On Optimism About New Military Technologies

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Vol 9, Iss 2 April 06, 2026 | 102–122

Throughout human history, technology has advanced military capabilities. Since 1945, US military planners have looked to technology to provide them with technology-based “offsets” to enable the United States to prevail in armed conflict—and there is no question that US military forces are far superior in capability today compared to the numerically larger forces that the US had at the end of World War II. Nevertheless, the US military establishment has also exhibited what often seems to be an unreasonable degree of optimism about how useful new technologies will be for military purposes even in the short run.

This article documents a pattern of American technological optimism about many military technologies; argues that a variety of psychological, cultural, and institutional factors influence its emergence; and concludes that the United States is often overly optimistic about technology in the short term. I then discuss policy imperatives for the acquisitions process that could help to mitigate excessive short-term optimism.

The Quest for Technological Overmatch Against Adversaries

Thomas Mahnken has written: “Reliance on advanced technology has been a central pillar of the American Way of War, at least since WWII. No nation in recent history has placed greater emphasis upon the role of technology in planning and waging war than the United States.”1 The canonical story about US reliance on technology begins with World War II, a “whole-of-nation” effort that mobilized the entire US economy and society, entailing enormous disruptions to society and daily life. In the aftermath of the war, the United States was understandably unwilling to maintain its wartime stance, and shrank its armed forces by some 85 percent by 1947 as the country returned to peacetime footing.

The Soviet Union, however, did not follow suit. As it became increasingly clear that the Soviets would emerge as the next geopolitical—and military—rival of the United States, the United States faced the problem of sustaining credible commitments in Europe and Asia without restoring a wartime military establishment. Rather than try to match the Soviet Union’s larger conventional forces man-for-man and weapon-for-weapon, the US in the 1950s sought to exploit technological advantages, in particular and above all nuclear weapons and their delivery systems.2 Nuclear doctrine—in particular, “massive retaliation”—aimed to offset Warsaw Pact manpower and armor with long-range bombers, ballistic missiles, and theater nuclear forces, promising deterrence and defense without the societal burdens of huge standing forces. Crucially, this approach was underwritten by a significant US advantage in deliverable nuclear forces during much of the 1950s, which made threats of nuclear use more credible.

But as the Soviet nuclear arsenal began to expand in the 1960s, the mutual vulnerability of the United States and the Soviet Union ero