The Airpower Advantage in Future Warfare

Technological Context
Extensive past experience demonstrates that technological
prediction is close to worthless. 44 Great unexpected discoveries
are exactly that, unexpected. Typically, they are made by individuals
or small teams, not by massively funded official or industrial
programs. Often they are the thoroughly serendipitous
product of a single brain. There is a concept that covers the
case; it is genius. Current technological trends are easy to identify,
but they offer no reliable guide to the future because they
rest upon a basis in science, which is to say in scientific discovery,
that cannot be predicted, even by scientists themselves.
To predict the technological future for warfare many decades
into the future is a perilous undertaking. However, we cannot
simply throw up our hands in despair. Fortunately, there is some
limited help at hand. First, given the lead-time for science to turn
into usable military technology and given the porous nature of
the barriers protecting national secrets in an all but universally
digitized world, advance notice of foreign technology is generally
attainable. Much less attainable is understanding of just what new
technologies will mean for alien strategic and military cultures and
their possibly cunning plans. Since those cultures are likely themselves
to be in doubt as to how new capabilities can best be exploited,
US uncertainty will be thoroughly understandable.
One can be certain that America’s principal foreign challengers
in this century, who must be China and Russia, just possibly
in combination, will seek asymmetric advantage in order to degrade
the potency of America’s military, political, and economic
strengths. 45 Already, the Chinese are working hard to achieve a
useful, and prospectively an actually disabling, space denial capability.
46 In addition, China is devoting major efforts to modernize
its armed forces for combat in information-led battlespace
by developing a credible access denial capability resting upon a
large force of both nuclear and conventional missiles, ballistic
and cruise. However, precise guidance at longer ranges will remain
a severe challenge for many years to come.
The Russians have decided that the centerpiece of their return to
the higher table of states that matter, aside from a coercive energy
policy, is a sophisticated, modernizing, nuclear missile arsenal. 47
This arsenal is matched by a doctrine of very early nuclear use
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