Sociology of Innovation
The "Tocqueville" Base
Trial and Discovery
A turbulent society
Economic Innovation
American innovation sleeps and then arises
Dematerialization of the economy
Institutional Restructuring of the Economy

Institutional Fluidity
Multiple constituencies
Contradictory Debate
Strategic Innovation: Geopolitical upheaval

Dematerialization
The least density
Smart Bombs
Electron flows directing energy flows
Organizational changes
Just-in-time stock deliveries
Virtual organization, networks and synergy
The Nature of work
America’s Business is Business

What does the RMA mean?
RMA: cause and effect
Itinerary and Destination
Inertia, Problems, Discussions

Searching for Sun Tzu
Restructuring: industry R&D and COTS

And the allies
Some ideas for France and Europe.
Opening the debate
Some Choices for France and Europe?

Introduction

According to historian and military analyst Martin van Creveld, military technology and infrastructure, logistics and communications “dictate for the most part the major characteristics of organization, training, strategy, even the concept itself of battle. Without it, one couldn’t conduct an armed conflict, and even the existence of conflict would be inconceivable.”1 The vast amount of land held in the rear of the battle sets narrow limits on what could take place along the front: battles, campaigns, and even war. The modern era, since the beginning of the industrial revolution has seen the front line expand to the detriment of the rear flanks. The path dependency described by van Creveld has grown: one fights wars based on and limited by technology.

The acceleration of technological innovation over the 20th century is such that we could describe this era as an age of innovation. Moreover, the speed of this acceleration is rapidly increasing. The striking progress in electronics, information and telecommunication in the last two decades have contributed to the creation of unprecedented economic upheavals: innovative waves have a multiplier effect.

All innovation necessarily disrupts the status quo ante. This axiom holds as true for military affairs as for economic ones. For example, the introduction of the steam engine and electricity transformed not only industry but also the realm of military affairs. These new technologies did not impact all nations in the same fashion or way. The resulting imbalance soon benefits one [nation] at the expense of another: those gaining from the breakthrough will be able to dominate those who do not. Innovation is an element of power.

First this paper will analyze the innovative nature of the United States as a society before studying the significant waves of economic, technological and social innovations as experienced by this country.

In the second part, the paper looks at the institutional fluidity valued by Americans and how this has played a role in fostering innovation. In this section, the study will also look at U.S. geopolitics.

Thirdly, the study will then observe the connections between civilian and military evolution and how each has influenced the other, particularly in regards to the fragmentation of economic activity and organizational changes.

The paper will question what is meant by the concept, the “revolution in military affairs,” looking closely at promulgators of the concept and at resistance to its acceptance in the fourth section.

The fifth section will sound out the RMA’s impact on doctrines, industry and research and development.

The sixth and final part will attempt to put forth some of these notions as they apply to France and Europe.

A bibliography of documents relevant to the current U.S. debate is provided in the Appendix.

The United States: Innovative Society

An observer of the United States today would have two principal impressions: its renewed sense of power and its bubbling innovation. These are not discrete, but rather are associated phenomena. The facts seem to clearly show that the United States is better at innovation than other countries. First, this report will attempt to grab hold of the rebound effects of this superior innovation, without forgetting the recent decline that affected power and innovation, the nadir of which is symbolized by Carter’s presidency.

First this report discusses the sociology of innovation—which is based on U.S. history and its constitutional nature—and then examines the economic character of the American marketplace, and moves to the idea that there is a socio-cultural fluidity within American society.

Second, the study will look at economic innovations, particularly those caused by a wave of technological innovation, the “drought” between the end of the Vietnam War and the end of Jimmy Carter’s term of office, and then the benefits from a new type of economy, based on decentralization and the unfolding economic revolution.

In the course of human history, the first experiment demonstrating thermodynamic efficiency was conducted by Benjamin Franklin in 1744. This is one of the first contributions of the American colonies to innovation. Just as Franklin encompassed the scientist, the businessman and the politician, the causes and effects of innovation studied in this paper are parts of a whole.

Sociology of Innovation
The "Tocqueville" Base
As many historians and analysts have noted, the United States, in contrast to the old nations of Europe and, it could be said today, of Asia, possesses neither a territorial nor an ethnic identity. Rather, the United States has become a new ethno-territorial entity, having been created on the basis of a social contract freely entered into by its citizens. This is what American social scientists call the “American Experiment,” in the sense that the nation [United States] is an experiment rather than a country rooted since time immemorial in, according to the ideology of some Europeans, “blood and earth.” Thus, the United States is first defined by being established on a contractual, not natural basis, and is itself the very representation of that contract.

The contract is—following the epistomological issues raised by the Declaration of Independence—the Constitution of 1787, itself arising from a long, deliberative process involving not just the Founding Fathers but many other thinkers, intellectuals and political scientists. Completed by the Bill of Rights in 1791, this contract enhances and makes universal the fundamental concept that power originates from the people and so constitutes the state; the state is the representative of the people and the territorial organizations it creates: the federal government and its administration are not fundamental, but secondary; they do not establish, but are established.2

Clearly, unlike the European tradition preceding this era, the populace is not beholden to the state, nor are people subjects of the crown, but rather they are subject to a law in which the governing concept is natural law, not divine right. The abolition of an ideology based on roots and ethnicity corresponds to the abandonment of these as criteria for belonging: no longer is sanguinity or caste membership the basis for social hierarchies, but an individual’s worth: the American social contract is based on the individual.

This notion of a meritocracy, and the absence of identification with a particular region or territory, makes social fluidity normal, not exceptional; the social rigidity that serfdom, guilds, and [medieval] corporations hold as coterminous with the divine order of things, disappears; change becomes the norm. It was not surprising that emigrants settling down in new territory, became inspired by the pioneering spirit, itself arising out of such notions. American history as such fosters the notion of change and pioneering. The apparently endless extension westward, the frontier unfolding before the conquest, the ceaseless contribution of immigration were consolidating unconsciously what was desired by the collective conscience. Despite the melting pot’s recurring crises, the pattern continues.

The United States did not escape the desire to consolidate acquired positions and transform them into social monopolies: the blue bloods of Boston and New England wanted to erect an English-style aristocracy. Robber barons believed they could also create another European aristocracy, but all these attempts have remained ephemeral and have been swept aside by the flux of change. The United States remains a nation of pioneers and immigrants who are conscious of these realities. The closing of the frontier, once the Pacific was reached, and the refusal to pursue colonial policies have not tamed the vision, but have redirected it from geography to other spheres such as the New Frontier announced by President Kennedy in 1961.

