I have worked in a defense contractor for 20 years. This change took place a long time ago. It is why COTS is such a big deal for defense. I am amazed at how quickly the military gets left behind. The biggest advancements in the battlefield are tech savvy soldiers piecing together something ad-hoc and driving procurement from the front.
In some ways it is frustrating because the contractors could provide a better system but the procurement rules tilt us to huge over engineered systems which collapse under their own weight (think FCS)

I know that Medal of Honor gave me a new appreciation of D-day…it’s one thing to hear about it in the class room. It’s another thing to be that guy in the simulation who gets slaughtered trying to invade the beaches.

In the 1940s through the 1970s we had enormous amounts of moeny go into research from military spending and as spin-offs from the real or de facto monopolies of AT&T, IBM and Xerox. That research money does not appear to have been replaced and so we are still heavily dependent on the technology develped during that time with nothing really profoundly new having appeared since the microprocessor forty years ago. The military/AT&T/IBM/Xerox path to technology development may not have been efficient but it worked. As a society we need to find ways to put more money into research.

Mike,

The Kinect example is complete bunk! PrimeSense, the developer of the technology, is primarily an Israeli Military contractor. When they couldn’t find a military buyer for the technology they “shopped it around” Silicon Valley where Microsoft picked it up, but not before Apple lost the opportunity to own it: http://www.cultofmac.com/how-apple-almost-got-microsofts-kinect-game-controller/67951

The notion of a technologically progressive military is a comparatively recent idea. It really emerged from the Second World War.

In the eighteenth century, the Tower of London, the British national armory, obtained muskets by purchasing them from large numbers of small craftsmen. Muskets were not the finest examples of the gunmakers’s work. Fine workmanship was associated with the pistol, either the pocket pistol or the dueling pistol, both intended for the private use of an upper-class buyer. As late as the early nineteenth century, military weapons ran twenty and thirty years behind in adopting such technological advances as the percussion cap. For that matter, in the eighteenth century, the true exemplars of precision [custom] manufacturing were clocks, watches, and musical instruments, most notably pianos. American mass production began at the Harper’s Ferry arsenal, but it was rapidly taken over and advanced by private gunmakers, such as Colt, which did not particularly cater to the military market. These firms catered to the more lucrative private market. About 1880, guns ceased to be the leading edge of mass-production technique, being superseded by sewing machines, and then bicycles and typewriters, and finally, about 1910, by automobiles.

The leading navies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not especially early adopters of steam power. The characteristic early adopter of steam power was the riverboat. Steam power gave the key advantage of being able to go up-river as well as down-river. Sailing ships worked well in the open ocean, where there was room to tack against the wind, but sails did not work very well in rivers. In one case, about 1830, the American Fur Company built a special shallow-draft steamboat which could go up the Missouri River, all the way to Montana, to buy furs, buffalo hides (and even live buffalo calves) from the Crow, Blackfoot, Mandan, and Arikara Indians. Steamboats were the precursors to the railroads.

Modern physics (*) is a bit of an anomaly, in the sense that the theory existed before the technology, and the technology started from nothing in industrial terms. By contrast, there was a chemical industry long before there was chemistry. In the eighteenth century, when the understanding of the composition of matter had not advanced very much from the middle ages, there were tanners, fullers, dyers, brewers, bakers, candle-makers, soap-makers, iron-smelters, potters, glass-makers, etc., etc. People were doing things by rule of thumb, and theoretical chemistry, starting with Lavoisier, gave them advice about how to make better use of their existing ovens, kettles, fermentation tanks, stills, and whatnot. High-tech has been more or less synonymous with the application of modern physics, starting more or less out of the blue. It cost a lot because there was nothing there to start with.

(*) As distinct for classical, or Newtonian physics, the kind of physics which descended from Einstein and Bohr, eg. atomics, electronics, particle physics, quantum physics, etc.
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David A. Hounshell, _From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States_, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1984.

Merrit Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change, Cornell University Press, Ithica, 1986, orig. pub. 1977

Both deal with the emergence of mass-production manufacturing in the United States after 1800.

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John Ulric Nef, War and Human Progress: An Essay on the Rise of Industrial Civilization, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1950

Makes a case against war being the cause of technological development in the period before 1800. According to Nef. the potential for war is a more or less inevitable consequence of material progress, which provides the means. “Warfare is less
a cause for industrialization than its shadow and its nemesis (p. 377).”
]———————
For a discussion of steamboats on the Missouri, see: David Lavender, _The Fist in the Wilderness_ (University of New Mexico Press, 1964), pp. 390-406. This a history of John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company.

> Don’t worry. China has already taken the lead.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but China is not engaged in any foreign military ventures, unlike the USA, nor does it have history of such adventures.