Air and Space Power Going Forward

摘要

As we work to optimize security investment for the future, the Department of Defense (DOD) should adopt an approach that rewards the Services for developing innovative methods to attain national security objectives with the least risk and lowest cost in both blood and treasure. To accomplish this, DOD might have to revisit its tendency to provide each Service with relatively equal slices of the military budget. Under such an approach, the Services are motivated to make incremental changes to the weapons and concepts of the last war and have little reason to take risks to increase productivity of man and machine alike. What is needed, particularly in these times of increasingly complex national security challenges, rising costs, and shrinking budgets, is a plan for going forward that is centered on a shared vision of the variety of threat conditions we are likely to face, an honest evaluation of their significance, and a mature appraisal of what will be required to deal with them.