This said, the American social contract is not that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The secret meritocracy of elites. The circulation among elites allows for renewal, but it still assumes a society directed by elites. In the American version, there are functional elites, not feudal or post-feudal ones. Nor are the elites tied as such to the state: they do not derive their force or power from their association with the government, but on the contrary, once established as elites, they then bring their status under the guise of providing the service an elite owes the state. These elites are local, primarily wealth-based, whether it was earned in agriculture, business, industry or banking. The power comes from below.

This power itself is not the monolith of European absolutism. The separation of powers theorized by Montesquieu, John Locke and David Hume has been realized. The executive, legislative and judicial exist and function as equals (whatever may have been the entirely normal historical fluctuations that affected the balance of power among these three branches). The president of the United States can, as his prerogative, propose his budget to both houses of Congress. But it is Congress alone that disposes, to take the most striking example. The Supreme Court could invalidate a law passed by Congress. The powers are separated.

But this “horizontal” separation of powers is not all; there is also a “vertical” separation of power: if the federal government has considerable power, the 50 states also have a fair number of prerogatives: budget, social, internal organization, judicial, etc. There too, power originates from below, before reaching higher levels (this is why weak electoral participation during presidential elections does not necessarily translate into disaffection with politics: “all politics are local” is a well-known adage in American politics). Power is increased and decentralized, thereby preventing an individual from long-term abrogation of power at the expense of the majority.

The double separation of power, reflecting the clear limits to a central government’s ability to usurp power, which the Founding Fathers feared like a plague, reinforces the autonomy of an individual and local groups, the “second powers” of which Alexis de Tocqueville spoke; fluidity is the rule, drawn from the Constitution, it is essential to the defining of the United States of America.

The 20th century has seen, since 1916, the [U.S.] federal government reach a size and impact without precedent in American history: the government ordered the economic mobilization for World War I. Fewer than fifteen years later it used war economics more or less successfully to respond to the Great Depression. The federal government became all-powerful with the mobilization for World War II and continued, under the guise of the Cold War, to receive the principal share of political power as the national security state. Nonetheless, even during the height of these mobilizations, the federal government only gained a share of the empire also held by the fifty states. And the 1980s have witnessed the reversion back to historical balances between federal and state power.

The state, in American life, is discrete, often distant, and, with few exceptions, not very intrusive. The American citizen, if compared to a European one or one from developed Asian nations, sees little of government in daily routine. The taxes owed to the federal government are far less onerous than those elsewhere. Public service has a weak share of total employment. The functions fulfilled by the government are fewer and less important.

Still, the federal government as a “Weberian” system of administration is the very example of fixed procedures, of various levels of bureaucracy, of uniform regulation. History has led the European or Asian state to be above most of its citizens and the individual as a distinct entity. American citizens are alone in considering themselves to be the repository of any power that they do not delegate to Washington, [and] that they have the power to change things, whether wrongly or rightly or to what degree is not important, other than to note that this belief is operational and guides Americans behavior.

A society whose social order is defined by hierarchies demands and encourages predictability in behaviors, and necessarily discourages innovation (in all its senses) because the latter could only be a violation of the immutable order assumed by this society. By contrast, a society that rejects rigidity will be one in which innovation, experimentation and novelty flourish.

If American society is individualistic, it is not atomized. Individuals regroup into many associations and other membership groups to work on collective problems. The basic example used by movies is the posse, a voluntary and semi-spontaneous detachment of citizens, the clichés of Westerns, around an elected official, the sheriff, to take on an urgent and communal problem. Once the bandits are brought to justice, the posse disbands, and everyone returns to private affairs. At a more sophisticated level, the covered wagon trains which brought together pioneering families represent the highest form of this model of the collective effort. A collegial community is formed pro tempore in order to achieve a given end. Once California is reached, each family will go its own way, ready to leave behind former members of the brotherhood.

Trial and Discovery
The individual at liberty to seek out his inalienable rights—as stated in the Declaration of Independence, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—goes about his business in an economic arena freed of those constraints with which contemporary Europe overburdens its weak entrepreneurial desires.

A contract freely entered into by two autonomous parties embodies the meeting of demand and supply. The contracting parties, as permitted by law, find common ground.

As soon as the number of business dealings exceeds the limits of minimal transactions, the risk may be greater than the personal wealth of the contracting parties. To encourage deals and reduce risk the 19th century saw the formidable development of the company as the [legal] equivalent of a person; one of its principal functions was the separation of risk from the individual. In a joint-stock corporation, whatever its actual form, the stockholder only risked the stock involved, not his or her entire fortune. The risk was transferred from an individual’s shoulders to the impersonal structures of a corporation. This limited liability is certainly not an American invention, but it has flourished here: today there are some 13,000 companies listed in the stock market, 63,000 incorporated as large companies, and two to three million corporations. There is also a general societal recognition that these businesses benefit the Republic and serve its ends.

Free risk represents the right to make mistakes and fail. American society does not consider failure a sin, like a vice or trait. Failure does not equate to condemnation to everlasting Hell or a long Purgatory. Henry Ford failed twice before finding a successful formula; taking risks is considered favorably, and failure is not shameful. The United States has never had debtor’s prisons; the Puritan’s scarlet letter stigmatized moral deviancy, not entrepreneurship.

This “tolerance of failure,” to use former CIA director James Woolsey’s phrase, “is a basic cultural fact.³ It is extremely difficult to create, it draws its beginnings from all of history and the culture of a country. In Germany, for instance, if a business is formed and then goes under, it is finished for good; no banker will lend you any more money. What is unique about the United States is the acceptance of failure. This is what distinguishes the United States from other nations. Take for example, a junior Marine Corps officer commanding a destroyer, which was lost during a false maneuver in Subic Bay. He was court-martialed and punished, but this didn’t bury his career—this was Chester Nimitz. In this system, you are accountable—you have to take responsibility for your actions—but you aren’t destroyed by a mistake or a setback. In Silicon Valley, people list their failures and setbacks on their resumés just as Prussian officers carried dueling scars on their faces: it’s a decoration, a medal, something to be proud of.”

This is the underlying principle of the venture capital market. J. Woolsey spoke of it in instructive terms: “The venture capitalist knows that of 20 startups, five to seven will fail, five to seven will break even, three to four will be moderately profitable, two to three will be successful, and that he’ll hit the jackpot with one of them, a Netscape or Oracle. He plays roulette on the numbers, not the colors.”

Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms last year raised a third of the venture capital in the United States and a sixth of the world’s.⁴ Organizations called “gazelles,” where business growth tops 20 percent each of the last four years, represent a fifth of Silicon Valley businesses (as opposed to a thirty-fifth of average American firms). Last year, at least $6.5 million was raised by these companies. According to the Economist, a middle-of-the-road venture capital company could count on an investment return of 35 percent.

