-sets in the US (and to a certain extent in Western economies such as the UK) which was thought to provide the ‘silver bullet’.

One might argue, based on some of the findings reported by FitzGerald & Sayler (2014), that in the future the USA could find itself on the receiving end of such a strategy being applied by China – only time will tell.