People enjoy taking stock and such a tangible threshold as the turn of a decade is a wonderful opportunity to reflect on past achievements and look to the future. The development of military hardware and technology in the past decade provides enough material to see certain tendencies.
Technological glass ceiling
Over the past decade or two, the military have repeatedly faced a situation when design costs for a new piece of equipment grew outrageously high while the deadlines were not met. A case in point is the U.S. Joint Strike Fighter program under which the F-35 fighter is being developed. Over of the course of the program, the costs have doubled and the commissioning date has been pushed back again and again.
The roots of these processes are to be found 20 to 30 years back when the United States and other developed countries began working on projects to replace Cold War-era military hardware. It was evident even back then that next generation weapon systems would cost far more than their predecessors. But designers promised a dramatic increase in efficiency and given the then-ongoing arms race leaders lavished money on the defense industry.
The collapse of the USSR meant that one of the main arms race participants was out of the game. But the United States continued the race unabated. The U.S. leadership strived for global military supremacy, which, combined with the country's political and economic influence, was supposed to ensure the United States' global hegemony for many decades to come. But the U.S. almost immediately found itself in a tricky situation. Skyrocketing military R&D costs did not guarantee a comparable growth in the new equipment's combat capabilities while measures to cut costs proved ineffective.
The reason was the technological barrier, which all leading arms producing and exporting countries eventually run up against. This is not the first time defense industries face this barrier, when each new ruble (or dollar) invested in military R&D brings about less progress. The same thing happened during World War II and in the first years after it. Then, it was the war itself that 'helped' world powers make a tremendous technological breakthrough forcing them to increase vastly their investment in military R&D and fundamental engineering. Virtually every industry now faces a new barrier, which has forced them to pay more and more for increasingly shorter steps along the path to progress.
It's all about cooperation
Growing weapon development and production costs - and the growing costs of military might on the whole - significantly raise the profile of military integration and cooperation. More and more often countries unite their efforts both to develop and to produce military hardware for their own armed forces and for export. Many pursue an even deeper integration and the main trend in this area is consolidation of military agencies and long-term military programs. One of the recent examples is the agreement France and Britain signed in the fall of 2010.
Many say this agreement is unprecedented. The two countries intend to coordinate their military policy so closely that one can call it a merger of the countries' armed forces or at least a revival of the Triple Entente - a World War I military alliance.
This agreement entails joint command over the countries' military operations and naval forces, above all aircraft carriers, cooperation in military hardware design and production as well as cooperation in the nuclear sector, in which France and Britain have historically been moving along different paths. So far, the former has been creating its nuclear forces independently while the U.K. has relied on the support from the United States.
Joint military programs will help the countries save money and boost their political potential because their combined military capabilities will allow them to tackle tasks much more efficiently than each of them alone. The question is how successful they will be in devising a joint strategy.
Speaking about France, we must also mention the Russian-French cooperation, which goes far beyond the plans to build four Mistral-class ships. The technology exchange between our countries has highlighted another tendency: Russia is willing to buy weapons from abroad if its own industry falls short of its defense needs.
All these factors combined make one reflect on the changes in global politics that we are witnessing. Facing new threats, great powers are forced to change their strategy and sometimes the process is painful. How successfully the world will adapt to these ongoing changes depends on how quickly global leaders will become aware of them.
The views expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