The risk is within limits, the prime [interest rate] could be raised: there are positive indications this might happen. A market organized in such a manner plays an investigative role: it is up to the marketplace to uncover which firms are performing well and which are not, which products are finding buyers and which are not, which product lines are making money, which are not. This process, which Friedrich von Hayek analyzed, insisting not only on its imperfections but also on its irreplaceability, is the invisible hand: “Markets use the knowledge and skills of members of society much more and much better than anything created under a centralized system.”⁵ This process of selection, even if it does not always choose and promote the best everywhere, on average tends to pick and promote the best. The invisible hand created by markets, explains Hayek, is based on the positive role of ignorance: as we do not know what tomorrow will bring, we must move, decide and risk [today]. Ignorance, thus conceived, pushes us ahead. Market signals are decoded by participants in the marketplace. Their ignorance of tomorrow permits experimentation.

The more experimentation is free of constraints and fostered by institutions, private or public, the better the results are. In this sense, the American economy is very experimental—more experimental than any other.

A turbulent society
As was described above, here is a society that is basically characterized by fluidity and mobility. The average American moves seven times during a lifetime, many times greater than the mean in most European countries. This mobility, quite natural in a young country of immigrants, is regional as well as professional. Internal migratory patterns are sometimes incredibly strong. Postwar California and western states experienced a huge wave of immigration (countered slightly by a flow back to interior western states in the early 1990s), as a time when economic difficulties in the traditional industries of the Northeast and the Great Lakes region motivated many of their inhabitants to relocated elsewhere. Since the 1970s, many have gone to the technology-based industries in the “New South.” These flows are so continuous as to be considered normal.

Mobility is not only regional but also professional, not just because of the relative ease with which American firms can hire and fire employees as compared to their European counterparts. Just as fads and crazes in fashion, clothing and diet can quickly engage large numbers of fans, regional mobility reflects the attractiveness of new employment opportunities. As soon as an idea has shown its potential, everyone storms after it. The creation of new businesses opens new job opportunities. These, in turn, generate migration patterns.⁶

Consider two recent commercial examples: the surprising success of the megabookstores chains such as Barnes & Nobles and Borders, due to powerful data management tools, or the quick rise of Boston Chicken as a fast food chain—by applying new techniques from the kitchen to the cooking, the chain reduced the cooking time of a chicken to five minutes. It also analyzed the statistical timetable of orders so as to adapt to peak demand times. Everything is computerized, from the store with the best location for attracting a client, preferences, etc. Boston Chicken has made it possible to deliver a meal order (half chicken, coleslaw and rolls) for $7.99 in under 45 minutes, or for little more than what it would cost the customer to buy it in a supermarket. Its success is remarkable. “And it is based on the marriage of cooking and information technologies,” explains Gail Fosler, chief economist of the Conference Board.⁷

Fluidity, mobility and movement—these traits, which prove the weakness of rigid compartmentalization, might be compared to a situation in which the number of interactions, the enormous quantity of movement, raises the general “temperature.” The number of interactions creates a higher level of social connection. This “interaction effect” has been presented as follows by some mathematicians, economists and sociologists: if we take five people, each one shaking the hand of all the others, the number of handshakes (interactions) will be ten. The formula n(n-1)/2 provides the answer. By adding one more handshaker, for six in all, the number of handshakes will go from 10 to 15. Adding one more handshaker to n has a multiplicative effect. With ten handshakers, there are 45 handshakes, with 100, we are already at 5,000, etc.

The increasing social connectivity (number of interactions) that could be referred to as the social mix is a major creative force behind initiatives and innovations. The American economist Michael Rothschild has compared the modern economy to an ecosystem subject to Darwinian evolution—in his words, a “bionomic.” The more interactions, the more mutations occur. But, he underlines, while organisms in an ecosystem rarely change, because mutations themselves are relatively infrequent, participants in an economic system are capable of changing themselves through their own efforts. In this fashion, an economic being is Lamarkian, that is, able to transmit the characteristics acquired through evolution.⁸

We find in the United States both a high rate of mutation and a friendly terrain for promoting mutations: the experimental society corresponds to the experimental economy. The United States could be considered a truly innovative machine.

Innovation—whether it concerns science, technology, art or culture, political science, social organization, economics, war—is most likely to arise where there are many cross-currents. It is at frontiers, with their elevated rates of mutation, that cross-fertilization easily occurs. Variation and mutation are more easily created and accepted on frontiers as they are zones in which difference is more acceptable and, in fact, encouraged. Behavior is not considered as coming from the self, but rather, to use the famous words of Blaise Pascal, “Truth from here in the Pyrenees, error from there.” However, where classical thought sees an untenable contradiction, modern practice has found advantages.

The United States has always shown an ability to rid individuals of their fixed ways (traditions, old customs, regulations, etc.). In place of a narrow band of variation, differences have occurred in larger and expanding ways during the course of the 20th century. The lifting of what is forbidden has given way to a frenzied anarchy of initiatives, most of which disappear, or leave the faintest trace, while others take root and become one of the important innovations in their field. The desire to experiment “in all its meanings” and the accompanying application has opened ad infinitum the possibilities for change.

As social inhibition is more or less weak, all sorts of innovations can have their day in the “marketplace.” And, the evidence seems to show that the benefits obtained through “good” innovations depend on giving opportunities to all innovations, including “bad” ones. Thus, there is the Internet and gansta rap, Silicon Valley and bizarre cults, biotechnologies and hip-hop. This “open society,” to use Karl Popper’s term, accepts uncontrolled bursts [of ideas], and it is the entire society that explores which traits are promising. In this sense, the market is a exploratory device in a open society.

The enormous territory settled by Americans allows a multiplicity of inventions to take place; it is on a continental scale, inhabited by over 250 million people. The process of trial and error depends on so many individual experiments that the number of resulting innovations is very high.

So that the cycle of experimentation-innovation takes place, it is still necessary that the social entity tolerate differentiations, eccentricities, divergent points of view and different interests. A society needs to be so set up that it permits, on the one hand, legitimate differences in viewpoints and interests, and so that it creates the institutions for resolving and integrating conflicts. The existence of a unique Constitution over more than 200 years (during which only one conflict threatened to overturn the entire edifice and resulted in a violent upheaval) shows that the process of moderating conflicts has so far been successful.

Economic Innovation
At this stage of the inquiry, it is convenient to ask more precisely what is meant by innovation. What is technological innovation? How does a society innovate? What is the opposite of innovation?

First,⁹ it would appear that technological innovation consists of producing objects or artifacts which have never before been made. In reality, there is a complex chain of events that leads to their creation: they are invented, designed and then produced. For this to occur, there needs to be a manufacturing structure (machines, factories), the necessary factors of production (labor, power, raw materials) and finally, human capital. Innovation, therefore, does not consist of discrete events, it is both a continuous and discontinuous process, that brings together invention, diffusion and, once adopted, innovation.

