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Sen. John McCain pens an opinion piece on Wired:
America's military technological advantage is eroding—and fast.
For the past decade, our adversaries have invested heavily in rapidly improving their militaries to counter our unique advantages. At the same time, the speed of globalization and commercialization means that advanced disruptive technologies are now—and increasingly will be—available to less sophisticated militaries, terrorist groups, and other non-state actors.
Maintaining our military technological advantage is about much more than a larger defense budget or a better fighter or submarine. These things are important, but to give our military the capabilities it needs to defend the nation, the Department of Defense must be able to access innovation in areas such as cyber, robotics, data analytics, miniaturization, and autonomy, innovation that is much more likely to come from Silicon Valley, Austin, or Mesa than Washington.
[...] There are those who say that even with changes like these, our nation's innovators simply aren't interested in doing business with the Pentagon. And after spending much of my career in Washington scrutinizing Pentagon business practices, I am not exactly surprised to hear such sentiments. But in the final analysis, I believe the brightest minds will always be driven to solve the world's toughest problems. These are the problems our military confronts every day. And these are the problems we can solve if we create an acquisition system that enables the Department of Defense to take advantage of the best minds, firms, and technologies that America and the world have to offer.
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Interesting) by aristarchus on Friday June 12 2015, @01:17AM
The real problem that militarists like McCain have is that they have no idea what reality is about. The military is paranoid, hey, that's their job. And if they cannot find an existential threat, they will need to create one (or become one: read Machiavelli on mercenaries.) But this leads them to think that things like universities, research, science, and hey, even law and the arts, all exist to support the military mission of defending, um, something. Now scientist know that they do not exist to serve a particular nation-state, especially one that has gone totally off its rocker with violations of international law, but rather science serves humanity as a whole. Any decent military would be aiming to protect science, not to subvert it into a weapons program. Pynchon's observations on the V2 rocket project under the Nazis is illustrative. Preverts, getting the whole thing backwards, thinking they are what it is about when what it is about is what they should be serving. Eisenhower saw this coming, as much a Machiavelli did. (But we should talk about honor, Daddy's influence, and "what happened to the first wife, the one who waited for you when you were a POW?" when we discuss McCain.)