"The trouble is that all the paradigms you mention come with a bigger price tag than the thing they replaced"
On a one for one basis yes, but it doesn't need one to one substitution to provide a significant military advantage,
How many horses equal one tank? How many arrows equal one gun? By making the business of killing more efficient, you cam actually keep the cost of that killing static. Indeed by using the advanced technology you can reduce the cost because you can cause the opposing to force to surrender with a smaller number of kills: True shock and awe
The problem is that modern improvements in military technology are incremental. not revolutionary. Aircraft in the last fifty years have got incrementally faster, more efficient, better targeted, but with incremental increases in costs. But what we need is something new - something which will make the aircraft as irrelevant to warfare as the tank rendered the horse, and reduce the overall spend.
What is that change likely to be? Hard to know, but the obvious choices - space based bombardment systems, advanced rocketry, are all curtailed by treaty forcing us down the expense route. Likewise treaties over the use of chemical and biological warfare, which I would argue have prevented the development of cheap low-lethailty incapacitating systems.
Maybe the answer is in pulsed energy weapons, but again our ability to develop those is hampered by space warfare treaties.
Last edited by Milo Minderbinder; 3rd Jul 2012 at 20:56.