The history of innovation is basically the history of inventions that have not been innovative, that have been ignored. The time lapse separating an invention from innovation appears to be set at 15-40 years over the last two centuries. It then should be noted that the best innovations were not necessarily the ones that were adopted and gained wide currency: a series of parallel incidents could set events along a particular path, which might have been less than ideal.

Next, it is useful to distinguish among four levels of innovation: (1) incremental improvements (2) radical changes to objects and individual technologies (3) changes in technical systems, that is, combinations of radical transformations altering technology and organizational and administrative changes, and (4) transformations of entire categories, of classifications, of technology, and their corresponding organizational and institutional structures.

A change of the fourth type could be studied as a complex wave, in which each particle (a revolutionary innovation impacted a family of technologies) is essential to the other “particles.” The development of the automobile industry needed:

• new materials: sheets of high quality steel

• in the chemical industry, development in gasoline refining and, in particular, cracking

• development of oil exploration and production

• pipeline production, pumping stations

• road network, including garages and service stations

• many other technological innovations (rubber, electricity, etc.)

There is then a reciprocal multiplier effect among certain groupings of innovations. The cumulative character of technological change allows for the classification of long waves of economic growth founded on the exploitation of a complex “wave”: that is, pockets of mutually reinforcing technological innovations. These long waves pave the way for the creation of new products, new markets, new industries and new infrastructures. By the same token, these waves provoke institutional and organizational changes that are essential to the transformation underway.

In terms of the United States, the historian can discern four major waves, four groupings of technological innovation: around 1820, it involved textiles, major roads, water mills; then to nearly 1870, steam engines, canals and iron mills; to about 1940 it was the era of coal, railroads, steel production, electrification of industry; the next wave, which lasted until recently, featured oil, highways, plastics, electrification of homes. The latest wave seems to involve natural gas, aviation, certain atomic structures, and information.

To synthesize the phenomenon of innovation, it is best to turn to the Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter: “The basic impulse to start and keep the capitalist engine running comes from new goods for consumption, new methods of production or transportation, new markets, new forms of industrial organization that create capitalist enterprises… the same process as industrial mutation ... if I could use this biology term … that continuously alters economic structures from the inside out, continuously destroys the old structure, endlessly creates a new one. This process of creative destruction is the essential fact of capitalism.”¹⁰

What fosters or impedes innovation? One could respond, somewhat tautologically, inertia. But the phenomenon relates to or summarizes other [phenomena]. One could speak more precisely of the nondepreciation of historically fixed values. A firm that has little amortization from an old investment is not able to replace it and will refuse to depreciate the worth of the investment. Another firm, through a technical, organizational or marketing advantage, can take the part of a bull in the market place, or a monopoly, which allows it to keep the rent that makes the monopoly profitable while blocking competition. The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen diagnosed that social inertia arose from vested interests, those who would keep an income stream, a monopoly, a privilege and cling to the historic worth of investments that have depreciated thanks to external developments of technology or productivity. This last definition will be used in this monograph.¹¹

American innovation sleeps and then arises
Having presented a series of definitions, it is now necessary to pass over a legitimate objection: if the United States is an “innovation machine” as has been argued here, how is this image reconciled with the picture of the American automobile industry in the 1970s and 1980s in which this “innovation machine” was the least flexible?

There is a characteristic cycle to waves of innovation. Without giving too much weight to Kondratiev’s cycles, it is necessary to recognize that the diffusion of innovation follows the contours of a logical function (the classic “S” curve). According to the cited study by Arnulf Grüber, the period of time necessary for an innovative process to spread, representing the growth from 10 to 90 percent of usage, is roughly 31 years, whether this time period is for the Cisterian reforms of 1125 to gain acceptance or is for the development of canals in the United States a hundred years ago. It seems to Grüber that for an innovation to become completely dominant (from 1 percent to 99 percent)¹² a double time period of sixty some years is required.

The wave of innovation extends and expands before saturating its destined market. As the market becomes saturated, the earnings from this innovation start to fall. This proto-saturation phase is when problems of inertia and vested interests become most difficult.

Taking once again the example of the American auto industry: enjoying a complete monopoly within the United States in 1945 and an uncontested position during the 1950s, (the era when “Engine Charlie” Wilson of General Motors could exclaim, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America”) Detroit fell asleep at the wheel by relying on factories built in the 1950s and 1960s. Then came the oil crisis, and this very protected monopoly was shocked to discover competitors: there were others, Europeans and Japanese, who had innovated and who had developed models more appropriate for energy shortages. The period of retrenchment in an industry lasts roughly 12 years, about the time Detroit required to reorder its affairs. The same process was also demanded of the American steel industry, which went through serious convulsions before developing the mini-mills for producing specialty steel, and other industries.

The underlying lesson is—contrary to the widespread illusion of power that dominated postwar United States and the notion that America had a manifest destiny—that Americans are not innately better, and their excellence is not automatic. In fact, what was referred to as falling asleep at the wheel in the United States occurred in all fields, developing from the United States’ crushing dominance over the rest of the world in 1945. (Its GNP represented half of the globe’s.) A series of worldwide shocks gradually woke the United States, the effects of which are still with us. First there was the double shock from the Soviet Union, the missile gap and Sputnik, when Americans discovered that they were vulnerable. Then there were repeated monetary shocks, which embroiled the dollar, peaking in the 1971 and 1973 crises and the dollar’s fall against the gold standard. Of course, there was also the Vietnam war, stagflation of the 1970s and injured pride under the humiliations of the Carter era. The wakeup was gradual, but brutal: illusion gave way to reality.

This is the situation in which the U.S. capacity for innovation appears so astonishing, despite the naysayers from all over the world, and even in the United States. From the influential editor of the Economist Norman McRae—who forecast in the 1974 special Christmas edition that the United States was henceforth sliding downhill just as the British Empire had—to innumerable books, editorials, conferences and colloquia dedicated to the American crisis or the American decline, even to Paul Kennedy, opinions announced that the United States—reunited with Germany and Japan (yesteryear’s enemies and today’s slyly competing allies) as well as most of Europe, traumatized by Vietnam, and submerged in internal problems of race, poverty, illiteracy, urban decay, industrial weakness, and deficits (budgetary, commercial, balance of trade)—was sinking.

Innovation, at the level of an individual act, group or company, is inserted in a larger setting from which positive and negative feedback can be drawn. If the Iranian hostage crisis represents the nadir, the number and source of rebounds show the U.S. capacity to reinvent itself.

The political rebound, summed up in Ronald Reagan’s favorite phrase, “America is back,” was the first drive. Also near the top of the list would be macro-economic and macro-administrative rebounds: the decision to finally hold down inflation as firmly applied by Paul Volcker, head of the Federal Reserve; fixing the fiscal system by making it less opaque and simpler; reducing taxes and raising thresholds for imposing taxes; abolishing thousands of regulations that were harming businesses—all of this improved the health and vitality of the system in which economic agents act.

