The Strategy of Technology

The Strategy of Technology doctrine involves a country using its advantage in technology to create and deploy weapons of sufficient power and numbers so as to overawe or beggar its opponents, forcing them to spend their limited resources on developing hi-tech countermeasures and straining their economy.

In 1983, The US Defense Intelligence Agency established a classified program, Project Socrates, to develop a national technology strategy policy. This program was designed to maintain the US military strength relative to the Soviet Union, while also maintaining the economic and military strength required to keep the US as a superpower. An IT strategy mainly covers all the facets of technology management, including human capital management, cost management, vendor management, hardware and software management, risk management and all other considerations in an IT environment.

The Strategy of Technology is described in the eponymous book written by Stefan T. Possony, Jerry Pournelle and Francis X. Kane (Col., USAF, and ret.) in 1970. This was required reading in the U.S. service academies, the Air War College, and the National War College during the latter half of the Cold War.

The classic example of the successful deployment of this strategy was the nuclear build-up between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the Cold War.

Some observers believe that the Vietnam War was a necessary attritive component to this war — Soviet industrial capacity was diverted to conventional arms in North Vietnam, rather than development of new weapons and nuclear weapons — but evidence would need to be found that the then-current administration of the US saw it thus. Current consensus and evidence holds that it was but a failed defensive move in the Cold War, in the context of the Domino Doctrine.

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