While the trend since the New Deal and World War II has been to strengthen the federal government’s prerogatives, functions and offices, along with the requisite revenues, and the mobilization of the Cold War reinforced the process of centralization, Ronald Reagan and his administration privatized and transferred the functions of the federal government to the states or the marketplace—entire areas which had been part of the federal government for several decades.

Innovation on the large scale never ended. But it would henceforth find a setting in which it could flourish.

We should not forget, before describing this flourishing, that a large, young population, fed by strong immigration flows, is an accelerating condition of innovation in modern societies: those under age fifteen make up a bit less than one-third of the population of the United States compared to about one-fifth in France and 14 percent in Germany. As a result of the Baby Boom, there has been a boomlet, which contrasts to the flattening or declining demographic trends in other developing countries.

Dematerialization of the economy
The growth of productivity and efficiency in an economy are two critical, external features in its evolution. More is produced with less, a principle of least action is at work, more is compressed into a material good, and the amount of energy, primary inputs, and required labor to produce one economic unit (one unit of GNP, or any other measure of choice) has declined historically. A crucial feature of this process is dematerialization: the shift from mass to energy.

The amount of steel used to produce $1,000 (in 1983 dollars) in U.S. GNP has gone from 70 kilograms in 1920 to a third of this mass recently. Inversely, over the course of several decades, new techniques in the metallurgical industry have permitted the cutting in two of input materials. ¹³ During the 1970s, the invention of the radial tire reduced by a quarter the weight of the tire and the amount of rubber used. The radial technology doubled the life of the tire, which also halved the quantity of inputs required.

Whether through the intermediary of using lighter steel (retaining the best properties per unit of mass) or choosing a substitute, weight is in decline. Wood, steel, copper, lead, all components of economic activity, along with coal, are falling, benefiting from better materials such as aluminum and plastics. In short, the mass needed to create a unit of energy or material efficacy are in a constant relationship. Inversely, for a given mass or weight, the unit of action has significantly increased.

Dematerialization can be measured in terms of energy. In the sense that combustion engines become lighter, to the same extent they are more efficient. In a few hundred years we have gone from charcoal, to oil burning, to gasoline, to nuclear forces; mass has decreased, the absolute and relative thermal productivity has increased. If one imagines this in light of chemistry,¹⁴ one could measure the relative proportion of carbon to hydrogen in combustion, and find that carbon, the element that holds the hydrogen but does not produce energy, is decreasing while the element that truly is combustible is on the rise: the proportion, in effect, is 10:1 for wood, 1-2:1 for coal, 1:2 on average for oil and 1:4 for methane gas. One could discuss the decarbonization of the economy. The shift to nuclear power entirely eliminates carbon and we begin to achieve an economy based on hydrogen-electricity.

Energy usage in the United States has fallen about one percent a year per unit of value produced since the middle of the last century. Since the 1970s it has fallen by two percent per year even though the United States is still in an energy slump. “For the last 200 years, the world has progressively alleviated its energy consumption by preferring hydrogen to carbon,” writes technical historian Jesse Ausubel.¹⁵ Less energy is require to make better products, absolutely and relatively.

The transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy has amplified this trend. An economy producing more and more services compared to physical goods dematerializes. If energy is a striking example of this dematerialization, electronics provides an even more astonishing case. The famous Moore’s Law, according to which the capacity of microprocessors doubles every 18 months, has been upheld for the last 15 years, and experts expect that this triumphal process will continue for at least another dozen years. The Pentium 200 microprocessor is 300 times faster than the first IBM PC (1981). The standard memory (RAM) in a personal computer has gone from 64 KB to 24 MB. Storage capacity has grown from 10 MB in 1984 to 2 GB in 1996. Modem speeds have risen from 300 to 56,000 bits per second. Fiber optic networks have increased transmission speed by 50 percent a year since 1980. The 8088 circuit board had circuits 3 microns wide in 1984; the IBM–Siemens board’s are .35 microns. Dematerialization in this field has taken the form of miniaturization.

But dematerialization is also putting the transmission of information into a more powerful position compared to mass production. The telephone directory may be replaceable by a CD-ROM containing 100 million entries; the ton has been supplanted by the gram as a unit of measure. Electrons carrying information create economic value as do material flows, perhaps even more so.

The arrival of tens of millions of computers has shaken the entire realm of economics, production, transport, management, telecommunications, commerce, and society. Once these machines are all connected via modems and the internet, then another revolution will attach itself to the first, and enlarge the latter.

We are enabling the creation of an information world (cyberspace) which is the appropriate location for deploying the interconnected networks that carry information. It will superimpose itself on the economic sphere, that is, on the production of goods (material). But, more and more, cyberspace is the driver.

The growth in calculating power, memory and computer speed has allowed the switch from mainframes to work stations to PCs. This has augmented the number of users and infinitely increased the range of users and of uses. As the number of computers has risen, so has the need to put them into networks. As is frequently the case in the history of technology, one innovation begins to replace an older one by doing the same task before creating new tasks: in the sequence of replacing an old technology with a new one, the goal is to improve and speed up old tasks before doing anything else. “Initially, can a new technology only substitute for an old one? It is only later that the new one will be used for entirely different goals that will necessitate institutional changes in order to maximize their impact.”¹⁶

The technological revolutions in electronics, information and telecommunications were going to recoup the political and economic rebounds of the 1980s to cause an organizational and industrial shock without precedent since the appearance of Fordism and Taylorism.

Institutional Restructuring of the Economy
During the postwar years, the American economy was organized around 500 major corporations, large companies which, circa 1950, alone produced about half of the national product, owned three-quarters of industrial stocks, reaped 40 percent of industry’s profits, and employed one out of every eight workers. At the time, General Motors earned three percent of U.S. GNP, or about the GNP of Italy. Each sector was dominated by several giants, which were surrounded by their suppliers, resulting in a second circle of several thousand major companies that, in turn, were supplied by several hundreds of thousands of smaller companies of specialized goods.

Control, precision, exactitude, efficiency, mass production, large production volumes, achieving economies of scale and falling unit costs went hand-in-hand with the close collusion of a cartel and other sizable groups, all of which allowed for reasonable benefits and dividends, all within a firm and durable “social contract,” for stockholders, workers and their unions, and for reinvesting.

This model corresponded to the mass production of standardized articles by semi-skilled workers, monitored by supervisors themselves using standardized methods of work and organization. The company’s organizational chart closely resembled that of an Army division. Production methods were strongly inspired by Operation Research that had flourished during the Second World War to the greater benefit of the allies. Most company presidents and senior managers had been, moreover, officers during the war—the typical example would be Robert McNamara, who imported the OR methods and system analysis into Ford before going to do the same at the Pentagon.

These huge enterprises were organized into hierarchical pyramids typical of military organizations: on top, the [president] who determined the overall strategy, assisted by a chief of staff who delegated to the senior vice presidents and division heads their operational tasks, the execution of which was carried out by middle managers, etc., with the blue collar worker at the bottom of this industrial army. An entire hierarchy employed military terminology (chain of command, division, division chiefs, standard operating procedures) so that a predetermined plan would be effectively put into action, production goals would be met, goods would be sold at a fixed price. Priorities and objectives were defined strictly at the top, while the bureaucracy was in charge of supervising lower level echelons and giving them orders while gathering information to send upward; as described by economist Robert Reich, “[I]n the Army, the greatest value was placed on maintaining firm control, on the ability of superiors to inspire loyalty through discipline and unconditional obedience and on the ability of subordinates to be inspired.”¹⁷

The type of men wanted by the giants and their emulators were the organization men so finely studied by sociologist William H. Whyte.¹⁸

The prolonged miasma of the period of stagflation, which lasted from 1965 to 1980, affected this model most. Some of the giants of the postwar era foundered (PanAm, U.S. Steel, railroad firms) or faced ruin (IBM, Chrysler, Ford). From 1975 to 1990, these 500 premier companies did not add one net employee.

The organizational revolution which overturned the internal and external view of American businesses is based on the following principles:

The company is restructured. It eliminates earlier acquisitions from the era of conglomerates (ITT, for instance), if these new companies are outside its main business(es). The firm thus is recentered and reorganized around its core competency: instead of sending all the financial decisions and money flows to a central decision-maker, the company is broken into profit centers which are each responsible for its own operations, but must provide a share of the earnings to the federated entity. The firm becomes a network, allowing for a flattening of the organization and eliminating some of the intermediary levels traditionally devoted to vertical transmission. As the same time they are becoming flatter and less centralized, the resulting “horizontal” companies are separating certain functions from the firm in order to have the work done by contractors, the practice of outsourcing.

The basic units of a business, these profit centers, reorganize themselves in a modular way, through networking. The company, as a result, appears to be a sort of virtual company, with changing coalitions of profit centers that combine forces to handle a shared task, whether the commonality is shared geography or a production goal. There could even be a virtual company in which each of the functions essential to the production cycle, from conception to selling, would have a different responsible unit. This business will gladly adapt some of the ideas and practices developed by Japanese industry, namely, just-in-time delivery for inventory, total quality management—all requiring involved personnel.

The proof is in the decline of mass production of standardized items in favor of individualized or customized items. Mass-produced goods providing small marginal benefits and little value-added have been replaced by high value-added goods or services providing significant benefits at the margin. No longer are armies of semi-skilled laborers working, but instead technicians and specialized engineers. The ratio of blue to white collar jobs has been essentially abandoned, because the educational levels and qualifications of the workforce necessarily require a high degree of autonomy, often correlated to a high level of interest. The work itself has transformed: instead of assembly lines of unskilled or semi-skilled workers, of vast floors of accountants, routinization has given way to more creative and personalized work.

This type of business is not interested in forging a strong, centralized bureaucracy that would slow the flow of information and the internal exchange of ideas: the business needs more horizontal coordination. Essential virtues are speed and agility; participating in an unregulated or minimally regulated market; competing against similar companies, even those from other countries; an ability to form coalitions; adapting products and services to swiftly evolving demands; offering specialized services for niche markets and are its trump cards. Above all, the firm needs to experiment, which is something a small team accomplishes better than a large entity.

It is precisely this type of company that has created the most job opportunities in the United States over the last twenty years. According to Robert Reich, former secretary of labor under the Clinton Administration, jobs of this type represent more than 40 percent of American employment.

Silicon Valley symbolizes this type of business. Such a degree of decentralized modularity would be unthinkable without the networking capabilities of a PC connected by modem to the internet: this technology recognizes the social structures that it can exploit and develop; these organizational forms welcome technologies that allow them to spread.

To the extent that Silicon Valley is a representative microcosm of the burgeoning U.S. and world economic “universe,” it is interesting to note a British analyst’s discernment of its characteristics:

• decentralization and networking

• tolerance of failure

• tolerance of duplicity

• risk-taking tendencies

• high degree of reinvestment

• enthusiasm for change

• merit promotion

• openness

• obsession with the product

• collaborative efforts that mix individualism and communalism

• variety

• acceptance of anyone and everyone as legitimate participants in the “game”

• noninterference and invisibility of government authority¹⁹

The information highway, the principal innovation of this fin de siècle, has developed without being made, or as might wrongly be inferred from its name, dependent on a large, costly and immobile infrastructure such as the railroads or freeways; the information highway comes out of decentralized networks, in the image of the society in which it was born.

There are many chain reactions that ensue.

Geopolitics and Institutions

It has been said that inventing does not suffice, one must still innovate: to move from the idea to the action, the scientific breakthrough to the technical application to the industrial process, and, it could be added, eventually to marketing and sales in order to encompass everything entailed by a leap into the unknown. The ability to perceive a new idea, analyze it, integrate into a setting where it will expand, in short, to make something requires innovation. Failing to find fertile ground, this [innovation] will fade away or seek a more propitious setting.

An entire society’s perception of innovation can be placed in a larger context, that is, the process through which this society arrives at a decision, in the same way the visual apparatus, neurologically speaking, belongs to the larger category of general thought processes.

From this vantage point, the United States has an exceptionally rich number of decision-making sources. This study proposes then to analyze the way in which the American system has institutionalized this diversity.

Second, this section will examine how the system has responded to the new geopolitical situation, dating from the end of the 1980s.

Institutional Fluidity
Multiple constituencies
The word supra has been evoked to describe the role of the separation of powers in the United States. It is necessary to add the role of regional power, both in the sense of the extensive powers devolved to the state level and in the sense that history, traditions and practice have formed regional identities and geography: the South, Midwest, and West Coast are quite far from Washington (DC) and, in many ways, are little concerned about what happens in the capital.

This portrait also needs to touch on the multiple centers of power—economic, social, religious, and cultural—that exist in the United States.

Finances: if New York remains the leading financial metropolis, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, [and] San Francisco are also powerful financial centers. The Federal Reserve is a federation comprising 12 banks of the federal reserve, instead of 12 regional branches connected to a central bank. Economically, the United States lacks a center. The airline infrastructure makes the case: there is no center from which flight paths radiate, but multiple hubs with interconnections; accordingly, St. Louis, Chicago, Dallas, Washington-Baltimore are all locations of hub airports.

The nation has never had a state religion—the separation of church and state is a constitutional principle because the First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”—nor does it have a religious center, but a disconcerting number of faiths ranging from major, worldwide religions to small, independent ones.

Even if metropolitan Boston, in particular, and New England, in general, offer quite a few excellent universities, New York, Washington, Chicago, California, and many other cities constitute centers attaining the best levels of research and teaching. There is even a university in Nevada’s desert.

Socially, the country’s wealth guarantees an explosion of power. Nations in which a few monopolize the wealth, most of the population is miserable, and only a tiny portion belong to the middle-class, are also nations in which power is monopolistic, or at best, oligopolistic, with power shared among a few families. This is essentially the pre-democratic, pre-republican model that dominated history before the industrial revolution. To the contrary, a wealthy nation, blessed with a sizable middle class comprising the majority of the population and its wealth, will lead both to the growth of a powerful and diversified civil society and an even greater distribution of power, because all the types of associations that cover the United States represent pieces of political, social, religious, cultural, and other power.

This is not a unique model. The horizontal links and the vertical separation work together. It is the rule of multiplicity.

The intense movement from one geographic area to another, from one social or professional domain to another, and even, within certain limitations, from one social class to another, is the well-known American mobility. As has been discussed, these different types of mobility increase the number and variety of mutations, allowing for an improved mix.

The fluidity of movement, whether of goods, people or ideas, is therefore part and parcel of this society, whatever may be the inertias, which inevitably affect any of society’s institutions, according to this principle: the older and more important an institution is, the more it provides inertia. Of course, the behaviors of a [royal] court can be found in the United States. But the absence of a unique court diminishes its influence.

Contradictory Debate
To repeat, the American nation results from a voluntary contract between parties; the concept of a social contract is not a noble metaphor, as it is in Europe, but a basic reality. A fortiori it is the same for the government (the state). In Europe and even more so in Asia, [government] administration originally played a major role in history, whether royal or imperial. Its procedures are still often marked by this genesis: secrecy, opacity, reserved areas, special laws reserved for it. The formation of large bureaucracies, using Weber’s meaning, has certainly given the government its power, its efficacy, and often a measurable impartiality. But often, these have not overcome the lack of transparency, the monopolization of power that keeps the public and even representative bodies from partaking in decisions, or even knowing the facts and most elementary procedures: imagine Wilhelm’s army, a corps completely estranged from and hostile to its society; think of the hidden world of Her Majesty’s Service, the existence of which is still veiled under the official secrets act; consider finally the completely opaque procedures of the Italian government from which basic decisions about the nation emerge, Athena-like, without any contradictory debate.

Now, even guarding against praising the American model for nonexistent virtues, it is necessary to state the common-law notion of “contradictory debate in open court,” which is largely applied to political decision-making: a well-informed debate occurs in the public arena, not through elaborate political machinations behind literally closed doors; it is an open-door debate.

Obviously, secrecy exists. The United States, for example, supports a secret aeronautical industry, the structure, location, budgets, and companies of which are classified and little information filters through to the even well-informed; this is where spy satellites, such as KH-11 and surveillance aircraft are built. But this discussion is examining how politics are structured, not the actual policies. Since the efforts of the Church Commission 20 years ago, the secret world of the CIA has shrunk. DIA and NSA continue to protect their classified information, barely. Here too, intelligence agencies are the means and not the ends. In short, if the political tools of the state sometimes operate in an opaque way, the means to develop policies have been gradually opening over the last two decades and the choices are essentially open to the public, or at least to interested parties.

In studying American defense strategy politics, what is striking is the number of people involved. Whether it is the list of witnesses testifying before the Senate or the House or the issues debated on op-ed pages, there is a deafening diversity of opinion, the antithesis of corporatism or of a monopoly on ideas:

(a) executive branch

• White House and National Security Council staff

This, of course, guarantees nothing. As the respected defense scholar Richard Garwin explains, “The revolution in military affairs is above all a long struggle and victory against bureaucratic stupidity, inertia and lethargy.”20

Strategic Innovation: Geopolitical upheaval
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, an essential part of the balance of power in the 20th century, more has changed than just the 23 million square kilometers lopped off the USSR. If geopolitics operates metaphorically like a magnetic field, then the sudden disappearance between 1989 and 1991 of one of the magnetic poles by necessity demands a redefinition and a reorientation of all the other parts of the system, beginning with the other pole, the victorious power.

Since its full entry into international affairs, first under the more or less limited form of McKinley’s and Roosevelt’s imperialism that was active in the Pacific and Latin America, then in full force with the American intervention into the First World War, the United States has been one of the key elements in the international system. In Mackinder’s geopolitics, global equilibrium rested on the heartland, the center of the Eurasian world. The two axes were the Yenisey and the Missouri. Spykman corrected or, rather, adapted this view of the postwar world in underlining the importance of the rimland. A major maritime power would be important in this construct.

But, with the collapse of the great continental power of Eurasia, world geopolitics kept a significant surprise from the United States. In a no longer bipolar world, where there is no other superpower, in which potential candidates for superpower status are not exactly plentiful, at least not for the foreseeable future, the United States finds itself the lone superpower, as spokespersons at the end of the Bush Administration made known far and wide.

As the sole head of the world hierarchy, the United States alone possesses all the determinant active and passive criteria of power: territory, population, geographic position, natural resources, industrial might, scientific and technological excellence, monetary influence, commercial and financial institutions, educational quality, military and strategic power, alliances, a preponderant presence in various spheres (land, air, sea, space), self-affirmed identity, a sense of its own importance... All the other countries might have at their disposition many of these criteria, but none could begin to master the entire list. A given nation might surpass, even to a large extent, the United States in a particular criterion, but the gulf which separates it from the United States in the other remaining categories is insurmountable.

It is never simple after a major shift to redefine the national interest, a corresponding strategy, the operational means to put it to work, and the doctrine to guide the strategy and means. Only the passage of time, which shortens and deforms perspectives, would lead one to believe that the Cold War strategy of containment came fully armed out of the heads of General Marshall, Paul Nitze and Mr. X…. of 1947. Visions of the post-Cold War world have been debated now for a decade in the United States. Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, Paul Kennedy, Robert Kaplan, the Tofflers, Edward Luttwak, and many others have tried with varying degrees of success. But without a doubt such a redefinition is never more arduous than when the source is uniquely positioned; there is no enemy against which the United States can judge and measure its strategy.

The United States was, at the time of its first doctrine of international relations—the refusal of foreign entanglements originated by George Washington—a new and weak nation, at the mercy of outside intervention, as shown by the War of 1812 when the British burned the capital, Washington.

The second doctrine, formulated in 1823 by James Monroe, badly rendered as “America for the Americans,” and stated better as “the Americas for North and South Americans, others keep out,” was to protect the Caribbean and Latin America from imperial European invasions. The United States henceforth dedicated itself to conquering and developing its interior. Its limited international power, however, allowed it to avoid European (French or British) intervention during the Civil War.

The third doctrine, promoted by McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt and imperialist ideologues such as Herbert Croly, sought an end to a tenacious isolationism by inspiring colonial policies in the name of America’s manifest destiny. America becomes a power, able to intervene in China, to impose itself as a mediator between Russia and Japan. The America of 1918 already is a great power; it was behind the export of armaments. But lacking a domestic consensus, it returns to isolationism between the world wars.

Since the shock of December 17, 1941, the international politics of the United States is a global strategy. During the entire Cold War, the United States was one of two superpowers. And since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States “of the year 2000” is the unique world hegemon. Most analysts see the present as a strategic lull, haunted perhaps by the notion of a peer competitor appearing one day.

Much hesitation is the price of all this. The disappearance of the sworn enemy, and with him the list of sworn enemies which had constituted the thorns in American foreign policy: the kaiser and European emperors, Hitler, Mussolini and Admiral Tojo, Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev, Mao… As for Saddam Hussein, he is but a shadow of the Great Tyrants. General Aidid was momentarily promoted to the rank of a shadow of a shadow; it was quickly realized, whatever CNN imagined, that there was no point in making a mountain out of a molehill. The remains of communism in Cuba and North Korea, although watched, have fallen far below the strategic threshold.

Thus, the entire view of the world had to be reinvented. What a shock! American public opinion is rarely suspected of exhibiting excessive interest in the rest of the world, having been exposed to the slogans such as “the peace dividend,” “the end of history” or, better, “neo-isolationism,” [which were] spontaneous reactions to a situation more than reflective visions. The slogan “New World Order,” thrown in hastily by some speechwriter of Mr. Bush, did not last a season. The isolationist fringe is miniscule, limited to a small number of Patrick Buchanan supporters on the far right and Ralph Nader supporters on the far left of the electorate. Discussing “continentalism” is more suitable, which puts Americans in the forefront without implying retreat from—impossible—the rest of the world. The Carter-Wilsonian multilateralism that enlivened a section of the Clinton Administration in the beginning gave way to the shock of reality.

Opinions have not yet crystallized into “hard” options. From the overall strategic viewpoint of the United States, the Bottom Up Review put forth by the former Secretary of Defense Les Aspin or the QDR of last May are mostly exercises in indecision. It is possible, however, to distinguish the outlines taken by various historical-geopolitical schools of thought, whose theses sometimes draw on each other and which are not always mutually exclusive. The major choices of the next years will undoubtedly reflect a synthesis of these ideas:

the school identified with Francis Fukuyama: his hypothesis of the “end of history” marked by the clear triumph of democracy and the marketplace is quite damaged by developments in recent years. The very multilateral implications of this analysis, that is, involving the United Nations, has retreated before a more realistic political approach.

Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis, object of fierce polemics, which seems to have covered more media than political terrain.

the concentration on two great future enemies: radical Islam and China

the realpolitik current, aimed primarily at preventing the rise of a Eurasian power, China being off in the distance; this geopolitical view is the basis of From the Sea, the official doctrine of the U.S. Navy.

the concept that the main enemy is chaos—the central idea behind Project 2025, sponsored by Admiral Owens during his tenure as vice chief of the Joint Chiefs—“The threats below the threshold of danger for us, non-essential threats, could snowball and cross over the threshold,” explains the project’s director. In his [the director’s] version à la Spengler or Toynbee, such an idea could feed the defeatism of an empire in decline. In the more generally held version, the ideas have more force and energy.

the image of the United States as a world hegemon charged with the inherent responsibilities of the position.

The word “hegemon” does not imply “empire.” In the traditional sense, logically and historically, it has the implication of power imposed arbitrarily, through force or threat, and which oppresses the peoples in its sphere. In contrast to the lazy usage of the term, premised on U.S. power and its often arrogant and invasive behavior which thoughtlessly rubs against other national sensibilities, it is important to distinguish and not conflate imperial politics on one hand—the Persians, the Middle Kingdom, Rome, Charles V, Queen Victoria—always accompanied by an imperial ideology (Austria est imperare orbis universum) and [on the other] a unique superpower toward which everyone else turns.

Cabanis the Ideologue believed at the end of the 18th century that the brain secreted thought like a gland. National interest is not spontaneously secreted by some strategic gland; a nation, were it a superpower, has no other interests than those it knows and recognizes; national interest and strategy must be grabbed, described, taken apart and codified.

American geopolitical thinking, finding itself at an exceptional juncture, has run into a technological and an economic revolution. It has been necessary, it is imperative, to reconstruct a vision of the world in which the puzzle pieces can be adjusted.

Already the telltale signs of this readjustment are discernable in the dénouement of the Cold War: after four decades of conflict, in the 1980s everything focuses on the Soviet perception that there was a “military technical revolution” underway in the United States. Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov and his team see in the future where conventional long-range precision strike is capable of inflicting damages along the lines of nuclear arms, while avoiding [the use of ] nuclear force itself, the premise of a new strategic order. Military Soviet leaders were interpreting Air-Land Battle as a creation of the United States, thanks to precision technologies, electronics, automated C2 systems, and long range precision munitions, of a superior force in Europe that Soviet doctrine viewed as “complexes of information and assault.”²¹ Guided missiles, “new means of intelligence and radioelectronic combat” were going to change the face of a European war. The Gulf War was post facto going to confirm their fears of seeing western nations proceed to “incorporat[e] information sciences in the military sphere.”²²

The taking stock and interpretation of Ogarkov and company of a “military-technical revolution” underway in the United States was leading them to form a strong alliance with KGB reformers, headed by Yuri Andropov, and to support the new scientific, technological and managerial intelligentsia in order to prepare those reforms susceptible to permitting the USSR to counter the threat and maintain technological parity.

The subsequent wave of revolutionary innovation, in the form of the Strategic Defense Initiative, caught Moscow unprepared: the capacity to mount a Soviet techno-industrial counter-response was completely saturated. The ratio of the military economy to the civilian one was already unsupportable. The appeal to doctors, to Evgenii Velikhov, to Rudakov, to sociologists, to Zaslavskaya and her colleagues at Novosibirsk, could not compensate for the vast range of technologies put into SDI—the lasers and directed energy weapons, calculating power of computers, miniaturization, system integration, space, precision …

The hopeless efforts of the last years of the USSR to respond to the technological emergencies and to their military applications were underwriting the ill-conceived reforms and the regime’s fall.

The meeting of geopolitics and a revolutionary innovation in military affairs has thus already happened.

Civilian and Military Developments/Evolutions

War does not belong to the arts and sciences but to society. It is a conflict between important interests differing only from society in that it is resolved in blood. It would be better, instead of comparing war to any other art, to compare it to the competition among businesses, which is similarly a conflict among human interests and activities. Even more so, war resembles politics, which can be thought of as business competition on a higher level.